This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning.

Professor Limefellow held his spectacles half way between himself and the carvings. The ancient creators of this lost city—the Atlanteans—had crafted masterful bas reliefs and inscriptions. In the few hours he had been inspecting the city, Limefellow had already developed ideas for a half-dozen scholarly articles, beginning with the explanation that their ancient script shared roots with the Proto-Indo-European language as well as elements of Mayan script and Ancient Chinese pictographs.

“Excuse me, Professor,” Thelonius asked, his ape-man lips forming the English words with well-practiced grace. “I don’t think we’re entirely safe up here. Shouldn’t we be moving on?”

“Oh, we’ll be fine,” Limefellow said without looking up from the inscriptions. They were perched on the highest ledge of the central pylon, almost directly above the Nazi command tent. “They aren’t looking up on the rooftops.”

“And what about that?” The ape-man pointed up at the zeppelin hovering menacingly over their heads. “Do you suppose your friends are being kept up there?”

“There’s no need to worry about them yet,” Limefellow said. “I’m sure the Nazis will respect the Geneva Conventions and what not.”

Limefellow waved his hand dismissively because he was on the verge of a breakthrough. He whipped out his sketch book and furiously scribbled down a transcription of the text on the pylon, skipping three lines between each string of text and filling the space between with more familiar linguistic characters. The Atlantean symbols worked on his mind, burning their way into his memory as if he had been studying them for years. As his pencil flew across the page, it felt less like delving into murky areas of pre-historic linguistics and more like assembling a puzzle with half the pieces already in place and the other half interwoven into the beautiful stone vista before him.

“Eureka,” he whispered. Given time, he felt sure, he could fully decipher this language. Already he was able to read enough to learn that the builders of this ancient city had split into three factions and each had departed—suddenly and with no reason evident—to various locations Professor Limefellow translated as “celestial realms.”

Strange to abandon a city of such splendor, Limefellow thought. But there is no accounting for the superstitious motivations of primitive man.

Most of the carvings on the pylon suggested that this structure was a gate through which the Atlanteans departed on their one way trip. Limefellow assumed that it represented some kind of symbolic ritual to prepare the people for their migration. The instructions were clear enough; he could easily translate the rest and conduct the ritual himself. According to the writing, all he needed to complete the ritual would be an Atlantean oror—he squinted at the next character—some kind of blackened skull. No doubt an artifact of religious significance.

“I say, Thelonious,” he said. “What would you say to a little historical re-creation in the name of anthropology?”

Thelonius did not answer.

Limefellow looked around him, but his ape-man friend was nowhere to be found.

“Aaaa.. aaw…” Celeste managed to squeak despite von Wartenburg’s mystical command. Dumb galoot, she thought as she glared at him. You grow up with as many brothers and sisters as I did and ain’t nobody gonna stifle your voice.

“I have only one further question for you,” he said sternly. “Have any of your companions mentioned an ancient artifact, or have they spoken of a culture that once called itself Atlantis? You may speak now.”

She was certain he threw in the last sentence to cover for his spell’s inability to bind her voice.  “Aaaa… awright, buster,” she demanded as her words came flooding back to her. “Nobody shuts me up like that. What’d you do to me?”

“You will answer my question now.”

“Wrong, buster, you’re gonna answer my question. You can order me to shut my yap, but you can’t force me to talk. See what I mean? So you tell me how you do that voodoo you do and then maybe I’ll stop being too mad to sing like a canary.”

Von Wartenburg, as expressionless as ever, used a key to open his gun case. He selected a luger, loaded it, and turned back towards her. The pistol wasn’t pointed at her, but it wasn’t quite pointed away from her, either.

“I compelled you by means of the Atlantean language,” he said. “Every creature on this planet is neurologically evolved to understand and respond to that language. Perhaps even a simpleton such as you can see what that implies about the power of these ancient ones. Now, before I demonstrate the full might of these words, you will tell me if you ever overheard your betters speak of the Atlanteans.”

