Our intel, fragmented yet insistent, led us to Maxwell Lord. A name rising star in the financial cirlcles, now confirmed as the holder of the stone. Our path was clear, if not precisely legal: his workplace.
We infiltrated his office, a modern, cold room filled with fancy gadgets.
There, nestled amongst the disordered objects, we found the stone's casing. It was a piece DIana recognized, a familiar piece of an object she had encountered before.
As her gaze fell upon it, words, faint but undeniable, etched themselves into her perception. Her eyes, usually pools of unwavering resolve, widened in a flicker of profound recognition.
She identified the script as the ancient language of the Gods themselves, a revelation that both thrilled and chilled.
Diana wasted no time. A discreet message sent, a clandestine call made. She tasked a trusted friend with delving deeper into the stone's genesis, its mythic past.
And just like that, a fragile lead emerged, a faint trail that promised to unravel the mysteries we so desperately needed to understand.
"We must ascertain which deity forged it, and what boundless powers it truly possesses," Diana declared, her voice now infused with a professional urgency that felt strangely detached from the frantic, desperate reality swirling around us.
We were, after all, trespassing, stealing information, and I, a consciousness housed in a stolen body, was chasing a mythical wishing stone across continents. The sheer absurdity of it all was a bitter pill to swallow.
"Well, it certainly whispers of wishing, doesn't it?" I replied, the words leaving a small, acrid taste in my mouth. "And my very existence here... you said you had the stone before. Perhaps, unknowingly, you wished me back into being."
The thought was a barb, sharp and unwelcome. I had never yearned to be a mere magical token, an object born of someone else's desire.
I tried to inject a lighter note, though it felt hollow. "Perhaps it's the God of Hope, or even Love, who shaped it."
My eyes drifted, scanning the room's unfamiliar technology, searching for a distraction, a clue, anything. They landed on a discarded wastebasket. Rummaging through it, I found a pair of tickets – first-class, to Cairo.
My breath hitched. I marveled at the sleek design of the tickets, the listed flight time. The engineering, even of their simple flight, seemed far more advanced than any vessel I had ever piloted.
"We know where he's going," I announced, the discovery injecting a jolt of fresh purpose. "Let's board the plane."
"Easier said than done," Diana murmured, her voice pulling me back from the intoxicating lure of flight. "We can't get you on one. You don't exactly have a passport, or a visa, for that matter."
A mischievous grin, fueled by a deep, almost primal longing, spread across my face. "I don't want to get on one," I confessed, the words a jest wrapped around a raw, honest desire. "I want to fly the plane."
The thrill of flight, the exhilaration of soaring through a world that was both ancient and startlingly new, a world I shared with her, was a feeling I now desperately craved.
To my surprise, Diana agreed. And so, we flew.
We commandeered a sleek, stolen jet, climbing into the twilight sky. To elude our pursuers, Diana performed a feat I hadn't known she possessed: she rendered the aircraft invisible.
I hadn't realized she could do that, a skill she must have acquired in the decades since our last encounter.
It was a stark reminder of the vast expanse of time that separated us, of how much she had learned, how much she had lived.
She was ancient, Diana, though I dared not voice the thought. As I gripped the controls of the unseen plane, a small, defiant part of me reveled in the sheer thrill of it all, and my worries, for a precious moment, dissolved into the vast expanse of the sky.
Our arrival in Cairo was punctuated by a fierce skirmish.
Diana, usually an unstoppable force, engaged a troop of armed men, Maxwell Lord's hired muscle.
The ensuing battle, though ultimately won, revealed a subtle, disturbing truth. Despite knowing her immense capabilities, I observed the toll the fight took on her.
Her movements, usually fluid and powerful, showed a hint of strain, her eyes a flicker of something unsettling. Her condition, I realized, was not right.
Something was happening to Diana, a creeping malaise I knew was intrinsically linked to the stone. The price for my life, it seemed, was a terrible one, but I swore I would not let Diana be the one to pay it.
Her strength was ebbing, her vitality diminishing, and I could see the fatigue, the growing burden, reflected in the depths of her gaze.
After our failure to apprehend Maxwell Lord, Diana received a message from her informant, the friend she had tasked with uncovering the stone's secrets.
The news hit me like a physical blow: the stone, according to the report, had journeyed across the world, leaving a devastating trail in its wake. Every civilization that had possessed it had, without exception, collapsed catastrophically.
That doesn't sound ominous at all, I thought, a sarcastic counterpoint to the dread coiling in my gut.
I finally understood: the use of the wishing stone demanded a price, a terrible cosmic debt.
What that price truly was, we still didn't know, but one thing became horrifyingly clear. We were in trouble, far beyond our depth, caught in a current from which there was no turning back.
With a renewed sense of desperate urgency, we quickly made our way to the informant's location. We needed more information, every scrap we could glean, to stand even a remote chance.