As mentioned previously, the stone texts making up "Message End; O World!" were found under quite unusual circumstances. On June 12, 2016, every person in the Amelia Court House, a location at the center of the rural county of Amelia, Virginia, mysteriously vanished. The time was 10:36 AM, and though many people were around, none had an explanation. The people were there one second, and gone the next. To this day, no serious scientific explanation has been proven or even given, and we are still unsure of what exactly happened. Initial investigations showed that all signs of human life itself had vanished, leaving the building empty, as if nobody had ever stepped foot inside.

Something else just as strange was uncovered as well: a massive underground chamber, a hundred feet tall and several thousand feet across, hidden underneath the building and containing hundreds of seven-sided stone monoliths, each side being inscribed with text in unknown languages. Some sections were written in a script akin to cuneiform, while others were written in a pictographic language, and early analyses revealed that within these two scripts, different sections used different grammatical structures. These texts were completely alien - neither the scripts nor the languages had any relation to those we know.

As if things couldn't get any stranger, carbon dating showed that these objects, despite all evidence to the contrary, seemed to be brand new. In fact, they may have been even more than brand new - the first part of the texts to be deciphered was a numbering system, fairly similar to our own, which indicated the events as taking place far in our future. This fact would become significantly more unnerving as the translation process continued.

For a few years progress remained at a standstill, with nobody sure what to make of the texts or the corresponding events and eventually, for the most part, forgetting about them, many laymen assuming it was an elaborate hoax. The fact that the building was inaccessible to the general public did not help with this perception. This was until February 2, 2020, when another team of experts exploring the underground chamber found a final stone monolith, tucked away in an additional secret chamber off to the side. When examined, it revealed something utterly shocking - the indecipherable alien scripts placed alongside our own modern scripts and languages, done for the purpose of translators, presumably those looking at our words in confusion! With this, attention and excitement was quickly brought once again to the texts, and with COVID-19 lockdowns starting in March 2020, translators now had quite a good excuse to spend their days poring over the texts (though not in physical form) and begin in earnest the process of translation.

The translation project, of course, was much more difficult than most. First, we had to understand the structure of the languages themselves, an extremely difficult and technical process which still isn't quite fully done and of which I won't bore you with the details. By December 2023, though, we had enough of a grasp on the languages to begin translating the text of the mysterious monoliths. Each language, though using different grammatical structures and even different scripts, were unusually and unnaturally similar - indeed, they seem to be close variations on one central language, with differences in structure and script used as a demarkation for different sources and tones in the writings themselves, making them relatively easy to merge into a single-language translation (though nothing here can really be called 'easy'). This variation of languages also suggests that people generally wouldn't be expected to read the texts themselves, as even with the similarities, most wouldn't be able to read every language and script. Instead, a small number of trained literate people would likely recite it to an audience. Multiple parts of the texts also claim the story is already known and popular, and that the texts are simply one written version of a typically orally transmitted narrative.

The results of these translation efforts, I think, speak for themselves: an intensely odd and compelling story, and one that seems to have been of extreme significance to those who wrote it down. There is still debate on their authenticity, but as more is translated the chance of them truly being from a far future (though perhaps not our own) grows, despite such a thing seeming completely impossible. While not everything about our time in the texts is accurate, small details give pause, including - to come full circle - an offhanded reference to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. This reference would, of course, be impossible if the texts had been written in 2016, when they were found.

The exact circumstances behind these texts is still a mystery, one that becomes increasingly difficult to explain by the day. If they really are from the future, how did they get here? And even if they aren't, how could they possibly get where they were? And, most importantly, what happened to all of those people, some of whose families still wait for their return, and all of whose families at least wait for an explanation? As much as it pains me to say, we may never know. We can only hope that solving what we can of this deep mystery will bring some amount of closure, and that by translating and publicizing the texts they can bring something back to the world.