How It All Goes Down
I Drop a Little Man on His Head
- Sadie's tells us just how stupid Carter is for being too afraid to visit a library (he always follows the rules).
- Unfortunately, the door's locked. Like, totally locked. Sadie remembers the word Amos said at breakfast for "destroy," and she says it at the locks. Hieroglyphs appear, and the doors explode.
- Sadie feels so weak afterward that she almost collapses, so magic apparently takes a toll.
- Sadie and Carter go in to explore, but the library is huge.
- Sadie and Carter retrieve their dad's workbag, and Carter pulls out the box that Julius had used in the British Museum.
- Carter opens the box and pulls out wax, rope, papyrus, and a wax figurine.
- The wax guy is an ugly little dude with his legs cut off at the knee. Sadie jokingly asks him what had happened to their dad, and the wax man talks to her.
- Sadie screams and drops the wax man on his head. He curses, and then explains that he's a shabti, which means answerer. Basically, answerers are wax models that serve their maker.
- Sadie and Carter establish that the answerer's nickname is Doughboy, and Sadie takes charge of questioning him.
- Doughboy can't tell much, except that Julius's staff and wand (the boomerang thing) aren't in the box, so something obviously happened to Julius. He might even be dead.
- Doughboy declares that his service is finished, and turns back to hard, lifeless wax.
- Sadie and Carter look around for other shabti to help them, and end up looking at a bunch of scrolls.
- Oddly, Sadie's able to read some of the ancient Egyptian writing. She deciphers a book titled Blood of the Pharaohs, and they find their family name (Kane) in it. That kind of makes things feel more real: this magic stuff is legit, and their family's in it deep.
- They find a picture of five animal-headed gods with a starry goddess arching over them. Carter explains that the starry goddess is Nut, the goddess of the sky, and that the birth of those five gods has something to do with the Demon Days.
- The story, as Carter narrates it, goes like this: the sky goddess Nut was married to the earth god Geb. Things are fine until Ra, the sun god, hears a prophecy that a child of Nut will displace Ra. So Ra forbids Nut to give birth on any day of the year. Nut gambles with the moon god Khons and wins enough moonlight to create five new days. Those are the Demon Days, and the five children born (one on each day) were Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis, and Nephthys.
- Sadie and Carter realize that if all five gods were born together, perhaps they were also imprisoned together and released together. This is especially bad news since Set was pretty evil.
- Carter reminds Sadie that back in the British Museum, their dad told fiery dude that they would stop him before the Demon Days were over—meaning that Sadie and Carter would stop him? If he's Set?
- Better yet, the Demon Days start the day after tomorrow, on December 27.
- Sadie realizes how insane it is to try to develop her powers and face down Set and save Julius in a matter of days. But maybe it's not impossible?
- There's a crash. Something's happening outside the library.