Now, in real life, K’ip’s and Si’ri’s travelogue would get a bit boring from here on out, a desert not usually offering much of interest to anyone but aficionados of weather phenomena or landscapes…but this is a fantasy RPG desert, so of course they stumble across some interesting ancient ruins right away. But somebody still showed some restraint, there, because at least the pyramids were placed far enough into the desert to be (barely) invisible from the forest.
Which is a good thing, because that cat/curiosity thing does really apply – if even the tips of the pyramids had been visible from within the shady forest, they’d been overrun with Eni’lef within hours. But since they can’t be seen without taking at least a dozen steps out of the forest, the Eni’lef race have remained blissfully unaware of how close they’ve been living to such astounding relics for centuries.*
And, yeah, those are Egyptian-style ruins. They show up in a lot of fantasy settings, in fact. I don’t know, I guess ancient Egyptian culture is just about barely alien enough, from a modern-day perspective, to fit into a fantasy setting without alterations and then there is that morbid charm … by comparison, you don’t often see ancient Rome or ancient Greece getting transplanted in that way, or ancient Mesopotamia for that matter. And in most cases, ancient Egypt shows up as an already long-lost civilization in such settings – while it wouldn’t really break the mold of a fantasy world as a living civilization, given the state of development of its material culture, it would somehow be only half as cool if it wasn’t depicted as a realm of dusty necropolises peopled by shambling mummies of long-dead kings.
Speaking of which, the mummy lord appearing as soon as they enter the pyramid is a shout-out to the first chapter, of course – The Revenge of Rutentuten. Which, unfortunately, isn’t yet back online again. But we’re making some progress with uploading the archives from the old site – chapter six is already back up, but for the moment you can only navigate to it by going one strip back from the first strip of chapter seven. ^_^; As I said, we’re working on it…
Naturally, in a fantasy setting aspergillus flavus would be a thing of fearful legends, while a curse guarding an ancient tomb would be more of a trivial nuisance…being considered a standard precaution, like the death curse a responsible mom is supposed to place on the cookie jar before leaving the house.
More on Mon…uh, Thursday.
* Of course the whole invisibility wouldn’t have helped if somebody had happened to open a can of tuna while standing close to the ruins, but apparently that hasn’t happened for centuries, either.