Chapter Text
"Why are you introducing me to my coworkers?" Jon asked. "I already know two of them, and I can introduce myself to the other people without your help.”
"Well, the one HR person we have working here wanted you to do this," Elias explained. "Before they quit from the . . . Stress they were experiencing."
Jon sighed. Elias was being incredibly cryptic when it came to the new Archivist job. First, he wouldn't explain what happened to the previous Archivist, Gertrude Robinson. (And the HR person who supposedly quit because of stress.) Now he wanted to introduce Jon to his coworkers. It made Jon's fear of unnecessary social interaction even worse.
"Okay, fine. Just make it quick. I want to actually accomplish something on my first day rather than play icebreakers with people I already know."
Elias's eyebrow twitched, but he didn't say anything, just kept guiding Jon towards the Archives.
That was at least something he was looking forward to. Jon hadn't been in the Archives before, as he worked in research, working on more urgent matters than dusty old papers. All he knew was that it was in the basement, and that it was a complete mess. Everyone in research gossiped about how unorganised it was, and Jon had to fix that. Just great.
After walking down a flight of stairs, they emerged into the main office area. There were four cubicles set up, each with someone in them.
"Hello!" Elias said. "I've got your new Head Archivist right here. Meet Jonathan Sims."
Jon could feel the heat rising on his cheeks. He really didn’t have to be introduced by Elias. This wasn’t necessary.
"Hey bossman!" Tim said, getting up from his desk to say hi. Jon could deal with that, he knew Tim. Of all the people he considered friends, Tim was probably the one he was closest to, but it wasn’t saying much, as Jon didn’t have many friends.
"Nice to see you," Jon said. "And Sasha. It was great to hear that we would be working together."
Looking at two familiar faces made Jon feel a lot better about his new job. It has taken a long time to build a friendship with those two, and Jon was glad that he had that. Two people that he already knew had his back.
"Would you like to meet your other two coworkers?" Elias suggested, gesturing in the direction of the two other people in the office.
"Fine, fine. Who are they?"
"This one is Martin Blackwood," Elias said, gesturing to the man sitting on the desk closest to him. "He worked in the library for quite a few years before I transferred him down here."
Martin got up from his seat and reached out a hand to shake Jon's. "Nice to meet you!"
Jon didn't shake his hand.
"Are you sure that he's going to be qualified?" Jon asked Elias, because Martin didn't look like the kind of person who would be good at archiving.
"He has a degree in Parapsychology. I'm sure he's good enough for the Archives."
Martin still had his hand out for Jon to shake. Jon finally conceded and shook it.
"I hope that we can work well together."
"We'll see about that." The jury was still out on Martin, though Jon had a feeling he wouldn't like him.
"And this is Jimmy Jones," Elias said, gesturing to the person currently stapling together a haphazard stack of files. "He's the intern. Technically, we don't need an intern in the Archive, but he was very persuasive."
Jon looked at the intern who was supposed to help him. He was wearing khakis and a button-down shirt, which was better than Jon had expected from him, but he still could have been more professional. Jimmy's hair looked like he'd rolled out of bed and done nothing else with it.
"You could always use another helper," Jimmy replied, looking up from his files. "With the mess this place is in, you need it. Gertrude left it in disarray. I've been trying to make it make sense. It's not going well."
"Yes, yes, you can explain that all to Jon. You'll have plenty of time for that today." Elias glared at Jimmy so hard that it looked like he was trying to melt him with his gaze. It wasn't working.
Jon could understand his hatred. Whatever Jimmy was stapling together looked like an incredibly messy stack of paper, which was of seemingly random papers and held together by at least nine staples. Jon knew he was going to have a least favourite. Martin may have been getting on his nerves, but this intern seemed even more incompetent than him.
"Yes, you can explain all that to me, including why you are stapling a stack of paper together like that." Jon joined Elias in trying to melt Jimmy with his glare. He wasn't the best at archiving (he knew nothing about it) but even he knew this was an archiving crime.
"I'll give you a few minutes to get acquainted with everyone here," Elias said. "And I need to place some historical paintings down here." He turned around and walked back up the stairs.
"Why do we need historical paintings in the basement?" Tim asked. "I don't want to have Jonah Magnus watching me while I work."
