------------- Tales of the Raptors – Ginger

She was truly the stranger in a strange land. The Cliff Raptors had met Ginger as the singer, Margaret Adler, on the SS Majestic, sailing from New York to London. She had a cover story, a young singer and actress heading to Europe to be Sarah Bernhardt’s understudy for Sardou’s Cleopatre. However, her real story was even more unbelievable.

Ginger was the orphaned daughter of Irish immigrants who’d died in a tenement fire in New York. She’d grown up a street rat, victimized and taught to hate and strike first. But in her early teen years she’d crossed the path of George Dougherty, a Pinkerton who saw something special in her. He took her in, cleaned her up and finally paid to have her shipped off to Cornell. He kept an eye on her and made sure she graduated. Along the way, though, she’d developed a persona that simply didn’t fit in with Victorian Era America. She was strong, independent and confident. If she’d been born twenty years later, she would have been considered a Suffragette. Instead, she was simply called difficult. It was no wonder that she had no options. She wanted to be a Pinkerton, like George, but when push came to shove, her talents were better served by her new life, that of international jewel thief.

Of course, stolen jewels were at the center of her encounter with the Cliff Raptors as they sought to return to their own world somewhere on the far side of the galaxy, and their own time, some forty six thousand years in her future. She had been arrested as the chief suspect in the murder of another Pinkerton, Robert Calville. The Raptors had managed to free her and helped solve the crime. Turned out Mr Calville had been shot by a union agitator who wanted revenge for the death of his little brother in the Homestead Massacre in Pennsylvania earlier that summer. So naturally, when they offloaded in Southampton and took the train into London, Ginger came along.

The Raptors were looking for one of their own, another time traveler from Arrallon, the Krell paratech known as Soth el’Mar. Here and now, on Earth of 1892, he was known by two other names; first as a character in the stories of a burgeoning author over on Wimpole Street in Paddington, Professor George Edward Challenger. The other was the name that had been misread to create the only name he was remembered by in modern Arrallon, Lord Sir Marsden Southersby. Of course, they never found Professor Challenger. But they did find Lord Southersby staying in the Savoy, just down the street. Ginger then assisted in their investigation of the Spring-Heeled Jack affair and the cult of devil worshippers run by the Iluminati down at Dunwich College. That led them to the real reason the Raptors had been sucked through a time portal to the other side of the galaxy, to stop another time traveling Arrallonian, Ma’luk ben’Sharif, posing as the high priest of the Cult of Osiris, Sheik Mohammed al’Sharif. In the end, he and his Shade swordarm were slain and the mummy of Seti I was destroyed.

Their adventures opened Ginger’s eyes to a world she would never have suspected existed, a world of magic and very real Gods and high adventure. And when they finally found the portal to return to Arrallon, she didn’t hesitate to volunteer to go with them.

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