Field trips are supposed to be educational.
A calm escape from the classroom, a chance to stare at dinosaur bones and pretend you understand fossils while secretly plotting to ride the animatronic T. rex when no one's looking.
That… was not how today went.
Our destination: The New York Museum of Natural History.
Our mission: Learn about ancient civilizations.
My real goal: Don't awaken anything that ends in "the Undying."
We arrived via a convoy of school buses, all of which smelled faintly of crayons and existential dread. I disembarked with the grace of a floating demigod (but landed like a normal kid, because Jenkins had bribed the anti-gravity node in my sneakers to behave).
"Arthur," Mindy said, stepping beside me with a clipboard and serious agent energy, "if you accidentally break time again, I'm not helping cover it up this time."
"Noted," I said, slipping a juice box into my hoodie pocket. "But if history breaks itself, that's not technically my fault."
Ms. Benson gathered us all together. "Okay, class, buddy up!"
I immediately linked arms with Sir Chompers, who had somehow hitched a ride in my backpack. The hamster adjusted his tactical scarf and saluted.
Mindy glared. "That's not a buddy, that's a rodent."
"He has seniority," I replied.
Inside the museum, we passed taxidermied animals, ancient tools, and one very confused security guard who definitely didn't remember installing a squirrel surveillance drone on the fourth floor.
We arrived at the Egyptian exhibit, where things started to wobble—literally.
I felt a strange hum in the air. Magic. Old, cranky magic. The kind that smells like sandstorms and bad life choices.
The centerpiece was an ornate sarcophagus labeled:
"Tomb of Nefrakah the Eternally Judgy"
Do Not Disturb Under Any Circumstances
Naturally, someone disturbed it.
Specifically, Tommy Jenkins (no relation to my butler), who poked the side of the sarcophagus and said, "What if there's treasure in there?"
Spoiler: There wasn't.
There was a 4,000-year-old undead bureaucrat with serious opinions about modern dress codes.
With a whump of ancient dust, the lid shifted. A skeletal hand emerged, followed by a full-on mummy in gold-trimmed bandages and a truly fabulous cobra headpiece.
He sat up. "WHO DARES INTERRUPT MY ETERNAL SLUMBER?"
Everyone screamed.
Except me.
"Hi," I said, sipping juice. "Welcome to the 21st century. We've got Wi-Fi and existential dread."
The mummy turned to me. "Who are you, tiny sorcerer?"
"I go by Arthur, Chaos, or That Kid Who May Be A Minor Deity Depending On Who You Ask."
The mummy blinked, clearly unsure whether to smite or adopt me.
Meanwhile, Ms. Benson had fainted near the dinosaur skeletons, and Travis—yes, Travis—was hiding behind a vending machine whispering "I told you he was cursed."
The mummy climbed out of the sarcophagus and raised his arms.
"I, NEFRAKAH, DEMAND TRIBUTE."
Mindy, bless her, tried diplomacy. "We have… leftover pizza?"
"AND WHAT IS PIZZA?"
"Flat bread with melty cheese. Sometimes regret."
He took a bite. His eyes—well, his bandage sockets—widened. "THIS… THIS IS GLORIOUS."
So naturally, the museum cafeteria ran out of pizza in five minutes.
Still, the mummy was not entirely appeased.
He stomped around, demanding a pyramid, an army, and access to streaming services. I offered him a tablet with Disney+. He got distracted watching Encanto and we almost avoided total destruction…
…Until someone (Tommy again!) tried to take a selfie with Nefrakah and used the flash.
That's when the sandstorm hit.
An actual indoor sandstorm.
I activated my emergency containment protocols—read: a glowing bubble of light and an annoyed scowl—and yelled, "Sir Chompers, deploy Plan Tutankha-munch!"
The hamster bit the mummy's ankle.
The mummy screamed. I launched a containment field shaped like a jellybean. Mindy hit him in the face with an educational pamphlet. Chaos. Pure, glitter-coated chaos.
In the end, we managed to reseal the sarcophagus using a combination of pizza grease, pigeon feathers, and me chanting the lyrics to an old theme song backward.
"Is it over?" someone asked.
"For now," I said, brushing sand off my shoulders. "But Nefrakah has Wi-Fi now. So… we may have created the world's first undead influencer."
Jenkins arrived fifteen minutes later with an emergency clean-up team disguised as janitors.
He glanced at the broken exhibit, the sand-covered students, and Ms. Benson, who was muttering, "Mummies aren't real… mummies aren't real…" into a display pillow.
"I assume this was 'educational'?" Jenkins asked.
"Extremely," I said. "Also, I taught an ancient being how to do the Macarena."
Back on the bus, everyone was too traumatized to speak. Except Sir Chompers, who had a tiny scar under his eye now and refused to blink.
I looked out the window, already planning tomorrow's events.
Spoiler: It involves a bake sale, mild interdimensional rifts, and a substitute teacher who may or may not be a time-traveling librarian with laser eyes.
Ready for Chapter 8?