"Don't question Elias," Jimmy said. "Besides, it's not like the paintings are haunted."
"I just want to start my job." Jon really wanted to take a peek inside his new office and start working on recording the statements, but he knew Elias wanted him to have a few more minutes of social interaction.
Jon walked over to the two people he actually knew and decided to start up a conversation with them.
"I'm so glad that you finally got out of Artefact Storage," Jon said to Sasha. "You hated that place."
"I hated it so much," she said. "It's the second worst job I've ever had. The retail one was worse, but if I worked there any longer, I might have a very different opinion."
"Well, she's out, and we're so glad that you chose us to help you," Tim said. "You could have chosen a lot better researcher than me."
"No, you two are great. Sasha can get information we need through her hacking skills, and you can get everything else. And I guess Martin and Jimmy might be good at this. I'll have to see how they do."
"I know Martin," Tim pointed out. "He's worked in the library for a long time. I'm sure some of that experience can come over to archiving."
"Yeah, filing books in a library is probably similar to filing statements in the Archives." Jon hadn’t really thought about it. He’d made an assumption about Martin, and Tim was right.
Elias was back down in the basement, carrying a large painting of Jonah Magnus. These were scattered all throughout the Institute, with the largest hung in the library. Apparently, Jonah had liked to sit for portraits. Tim had always joked that it was the most entertaining thing for people to do back in 1818. Jon just found it incredibly strange.
"Gertrude hated this painting," Elias said, walking over to the far wall, where a nail was already stuck in it. "I hope you don't have any objections."
"I don't," Jon said. A lie. The painting honestly creeped him out. Whoever painted it had spent a while on the eyes, making it look like Jonah was staring right into his soul. And those eyes looked almost exactly like Elias's. They were the same shade of grey.
It had to be a coincidence. Which meant that Jon shouldn't focus on it, and just shove it into the back of his brain.
“I’ll leave you here together. I’m sure you five can work well together.”
“We will,” Martin promised as Elias left the basement.
“I’m going to go look at my office,” Jon said the moment Elias was out of his sight line. "How about you guys work on getting your desks set up?"
The moment everyone had nodded and agreed with his suggestion, Jon walked into his office, shut the door, and hoped that no one disturbed him for at least twenty minutes.
The place looked like it hadn't been touched since Gertrude had disappeared. There was a thin layer of dust covering everything, and quite a few cobwebs on the shelves and in the corners. Jon's first thought was that he needed to clean the entire thing.
He could deal with that tomorrow. After he went out and bought some cleaning supplies.
Jon remembered hearing the news about Gertrude's disappearance. It was actually at the same time that Elias had told him about the promotion. He'd called Jon into his office, said the previous Archivist was now missing (while being as vague as he always was) and he had the opportunity to take her place.
Jon should have said no. He didn't feel qualified for his new job. He was happy in research, even if it bored him half to death. It was fine. He had enough money, and he didn’t want to be anyone’s boss.
But Elias seemed so sure that Jon was the perfect man for the job. He sounded so sure, and Jon felt like he had to say yes when Elias's eyes locked on his.
Well, if worst came to worst, Jon would just quit and go back to being a researcher. In the meantime, he would try to do his job as competently as possible.
Jon sat his bag down on the desk and started rifling through the drawers. Maybe Gertrude had left some pens and other office supplies behind.
Turns out, she had barely anything in the drawers except for dust and more spider webs. Jon resolved to buy anti-spider spray. About ten litres of it. (He didn’t know if he could buy a giant bottle of it or just a whole bunch of little bottles, but he was getting a lot.)
The top drawer was the worst when it came to the webs, and strangely enough, it was the only drawer with something else in it. A tape recorder and three cassettes.
"Seriously? The only thing in this office I could use is a device from 1956?" Jon sighed. "I bet my laptop is the first piece of digital technology that's been in this office."
The other problem with the office was that there wasn’t a single chair in there. Maybe Gertrude had died on it, or taken it with her when she disappeared.
Jon opened his laptop and started making a list of things he needed to do. Most of it involves cleaning, or getting office supplies, or more cleaning. From what was in here, it looked like Gertrude had stolen all her office supplies and gone into hiding to avoid the wrath of Elias.
