If you had told Leta two weeks ago that she'd be spending her spring break sifting through the ruins of an underwater villa dating back to the Mycenaean Period off the coast of Greece, she'd have laughed in your face.
And yet, here she was. One hundred feet below the surface of the Sea of Crete, using her tools to suck up the silt and sand and exposing the colorful blue tile underneath.
Behind her mask and scuba equipment, Leta was grinning as if she'd won the lottery.
Seventeen and she felt she could finally car herself an archeologist. She'd been dreaming of this since she was a child when her father would read her bedtime stories.
Leta was the product of a university anthropology professor and a museum curator, which led to a childhood filled with stories of the past.
Her earliest memories were following her parents from one archeological sight to another. The banks of the Nile River, the highlands of Scotland, the jungles of South America. History was her playground.
But ancient buildings and fascinating artifacts of civilizations long past did not give her a lot of social skills for children her age.
When she was ten, her parents had decided that she needed to have an education outside of the dig sites, and off to boarding school she went.
The fact that she'd rather spend her time digging through dirt underwater than spending more time with her classmates said a lot about how that went.
Leta couldn't really say that it was unexpected. She cared more about history and discovery than looking good, which only made the taunting, teasing, and bullying worse.
But, Leta couldn't be too sad for herself. Sure, she was short, a bit on the chubby side, and had the social skills of a wombat, but here she was.
She wasn't even in university, and yet her history professor at school had recommended her to go to Greece for spring break to help on this dig.
Unlike when she was a child and could only watch with fascination, this time she had her hands on actual history.
Giddy with excitement didn't even begin to cover what she was feeling.
Professor Vivienne Morrow, head archaeologist on site, had informed her during the briefing that they believed that the villa dated back from the Late Bronze Age. Based on the artifacts found, it was believed that it had been a small island colony part of the Mycenaean empire that sank into the ocean during an earthquake.
However, a storm recently shifted the sands, revealing a new structure was, in fact, from the Early Bronze Age, one of the only Early Bronze Age architectural sites of Mycenaean culture in existence.
Truly, this would be the first recorded site of Early Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization outside of mainland Greece ever discovered. It would prove that the Mycenaean had been building their seafaring empire much, much earlier than first thought!
Leta pulled from her thigh carrier a flag and pushed it into the ground next to the tile piece so that the tile could be photographed and examined later.
She checked her air tank gauge and saw that she was just under half a tank. Enough time to continue clearing back the silt for a little longer.
Leta was clearing another section when she noticed something odd.
The had a very deep internal ridge, much more than one would expect from something affixed to the floor with grouting. It wasn't something out of the realm of possibilities, but certainly something to take notice of.
Using what was basically a glorified underwater vacuum, she cleared away the sand and was surprised that the tile was hollow without something underneath it. This section was supposed to be the edge of a room where the floor meets the wall, but in this section it looked like the wall had collapsed outward, probably during the earthquake that sunk it beneath the sea.
As Leta cleared the debris underneath the tile, she was shocked to find what looked like metal contraptions based on the rust that held the tile up.
She hypothesized that this was a secret compartment built into the floor, probably a hiding spot for valuable goods or important scrolls. Not unheard of - the Greeks and Egyptians had been known to build clever contraptions to deter thieves, but nothing she could think of had been made from the time period of this site.
Leta was practically vibrating with her excitement. She could think of no time that such ingenuity was shown in any Early Bronze Age Mycenaean artifacts.
Technology such as this belonged among early inventions like the battery of ancient Egypt or the wine vending machine of first century Greece.
Motivated by such a discovery, Leta began clearing silt in earnest, determined to find the size of this hidden compartment, using the vacuum and a brush to move quickly but gently.
She had about seven inches of dirt cleared and she noticed something starting to be revealed from the muck.
It was slightly green, like copper that had oxidized. Strange. While bronze would have included large amounts of copper, it would have been offset with tin, the ratio for whatever this was was very off for what is normal for this the time frame of this building.
As more and more silt was cleared, she could see a shape beginning to form.
It was a metal contraption with jagged edges and… glass?
Yes! Held within metal prongs and obscured by oxidation runoff and ancient barnacles was a small glass tube around three or four inches long.
If Leta could have screamed in excitement through her apparatus, she would have.
Glass bottles weren't invented until 100 BCE in southeast Asia, at least 100 years before the Romans learned about the technique. By that time, this building would have been underwater for at least 1,500 years!
Leta, at eighteen years old, may have just discovered the oldest piece of intact glass in history. This was monumental!
It completely rewrote history, proving that the Early Bronze Age civilization had truly advanced by leaps and bounds past the Stone Age and into the future!
The tube contraption had stylized prongs and was tilted upward at a 45 degree angle, a tapered cone ending in an extremely metal tube that attached to another piece of the same alloy.
Leta pulled back the vacuum and started to brush away the debris to see what the tube contraption was affixed to. She couldn't make out exactly what it was, but it had a square like shape and appeared slightly raised compared to the rest of the other stones.
It looked like the remains of some inscription carved into the raised stone, but it was so rough she couldn't hope to try and understand it.
Maybe if she whipped it off…
The raised stone square suddenly pushed down with her touch and the metal and glass contraption flipped on flipped around 180 degrees on its pedestal. It was fast, too fast for something underwater, and much too fast for her to react.
Before she could move her hand back, the small tube was stabbing into her arm an inch below her wrist, digging through skin and muscle.
Leta nearly coughed out her breather as she screamed in pain.
Instincts took over and Leta forgot that this was a priceless artifact thousands of years old as she grabbed the tube and prongs and tried to forcibly pry it out of her arm.
Through her grunts of shock and pain she hissed as she felt a burning sensation spreading through her wrist and fingers and up her arm.
Through the grim, she could see the black liquid in the vial emptying into her arm, probably the cause of the burning pain that was spreading through her. She wasn't focusing on the unsanitary and possibly deadly bacteria in said liquid, her mind only focused on getting the thing out of her arm.
Finally, she was able to pry what she realized was some kind of needle out of her arm and clutched her wounded arm to her chest.
She had enough sense of mind to go up slowly and pressurize, seeing that some of her teammates had noticed her distress and were also swimming her way.