Ancient Mesoamerican Language and Writing Systems: A New Unified Approach and translated journals from missionaries all the way back to the Conquistadores hadn’t turned up anything during the previous day’s research session. She couldn’t find anything that looked remotely like the symbols, not even if she squinted and tried to find vague similarities.
The day before that she’d hit some of her South Asia sources heavily, working on the theory that the stone might be related to a vimana. Hours and hours of skimming hadn’t located anything familiar.
A Modern Field Guide to Ancient Scripts didn’t help.
Her trip through Oriceran Writing: An Academic Survey proved no more useful than any of her other books.
Shay held up the stone and stared at the glyphs. The more she looked at the symbols, the stranger they seemed. Something about them was different from anything she’d ever encountered.
She thought back to what the elf had said about it.
“It gives me hints. Places to visit. For the future.”
The words were English, but she no idea what they meant.
His explanation could mean everything from the stone being a map to it being some sort of time-travel artifact, if such a thing even existed. She hadn’t heard about time-travel magic, but it was hard to dismiss anything out of hand, no matter how outlandish.
How would I know? Maybe some asshole keeps fucking with time, and we all don’t notice because events reset?
Shay chuckled. The thought didn’t disturb her for some reason. No point in worrying about something she couldn’t even begin to control.
She set down the stone and rubbed her chin.
One possibility was taking the stone to Tubal-Cain. She could ask him if he knew anything about it, but she was leery of presenting an unknown artifact to a gnome she had no reason to trust and who didn’t seem to care whether she lived or died. Just because he’d made knives for her didn’t mean he wouldn’t seize a powerful artifact if given the chance.
No, she needed to keep the mystery in-house. Even the Professor didn’t need to know. For all his smiles and friendship with Brownstone the man was still cryptic, and sometimes the only way to maintain control was to keep certain information private.
Secrets made the world go around, and everyone had more than a few.
Even though Peyton and Shay were tied together in a mutually beneficial relationship, he still didn’t know she’d defused his dead man’s switch, which meant she had the upper hand. He could keep his mouth shut, even if he was being a dumbass and using shadowy underworld companies to deliver pizza ovens.
That all meant, however, that he could be used as a resource once she had a better idea of where to direct the investigation. She also didn’t want him to know just how desperate she was. Showing weakness or ignorance was never an advantage.
I’ll figure this shit out. This library isn’t just for show.
A few days later, Shay stifled a yawn as she opened another book and started flipping through the yellowed pages. True desperation had long since set in, and she’d stopped even trying to narrow her search by picking useful sources.
Instead, she’d settled on grabbing books and skimming through them until she found any diagrams or pictures she could compare to the symbols on the stone.
Small piles had grown into larger piles until she’d been forced to stop and re-shelve them all. If the situation continued, she’d have to look into if there was such a thing as an underworld library assistant.
Damn, I have a lot of books. Maybe I should digitize all this shit someday. Then again, who would do the work? Purity?
She snickered at the thought of creating a whole new underworld service industry.
Shay returned her attention to her current book. She hadn’t even bothered to check the cover. At least it wasn’t all that long. At this point, reading any of the text instead of focusing on the images was a waste of time.
She paged through a quarter, then half, then three-quarters of the book.
“Another whole lot of nothing. Yay.”
She turned a page and froze, staring at the picture in the center of the new page. Her hands trembled in excitement.
The image depicted an iron obelisk unearthed on a Greek island. The writing didn’t resemble anything from that area and most of it was unreadable, worn down by the elements, but she did recognize one of the symbols. She slid the stone next to the picture. Despite some minor stylistic differences, the similarity to one of the glyphs was unmistakable. She read the caption underneath the picture.
This iron obelisk might be considered an out-of-place (OOP) artifact. The pillar was uncovered in a clearly bronze-age cultural stratum but is the product of advanced iron working. The unusual writing hasn’t been linked to any extant or non-extant writing system, leading certain fringe theorists to suggest it might ultimately be of extraterrestrial origin, even though it’s far more likely to be sourced from a lost regional language.
“Aliens, huh?”
Shay flipped to the front of the book to check the copyright date, which was 1982. That was decades before the truth about Oriceran had come out.
She rubbed her chin. Everyone now assumed that all ancient alien reports involved Oricerans, but it was hard to be sure. So many things had changed. The writing didn’t resemble anything from Oriceran that she’d been able to find, and the book’s blithe assertion that it must be linked to another lost language didn’t sit well. Very few non-Oriceran languages and writing systems couldn’t be traced to something else in Earth’s history.
Places to visit. Had he been talking about other planets?
Shay laughed, not sure if some ancient lost Oriceran language was a more outrageous theory than the idea that the writing had come from another planet harboring intelligent life.
It wouldn’t hurt to follow up that angle.
This shit is crazy. If aliens were real, people would have proof, just like we do with Oriceran, right?
