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The The

Awe-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha Formas Drossam brushed away the lingering specks of dust on the surface of his new discovery.

For decades he had busied himself with the findings of ancient things in the region of Sumer in Babylon.

In the beginning of his career, every little fragment of tablet or tool sent waves of excitement through him. But in his later days,

the days of his brushing this particular dust off of this particular chunk of limestone,

only the big things motivated him, palaces and colonnades and massive carvings of pieces of

literature. He had already found the oldest known recording of a cataclysmic flood event.

He had already dug up the breadcrumbs that would lead to the palace of Nebuchadnezzar

the Great and the famed ancient wonder of the world, Babylon's hanging gardens.

He had done all of this and much more to usher in the golden age of Middle Eastern archaeology,

and so, as he held another chunk of

cuneiform writing in his hand, he regarded it with little interest and quickly moved on to the

next thing, content to let his aides finish digging up this tablet's remaining pieces. Had he known

what the rest of this tablet contained, he may have stopped and appreciated it for a while

longer. Not long after he

shuffled away to something else, the aides finished digging out the rest of the pieces to this

fine discovery. Two halves had split apart sometime in its burial and six smaller fragments

had broken off on one side. All the pieces were gathered and the puzzle was put back together

with care. The result was a puzzling thing indeed.

Surely it was something an archaeologist of Rossum's caliber had seen plenty of times before,

...