"Researching."
"Researching what?"
"You caught me. I have a teleport station in my house so I can beam myself to other worlds--"
"Dimensions. If there was life out there, close enough for that kind of tech to work, it would have to be dimensional, not linear."
"Thank you, miss scientist. Then I have aninter-dimensionalportal in my house."
They both cracked up.
The tide, however, started to creep into the cave a bit more.
"Hey, should we leave?" Gianna asked.
"It does this sometimes," Tina said. "Come on, we can go a little deeper."
They hopped down into the splashing water.
"Um, doesn't this mean we'll get trapped in the cave if the tide comes in?"
Tina waved her hand. "There's a hole back a way if it does, but it never... What in the world?"
"Tina?" Gianna came up to her.
Tina stared at the cave wall. "What is that?"
"What?"
"That?" Tina said and pointed to the round stone archway. "Where did that come from? Has someone been down here carving out the stone?"
She approached the ring. And it was a perfect ring. True, nature could do some exciting things, but she was willing to bet, just looking at it, if she had her measurement tools, it would be precisely a perfect ring. The lines were too neat to be natural.
Tina popped out her phone and snapped a few pictures to measure at home on her computer.
"Hold the lantern up," Gianna said. "Look at this." She gestured to the wall of it. There were markings.
Very faint, but Tina could see them.
She crossed to Gianna. "Take my hand."
"What?"
Tina flipped off the light.
Gianna cried out. "It's dark," she said after a second.
"Yeah, but look at the ring."
"I can't see anything--oh, what is that?"
"Writing. There's writing on the ring. I don't know what it says, but it is there. Crisp and clean."
"How is that possible? This stone is the same as the walls. It has to be a natural--"
"Nothing in nature is that perfect of a circle," Tina said. And she'd bet her degrees that it was a perfect circle. "And it can't be the same as the walls. Look for some kind of carving marking on it."
They both crept closer.
