Ninja fell in droves, bleeding out all over Dr. Omega's nice clean lab, even as the doctor produced yet another raygun from his coat.  "You'll pay for this, Spoiler!" he howled after the fleeing man, the sizzling death ray missing by a mile.  "No one crosses me with impunity!"<br/><br/>----<br/><br/>The immortal adventurer, Sir Sylvester du Tremont, was famed for his absurd resilience, for he had survived a thousand crises that would have killed any normal man (and even most abnormal ones), always turning up alive and well almost immediately.<br/><br/>He was also a huge pain in the ass to track down, since he traveled all the time and only did anything newsworthy once in a few months, if that.  But the man had admitted once to having disturbed some ancient ruin and being cursed "to forever live in interesting times," so at least the Spoiler had something to go on while tracking him through history.<br/><br/>It was still time-consuming, but the Spoiler had all the time in the world and then some.  Eventually he found du Tremont in a strange cavern beneath a confluence of three rivers in seventeenth-century Africa.  The half-ruined architecture was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike any civilization the Spoiler was familiar with.  Nothing in the place looked overtly threatening, but Arachnerd's danger senses were screaming at him.<br/><br/>Up ahead, a still-mortal Sylvester du Tremont was examining a cask of some sort, which rested on an ornate pedestal near the back of the cavern.  The cask was covered in flowing runes, and sealed firmly shut with what might have been wax, imprinted with another series of runes.  The Spoiler had no idea what any of it said, but if du Tremont did, it clearly hadn't been enough to deter him in the prime timeline...