Survivors

Chapter 1

Tom Hancock is a rebel scholar of sorts. Most of his life has been dedicated to the study of human history and his personal mission in life is to map out Man's past and overturn the incorrect but stubbornly dug in "mainstream" version of history. It is Tom's belief that Man has been civilized much longer than we have accepted officially. In fact, Tom believes that there have been many rises and fallings of civilized Man and not just the one that we are currently a part of. The evidence, Tom is convinced, demands that the minimum starting point of an advanced civilization is placed much farther back than even the last ice age. The ruins in modern-day Turkey referred to as Gobleki Tepi, are one example of such incredible evidence that predates what is accepted as the time of "advanced" man. Tom is a run of the mill kook.

It all started when a friend of his, Carl Randalson, reached out for help with some "work-related" stuff. It's always a pleasure for Tom helping out this friend because Carl finds and maps lost cities that have been overgrown or buried or flooded. Tom's own personal interest is very much in line with this kind of work. The prospect of putting the pieces of humanities lost history together is what drives him. So on the rare occasion that his friend finds some artifact that needs to be dated or translated on the quick- sometimes not so quick- Tom is all over it. He's led his share of learning or exploring expeditions as well. He used to love learning about those people that came before us. Tom has a collection of Sumerian tablets that describe the daily life of the "black-haired people". Bills of sale, poetry, citations, all kinds of regular things like that. Tom is so passionate about this kind of study because he believes that one day we will be the civilization whose artifacts are being dug up from ten thousand or more years ago.

But Tom was not prepared for this gig. His friend Carl discovered something very peculiar while on a not-so-legal ruin mapping expedition. Peas in a pod, these two madmen. He has a modified LIDAR system that can be quickly installed on most prop planes. Carl says it makes it easy to travel light and map things cheaply and quickly. Up in the air on the first illegal flyover of the night, Carl spotted it. It was a weird blip on the LIDAR screen that the experienced ruin hunter's intuition latched onto and wouldn't let go of. So after the initial mapping of the area, he marked out a couple of interest points on his fresh laser map and went to the spot of the previously mentioned blip with a ground-based mapping set up. Carl didn't specify how he got the damned thing out of the ground, but he dug his blip up. Turned out to be what they thought at the time was a weird burial chamber of some sort. It was a small dome. Like an igloo but not ice and fully enclosed. They had to break into it.

According to Randalson during his recent phone call that sent Tom's life spiraling into chaos, "There was a mummy sitting in the lotus position in the center of the small room. We also found a small library of 100 paper-like sheets written in an unknown language, a bowl, a cup, an empty box, an inkwell with an ornately carved brush handle whose brush had disintegrated ages ago, umm let's see what elts... and, oh yeah silly me I almost forgot, the fully mummified corpse was a Lizard-Man, mother fucker!!!"

There are old Mesopotamian dolls that depict lizard-looking people. There has never been anything found about them, other than the few surviving dolls we had. Some people thought they were probably depictions of gods, but as it turns out, there were definitely lizard people at some point. Just walking around all normal-folk-like. Probably going to their local Lizard grocery to buy their normal Lizard food. Don't worry it gets weirder. Carl had the paper-like sheets from the dome carbon dated and they came back with results of over one million years BCE. Of course, Tom thought Carl was joking when he first called and told him the news over the phone.

"Carl you're off your rocker. I think it's time to take a break from your whimsical adventures for a spell. Charge up the ol' batteries! What do you say, eh Buddy?" Tom said, legitimate concern creeping into his voice. Carl told Tom that he wanted him to translate the documents and take a look at a "neat" sculpture.