Through the gates of the silver key

A free-for-all of key-grabbing ensues. Two Setites come burrowing through the sand, but before they can engage, an enormous spaceship crests the rise. Ambrose calls it a Vader, says it's a Technocracy ship, and suggests they all run for their lives. They flee out of the Umbra to the west, coming out in the desert, and follows a road they encounter toward Cairo. Something's off, but at first the Garou just put it down to the strangeness of the western desert. They do note they have trouble getting their technological gear to work when Sonya tries to check her cell phone's GPS.

Eventually, a sign informs them that they are in fact somehow in the year 1468, on a road protected by the Order of Reason. After dodging Order members and mage-related chaos three times, they find some Striders to talk to in Cairo, and Mark and Ambrose realize that they've been avoiding the First Cabal.

The Striders suggest they go to Karnak, where they talk to more Striders and some Bubasti, with whom they trade information. The Bubasti show them prophecies from a book, which Ambrose sneaks a photo of while they're not paying attention to him. While studying the photo, images of the depicted prophecies erupt from the picture, showing the Dark Man trapped in a crystal deep in the Umbra, from which he escapes.

They work out that they're probably being held in place by the effects of the key, so they want to find Aila's past life, which they locate as being out in the desert. Heading that way, some of the group fall into quicksand, which drops them into a stone hallway covered in twisted heiroglyphs.

While they try to find their way out, the others above get into a fight with Ajaba. RF owns their mamas. Into the fray comes a flying BSD with a child riding it. Jonas blows away the BSD, while Aila messes up the Setite child riding it, and RF finishes the thing right after it completes a stylish jump-off-and-land maneuver.

The people underground follow the hallway to a large hall where they find the Nephandus Batini
sitting on a throne, waiting for him. He opens some kind of unpleasant chasm in front of them, and they decide not to stick around to see what comes out. They head off running the other direction, meet up with the rest of the group, and flee to the safety of the caern they were heading for.

There, they manage to find Aila's past life, who is the priest in the vision she had. A Mokole who's staying at the caern heads out and tears apart the things the Nephandus had called up to chase them (Ambrose spends some time being flabberghasted at the militant dinosaur, then asks if there are any more alarming shapeshifters he ought to know about), then agrees to help them deal with the key. They install the key within the priest (it's really just a manifested bit of spirit energy), thus rendering the key permanently inaccessible through a temporal loop and breaking them out of the time period they'd been held in. Back in the modern day, they make their way back to Cairo, stopping in an oasis town for the night.

There, all the inn's guests get turned into zombies, whom the Garou have little trouble shredding. A couple of vampires turn up, and they get deaded quite quickly too. The Nephandus comes in, and Aila and Sonya jump him. He narrowly escapes death, leaving them irritable and unsatisfied.

A werespider turns up in the hallway with Ambrose, who shouts, "You said there weren't any more I should know about!" At a loss for what to do, he sprays the thing with bug spray. It--he--is completely offended by this, takes the can away and sprays him with it in retaliation. Ambrose: "Hey, that stuff's toxic!" Aila tries to make Ambrose apologize, but he won't, and the Ananasi sprays him again--at which point he becomes quite adamant about refusing.

The Garou are suspicious of the werespider's presence, and the werespider himself, but choose to accept his explanation that he was in the area and came over to see what was happening. With all that out of their hair (for the moment), they finally make it back to Cairo and then catch a flight back to the US.