Fleeing an alien invasion, Dr. Donald Blake stumbles across a cave. Inside he finds a hideously ugly walking stick. Leaving it where he finds it, he tries to hide deeper in the cave.
A Chinese nobleman, well-educated but impoverished, stumbles across the wreck of an alien spaceship in a hidden valley. He is unable to reverse-engineer the alien technology (as even the simplest machines are not only far more advanced than anything on Earth, but are labeled in a completely alien language) but he does get rich marketing the ship as a tourist attraction.
He later meets the world’s greatest Swordsman – who, with neither a mandarin to supply futuristic alien tech nor costumed superheroes to go undercover alongside, simply continues his mundane criminal career: able to beat Captain America in a straight fight, if there were a Cap, which there ain’t; there’s just a crook who sometimes looks back on his days as a knife-throwing circus performer, idly wondering why nobody ever builds really nifty stuff into a blade’s hilt.
Andrea Thomas, a high school science teacher, found an ancient mystical amulet on an archeological dig in Egypt. The amulet belonged to Hatshepsut, an ancient Egyptian Queen and it gave the wearer the powers of Isis. The Egyptian government arrested Thomas and charged her with stealing antiquities, which carries a prison sentence of 25 years. After her release from prison she returned to the U.S., where she earned a meager living as a free-lance translator and tutor in Arabic.