Capeworld Comics

The Phantom Sphinx

 

I came into this modern world in 1941. I couldn’t speak or write English. I was older than the English language. And yet Earth State considers me privileged because I have magic powers. Believe me, I understand your frustration. Super powers are all they consider to be a privilege….

 

The Phantom Sphinx turned his disdain to Danny. “I don’t need a list to know this scenario! She’s one of those amnesiac ghosts, doesn’t know who she is, but she comes to Egypt because she’s so certain she belongs here, she can just feel an attraction.” He turned his disdain back to Flicker. “Child, wearing an ankh around your neck does not make you an ancient Egyptian. You said you were from the 18th dynasty? The necropolis was built by Khufu. That’s the 4th dynasty.”

 

A 6,000 Year Old Superhuman

 

In the 4th millennium BC, Egypt was still an older civilization than the United States now. Little is known about the Egypt of the 4th millennium, as it wouldn’t be until the 3rd millennium that writing developed in Egypt and Sumer, but archeological evidence shows that humans were mummified in Egypt 5,500 years ago and superhumans 6,000 years ago.

 

In 1941, as the Allies scrambled to move Egyptian artifacts and burial sites out of the way of combat, the oldest burial site ever recorded was unearthed containing an impossibly well-preserved body. The skin still had the color of life in it. The blood was not dry. And when the body was taken to Mainline City for examination, faint brain activity was discovered…

 

Amron, mighty warrior before Ra, was the undisputed leader of Pharaoh’s armies. Spears and slings did nothing to his body. Nature obeyed his command as readily as men. The Nile parted at his command. Sandstorms subsided by his will. He once, just to see if he could, hid the sun behind clouds, but scared himself with the blasphemy of the act and prayed to Ra for forgiveness.

 

As perhaps the strongest superhuman of his time, Amron could have kicked out Pharaoh and the priesthood and declared himself the mighty god-king of Egypt. He could have expanded the borders of Egypt singlehandedly. Imagine a world where Egypt stretched north into Europe and south below the Sahara. Amron could have made that world. But Amron was a pious man. He believed in the gods and venerated them with all his heart. Pharaoh was the son of the gods, not he, and as mighty as Amron seemed, he knew that Pharaoh was mightier still. He also didn’t believe that the gods wanted Egypt to expand and pillage other countries for wealth and slaves. The gods had given the land of Egypt to the Egyptians. If they had intended for Egyptians to have more, they would have given more.

 

When Amron passed away in his sleep at the age of 211, all of Egypt mourned and Pharaoh’s great-great-great grandson gave a sigh of relief. Amron was treated as if he was Pharaoh himself. He was mummified and laid to rest with honors.

 

But Amron didn’t actually die at the age of 211. His superhuman body just wore itself out and fell into a deep and painless sleep. Fortunately for him, his culture was big on the preservation of bodies. Removing his organs and stiffening him with natron was certainly traumatic, good thing for that deep and painless sleep, but they didn’t stick Amron underground or leave his body to be eaten away by wildlife and the elements. Such treatment might have made him fully dead instead of just mostly dead.

 

Amron was revived by Dr. Salle at the Piper Museum. He didn’t have most of his organs, but he didn’t seem to need them to move around and talk. Amron’s revival into the modern world was unfortunately not a pleasant one. The Red Norton gang raided the museum in an attempt to steal Amron’s body while superheroes were occupied overseas. Panicking at seeing the body they were supposed to steal walking around, the gang gunned Dr. Salle down in front of Amron. Enraged, Amron turned the gang into piles of dust. Grieving over the loss of his one friend in a strange world where all his old friends were long dead, Amron flew into the sky and begged the gods for guidance. The gods listened, and sent Amron the soul of his father to tell him that the gods had seen it fit for him to fight evil in the modern world just as he had fought evil in ancient Egypt.

