The African sun beat down mercilessly on the rocky excavation site. The air shimmered with heat, making the distant landscape dance. Two archaeologists, Dr. Aris Thorne and his assistant, Lena Karr, were hunched over pottery shards, their shirts soaked with sweat.
"Nothing significant, Lena," sighed Thorne, palpable disappointment in his raspy voice. "More Neolithic fragments. We might have been sent on a wild goose chase."
Lena, younger and still an idealist, wiped her brow. "But the local legends speak of a city that appears and disappears with the desert wind, Aris. We can't just..."
Her sentence cut off. Her gaze was snatched by the horizon, her eyes widening behind her sunglasses.
"Aris..." she whispered, pointing a trembling finger. "Look."
A few kilometers away, where there had been only emptiness and heat haze, the mountain itself seemed to tear open. It wasn't a shimmering mirage; it was a revelation. The rock became translucent, then vanished, revealing crystalline spires, structures of silvery metal with impossible curves. A city, of an architecture both organic and terribly advanced, stood there, glittering under the sun.
"My God..." breathed Thorne, unable to believe his eyes. "The legends... they were true."
But the miracle quickly turned into a nightmare.
Three figures emerged from the city's heights, riding silent flying craft, angular gliders with metallic sheens. Their pilots were not men.
They were gorillas.
Massive, covered in light armor that hugged their powerful musculature, they rode the machines with natural authority. Their faces, scarred, were marked by a cold, determined intelligence.
One of them, clearly the leader, turned his helmeted head towards the two petrified humans. A low growl, more mechanical than animal, came from its throat. It raised a gloved hand, pointing a thick index finger at them.
The other two gorillas, obeying a silent order, immediately turned around, their craft veering with disconcerting agility to return to the city.
As the first gorilla maintained its threatening gaze on the archaeologists, the city behind it began to flicker. The crystalline towers lost their substance, becoming ghosts, then heat vibrations, and finally, nothing.
Within three seconds, the mountain was just a mountain again. Silent. Inert. As if nothing had ever happened.
The lone gorilla stared at them for another moment, a clear message in its dark eyes: You saw us. Tell no one. Then, its craft took off without a sound, speeding away at an impossible velocity before seeming to blend into the hot air and disappearing itself.
Silence fell, heavier than ever.
Lena and Thorne stood frozen, breathless, staring at the empty space where an impossible civilization had just manifested.
"They... they were real?" stammered Lena, her notepad falling into the dust.
Thorne, pale, shakily pulled out his satellite phone. His hand trembled.
"Call who?" asked Lena, hysterical. "To tell them what? That we saw an invisible city of warrior gorillas? They'll think we're crazy!"
Thorne looked down at the screen, his scientific mind wrestling with what he had just seen.
"Not the local authorities," he murmured finally, a new glint in his eye. He dialed not a local number, but an international code. "We're calling the Justice League. If something like this exists, it's their jurisdiction. And if they don't believe us..." He cast a last look at the now-empty horizon. "... then we're all in serious trouble."