Play@YSDC

Clay will start going through some of the books to see if anything remotely related to what we have discovered so far.

"I'll look online," says Liz, "starting with the prof's webpage. They must be colleagues of his, but they might not be at Brichester. We should warn Maria of the danger by email too. She's in Albania, so it would be even easier for them to get to her."

Jacob grabbed two books from the box. Skimming these books doesn't reveal any major revelations, but simply looking at the index indicates there are a couple of entries pertaining to the Verbti/Verbetoi.

Pliny’s Natural History – Latin w/English translation 233pp Oxford University Press, 1937:

"when speaking of the “Illyripropriedicti” ("Illyrians properly so-called"), we must explicitly exclude the Verbetoi. for “they preceded the Illyrians and were like, but not of the Thracian Stock, both wild and uncivilised. Only their horses and metalwork were handsome”.

The Histories – Latin w/English translation, 448pp, Polybius, Cambridge Press 1954

A conversation between Xerxes and Demaratus - an exiled Spartan king in his retinue after the Battle of Thermopylae wherein Xerxes notes of Leonidas, “did he not know I would have gladly rid them (the Greeks) of the Verbetoi".

OOC:   You call them Verbti I'll call them Verbetoi,While the names Verbti and Verbetoi now seem interchangeable, its apparent that in the past the people were more widely known by there latin name Verbetoi, but that more recently they are known as the Verbti. This popular modernusage though is incorrect as Verbti though was/is apparently the god they worship or worshiped.

In the Prof's potted biography on his webpage is a very dated picture of him and three others at Miskatonic University in Mass US, one of whom is clearly a much younger version of Maria Dermarchi.

OOC:   Further research is a difficult Library use or a normal Computer Use to trawl through Miskatonics records and year books.

So what should be our next step ?
Jacob asks
How this Verbti is connected to the fragments?

Liz codes up a spider to search through the Miskatonic University webspace, and it eventually hits paydirt.

Liz's spider finds a reference to a Alumni dinner two years ago which contains a photo of three men, one is Profess Gossham the others are:

Professor Charles Grundy - UCL (University College London) School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

Professor Tom Mathers - Chair of Russian, Eurasian and Eastern European Studies, University of Warwick

"Found them!" announces Liz triumphantly, showing the results to the others. "The chaps we're looking for are Charles Grundy at UCL and Tom Mathers at Warwick. We could even visit them in person. Let me see what I can find on them." She searches for biographical and contact information on the other two professors.

There isn't anything out of the ordinary about either of them, they have published papers in their area of study none of which have had anything to do with the Verbti/Verbetoi have what look to be normal academic profiles.

Liz shows the others what she's found. "We can at least email them," she says. "That way we can be sure to warn them quickly." She next opens up the file containing the professor's draft of his final paper and starts reading it.

Un-titled Thesis

The Maltese fragments Fragments were discovered by the archaeologist David Tavernier in 1985, at a dig in the Mgarr region of Malta. Called as such because these engraved stones are thought to be part of a much larger stone-working, the other pieces of which have never been recovered.

They are particularly fine examples of artefacts associated with the people Gosshamm has dubbed 'the Readers', who are thought to be descended from Sicanian stock and arrived on Malta from Sicily around 5200BC. They formed mainly farming and fishing communities, living in caves and open dwellings and predate the island's temple period (3600 BC), by which time they were likely extinct. Artefacts associated with the 'Readers', such as pottery and cave paintings, are recognisable due to being covered in intricate but crudely rendered script, several characters of which are tantalisingly similar to characters found in Archaic and Old Egyptian.

The orthodox view, and the one held by Tavernier and his team, is that the Readers' script is entirely decorative and the resemblance of some characters to characters in written languages is coincidental, or else the artefacts date from a much later period than is generally thought, and are the result of interaction with Egyptian explorers.

Gosshamm disagrees, as do other proponents of progenitor civilization theories. He points to the facts that there is no evidence of any Sicanian tribe practicing this sort of decoration in Sicily, nor of any Egyptian expansion into Malta. He also maintains that whilst the characters are crudely rendered, they are more numerous and distinctive than those of Archaic or even Old Egyptian scripts, suggesting they may form a more sophisticated language.

Grossham's thesis is that when the Readers arrived on Malta they encountered artefacts of a much older civilization - now lost to time all together - and were in some way profoundly affected by them, causing them to endlessly reproduce the mysterious characters they had encountered without understanding them. The Maltese Fragments are of particular interest to Gosshamm as they represent the largest uninterrupted example of Reader script found to date, and using various esoteric and contentious sources, such as past life experiences, psychic readings and the Book of Eibon, Gosshamm claims to have succeeded in translating sections of it.

He claims the translation identifies the text as belonging to the mythical Book of Skelos, and whilst while there are several disparate passages, the longest deals with the history of a nomadic people called the Atahath, who settled for some years in the city of Yb in the Western deserts of Shem before migrating across the Mediterranean - then a desert - to a land Gosshamm identifies as modern-day Albania. It was through his studies of Albanian peoples that might be descended from the Atahath that Gosshamm became aware of the Verbetoi, whose language appeared to be Afro-Asiatic in origin in stark contrast to their neighbors.

The problem with the ideas which form the evidence and arguments for the thesis while coherent are certainly not conclusive, the evidence is also lacking and requires something more incontrovertible. Basically, the thesis doesn't really prove anything and is at best an early draft, its certainly not something to send out to peer review.

"Hmm..." says Liz. "It looks like this is an early draft. Maria, Charles, and Tom must have the latest version. It doesn't seem likely that anyone would want to kill him over what I'm reading here, but there may be more to it. It seems like the Verbetoi really want to conceal their origins. Whatever he discovered that proves his thesis must be the key to all this, and his plans to return to Northern Albania may have prompted his murder."

The professor's killers probably wanted the fragments or preventing him to explore the topic further?
He might have found out something before he wrote his thoughts and findings on paper.
Jacob throws the notion to the air

Clay puts down the books unable to find anything worthwhile. Wasn't like he was really looking, but he didn't want to seem like he wasn't helping in the nerdathon going on.
.
"So what do we know of these, what did you call them, Ver-bo-tee? Anything on the internet about them?"

"I found a bunch of stuff last month," says Liz. "I've still got it saved on my laptop." She brings it up and shows him.

OOC,I know I found some material on the Verbetoi back in Chapter 1, but I don't remember exactly where in the chapter it is or what it said.

"So it sounds like these guys are not a good group to cross, which is what the prof obviously did. Does the Prof have any family? From the sounds of this, they could be in trouble as well." Clay gives his 2 cents worth.

Greg looks around. "Well we can start trying to get phone numbers and ring these people at their homes tonight, or we can wait until tomorrow and ambush them in their workplaces." He thinks for a moment. "These guys are in different part of the country aren't they? Warwick is about as far from London as this place isn't it, so if we want to see them at their offices will we need to get a move on and arrange transport? Also what are we going to tell them?"