 

His spirit revived by the words of his father, Amron became a superhero, though he had no idea what a superhero was. It took him a while to adjust to modern norms such as “try and capture criminals so they can be given a trial, don’t turn them into dust,” but he eventually made the adjustment with help from the Monster League, America’s superteam for misfits. Amron is proud that he got membership in the Monster League in the 40’s back before the membership rolls started to bloat, back before the membership booms of the 1970’s and 1990’s. He is an authentic monster–Amron, the Immortal Mummy! 

 

Amron the Immortal Mummy was Amron’s preferred supername, but the papers called him the Phantom Sphinx due to the Immortal Mummy/Living Mummy/Walking Mummy/Talking Mummy and all other versions of “adjective+mummy” being used to describe Mystico the Wonder Man, a 3,000 mummy who was revived a year earlier than Amron. Amron had a mild rivalry with Mystico. He felt that he deserved to be called the Immortal Mummy as he was 3,000 years older than Mystico, and Amron’s personality clashed with Mystico. Mystico was a priest and a scholar, Amron was a general and warrior. Mystico took to the weirdness of modern life like a duck to water while Amron longed for simpler times. Differences aside, the two developed a mutual respect, and became friends in the Lazarus Society for revived immortals. It was in the Lazarus Society that Amron met the reincarnated priest Kor, fellow mummy Kalkor (who was Kor’s revived sah and khet), the akh of the wizard Shazam, Ibis the Invincible, who by having been Baltim the First, prevented Amron from claiming leadership of the Lazarus Society as the oldest, and Taia of Thebes, who by having been Ibis’ wife, prevented Amron from flirting with her.

 

Amron grew to like being called the Phantom Sphinx. The Sphinx wasn’t built until well after Amron’s time during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu, but the name sounded cool. It made him sound mysterious and wise and ancient, and he took no small pleasure in inwardly smiling at the fact that he was older than his namesake.

 

During the war years, Amron hunted down the last members of the Red Norton gang (and remembered to capture them alive), defeated an evil jinn, crushed a psychotic version of the Hindu goddess Kali summoned by the destruction of the war, and fought against the Axis as part of a superteam known as the Power Pocket. Power Pocket consisted of himself, Black Cat, Red Blazer, the Spirit of ‘76, and the Zebra. Amron was very close to his teammates on Power Pocket. They weren’t fellow misfits like the members of the Monster League, nor were they fellow immortals like the members of the Lazarus Society, but they were fellow soldiers, and Amron was a soldier long before he was an immortal or a misfit. He even allowed himself to be talked into starring in Black Cat’s movie The Mummy’s Will in 1944 when he was forced back to the homefront on leave (which he hated).

 

After the war, the members of Power Pocket went their separate ways. Red Blazer joined the organization of his late mentor Pyroman, the Martin Foundation, which was created to review and overturn wrongful legal convictions, and the Zebra, who was wrongly convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, went with him. The Spirit of ‘76 perished during the war and his ghost became a member of Uncle Sam’s Army (USA) alongside other spirits. Black Cat became very active in the superhero community and joined several superteams. She and Amron briefly dated in the 50’s, but their relationship didn’t last. She was a thoroughly modern woman; he was a thoroughly old-fashioned man (and then some). She was a vivacious movie star, he was a morose warrior.

 

 Amron returned to Egypt after the war, and the greatest scholars in egyptology tutored him in the aeons of history he missed out on. But Amron never felt comfortable in the modern world, and he haunted the many ruins of Egypt as a phantom. The ruins were built many centuries after his time, but he felt closer to them than he did the noisy, bustling cities. But whenever evil threatened the world, whenever the Monster League felt the need to call in reserve members, whenever some audacious supervillain felt like building a secret base beneath the pyramids, Amron would appear as the Phantom Sphinx to fight evil as the gods had tasked him to do.

 

He was pretty happy for a guy that liked to brood in the shadow of the pyramids and sulk in the ruins of ancient libraries. He got to fight evil alongside other “soldiers” as a superhero. That’s all he wanted out of life.

 

Then Egypt joined Earth State in the 1970’s, and Amron found himself answering not to gods, but to mortals–small, fat, obnoxious mortals that couldn’t speak Arabic let alone the Egyptian he grew up speaking. His history placed him high within the Earth State hierarchy–but not high enough for him to decide what to do with his powers. He did turn several members of the Red Norton gang into dust, which negatively impacted his score.

