The team returned to Bailey Manor in Oyster Bay, a bit beaten up from their adventure, but happy to be home. Research promptly began on the strange writing found on the skull, with Archie translating the Atlantean script. The single word written on the skull was “YANYOGA”. With a clue in hand, the team began looking for answers.

Days went by, then a week, two weeks, three… while Archie tried to find references to this strange word, Penelope and Malcolm set about rebuilding the engines of the Cygnus. Penelope had found her mind filled with all sorts of strange ideas about how to create energy fields from crystals and how to control and project particles, an awakening of genius in her brain from her ordeal with the Mi-Go. Over the course of a month, she and Malcolm tore out all of the original Bristol-Pegasus engines and replaced them with Penelope’s new crystalline engines. These engines used no fuel, allowing Penelope to convert the existing fuel tanks into water storage.

Iris took to her room for the better part of the first month, typing away into the wee hours of the night, producing a manuscript documenting her recent adventures. The events were fictionalized, and she submitted it to her publisher as a fictional story. Her editor flipped over the story, and rushed the novel to production. Iris fought to keep her full name on the cover, not allowing the publisher to refer to her a I. M. Herbert to hide her gender. The book was released a month afterwards, and quickly became a small sensation among speculative fiction readers. By keeping her full name on the cover, Iris found herself also becoming a celebrity among feminist circles, and gaining connections with certain counter-cultural agents.

After several fruitless weeks of research, Archie even gave up trying to find a reference to “yanyoga” and dedicated himself to finishing his translations of the Dhol Chants and Codex Eztli. He also returned to NYU to take care of his class work, and found that they had moved his office into what had once been a janitorial closet. He told none of the others about this.

Eleanor also borrowed the Dhol Chants to attempt to gain some insight on the strange events she had witnessed. As she was reading Archie’s notes and attempting to translate it herself, she began to experience strange “hauntings”. Items would seemingly move when she wasn’t looking at them, and twice paintings fell off the wall as she passed by, both portraits of her parents. She became convinced that the ghosts of her mother and father were trying to communicate with her. She asked Iris for help, hoping to hold a seance. Iris, however, posited that the strange occurrences might be a new manifestation of Eleanor’s “episodes”, possibly brought on by the contact with the strange aliens on the slopes of Mount Everest, or the stress of the adventure. With Iris’s help, Eleanor found she could indeed move small objects by concentrating on them. It didn’t work every time, but it was clear that she had somehow come to possess psychic abilities.

After helping with the engine swap on the Cygnus, Malcolm made some inquiries with his military contacts. He managed to get a case of military issue Thompson machine guns delivered, and also put in a request for information on Victoria Niesennkraft. A few weeks later, to his surprise, he received a letter from Colonel Henry “Hap” Arnold, recently named Chief of the Air Corps. Hap was an old friend, Malcolm’s former commanding officer at March Field in California, and a close friend of Mal’s father, whom he had taught to fly. The letter tried to persuade Mal to return to the service, and also noted that there was very little information on Miss Niesennkraft – her records seemed to only go back as far as her visa for attending university. The letter also identified her as a member of the Nazi Ahnenerbe, a think tank group under Heinrich Himmler. Victoria’s specific team was known as the “Nachtwaffe”, or Night Force in English. Hap suggested they just call themselves “Hitler’s Ballsacks” and be done with it.

Penelope spent much of her time inventing and building, sketching ideas all over every scrap of paper she could find and even on the walls of the garage. Her mind was bursting with concepts, and she felt like she could create almost anything with enough time. She built for herself a small, belt mounted energy bubble projector, which she named the P-BO, that could protect her from harm. She even had Malcolm throw baseballs at her to prove how it would bounce them harmlessly away from her. At Malcolm’s request, she built a fuel-less flamethrower for him after he read a book that said werewolves were susceptible to silver and fire. After nearly six months of working non-stop, she decided to take a break, and for two weeks spent her time learning the game of badminton with Uncle Thomas.

Six months passed with no clues, no leads to follow, and life seemed to slowly be sinking back to normal…when suddenly Uncle Thomas gathered everyone in the library and showed them something he’d found completely by accident while reading a book by Doctor Robert Broom, a noted anthropologist. In his 1933 work The coming of man: was it accident or design?, Dr. Broom wrote the following passage:

In the heart of South Africa we find the earliest ancestors of man. In the dark cisterns of the ruins of Yanyoga, deep within the Skedelberg, the proto-humans carved tools of flint and iron. The remains of the ancient culture of Great Zimbabwe raised stone walls centuries before the pyramids of Egypt. Surely the cradle of humanity lies in Africa, and further south than anyone has suspected.

The team were all amazed. They had a lead – Yanyoga was a place, located somewhere called the Skedelberg. They all quickly decided to give the newly refitted Cygnus a shakedown flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, to meet Doctor Broom and try to learn what he knew of the mysterious Yanyoga…