“You got a politeness problem, you know that?” Celeste shook her head. “But, in answer to your question: nope, I don’t think so. That is, Professor Scrumtumbler kept talking about his theory that some people from the olden-days built something he called the Hollow Earth. But he was expecting to find a big cave, I think. Not this place.”

Von Wartenburg’s eyes narrowed. “How did he know of the existence of the Hollow Earth?”

Celeste shrugged. “He theorized it, I guess. You know: he just made it up.”

Von Wartenburg snorted and slid his luger into his belt pouch. “Guard,” he called. “Take this one to the brig. I have business to attend to below.”

This is an ongoing story about a lost world of hungry dinosaurs, sinister villains, and non-stop action. If you’re new to Hollow Earth Expedition, I suggest starting at the beginning.

The air was still roasting inside the gigantic skull-shaped monolith although only a slight red glow found its way in from the magma pool. Yet it was enough to see what Maia had come for: a life-sized, black skull artifact on a pedestal.

It was a woman’s skull, that much was evident from the graceful curve of the brow and the sleek line of the jaw. It might once have been a human skull because was detailed and organic in a way she had never seen replicated by an artisan. Or, it might also have been a very convincing sculpture, because it was black and shining, and looked like it had been formed from volcanic glass rather than living bone. Either way, Maia expected it would fetch a fortune on the open market. Museums would start bidding wars to get it. She flexed her fingers as if she were already polishing her treasure.

Begrudgingly, the Nazis entered the enclosure, their boots thumping irreverently on the floor. She gave them a quick glance, then stooped down to get a closer look at the skull. If the builders of this ancient tomb had gone to the trouble of creating traps in the hallway beyond and then coming up with some ingenious machine to pump molten rock through the room, they would surely have been counting on a rush of greed to ensnare future a tomb raiders. No need for haste, she thought. If she grabbed it now, she might set off a ceiling collapse or triggering a rolling bolder.

“Oh my beautiful and magnificent queen,” Maia said, flexing her fingers again. “You wouldn’t hurt me, would you? You and I have too much in common.” She knelt down before the pedestal, partially to show her respect for the god-queen, who seemed to be one of the few historical figures whom Maia could respect. More than that, though, she knelt down to get a look at the underside of the skull to inspect the pedestal for wires or pressure plates.

That was when she heard the click of a shotgun breach. She knew then that the lazy-eyed squad leader was aiming her own weapon at her back.

“You have found that which my commandant seeks,” said the squad leader. “To show my gratitude, I will allow you a moment to speak your final prayers.”

Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes of this story delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine!

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

This is an ongoing story about a lost world of hungry dinosaurs, sinister villains, and non-stop action. If you’re new to Hollow Earth Expedition, I suggest starting at the beginning.

She didn’t go far into the narrow, dusty hallway before halting. The squad leader protested, but she hunkered down and inspected the floor by the red light. She could just make out the mismatched lines of the floor-stones.

Pressure plates, she thought. The ancient builders lined the floor like the ribs of a skeleton, and one misstep would trigger something unpleasant. A trap door? Crushing walls? Poison darts? She saw no need to find out.

“Step only where I step,” she said, and led them along a circuitous route down the hall. They traced her path with great precision and never bothered to ask why. Nazis, she decided, had plenty of practice playing “follow the leader.”

The passage opened up into a bowl-shaped room that burned with the force of hatred itself. Beneath the edge of the threshold, the floor dropped away into a bubbling pit of magma. Maia kicked a few pebbles from the passage into the molten rock below, where they hissed and disappeared beneath the surface. So that’s where the red glow comes from, she thought. It was also the source of the putrid air.

