Terracon Chronicles
an excerpt

“Back in the early 1980s, we had an elderly gentlemen show up on the steps of our headquarters with a crate of odd rocks. He told us that he owned an island off the coast that he would use for weekend get-aways to fish! Earlier that week, according to him, he was hiking along the beachfront and ran across some old ruins. You know how it is these days… Most “ruins” people get all ecstatic about turn out to be nothing more than some old foundations of whatever was put there by the previous owners and simply erroded away… Things like that! We were skeptical, at first, especially when he literally dumped that crate of sand and gravel on one of our desks… That’s all we needed! A lunatic. We thanked him for his time and sent him on his way, promising to get back with him. You know the routine. We cleaned up the debris and sent it down to the lab. Most of it was complete junk, but out of all that mess… There was one. One piece of stone with some very, very odd markings on it. The professors almost missed it completely! After some quick checking, nobody could pin the markings on any language we’ve seen before. It might not have even been a language, but the professors were adamant about checking the site directly, and were suddenly quite upset that the fragment had been removed from it’s original location. Funny how quickly they went from “get out of my lab” to “how could you disturb this relic, you fool”!
"Once they had a chance to look at the site, it turns out that there were much more relics where that came from, and the company quickly offered a hefty sum to gain ownership of the island and send the now very rich occupant away. I’m telling you, Daniel! The site is amazing… Over 20 years of covert excavation and research and we’ve come across something big. It’s safe to call it the biggest discovery since Columbus found the New World!”

“Woah, woah… Really? You aren’t getting ahead of yourself are you?” Daniel asked. “Come on, I know digs are important, but do you realize how many times I read about the next so-called greatest discovery and it turns out to be the bones of some already catalogued dinosaur?”

“This isn’t some dinosaur dig, you’re smarter than that! Why do you think we hired you? You don’t need some linguist to decipher bones! Unless there’s something carved on them, but that’s beside the point! We’ve recently made a major breakthrough, almost literally, and we’re hiring all the linguists and experts we can find! No simple task, let me tell you… A lot of them are already busy on things they think are more important than this. Fools. There will never be anything more important than this.”