The setting sun glinted redly off a shirtless Gideon Jura’s hairless chest. Red, too, was the glow in Chandra Nalaar’s eyes, though it seemed a little brighter than one would expect from a sunset alone, even on Zendikar, the magical plane with a special kind of mana where the newly-formed Gatewatch, a super-cool team of four planeswalkers, had just defeated the unimaginably fearsome Eldrazi.
“Way to go, Gideon,” said the fire mage (Chandra), resting her staff on a blackened tree stump. “Way to go everyone. At last the multiverse is free of the Eldrazi and I can get back to what I do best – makin’ peppy wisecracks and settin’ stuff on fire!”
Jace Beleren smiled enigmatically. “It is so,” intoned his enigmatic voice. “I realised that there was one thing those plane-devouring beings from the blind eternities hadn’t reckoned on, and that was a team made up of a master telepath, a powerful pyromancer, a mighty soldier, and an elf.” The enigmatic mage smiled again, giving his face a somewhat enigmatic air.
“Iffaith,” agreed Gideon, his muscles rippling where his shirt (or jacket etc) would have been if he was wearing one. “The bards of Zendikar will sing of our deeds for many moons. In time, mayhap, it will be we who are mistaken for gods.”
“And goddesses,” he added ruminatively, his granite brow furrowing and his burly chest muscles moving as one would expect. “I do confess, ’tis passing strange that there should have been two women on our team. One is the usual number, in sooth.”
Chandra Nalaar rolled her reddish-glowing eyes. “Zip it, Giddy. Those rules don’t apply here. The only tokens this multiverse needs are 3/1 elementals.”
Nissa coughed slightly. Jace gave her an enigmatic look.
Ever restless, Chandra stood and stretched herself, as if to planeswalk away in search of her next adventure and a new permutation of direct damage, looting and casting spells for free. She smiled and turned for a parting remark. “You know what’s funny, though? When I cast that final spell to flambé those Eldrazi guys for good?”
Gideon smiled shirtlessly at the memory. Jace’s enigmatic visage took on an aspect of enigmatic curiosity as Chandra winked a fiery eye at each companion in turn.
“I never had time to learn that spell properly, so I just sharpied FALL OF THE TITANS on a Magmatic Chasm. And those world-eating goombas will never know!”
As she laughed her carefree, convention defying laugh, she didn’t notice that Nissa’s face, always somewhat ghostly, had turned a shade paler. Veins bulged visibly in Gideon’s neck, abdomen and left biceps, while Jace, ever the enigma, merely looked into the enigmatic distance.
Quietly at first, a very low rumble began. A rumble that seemed to stir the bowels of the very plane of Zendikar.
The rumble grew louder.
Nissa turned colorless.
The Gatewatch’s second challenge was approaching sooner than anyone had expected. And this time, even the combined awesome powers of the four happening and diverse mages would not be enough. They needed to recruit… a sexy necromancer.
Stabbing the air with inky fingers, Blugar protested: “It’s completely unreasonable that we battle mages aren’t allowed to duel this way if we want to. If I summon a merfolk spy and tell him he’s Jace, the Mind Sculptor, and Zhazha agrees to suffer a complete mental breakdown as if he really was Jace, then what’s the harm?”