As intimidating as it may have been, the churning magma seemed upstaged by the central feature of the room: a gargantuan skull in the center of the room that seemed to rise up out of the lake of fire like the face of terror itself. This was the image of the god-queen, and it had been hewed from some monolithic black slab of rock large enough to allow a grown man to walk upright between her gaping jaws. Her skeletal face had been stylistically rendered, with a snarl evident in the bony cheeks and a furrowed brow, and cascades of blazing red magma spilling from its crown backwards like flowing sheets of hair. A long, curving tongue projected from her mouth to form a bridge, beckoning them to enter.

Maia felt a surge of awe for this monument, and something more—a kind of kinship with the woman who fought so savagely to keep what had belonged to her people. She inhaled deeply, allowing the heated air to blaze into her lungs and warm her from within. She felt energized, purified, ready to lay claim to the lost treasure. Above all, she felt alive.

She stepped onto the tongue-shaped bridge, heedless of the seething red pool below here.

“Halt!” the squad leader called from behind her. “There may be danger!”

She had forgotten about her guards, and now she turned to see them huddled at the threshold, acting as fearfully as cattle in a thunderstorm. They wrinkled their noses at the room’s scent and held out their palms to block the heat and the glare from their faces.

“Danger,” she said, rolling the word around on her tongue. In every language she had studied, she enjoyed the sound of that particular word. “We wouldn’t want a little danger to hold us back, now would we?”

With that, she proceeded into the dark maw of the god-queen’s skull.

Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes of this story delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine!

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

This is an ongoing story about a lost world of hungry dinosaurs, sinister villains, and non-stop action. If you’re new to Hollow Earth Expedition, I suggest starting at the beginning.

The Nazi guards followed her closely, and the deeper she went the more they huddled together. She might have used her control of the only light-source to bully them, forcing them to keep up with her and go where she pleased. She might even have managed to ditch them in these forking tunnels, but she was too distracted by what the walls were telling her to play games. Ultimately, she stopped in front of a large mural, the Nazis clustered behind her like shadows thrown back by her flashlight.

Pressing her nose close to the wall as she examined it, Maia brushed brown dust out of the crevices and cleared the ancient cobwebs to reveal the full design. The lines of script revolved in great sweeping circles along the wall, contracting towards the center where  the image of the god-queen, her face a leering skull amid viciously flailing hair, glared out prominently. Maia caressed the central image with her finger tips, leaning in close and squinting as she looked deep into the black pits of the eyes.

“You took us here to find primitive gibberish on a wall?” the lazy-eyed squad leader asked. “I am certain this is not what the commandant is seeking. We have plenty of gibberish on the walls closer to the command post.”

“This isn’t a wall,” Maia said. “It’s a door.”

Without looking at him, she slid her index and middle fingers into the empty eye-sockets of the queen’s skeletal face. As she did, the wall shuddered and cast off a thousand years of dust before slowly rumbling backwards.

A blast of sulfurous air rolled out from the newly revealed passage. Only a moment later, a blood-red light filled the passage, as if the gust of air from the opening door had caused the combustion of a bonfire somewhere ahead.

This passage had been sealed for uncounted years, but it had been brought back to life by their presence. The thought thrilled Maia.

The three Nazi guards were not so bold.

“Why is there red light?” the squad leader asked. “No one could be in there, lighting fires for us. The tomb has been sealed too long—no one could possibly be living down here…could they?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” she said, striding forward into the eerie light.

Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes of this story delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine!

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

This is an ongoing story about a lost world of hungry dinosaurs, sinister villains, and non-stop action. If you’re new to Hollow Earth Expedition, I suggest starting at the beginning.

Maia inched through the shaded alleys and vine-clogged buildings, studying the architecture and intricate wall carvings as she went.  The professors would no doubt go mad for the broken down buildings and the dirty old pottery shards buried in the sod, but Maia didn’t care about that. The Nazis might be insufferable bastards as far as she was concerned, but at least they understood that history is only as valuable as what people are willing to pay for it. If history—and life—had taught Maia one lesson, it was that cultures rise and cultures fall, but if you don’t take what you need from the world, the world will take it from you.

