Les­son 1: San­gria and Oreo cook­ies doth not a story make.

It was a wet Feb­ru­ary day, and even the easily-excitable fairies were get­ting bored. While Kururu and Chiriri stared out of the win­dow at the glint­ing rain­drops bash­ing against the plants in the gar­den, Sarara flicked deject­edly through the pages of the ency­clo­pe­dia that Sen­sei had given them two days previously.

As she arrived at one page in par­tic­u­lar, though, everyone’s mood changed. A wide-eyed Sarara called her friends over, and together they looked on with delight at the sight spread out before them.

A desert under a blight blue sky, with vast mon­u­ments stretch­ing up from the sandy ground, looked back at them.

“Hey, Sensei-san!” called Kururu. “Can you teach us about this ‘Ee-guyipt’?”

“Of course,” her replied, sit­ting on the floor so that the fairies on the desk were at about his eye level. “Egypt is a coun­try far away, on the other side of the world. There was an ancient -”

“Nya!” shouted Tama as she kicked the door so hard it fell off its hinges. “I can teach you about Egypt!”

So say­ing, she dragged a huge device that looked a lit­tle like a cof­fee per­co­la­tor into the room, knock­ing a hole in the wall in the process.

“Behold my Super Deluxe Time-Travelly Transport-o-Matic 2000!” she cried.

“What the hell?” Sen­sei asked, spin­ning sharply around to glare at his men­tally defi­cient next-door-neighbour. “That can’t possibly -”

Whum­m­mmm…

Their feet sank a lit­tle into the sand as they arrived, and it took a few sec­onds for the crack­les of blue light­ning and the ghostly image of the cof­fee per­co­la­tor to disappear.

“Wow, that was just like that ‘Ter­mi­na­tor’ movie that Tama-chan showed us last week,” Kururu said.

“Eww… That wasn’t a very nice movie,” Chiriri replied, the images of its vio­lent con­tent rush­ing once more into her mind.

“I need your clothes, your boots, and your motor­cy­cle,” Sarara said in her best Arnie voice, which wasn’t very good. Then she chuck­led, and mimed shoot­ing Kururu with a shot­gun — who, for her part, dodged Matrix-style and ended up with a face full of hot sand.

She picked her­self up and dusted off her dress. “Hey, let’s go over there!” she exclaimed, point­ing to a con­ve­nient nearby palace.

“Agreed,” Sarara replied. “It’s too hot out here, we should get out of direct sun­light.” And, under her breath, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

Sarara sighed. It’d be a while before she got the hang of that voice.

They trudged through the sand for a few min­utes until they reached the palace gates. The guards instantly bowed upon recog­nis­ing them, and ush­ered them quickly into the throne room.

This room was dec­o­rated almost exclu­sively in gold, with lighter trac­ery form­ing pat­terns against tar­nished gold back­grounds. Three wide, arc­ing steps of mar­ble led up to a vast, impos­ing throne on which sat a vast, impos­ing head­dress — beneath which sat a small and unim­pos­ing Hororo.

“Wel­come home, oh famous explor­ers of Egypt,” the men­tally out-to-lunch fairy mum­bled. “Did you dis­cover that which we have been look­ing for for so long?”

“Indeed, oh mighty Pharaoh,” Sarara replied, half impro­vis­ing and half act­ing on the strange new mem­o­ries that sud­denly and inex­plic­a­bly had appeared in her head. “We are ready to com­mence exca­va­tion on your command.”

“Make it so,” Hororo declared.

As the three turned to leave, Hororo began to speak into the arm of her throne.

“Captain’s Log,” she said. “23^rd July, 4697BC, what­ever BC stands for. We have found the Sphinx. Also, I rec­om­mend that Lieu­tenant Sarara should not be equipped with a shot­gun on future missions.”

As night fell, Kururu, Chiriri and Sarara headed to a run-down bar in the cen­tre of Cairo. Silence fell as the girls walked in. The three of them weren’t much liked around these parts, and a gruff-looking guy at the bar glared at them with an expres­sion on his face that said he was about to make the point.

