Sempiternity (COMPLETED)

Prologue

"What has humanity amounted to?"

The cold words, sudden and whispered yet resonating in the otherwise quiet darkness, shook Wingef Teletov into a still shock. The Russian archaeologist, shaking with fear, looked around with bulging eyes and a sweating body. He patted at his forehead in a futile attempt to calm himself.

"H-hello? Who goes there?"

The heavenly voice did not respond. Teletov stood in place, gulped, and bent down to his knees once again. He picked up his fallen dusting brush and, looking over his shoulder once more, began to sweep at the floor once again. He contributed the voice to his partner, Kolbenik, who was supposed to be watching over the entrance of the cave they had discovered.

Kolbenik was a mischevious man who loved playing tricks on his partner, and Teletov was used to them by now after years of working together with the younger Russian. Still, something about his current surroundings made the trick take special effect on the already superstitious Teletov.

The two Russian scientists, met with mediocrity in their careers and both sharing a lust for glory and global recognition, had been working together for years, traveling the world and searching for the next historical discovery to turn the world on its head. They had been to the deserts of Mexico, the forests of Brazil, the arid wastes of Mongolia, and even the frigid banks of Antarctica, but were still met with failure when it came to reaching serious success. Their finds and paid work was enough to allow them both to survive, barely, but they agreed with each other on the fact that it was time for them to cash in on their ambitions and their abilities.

After the Collapse, the world had been turned around and completely changed despite the advances that science and society went through every day. Trinkets, gadgets, and memorials of the Old World still existed everywhere, and were indeed abundant on the markets both clean and black, but for a modern-day archaeologist, being in the big leagues meant finding crucial artifacts from a long-gone era; artifacts that had somehow managed to stay out of the hands of people after the Collapse had finished. The last big find in the community, for example, was an old object originally used for communication, something completely absurd in the modern world. It was a large white phone with an antenna and a wired interface. These were the sort of absurd objects people looked for nowadays in hopes of becoming rich and famous, and these were what the two archaeologists were searching for, had been searching for, for years. But they had found nothing and it looked like they would only ever find nothing.

That was then they had stumbled upon the mysterious cave in the far reaches of coastal Portugal.

The tip had come from a mysterious informant, who had gotten his information from a tip from a distant friend, and so on. Everyone who heard the tale of the extremely old, recently discovered 'man-made cavern' in the Portuguese beaches had disregarded it as pointless fiction. Among many fallacies, they loved to point out the fact that Portugal was far from holding the very first human civilization, as the rumors suggested. And how could such a cavern really be hidden on beaches?

Teletov and Kolbenik had taken the rumor as fact and set out to the Latin nation with haste. To them, every rumor and opportunity was a chance for success - and Teletov had the feeling that they had finally hit the jackpot.

Kolbenik, who had been harboring doubts about the entire situation, was floored when the two arrived on the sandy shores and investigated the site. Amazingly, after a few days of scouring, traveling, and digging, they found a deep underground cave exactly as predicted. Indeed, the cave had all the makings of being artificial, and even had enough artifacts to justify being labeled as ancient. But what was so startling wasn't the fact that the cave held clues of a previous civilization - that wasn't rare at all anymore.