"And we'll put our three heads together and find BOTH of those Totems and put them back together. We can worry about who gets them later. DEAL?" Bernice held out her hand.

 "Deal." Natalie slapped her hand on top of Bernice's.

 "We can't do it without you." Bernice motioned towards Miles, who was quite hesitant about the deal.

 Miles thought about it, then sighed, as he slapped his hand on top of the other two.

 "Oh, alright!"

 "HEHEHEHEHE!" An elfish voice cried out. "Here I am!"

 "That's it!" Natalie backed away.

 "DIE!" The Totem began to throw out fireballs at the three, and with each toss, one of the fireballs came closer and closer to one of the three, as they began to back away.

 "DUCK!" Bernice cried out, realizing that it was too late for her to take her own advice. Three huge fireballs were coming straight towards her, and she was now backed into a corner...

 An alley. It is grimy, cold, purely an empty space between buildings on a world where the good die young and the evil live forever and that's the way the people so desperately want it to be.

 Frozen in tableau: Professor Bernice Summerfield, a woman who has yet again had her entire life torn away from her by something so incredibly huge it just doesn't care about humans or humanity, backed into a corner. Flinging themselves away from her are Miles and Natalie, the current supporting cast in the drama of her life, a fellow archaeologist who's a bit of a git and an interstellar thief in far too deep respectively. The latter has just saved their lives after ramming their hovercar with her own, a good thing in a way because a lot of entities want all three of them dead for 2 reasons.

 One of those entities and one of those reasons is a little silver god standing at the end of the alley, hurling three unreasonably large fireballs at the humans. Three hot, crackling, shimmering, very very fiery balls of fire that are on a direct course for Benny. They fill the entirety of her vision and her hearing, the heat of their existence washing across her skin.

 So when the ground suddenly gives way under her feet, she is momentarily too grateful for her continued state of un-crispiness to be concerned that the ground has in fact collapsed beneath her and she has no idea what is beneath it. But that moment lasts for the second it takes her to hit a slope of rather claying feeling soil and start sliding.

 From where she had been comes a tremendous wave of heat and noise as several square feet of wall are reduced to so much rubble. There are other noises, ones that sound like screams or shouts, but by that point she is picking up speed much faster than she'd like and stops concentrating on what is behind in preference to what is in front.

 After some ten more seconds of slipping and sliding, that becomes a rather unappreciatively large tract of open air.

 "You say he belongs to Summerfield?" the human asks the other human, the one he had scratched for being so rude and standing up when he was unready to move. He looks up at the owner of the lap, looking askance in the way only a cat can. \\Belongs indeed!\\

 "Yes. I'm wondering what to have done with him."

 Wolsey gives off an aggressive purr, narrowing his eyes.

 "Can I take him?" The human he sits on scratches him behind the ear, in /that/ place, making him squeeze his eyes tight shut and tilt his head just so.

 "I don't see why not, Angel. It's not like she's coming back."

 She lets out a low groan, feebly using her right arm to lever herself into a sitting position, pleased that the rather jerky exercise fails to create any sudden stabbing agony that might be indicative of serious injury when she can doubtlessly least afford it.

 "Bernice?"

 The loudness of Miles' voice makes her wince. She can make him out a little distance away, illuminated by, of all things, a cigarette lighter. \\Perhaps there's hope for him yet.\\

 "Are you alright?" he asks, his foot steps squidging slightly as he moves to her side. "I'm afraid field medicine isn't one of my better qualities."

 "I think it's just bruising," she mumbles at last. "Where are we, and where's Natalie?"

 "I don't know."

 Miles at least has the decency to look shamefaced. After all, if it hadn't been for his idiocy with the gun, they'd have found out about some of the people trying to kill them, and wouldn't have been thrown into freefall and the sights of the psychotic totem of an ancient god...

 She grimaces and suddenly wonders what trick Emil is teaching his slugs right now. What right did gods have to do this sort of thing? She wishes her friend was here to laugh in the faces of the these gods and make them go away.

 A scrabbling noise comes from the darkness above them, and Benny feels her heart jump into her mouth.

 Miles' lighter choose that moment to sputter and die.

 To Be Continued...