He jumped from his stool, knock­ing it to the ground, and ran towards the fairies. They just looked at each other and mum­bled “not again…”

In a sin­gle swift motion, Chiriri threw her extremely out-of-place-looking som­brero from her head and through the man’s stom­ach, leav­ing artis­tic trails of blood on the walls and floor as the metal blades around the edge of the hat tore into his intestines.

She caught it as it returned, placed it back on her head, and bowed deeply as the man’s blood started to run in vis­cous rivers down her face. Her two some­what shocked friends fol­lowed her to the bar.

Three threats, sev­eral bribes and fif­teen glasses of Ye Anciente Egyp­tianne Sin­gle Malt later, the girls had found them­selves a team of either will­ing, ter­ri­fied or ine­bri­ated con­scripts with which to carry out their mission.

Mid­night saw the girls hud­dled together on a park bench, shar­ing the dregs of their whiskey in a last attempt to stay warm. Whether or not it was actu­ally work­ing they didn’t much care, but it was allow­ing them to for­get about the cold so they fig­ured it must be a good thing.

Just as they began to ani­mat­edly dis­cuss which part of see­ing some­one being hung, drawn and quar­tered they pre­ferred to watch, a strange man loomed out of the dark­ness and burped loudly in their direc­tion. Sarara burped in return, but see­ing as she was only three inches tall she couldn’t quite match the six-foot-six-inch man’s pitch or vol­ume. Kururu decided that the appro­pri­ate reac­tion was to try and burp as well, but unfor­tu­nately she had con­sumed so much alco­hol that she was vio­lently sick instead. Chiriri, for her part, cack­led insanely until the man got dis­turbed and ran away.

Three days and three mas­sive hang­overs later, the girls and their team of inex­pe­ri­enced archae­ol­o­gists arrived at the dig site. They got to work quickly, fear­ing Pharaoh Hororo’s infa­mous wrath if they didn’t com­plete their task within the week.

Kururu grinned glee­fully as her JCB started dig­ging away at the sand on the south side of the sub­merged struc­ture, so utterly absorbed that she failed to find fault in her own floun­der­ing foray into the artic­u­late art of allit­er­a­tion. Mean­while, on the rock­ier ground to the north, the smile that plas­tered Sarara’s face as she set the explo­sive charges had already caused sev­eral work­men to run scream­ing or at least seek out new underwear.

The day did not fin­ish as well as it started, how­ever. Around three in the after­noon, they dis­cov­ered a small see-through panel in the top of the par­tially unearthed struc­ture. It bore the inde­ci­pher­able cap­tion “!|\| c453 0f 3|\/|3r93|\|cy, 8r34k 91455 f0r z0|\/|8!3 h0rd35.” While Chiriri and Sarara debated the mean­ing of this cryp­tic mes­sage, Kururu grabbed a vicious-looking axe from her back­pack and smashed the glass anyway.

Thick foun­tains of sand were blasted into the air all around the exca­va­tion site, and the ground rum­bled as if the sky were falling. As the con­scripts fled in ter­ror, the girls just looked at each other with that same “oh no, not again” look on their faces. Kururu swung her axe threat­en­ingly, Sarara retrieved the shot­gun that she’d hid­den in her dress to ensure Hororo wouldn’t take it from her; and Chiriri raced down to round level, climbed into her JCB and pressed the big red but­ton that trans­formed it into a Chal­lenger II tank.

The zom­bie hordes didn’t last long under the fairies whirling mael­strom of destruc­tion. The axe and shot­gun turned zom­bie after zom­bie into show­ers of undead goo while Chiriri’s tank turned both the mon­sters and the partly buried mon­u­ment into a patch­work of smok­ing craters.

As the smoke and dust cleared, and Sarara finally stopped blast­ing the piles of dis­mem­bered car­cass with the min­ing explo­sives, they paused to take stock of the sit­u­a­tion. The mon­u­ment now stood fully proud of the sand, but it lit­tle resem­bled the strange crea­ture it once had. Not only was its nose miss­ing, but by chance Chiriri’s tank shells had reshaped the entire thing in the like­ness of a far stranger crea­ture — Oboro-chan.

The fairies smiled at each other with the knowl­edge of a job well done as blue light­ning began to crackle around them and through them.

Within a few sec­onds they were back home again. Exhausted, they fell asleep on an ency­clopae­dia that had one pic­ture slightly changed from what it had looked like when they’d left…