He walked back out of his office, which he didn't want to do, but he didn't even have a chair.
And he almost collided with Tim, sitting in a spinning office chair outside his office.
"Hey, bossman, what's in the office?"
"Not much," Jon replied. "There's furniture, spiderwebs, and a tape recorder. I don't even have a chair."
"Would you like to take mine?" Tim asked.
"Are you sure?"
"Oh, you know me, I always like to stand during the day. Besides, the last time I tried to sit down during an entire day, I got yelled at by Elias for sitting the way I do."
Jon looked down at Tim, who was sitting in the chair like a contortionist.
"It's probably better if you don't sit in a chair most of the day. I'm always worried that you're going to break a leg or something."
"There we go!" Tim got up from his seat and wheeled the chair closer to Jon. "I'll make sure to get a new one. Oh, would you mind if I took a peek in your office? I'm curious about what Gertrude left behind."
"Dust. That's your answer. But sure, you can see what it looks like."
Jon wheeled the chair into the office and Tim took a look at the dust and spiderwebs.
"Are you sure you're going to be okay in here with all the spiders?" Tim asked. "I know how you are with arachnids."
"I'm buying spider killer today," Jon said. "The moment I get off work, in fact. I'll be okay for today, I haven't seen any of them. Just a lot of webs."
"I can help you clean it."
"Thank you, Tim, but that won't be necessary. I can handle this on my own. Maybe you should get started on the mess that the Archives are in."
"Good idea. I glanced in there earlier and–you know, stay in your office until I make it slightly better." Tim left the office, making sure to shut the door behind him.
How could the mess be that Tim didn't even want Jon to see it? That mess had to be really bad.
Then Jon would just avoid Document Storage for a little, at least until Tim and the others fixed it.
Jon sat on his chair. It was perfect for Tim's height of five foot ten, but not for Jon's five foot three. He reached down and tried to adjust it, but the lever was stuck. Maybe it would take a bit more fiddling and–
The chair broke and sent him crashing to the ground.
"This department does not have a sufficient budget," Jon said, peeling himself off the floor. "Chairs are not supposed to break this easily."
Since Jon didn't trust any of the furniture in the Archives, he sat on the floor, on the other side of the room from the broken chair or the shelves that looked like they could come crashing down at any second. He set his bag next to him and opened his laptop. Jon decided to just write down all the supplies he needed in a document, then send that off in an email to Elias. Maybe he would buy them for the Archives, maybe he wouldn't.
Jon knew there were a few things he was going to have to buy himself. There was no way that Elias would buy spider spray for him. Jon also knew that the Archives situation was so bad he was going to have to go out and get a cot so he could spend more time at work. He knew Tim would scold him, but Tim had seen what they were up against, and he was going to need that time.
He also should get another chair or two for his office, because Elias had told him he would have to record statements from people who came in. Jon didn't think that any of the statement givers would appreciate having to stand in his office for twenty minutes.
They needed so much furniture. Jon hoped that their department's budget was big enough for all of this.
Jon rubbed his forehead in annoyance. He knew this was going to be a disaster, and he wasn't the person that could fix this mess. He shouldn't have been hired, but it was too late to fix that. Jon just had to just keep digging his hole until he hit rock bottom.
Jon heard the door opening, and silently prayed it wasn't Jimmy or Martin.
Instead, it was Sasha. Okay, he could deal with Sasha. He knew her.
"Hi," Jon said, waving from his spot in the corner of the room.
"Why are you sitting on the floor?" Sasha asked.
"Chair broke," Jon explained. "And I don't really trust the furniture around here."
"Understandable. Martin's chair is about to fall apart in there. The furniture is held together by hot glue and prayers."
"I might send you back up to research to see if you could get some of those nice chairs they have in the conference room they never use."
"Send Tim. They know him and he could flirt his way into getting them if he needs to."
"Yeah." Jon snorted. "Don't understand why that man thinks flirting will solve all his problems."
"Well, he's persuasive."
Sasha paused and pursed her lips before she said anything else.
"Look, I know you hated Elias forcing you to introduce yourself to everyone else, but you should talk to Martin and Jimmy. Just barricading yourself in your office isn't going to make anything better, and you should try and build a relationship with those two. You're their boss."
