Speculating about the Archaic Elevated Caste...

[WindexGlow]

By the way, check out the very first note in Penumbra Black Plague, found in the cell you start in.

=)

[Yuhaney]

You mean the one which says something like: 'Which lies between light and shadow' (or whatever it was...)?

[Voronwe]

Good stuff! But...

1. The note found in the toolshed in Overture, which has two types of dating - one is the usual 2001 AD, but the other states 9000-something... This would mean, that the Archaic have been around since the end of the last ice age (?!)

Just because someone is following a 9000-year old calendar, does not necessarily mean they are 9000 years old.

[Kedjane]

Huh? I missed this thread. Did talk some about the Archaic in another thread though.

The Archaic was founded in 1519 by Fransesco Melzi. He was an apprentice under Leonardo DaVinci and was thought to be his lover because of his frequent visits, but that was not the case (according to the Penumbraverse). DaVinci somehow gained great knowledge of many things from an unknown source (likely supernatural or extraterrestial) such as how to build flying machines and submarines. None of his constructions worked though, as he was limited to human building materials.
At his deathbed he taught everything he knew to Fransesco Melzi, who then founded the Archaic. It's unknown wether Melzi also had contact with DaVinci's source of information.
The Archaic have since grown explosively and by year 2000 they had 30'000 members in 203 installations worldwide.
The Archaic also use their own calendar which seems to use the year 7010 BC as their "zero", if they are using solar years. In a few notes in the game you find notes where dates are written as years and "phases" and from what I can tell one phase seems to be one month (the highest phase number seen before turning into the next year is 12). This strengthens the theory that their calendar uses solar years - only 7000 BC was an extremely uneventful century from what Wikipedia could tell me.

Now I've just uninstalled my Black Plague since I'm upgrading to the Windows 7 beta shortly but I know there's a listing over the total costs of the Shelter program along with Site B. I think the Shelters construction, equipping and research totals to a billion, but my memory could fail me pretty hard.
The expense reports are in saw-mans room from what I can remember.

Oh yeah, they also seem to have at least two ranks. Regular (can't remember if they were called something special) and Elevated. The Elevated are extremely valuable while it seems the regulars have absolutely no worth at all to the Archaic. It would seem both ranks carry cyanide pills at all time though. The Archaic fully trusts their employees to take the pills too, so I think brainwashing is pretty certain.