Before much longer, she found what she was looking for in the form of a stepped pyramid that resembled a Mesopotamian ziggurat. She led her guards up the stairs of this forgotten temple, then down the internal stone passage, deep into the basement, deeper into the sub-basement, and deeper still into the curling catacombs beneath the city.

The Nazis had confiscated her knife and pistol, and the lazy-eyed squad leader brazenly carried her shotgun strapped to his back, yet they had not taken her flashlight, which she now used to illuminate the hieroglyphs that danced and swayed among the shadows cast upon the smoothly-carven walls all around them. It was as eerie as it was exhilarating to think that no human eyes had read those strange figures or trespassed through these halls in thousands of years.

It took her hours of labor in those dark rooms, but Maia finally determined that the carvings were partially bas relief murals and partially an ancient script. Combined, they formed a sliver of history of this great city. With a few years of scrutiny, Maia might have been able to decipher the whole text, but it looked to her like it mostly consisted of the same apocalyptic garbage that had been scrawled by a thousand different dying cultures. According this particular mythology, there was a war among the gods which ended with the elder race abandoning the earth for various celestial destinations. This city was supposedly one of the last holdouts, were the ruling class refused to migrate to their newly appointed home. Their pharaoh-like god-queen held out against the wishes of her counterparts in other city-states, evidently battling them with the aid of some mystical emblem. Ultimately, she was overthrown and her cursed emblem was sealed away beneath this city. Maia tipped her hat in admiration as she read of the woman who fought against time and death itself. In the end, the god-queen failed, but her efforts were valiant.

Whatever kernel of historical truth these carvings might have held, Maia gleaned one very important fact from that wall: something of great value was buried down there, and she now had a pretty good notion of how to get it.

Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes of this story delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine!

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning of the story.

By the time Jack heard the shot, he had circled to the far side of the volcano and ascended the slope of loose shale to a small ledge. From his perch, he had studied the green landscape that extended out in every direction until it curved upwards at the horizon and disappeared into the misty clouds. Intricate river systems carved through the forests, while to the south—or what he guessed was south—a great lake or small ocean inlet sparkled blindingly under the noon-day sun. What drew his eye, however, were the ruins of an ancient city only a few miles away.

Peering through his binoculars, Jack had been able to see the stone buildings, wide roads, and tall outer walls of the city. All of it was crumbling and much had been lost to the jungle, but small groups of people labored throughout the city to fight back the jungle’s growth and rebuild the walls of the buildings. These people came in two basic types: the one in the shackles and the ones with the whips.

Those in shackles were men, women, and even children. Their skins had the rich, dark hues of people who lived in the open, and their clothing was simple, consisting of animal skins or thin fabric weaves. They stooped in the streets to clear away vines or strained in the hot sun to repair the roofs of the dilapidated buildings. Many of them heaved against heavy carts to drag mounds of rubble from somewhere deeper in the city out to the perimeter walls, where they formed long chain-gangs to pile the rubble into the gaps created by time and erosion.

The whip-wielding masters of this slave army were European, but Jack was too far away to recognize any insignia on their gray uniforms. They carried modern firearms—rifles, mostly, but Jack spotted a few submachine guns swinging from shoulder straps. It made Jack’s teeth clench. The year was 1936, for crying out loud—this kind of colonial abuse belonged to the last century. So who were these men?

Jack soon had his answer. Through his binoculars, he followed the roads inward, to the center of the city, where a tall obelisk rose up into the misty sky. From where he was perched, the tip of the obelisk was obscured by the branches of a nearby tree, but when he moved just a bit to his right he could see that a gargantuan zeppelin hung in the air above the city, tethered to that obelisk. And he could see that the side of the zeppelin was emblazoned with a white circle containing a black swastika.

“Nazis,” Jack growled to himself. Saying the word made him want to spit, just to clear out his mouth.

But that was the moment he heard the distant boom, and he knew it was a gunshot from the direction of the drilling machine. The Nazis would have to wait—Jack’s crew was in trouble.

Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes of this story delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine!

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com