“I know, I just don’t really like them. Martin is okay, but that intern? All he’s going to contribute is delays.”
“He worked for Gertrude,” Sasha pointed out.
“Mm-hmm, and look at what she did! This place is a mess because of what she and Jimmy did. Do you think I trust him to fix this mess? He probably made it even worse during the time between the end of Gertrude's time here and me being hired." Jon closed his laptop and sighed. "I'll have to talk to him. Get some sense into him so he doesn't commit any archiving crimes. Did you see him stapling those papers earlier?"
"Yes! And–oh I shouldn't even tell you about what he's doing out there."
Jon shuddered. "I'm going to go and tell him off." Jon got up from the floor, terrified about what Jimmy was doing.
Turns out, he was looking through a box of statements, randomly stuffing papers back into the box.
"What are you doing?" Jon asked.
"Filing statements," Jimmy replied.
"What filing system are you using?"
"Uh, I'm just putting the files back in here. There's a lot of files in here from different decades."
Jon took two statements out from different places in the box. One was from the late 90s, about spiders, and the other one was from–
"1816?" Jon asked. "Jimmy, this is a letter to our founder. It shouldn't be in the same box as stuff from the 1990s! Hell, I think this needs to be stored in a special way."
"I was just putting them back," Jimmy said. "It's not that bad."
"I don't care if Gertrude let this fly, but I am not allowing this in my Archives." Jon crossed his arms. "Until I get a chance to look at Document Storage, we are not touching any of the files. Right now, I'm trying to get the office into basic working order. I've already lost a chair this morning. I have no office supplies in my office. The only thing in this basement that counts as office supplies are your staples!"
"Fine, I'll get you office supplies before I leave," Jimmy said. "I'm only here for a few hours a day, anyway. I've got uni classes to go to."
"In which case, I'd like to know when you'll be working so I know when to assign you work."
"I'll try and see if I can give you that."
"Good." Jon took the box of statements away from Jimmy. "I will put these in my office until we can start recording and organising."
Jon was seriously considering not letting Jimmy anywhere near the statements. Jon had met him barely an hour ago, but Jimmy had already made his life significantly harder. Why was he doing this? Why did Gertrude not fire him?
Once the statement box was safely stored away in Jon's office, Jon realised he should probably talk to the one person he had only exchanged a few words with: Martin. He didn’t want to, but he was trying to build some sort of rapport with the two people he didn’t know, and he’d already gotten rid of the chances of that happening with one of them.
It wouldn’t be that hard. Just walk over to Martin and say words to him. Friendly words.
Jon walked over to his desk and Martin actually smiled at him. Alright, that was a good sign. That meant Martin was probably a nice person.
“I just want to ask–what office supplies do we have here?” Jon asked.
“I did hear your argument with Jimmy,” Martin replied, “and you’re right. The only thing I’ve seen is two pens and whatever the intern has. One of the pens is out of ink, too.”
“Jimmy said he’s going to get more supplies. I doubt that. Do you know where the Institute keeps its office supplies? I’ve never had to do this, or at least not in the quantity we need.”
“If we need an entire office full of supplies, I think we have to fill out a form.”
“That sucks. Maybe I’ll go over to Document Storage and start looking over the mess that’s in there.”
“Don’t,” Martin warned. “Tim and Sasha told me I can’t let you in there. I don’t know why, but I think it’s because they’re scared you’ll freak out when you see the mess?”
“Tim said that to me earlier. I’ll . . . stay out here for a little longer. Now, about that form you said we should fill out?”
“I’ll have to check to see if I have it, I believe it was downloaded on my PC in the library? I can’t even remember what it was called. I’ll have to find it sometime.”
“It’ll be fine,” Jon said, hoping this wouldn’t be a pattern for Martin. “The first week is going to be rough. Gertrude must have taken all the office supplies and went into hiding to avoid the wrath of Elias, or how much he would make her pay to replace them.”
Martin laughed. “God, you might be right. What else explains the dearth of things we need for archiving?"
"It's either she ran with office supplies or bled all over them."
Martin shuddered. "Don't make me think about that. We still don't know what happened to her."
"I know, but Elias told me she went missing and he found her blood all over the office."
“Don’t remind me!”
