How It All Goes Down
A Bad Trip to Paris
- Carter takes over the story, telling us that before he gets to the fruit bats, he should back up.
- That night in the dormitory, Carter didn't sleep much, despite using the silly magic headrest. His ba takes a little trip, and suddenly he's watching Amos sneak through a cavern.
- Red hieroglyphs activate, trapping Amos. Set appears with a bunch of demons and greets Amos with the word bonsoir, which means "good evening" in French. Uh-oh.
- Carter wakes up, freaked out that Amos has been captured.
- Rather than sit and stew, Carter decides to walk and stew. He opens the dormitory door with his mind and wanders through the empty marketplace.
- Zia appears, wrapped in black sparkly magic. She runs through a courtyard, opens a blank section of wall, and disappears inside.
- Carter is able to follow Zia inside the wall before it solidifies again. He sees Zia kneeling by an altar with old Egyptian stuff as well as modern photographs.
- Zia is holding a glowing blue sphere in her cupped palms, and then it rises and vanishes.
- Trapped in the room, Carter suavely says hi. Just kidding: he's awkward as can be.
- Zia is surprised to see him, and even more surprised when he says he saw her cloaked in black glowing stuff. Apparently he wasn't supposed to see that.
- Carter looks at the photos and sees a young girl with adults in a rural Egyptian village. He asks Zia if that's her home. It was her home, before it was destroyed by a dangerous artifact.
- The photos are all Zia has left of her home and family, since she was the only survivor. Iskandar and other magicians had arrived just in time to save her, but not the rest.
- Zia says she doesn't remember anything about her past, which Carter finds strange, since he remembers a bunch of details about his mom before she died.
- As Carter and Zia talk, it comes out that Zia doesn't have any friends. She says she doesn't mind being alone. Carter realizes that he's said the same thing, due to his lonely childhood spent traveling.
- Carter goes out on a limb and tells Zia that he'd like to take her to the mall when this is all over. They can get hamburgers and hang out like normal people do.
- Zia asks if that would be a date. Carter looks stunned, which makes Zia laugh. She says she's looking forward to this mall thing, and that Carter is either very interesting or very dangerous.
- Before Carter leaves, he asks what the black shimmery stuff was.
- Zia replies that it was an invisibility spell, which he shouldn't have been able to see. And the blue sphere? She looks puzzled and says she doesn't know what he's talking about.
- Carter stops asking questions and finds his way back to the dormitory.
- Now we're caught up to the part where Carter, Sadie, and Zia are at Luxor, and Zia is urging them to leave.
- As Carter and Sadie reach the obelisk, a white-robed magician appears and tells them to stop.
- Sadie starts trying to figure out the obelisk, while Carter draws his sword and braces for conflict.
- The magician animates the sphinxes lining the path, and a bunch of sphinxes attack Carter.
- Sadie gets the portal working (first-class to Paris) and disappears into it, while two sphinxes tackle Carter, crushing his ribcage.
- Carter manages to inch toward the obelisk and touch it with his fingertips, which is enough to transport him to Paris.
- Next thing he knows, Carter is lying on the damp, hard ground in some square in Paris.
- Trouble is: he brought two of the sphinxes with him.
- Suddenly, there's a battle cry involving eating muffins. And a slice.
- The sphinxes dissolve into smoke. The figure Sadie and Carter see turns out to be Bast. Yay!