The start of a beautiful tradition

[moonshadows]

“Welcome,” Artie gestured expansively, “to Warehouse Thirteen!”

Jack stared while beside him, the portly older man hid a smirk beneath his hand.

“C’mon, I’ll take you on a quick tour.”

Both men were soon rolling down the aisles on Edison’s handcar. The Warehouse boasted speedier, more high-tech transportation, but for first tours Artie liked to play up the eccentric old coot angle.

“…snag it, bag it, and tag it,” he was saying as they drove down a main aisle, Jack trying to look everywhere at once.

“Who’s that?”

Artie took his hands off the bar, bringing the car to a gentle stop while he looked around. “Where?”

“Down there.” Jack pointed.

The woman was tall and exotically dark-skinned, possibly Arabic, with jet-black hair done up in tiny braids and a flowing aqua dress that half-covered her bare feet. Paying the two men no mind, she went methodically down the aisle with a pile of wire panels that she was affixing to the front of the shelving.

“Oh, that’s uh…Lily. She works here. Sort of. I-I mean, she’s not an agent, she only does inventory and upkeep. You’ll see her from time to time.”

Jack’s attention never wavered. “Can I go say hello?”

“You can,” Artie said, a note of caution in his voice, “but don’t be surprised if she ignores you. She’s…uh…special. Not that there’s anything wrong with her mind, just that…well, she’s different. And she’s usually thinking about other things while she works. If she likes you and she’s not busy, she’ll respond. Most of the time, though, she may as well be mute and you may as well be invisible.”

“Does she like you?”

Artie’s expression softened, and the scent of apples drifted past his nose. If Jack were looking, which he wasn’t, he would have accused the older man of being smitten. “Oh…I think that’s safe to say.”

“She’s beautiful. Isn’t she cold, though? That dress looks awfully flimsy, and her feet…”

“Oh, the floor’s not cold. Geothermal heating. But let me tell you about that dress,” Artie said, putting his hands back on the bar. “It dates back to ancient Rome. The agents of Warehouse Three…”

Jack kept watching as they moved away, not hearing a single word, craning his head until even the aisle where he’d seen the woman was no longer visible.

 

Over the next few weeks, he did see her again…and again, and again, and again. He said hello every time, tried to be friendly, but it was like he wasn’t even there. Sometimes she would be fiddling with artifacts in a random aisle or, more often, installing more panels of sturdy wire grid with simple doors, like a birdcage might have. Jack wondered if that was really necessary, if the artifacts were in danger of just leaping from their shelves. Once, he raised the question to Agents Bering and Lattimer – he wasn’t comfortable yet calling them Pete and Myka – and what he could make out from their confusing and overlapping babble was that yes, not only was securing the artifacts justified, but it was decades overdue. There was something about cans of sticky string and dozens of balls, but he couldn’t quite make out what had happened.

When he asked Artie about the string and balls, he got a story about a clock that made him go deaf. After that, he decided that it was at least a wise precaution and left it at that.

The other times he saw her were when he came back from snagging an artifact. Somehow, she always knew just when they’d arrive and be waiting with purple gloves to take the artifact the instant they set foot in the office. He didn’t comment on it, though. Not after the first time she took the bag out of his hands as casually and impersonally as if she were plucking it from a shelf. He’d uttered a disgruntled ‘you’re welcome’ and gotten a blistering lecture from Artie about how grateful they all should be that she was there to choose homes for the artifacts, because without her they’d have to go through some song and dance about a spiral and artifacts not playing nice with each other. Agent Jinks had walked in on the tail end of that, asked if Artie was telling the story of the Norge Porthole, and left again muttering about gargoyles and lightning.

Six months after his first introduction to the world of endless wonder, Jack sat at the table by the kitchen nook with an oatmeal scotchie in one hand and a glass of milk in the other, listening to the phonograph play a recording of some lady from the 1930s singing, and realized that this crazy hodgepodge of the dangerous and bizarre actually felt like home. That he belonged here, and that he didn’t actually want to be doing anything else for the rest of his life. He closed his eyes as the indescribable feeling – remarkably like falling in love – swept over him, and when he opened them, Lily was standing beside him.

“Hello,” he said cheerfully, fully expecting that she would make no response and not being bothered by that.

She smiled, white teeth against bronzed skin. “Good artifact.”