“Alright, I won’t. I’ll wander over to Document Storage. Surely, Tim and Sasha have mainly cleaned it up.”
Martin grimaced. “You keep telling yourself that.”
Jon walked across the office to the door marked Document Storage, where he heard Tim and Sasha arguing behind it. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it had to be bad in there.
Jon opened the door and saw a mess. Tim and Sasha were gathering papers off the floor and trying to get them into boxes. There were rows and rows of shelves, with what must be hundreds of boxes, filled with statements. Every single box was open and looked like Gertrude had just stuffed random statements in there and closed the door.
When Tim and Sasha saw him, they stopped in their tracks, like deer in headlights.
“Whelp, he already saw it,” Sasha said. “Can’t hide this from you anymore, Jon. It’s a mess in here.”
“I see,” Jon said. “This is . . . Strange. Why are there papers on the floor?”
“I don’t know!” Tim said. “It’s going to make me cry. There were just stacks of statements on the floor. How bad was Gertrude at her job? Did you see all the post-it notes on these things? And the random sticky note tabs put on here? I swear, I’m going to cry.”
“I understand that, Tim, but don’t cry on the paper. It’s been through enough already.” Jon stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “I’ll help you get some of this into boxes. After that . . . Maybe we should try and go into each box and try and organise it inside there?”
“I don’t know; these weren’t even contained,” Sasha said. “Like, this group of statements is all over the place. They deal with different topics, were taken in different years, and come from different places. There’s one from an American tourist in here who claims he saw Father Christmas flying across the sky. Do you think I want to put that in with everything else?”
“Putting that in with real statements feels like an archiving crime,” Tim pointed out. He took the Father Christmas statement away from Sasha. “I’m going to make a pile for ‘definitely made-up’ statements from the floor.”
“Make it big,” Jon said. “I’m sure there'll be a lot of them in this place.”
“You sure?” Tim asked. “Some of this looks serious. Like this one, about a calliope organ–”
“Just make the pile.”
Sasha looked down at the mess in the room. "I'm going to get a chair. I can't stand here for the time that it's going to take to deal with this." She walked out of the room, ostensibly to get a chair, but Jon thought she was doing it to take a break from the organisation. Or to lock herself in the bathroom and cry.
“What do you want us to do with the statements on the floor?” Tim asked.
“Get a box, label it ‘floor statements,’ and put them in there,” Jon replied. “We can worry about doing more later, we just need to get it in a somewhat presentable state. I just–I knew I had to clean it up, but I wasn’t expecting for it to be this bad. Jimmy was messing with a box earlier today, and there was a statement from 1816 in the box, along with a statement from the late 1990s.”
Tim winced. “Oh dear. That shouldn’t be happening. You can store them normally, but if the paper’s that old, you need to put tissue paper between each page. Was Gertrude doing that?”
“No.” Jon grabbed a box that didn’t have a label on it off the shelf and hoped that there was nothing in it. “It was literally just shoved in.”
Tim sighed. “How was she an Archivist for fifty years?”
Jon opened the box, which was filled with hanging file folders. “I don’t know. Ask Jimmy. He knew her. I only talked to her once or twice . . . I don’t even remember what her voice sounded like.”
“Maybe she disappeared because Elias realised how bad she was doing and was going to fire her.” Tim grabbed the box from Jon’s hands and took the folders out, put them on a shelf, and started putting the files in it. “I really do wonder what happened to her. Does Jimmy know?”
“I don’t know. I should ask him. He knows more about her than any of us.” Jon took some of the files off the ground and started putting them in neat stacks.
“I wonder why Jimmy’s here,” Tim said. “He’s an intern. His boss, who he signed the contract with, left the place. Based on the blood they found, she’s probably dead. Jimmy could leave the Archives, or he could get an actual position. Instead, he decided to stay an intern after . . . all that.”
“Maybe he wanted to help us,” Jon suggested. “Help us get this in order. He probably saw the mess and couldn’t fix it under her, so he wanted to help the next person.”
“Jon. Think of what you’re saying. Has Jimmy helped you at all, in any of the few hours you’ve known him?”
“. . . No.”
“He just wants to get hired, but Elias doesn’t want to pay him. He kept him as an intern.”
“Well, at least I don’t really have to deal with him. He said he’s only here for an hour a day.”
