Artie: New Agents

[moonshadows]

Artie smoothed out the sheet of white cloth covering his object demonstration and hid a smile as the umbilicus door beeped and whooshed open. Pete shot him a grin as the other two, a black gentleman and a woman with dirty blonde hair, stopped to take in the sight of the office.

“Raymond, Sandra,” Pete said smugly, “this is Artie; Arthur Nielsen, your new boss.”

“Yes.” Artie clapped his hands together. “And we’re doing orientation a little different this time. Pete, would you get our new agents some gloves?”

They exchanged confused looks as they pulled on purple latex.

“These,” he continued, waving another pair, “are protective gloves imbued with a neutralizer that will – under most circumstances – allow you to handle artifacts safely. Do not underestimate this important safety step. Many artifacts trigger just upon touching them. Some only require you to be near them. You can ask Pete or Myka later about the Spine of the Saracen, an artifact that took the lives of at least two men and a Warehouse agent before it was destroyed.”

“Ask Myka,” Pete interjected tersely, arms crossed. “That thing almost killed me.”

“Yes. So always, always, make sure you handle artifacts with gloves. Now, in some cases, the artifact is going to be obvious.” He paused to shoot them a warning look from underneath bushy eyebrows. “Those are the easy ones. More often, it will be something so ordinary that you’d never think to suspect it.”

Pete snapped his fingers and pointed. “Like James Braid’s chair! Myka sat right on it and didn’t even know!”

“Exactly. Now, to prove the point…” Artie whipped the cloth off of the round table with a flourish. “I’ve assembled a few artifacts that you’ve handled personally, Pete, as well as look-alike items. I want you to try to point out which are the artifacts.”

The two new agents exchanged another look while Pete groaned. “You’re a cruel man, Artie. Why can’t you have Myka do this? She’s got the scary-accurate memory thing going in.”

“Ahaha. That’s why. Come on…” the older man beckoned him forward.

All three agents moved closer to peer at the table.

“Okay,” murmured Pete. “We’ve got Harriet Tubman’s thimble here…or is it this one? Hmm…” He eyed two poker chips. “This one’s the artifact,” he said confidently, pointing to one of them. “The other one’s from the wrong casino.”

Artie picked it up with a glove. “Very good.” With the other hand, he whipped open a silvery bag. “Sandra, Raymond, pay attention. When you identify an artifact, place it in a bag like this-” The chip dropped with a flash and sizzle. “-and watch for sparks. No sparks, not the artifact.” To prove the point, he picked the other chip up and dropped it into a second bag without reaction.

“One of these bowls has Bobby Fischer’s marbles,” Pete muttered, “but I don’t know which one. Wait!” Gingerly, he stirred one bowl with a glove-covered finger. “There, that’s the marble I used. This is the bowl.”

Sparks as they were poured into another bag, while the fakes went harmlessly in with the innocent poker chip. “That’s two.”

“Why did it have to be the spray-paint can?” he whined. “You know I wasn’t paying attention to what it looked like. Too busy freaking out trying to save Myka’s life.”

Hands spread in disavowal, Artie said, “I’m just proving a point.”

Pete glowered. “You know, if this weren’t a show-and-tell game, I’d just bag them both.”

“I’m aware.”

“I watched a man kill himself with that spray-paint can, Artie.”

“And I watched a Regent die to it,” he snapped back.

“That one,” Pete ground out. “It was used on the Berlin Wall, so it’s got to be the can with the German label.”

“You see?” asked Artie as he bagged it with a fountain of sparks. “Concentration and logic are valuable tools in this job. Now, the thimble or the dog tags?”

“Why the pop quiz, Artie?” Gesturing unhappily, he said, “Normally you’re more…goofy, grumpy, hands-on and less Safety Nazi.”

Instead of answering, Artie picked up one of the thimbles and stuck it on one pudgy finger. A swirling shimmer, and he was thinner, taller-

“MacPherson,” Pete gasped.