He’d never heard her voice before. It was warm and rich, like jazz and sequined dresses and Kentucky bourbon, and it made him lightheaded. She reached out with one elegant hand and patted his head, repeating good artifact. Then she turned and sashayed out of the office.

As soon as the door shut, Artie rattled down the circular metal stairs. “Was Lily just in here?” he demanded.

Jack blinked. “Uh…yes?”

“Did she say anything?”

That made Jack wonder if he’d imagined it. “She…called me a good artifact and patted me on the head.”

Artie sighed as if he’d just been told that suspicious mole wasn’t cancer. “Congratulations,” he said in the most un-grumpy tone Jack had ever heard him use. “The Warehouse likes you.”

Jack gave him a hard look. “Are you pulling my leg?”

“Lily, darling,” the older man said to the middle of the room, “light of my heart, could I have a word with you?”

A camera mounted on a pole rose from where it had been hidden in the floor, and a hologram of Lily projected from it. She smiled warmly at Artie. “Flattery will get you everywhere, Artie,” she teased.

“It’s not flattery when it’s true,” he countered with a grin. “So is it true? Our boy Jack is a good artifact, and Claudia never broke you of that habit?”

Lily laughed, and it was just as heady as her voice. “Don’t worry,” she soothed. “You’re still my favorite artifact.”

Artie beamed, confusing Jack further and making him feel just the tiniest bit jealous. “And now you know why she doesn’t pay much attention to us when she’s working,” he said smugly.

“Lily is the Warehouse,” Jack said dubiously, “and the Warehouse is…alive?”

“Alive, sentient, self-aware, and she likes you. We, uh, didn’t want to tell you until we knew you were ready.”

He wasn’t sure he was.

“I know that look,” Artie accused gleefully. “Yes, you’re ready. She’s sensitive to emotions. Has to be, really, considering that she was originally formed out of residual tangential energy from the artifacts accumulated by the Regents of Warehouse Two.”

“And my first Caretaker.”

“Yes, and your first Caretaker. But that’s not the point.” Artie waved the issue away. “The point is that she wouldn’t have spoken to you unless what she felt from you measured up to her expectations. You accepted her, so she accepted you.”

It sounded crazy. It should have been crazy, but it felt right. Jack smiled at the hologram. “I guess I did. I was just thinking that this place felt like home, and that there’s nothing I’d rather do every day of my life.”

Artie glanced at Lily, who nodded, then turned back to Jack with a look of pleased satisfaction. “Oh, good artifact,” he breathed.

“I get the feeling I’m being mocked,” Jack said dryly.

Lily laughed again. “I was somewhat less than eloquent the first few days I was able to communicate in English,” she said cheerfully. “Without eyes or ears, my only perception was emotions and in that regard, people are more similar to artifacts than you might think.”

“No,” Artie protested good-naturedly. “You were plenty eloquent. You just didn’t have more than a six-word vocabulary at first.”

She grinned at him. “Seven”

“Are you- I could swear it was-”

“Fix. Artifact.” Bronze fingers straightened on one hand as she counted off the words. “Good. Brought. Bad. Broke. Favored.”

“Shelf.” Artie added.

“That was eight.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it became a running joke, calling agents ‘artifacts’. Worth every second for the look on Mr. Kosan’s face when you called him a bad artifact,” he added, looking smugly at Lily.

She didn’t look the slightest bit ashamed or repentant. “Well, he was.”

“Don’t I know it,” Artie said ruefully. “So, Jack, got any questions for the loveliest piece of architecture to grace a landmass in two thousand years?”

Recklessly, Jack batted his eyelashes and put on his best charming smile. “Are you free for dinner tonight?”

“If I ate,” Lily chuckled, “I would be. But you’re not. Don’t worry, you’ll see more of me, but it will be like this. It’s easier to translate from tangential to digital than it is to focus it through the golem.”

The camera pole retracted back into the floor and for a long moment, both men just stared at where it had been. Finally, Artie heaved a contented sigh.

“I love my job,” he said happily.

Jack smiled, imagining decades of service to the Warehouse until one day, he was the grumpy old geezer and some other guy was telling him uncertainly that Lily had called him a good artifact. The inexplicable sudden scent of apples reflected the joy that thought gave him. “So do I.”