“Good! He annoys me. Elias herded me into this office and Jimmy insulted my hair. He called it stupid.”
“That’s really mean of him.” Tim’s hair right now was mainly black spikes, but he had a few streaks of pink, purple, and blue in it. How dare Jimmy insult Tim’s hair? “I like your hair. It looks awesome.”
There was a crash from the other room.
Tim poked his head out and looked at what happened.
“I broke my chair!” Jon heard Sasha yell. “I’m fine, though!”
“I’m going to go help her,” Tim said, walking out of the room. “You have fun in here.”
Jon sighed. Another one of his assistants was bailing on him. It was fine; he understood why they didn’t want to deal with it. And besides, as their boss, he should do his work and help them out.
Tim and Sasha did come back and help him, after fifteen minutes of a break and figuring out how to get office supplies. They ended up sending Martin back to the library to see if he could get them to give the Archives more office supplies.
They also brought Jimmy’s chair with them, which they gave to Jon to sit on. And it broke. At that point, they decided to stop using the chairs. They also had to get a new chair for Jimmy, because he was going to be pissed at Jon for breaking his chair. (Jon didn’t even know why it broke; it looked sturdy before.)
By the time the three of them decided to take their lunch break, they were very tired. They’d just started looking at the statements, and it was going to be difficult to deal with all of them. Gertrude either didn’t have a filing system, or she had a horrible filing system that only made sense to her. Jon was going to ask Jimmy about how it worked, but he had a feeling he didn’t even know how it worked.
The good thing was that they could check out the breakroom, which Sasha had only looked at for a minute, and said that there was a couch they could sit on. If it broke, that would be expected.
When they walked in, Martin was looking at the cupboards in the breakroom, brushing spiderwebs out of the way to see what was in there. In the one he was looking in, it appeared as if there was a coffee maker, some mugs, and a stack of plates. Below it was a stainless steel sink that was not very stainless. There was a fridge and stove top on the other side of the room, along with a microwave plugged into an outlet and sitting on top of the butcher block. In the middle, there was a table with six chairs around it.
Most everything in the room was either beige or a shade of dirty yellow. The only exception was the dark green couch, which looked like it had seen better days.
Tim flopped onto the couch. "I'm just going to lay here until the image of those files leaves my head. What did I sign up for?"
"Tim, if you want to wait until that image is out of your brain, you're going to be there for the rest of your life," Jon said. "So you can't stay here."
"Might not be a good idea." Tim sat up on the couch. "This isn't even very comfortable. I think there's a spring loose in there."
"You're going to have to deal with that. I don't think we can afford replacing a couch."
"Damn it."
"If you're good at upholstery, you can fix this couch," Sasha suggested.
Tin groaned. "You know I'm not good with DIY projects. I can hardly put together IKEA furniture without smashing it to bits. Sasha, you should know this, you were the person I called when I was about to give up and throw all the pieces in the trash."
“Do any of you want tea?” Martin asked. “There’s a lot of tea bags in here, and I can heat up a kettle on the stove top. I could make some for all of you.”
“Sure,” Tim said. “Maybe it will bring life back into my dead soul.”
“I’m guessing it was really bad,” Martin said, taking the tea bags out of the cupboard, “if Tim’s acting that way.”
“Normally, he’s super overdramatic,” Sasha said. “But this time, he isn’t kidding. That room is a mess. We only got about half of it in a state I would consider clean. It’s going to take a few days for us to even start organising it. You are so lucky, Martin, you didn’t have to see the mess of papers on the floor.”
“Yes, I was busy with other things: I was getting office supplies.” Martin had a little smile on his face, like he was proud of that. “I had to go back to the library, but I filled out the request form and sent it to Elias. Hopefully, he lets us have them. If not, I’m going to order them online. I was able to talk the library staff into giving us some paper, pens, and pencils–which is a start–and I got some chairs from them, too. We’ll have to pick them up at one, but I think that’s better than the two we have here.”
“One,” Jon corrected. “You didn’t hear the one Jimmy was using collapse. Because I sat on it. I'm not even that heavy, it just broke under my weight for some reason. The only chair that we have in this place is Martin's, and I don't know how that hasn't broken yet."
