Exciting Artifacts; Electronic Treasure Trove from the Sea!?

[Cass MacPherson]

Even working at a secret agency tasked with surveilling and containing the supernatural, strange and unknown could, sometimes, become dull routine. Especially if one, like Cassiopaia Lavinia MacPherson, works far removed from the realities of such things. Down in the basement, in a department previously only filled with a handful of... let's respectfully call them experienced folks. The Department of Synchronicity sounds fancy and modern but in reality it is full of arcane nonsense of occasionally reliable methods. Pendulums, dusty old prophecies, methods of arithmetic and geometry that bleed into astrology and the tossing of dice Cass is fairly certain are made from human bone.

In short, they stuck her with the crazy people. And one could argue she belongs here. After all she has her own walls of printouts, photographs, post-its and newspaper clippings connected by strings that rival the multiple layers deep of arcane ramblings her colleagues have produced over their decades of work. But this is the 80s, damnit. A modern age that demands modern methods and so Cass' corner of the department looks extremely at odds with the rest. Multiple computer chunk away and she has reams of printer-paper filled with calculations, graphs and data. Cables run along the ceiling in a vain attempt to manage them which has turned into it's own tangle of connections.

The truly mind-boggling thing to her is that the people upstairs are more inclined to listen to the ancient dinosaurs with their tomes and star-charts than her. Sure, somewhere someone recognized the worth of her work and recruited her to this place but whoever made that decision doesn't seem to have much sway in what information makes it to someone who matters, much less what resources are allocated to her little project. Occasionally she puts it on herself to venture upstairs and seek out one of the agents when she discovers something she thinks might be helpful. She does have access to a lot of information in the system, even if she's not quite sure if that's intentional or an oversight. So far no one has stopped her when she requests files. And slowly but surely more information finds it's way onto the burgeoning network of computers springing up within the Agency.

Right now she is waiting for the latest iteration of her program to finish compiling. She reaches the end of the magazine she's reading and leans forward in ehr chair to place it on a growing pile of similarly colorful covers. She's almost certain she's not supposed to, but so far no one has stopped her from sneaking through one of the ghost paths every week to pick up new issues of Shounen Sunday and WSM. It's amazing to be able to get material that would otherwise be annoying to get her hands on, especially so quickly, but the problem with that is she has caught up and now has to actually wait for new issues to be released. She could always branch out but either way she'd have to break from what has become a little bit of a routine. And she already almost got caught once by some of the agents. She's not sure of they'd care but still. They're not supposed to smuggle things through the paths. Something about opening the door to exploiting commercial abuse and potentially drawing attention to goods appearing where they shouldn't be. But what's the harm in personal use, right? That's what she tells herself anyway to calm her nerves about it.

The 'fwumph' of a delivery arriving through the pneumatic tube interrupts her thoughts. Weekly summaries of activities and investigations to feed her algorithms. She sits and up and grabs the delivery, unscrewing the tube and letting the rolled up file copies slide out. She flips through it, wondering if it's worth stopping the compiler and adding some of this but it'd waste a good hour of work. She sighs. She'll it to the database but digitizing things takes time so she tends to sort things into piles. There's a growing one of backlogged things deemed less important or relevant in the hopes they'll let her have an intern or something to work through that at some point. As she flips through the files she stops at one of them. Strange objects washed up on the shore of some dinky town. Normally she'd throw that on the 'irrelevant' pile but the attached photos catch her eye. Those are electronics. None she's ever seen but she can tell that's a screen and there's places to plug in cables. And one is a camera of some kind but smaller than the palm of her hand!

Suddenly she's wide awake. Some electronics prototype shipment got lost at sea? Remnants of Atlantean technology? Aliens? She reaches over to stop her compiler and goes to work...