 

Amron had to check in with his supervisor before he traveled outside Egypt and was only permitted to use his powers to defend the Giza necropolis or when summoned as part of Egypt’s superteam, Mesektet. He also wasn’t allowed to use his powers to perform labor or establish a business, and he was only allowed to vote in the lesser superhuman caucus of Earth State, not the greater one exclusive to basics.

 

Amron grew miserable and depressed under Earth State rule. It was true that he hardly ever traveled outside of Egypt, had no interest in using his powers to create a business, and had not the slightest interest in politics (though he would gladly vote yes on any resolution to get Egypt out of Earth State), and didn’t mind working with the Mesektet–he even liked most of them (and even briefly dated the Red Peri). But it was the principle of the matter. The gods had trusted him to act with not but his conscience to guide him. But now dried-up bureaucratic nobodies were telling him how to use his powers. Who were they to command Amron, the Immortal Mummy?

 

And he had the horrible suspicion that they had put him in charge of the Giza necropolis because all they really knew about him was his supername. “He’s called the Phantom Sphinx, so he must have been from the time of the Great Sphinx of Giza, right?”

 

Amron became a depressed ghost. By day, he watched fat tourists with a stern gaze on his face to prevent them from touching the monuments and by night, he drowned his sorries in tanna leaf tea at the Red Peri’s flying diner. He welcomed the rare occasions when a supervillain would try to steal the pyramids or a global threat would call for Mesektet to assemble.

 

Recently, Martin’s students have encountered Amron, and the encounter left the Phantom Sphinx in high spirits.

 

Meeting Martin’s School

 

After an incident at the school involving the Monster League and a student transforming into a “Devonian fish-man,” Flicker, ghostly “daughter” of Monster League member Ankhesenanum, teleported to Egypt to clear her head. Her teacher Ms. Garret followed her along with classmates Edith Ogden, aka Dragongirl, and Martina Morelli, aka Diabla. They found Flicker atop the head of the Great Sphinx, a place that she had fond memories of as a child (in terms of Egyptian manesology, Flicker is Ankesenanum’s ib, or heart). Though she was breaking the law, she insisted she was within her right to stand atop the Sphinx as there wasn’t any law against it in her time.

 

Amron appeared and informed Ms. Garret and her students that they were to be fined 20 USD…which, under Earth State’s 100X penalty for superhuman infractions, amounted to 2,000 USD…and since Martina, Edith, and Ms. Garret also touched the Sphinx and also had superpowers, they had a total bill of 8,000 USD.

 

Martina challenged Amron to give them a chance and decide the bill through a good old fashioned trial by combat–him vs her. Besides, she could tell that he really wanted to have a good fight.

 

But Amron wasn’t sold on the idea until Martina realized that he was the Mummy–not a mummy but THE Mummy, the bandaged defender of Egypt from the 90’s who fought her father Vampiro in a vampire vs mummy charity match in the early 2000’s.

 

Amron was a little embarrassed to remember a phase he and other members of the Monster League went through in the 90’s where they tried to seem “darker” and “more serious.” Zeus the artificial man stuck big metal bolts in his skin, Caliban the Victorian monster wore a frightening Japanese kitsune mask, and he himself played into his status as a mummy by covering himself from head-to-toe in bandages. Amron was embarrassed, but he was mostly excited to meet Vampiro’s daughter again after so many years–and have the chance to fight with her.

 

As Amron and Martina brawled in a thunderstorm, Danny and her other students drank tana leaf tea inside Red Peri’s diner and talked to the host herself. And when Amron and Martina finished their brawl (Martina won), a happy evening was had by all watching the storm and sipping tea.

 

Amron remembers the day he met the students as a rare happy, exciting day amid a slew of monotony, and he plans on travelling to Joyous Harbor (without or without permission from his Handlers) to see Martina compete in the Ishinomori tournament.