"Lucky me," Martin said. "I don't know why either. I guess it's just a strong chair."
“I said earlier that it was ‘held together by hot glue and prayers.’ How is it still standing?”
“Luck?” Martin guessed, filling up the kettle at the sink. “I hope that the library chairs are a lot better than the ones in here.”
“I hope,” Jon said. “But anything can be better than these chairs.”
"Is Jimmy going to come back?" Martin asked.
Jon shrugged. "He said he only works here for a little bit everyday. If he left, he's probably not coming back until tomorrow."
"Good. He isn't helping."
Ten minutes later, everyone was eating lunch, and the tea was ready. Jon was a little sceptical of tea from old tea bags in the back of a cupboard in the Archive breakroom, but he was immediately contradicted when he took a sip.
It was good. Really good. Almost perfect.
“What did you do to make this tea this good?” Tim asked. “God, this is the best tea I’ve had in a long time.”
Martin shrugged. “Don’t know. I just made it the same way I always do.”
“You’re going to have to keep making it for us,” Jon said. “This is the only thing that’s going to make this job tolerable.”
Martin smiled shyly at him. Maybe he wasn’t too bad. Martin was really nice.
Maybe this job wouldn’t be too bad. The people who Jon had to work with (except for Jimmy) weren’t too bad, and they had a great sense of camaraderie. As long as they were able to start cleaning up the mess, they would be fine.
Jon showed up at work the next day, with everything he might need for work. They’d gotten new chairs from the library, along with some office supplies. They were still waiting on Elias to sign off on the form, but Martin had gotten an email back saying he was probably going to give them more office supplies.
Jon had gone on an emergency shopping spree, picking up a lot of spider spray, cleaning supplies, and a cot, in case he had to stay at work late. The clerk had given him a weird look when he went to check out, as he expected.
Even if he'd gotten Document Storage cleaned up a little bit more, it still was a little messy. At the end of the day (yes, they had spent an entire day just getting the room cleaned up) they'd decided to start looking into the statements so they could figure out how to even file it. Jon also knew that he should start recording said statements, as that was part of his job. Guess what else Gertrude wasn't doing, along with filing things correctly.
The moment that Jon could get in the office, he started spraying every web he saw. He didn’t see a lot of spiders, but putting it there would slowly kill them.
Jon was the first person in the office, but this morning, Tim and Martin came in pretty early, within five minutes of Jon.
“Jon,” Martin said, “why are you spraying everything down in spider-killing spray?”
“Because they’re in the basement,” Jon explained, spraying a shelf, “and I can’t live with all these spiders.”
“You can’t just kill the spiders! They’re an important part of the ecosystem.”
“The wonderful ecosystem that’s in our basement?” Jon asked. “There’s nothing living here except for the spiders and us. And I’d rather us live than the spiders.”
“They’re not going to kill us.”
“You keep telling yourself that.”
Tim noticed what was going on and thankfully decided to defuse the situation.
"Martin, can I talk to you for a minute?" Tim asked. "I have to tell you something."
"Uh, sure!"
Tim took Martin aside and told him the story that Jon had told Tim when he first had a spider freak-out. Jon didn't tell him about a Guest for Mr. Spider, but instead had simply said he had a traumatic experience with spiders when he was eight.
It wasn't a lie, but it still was an omission of the truth. An omission that he was happy to never correct. Jon didn't have to explain his trauma to anyone, and he didn't have any plans of doing that.
Jon kept spraying while Tim and Martin were talking. When their conversation kept going, he retreated into his office and hoped he could get rid of as many spiders as possible. His office was covered in he webs, so he sprayed the entire thing down and walked out, leaving the door open so the fumes wouldn’t kill him when he walked back in.
When Jon came back, he could see Martin giving him a weird look, but he didn't say anything else.
The good thing was that Jon didn't have to talk to him if he didn't want to for the rest of the day. He could start recording statements today, because after Gertrude disappearer, Jimmy had sent some to research to follow up on. Jon had a stack on his desk of ones he could record with the follow-up attached. He did have to give one to Sasha to double-check, but other than that, he didn't have to talk to anyone at all.