“Yes,” the older British gentleman drawled. “And if you recall, I wrought significant havoc with an artifact as harmless as this one, not to mention-” He changed again, to a younger man. “-the damage I did,” he declared as Pete paled.

“Walter Sykes.”

Artie removed the thimble, pinning Raymond and Sandra with a hard look. “James MacPherson smuggled dangerous artifacts out of the Warehouse in order to sell them on the black market, and engineered my death. Walter Sykes went one step further, amassing an arsenal of artifacts we never even heard about until he used them on us, and successfully carried out a plan to destroy the Warehouse entirely.” He gave them a moment to look confused. “One of our agents sacrificed her life to keep Pete, Myka, and myself safe from the explosion, but the most powerful artifact of all was destroyed and the world sank within minutes into despair, with riots and mass suicides being reported around the world. We had twenty-four hours to decipher some extremely obscure clues and find an artifact we hoped would be able to reverse time. I watched one agent get buried alive. A second agent caused a distraction to buy us entry, and was arrested. The third agent…” he trailed off, licking his lips and swallowing, not looking at Pete. “The third agent…died…retrieving it. I was able to reverse time and stop the explosion from happening, but at the very real cost of my sanity. Every artifact has a downside. Some of them are negligible or tolerable if the artifact is used correctly. Some…are not. I suffered a sort of split personality, an evil twin that did its best to destroy everything and everyone I care about, going so far as to m-murder a very cl-close friend in cold blood and…unleash a global, deadly plague.”

“The sweating sickness,” Sandra blurted. “The one-day epidemic. That was…?”

Quietly, Pete said, “Yeah. Myka and I had sixteen hours to find a way to undo that before people started dying, us included. You know what, Artie? I take it back. We work with artifacts every day and we forget that they’re dangerous, and we get sloppy.”

“I had five wonderful years free of agents suffering artifact-related deaths,” the pudgy man said quietly. “Not that you guys didn’t come close on more than one occasion, and Steve’s resurrection notwithstanding. I want to keep that streak going a little while longer, okay? I’m not trying to scare you off,” he told the alarmed newcomers, “but this is a very dangerous line of work.”

Raymond straightened, as if stopping just short of a salute. “Thank you for making us aware of that danger. I can’t do my job effectively if I don’t know what to watch out for.”

“Welcome to the world of Endless Wonder And Sometimes Death,” Pete joked.

Sandra looked uncertain. “I’m not sure I’m cut out for this.”

“What? Naw, you’ll be great. Hey Artie, remember the time I touched Philip Van Doren Stern’s upholstery brush and brushed myself into an alternate world where I was never born?”

“Not as vividly as you do,” he grumbled.

“Yeah, well, guess who were working here in lieu of me and Mykes?” Pete looked smug.

Both the new recruits looked intrigued by this. “Really?” Raymond asked. “Were we good?”

Pete threw his chest out a bit. “Well. Not as good as me and Myka, but we had three years under El Maestro with the eyebrows there while you were hampered by working Dr. Evil.”

“Pete!”

“Sorry, but he killed you again and this time, there was no Phoenix to bring you back.”

Artie rubbed his eyes. “Okay. Moving on, it’s time for the tour.”

“Edison’s hand car?”

“You got it. If you’re good, I’ll let you steer on the way back from the Dark Vault.”

“The Dark Vault?” Pete backed away, hands up as though disavowing anything and everything. “Whoa there, Artimus. Don’t you think that’s a little heavy for their first day?”

“It’s not like I’m introducing them to Alice,” he protested. “I’m just, you know, going to show them – safely – how dangerous artifacts can be. Myka’s already down there with the harness and rope.”

Raymond looked slightly alarmed. “Harness?”

Sandra was even more alarmed. “Rope?”

“You won’t be in any physical danger,” Artie said as he herded them all towards the Warehouse door. “They’re just precautions.”

Pete groaned. “The typewriter?”

“You got it.”

The two new agents exchanged looks of alarmed confusion as they followed Pete down the stairs and took seats on the front of the handcar, both hands on the bar.