Jon focused most of his energy on cleaning his office up. After spraying for spiders, he'd used some of the cleaning supplies to get rid of the webs and dust that had accumulated in the months that no-one had really been in the office. Or even the time before that, as the Magnus Institute didn't hold onto employees, and that included janitors. Jon and his assistants were going to have to clean their office by themselves, but it was just another task to be added to the pile.
By the time Jon had gotten his office into a more acceptable state, Jon decided to go back and see how it was going with Sasha. Turns out, she was arguing with him.
“No, Jimmy, just because you worked here doesn’t mean you know what’s going on with this statement,” Sasha said. “I looked into it. I know what’s going on.”
“Yeah, but I know more about this than you.”
Sasha raised an eyebrow. “Okay, who gave this statement? What’s their name?”
“Uh . . . Sarah?”
“Congratulations, you are wrong.” Sasha sighed and looked at Jon like he could save her. “Can you help me? Jimmy stole the statement from me and thinks he knows what to do with it.”
“Jimmy,” Jon said, “let Sasha figure it out. She’s really smart. She probably knows what she’s doing.”
“She doesn’t!”
“What’s your reasoning?”
“Uh . . .”
Jon sighed. Dear Lord, Jimmy was going to give him a headache.
“You don’t have anything to stand on. So don’t argue with her. As long as she’s done all the follow-up, we’re good. Elias wants us to simply observe.”
Jimmy huffed. “But Jon, you don’t understand–”
"I do. Now, if you excuse me," Jon said, grabbing the statement off the desk, "I am going to go do my job."
Jon retreated to his office to record that statement. That was the main part of his job that Elias had stressed during the interview. Jon had to start recording statements, because Gertrude hadn't been doing that as much as she should have. However, the sheer amount of statements Jon had to record was stressing him out. He had over two hundred years of statements to record, and based on the length of this one, it would take him twenty to thirty minutes to record each one. Maths wasn't Jon's strongest subject in school, but his rough estimates told him he would be here for the rest of his life, sitting in this damn basement and telling a spooky story to himself.
Maybe he would give his assistants the job of recording some of these. As long as they put the bare minimum effort required into recording the statements, it would work.
When he was done with recording the statement, he played the audio back, only to hear a distorted version of his voice. He couldn’t make out any of the words, or even have a vague clue of what he was trying to say.
Jon sighed and tried recording it again. Just a part of it, because he didn’t want to waste too much time. Again, it didn’t work.
He tried restarting his computer and recording it again. That didn’t work.
He tried not to curse. He hated having to go to other people for help, but that was what he was going to have to do.
Jon walked back into the main area, holding his laptop, and actually asked someone to help him.
"Sasha, can you help me fix my computer problem?" Jon asked.
"Sure," she replied. "What's the problem?"
"I tried recording a statement on this–multiple times–and the audio didn't record right. Just listen to this." He turned up the volume and clicked play.
Somehow, the audio was even worse than it was in Jon's office. It sounded like a dying chicken. That had laryngitis. And was slowly falling into a void with a whole bunch of other dying chickens with laryngitis.
"Oh dear," Sasha said, stopping the recording. "Have you tried restarting your computer?"
"Yes! I think that made it worse. I don't know what's causing this."
"I will say that some objects in Artefact Storage refused to be photographed with digital cameras, but worked fine on Polaroids. This might be a similar situation."
"Does that mean I have to use the ancient tape recorder in the desk?"
"Yes! Use the tape recorder!" Jimmy yelled from across the room. He’d gone back to sit at his little desk, with the new chair that he did not know was new.
Jon groaned. "That's the one time he wants to help, and it's for this?"
"Take his advice," Sasha said. "If Gertrude recorded on that thing, it has to be good enough for us. And maybe I can do something to fix your computer. Try on your computer, and if it doesn't work, put it on tape."
"Using an analog recording device is not going to help organise my Archives."
"I know, but it's better to have a statement recorded than just a mess of paper. We can digitise the tapes eventually, but for now, use the recorder."
"Got it. I'll go back and record this statement, and maybe it'll work on it."
As it turned out, the statement recorded perfectly on the tape recorder. There weren't any problems, unlike the mess that was his laptop recording. It was strange, but it would make his life easier if he could record statements.
Jon sighed. This job was going to slowly suck the life out of him. He should just accept this was going to be the rest of his life, and he was stuck.