Nine
Lost Property Report
NAME: Boswell
PURPOSE OF TRAVEL: That’s rather a sticky philosophical question for this early in the morning, don’t you think?
LOCATION OF LOST PROPERTY: I really don’t think I can wait until the comments section at the end to complain about what a bloody stupid form this is. Not to mention how downright insulting it is to have to use an automated lost property form for a somewhat more significant loss, actually. If we knew where our lost property was, why would we need to fill in this form in the first place???
Caution: failure to answer question appropriately and accurately will make it difficult to progress with the automations built into this essential form.
LOCATION OF LOST PROPERTY: England. The village of Kettlewick. 912. Only not there, clearly, because we looked there. We looked all over the tenth century. The only reason we stopped looking was because we caused a significant Event that blocked off the most relevant years. And when I say ‘we,’ yes, I do mostly mean ‘I.’ I’ve already filled in that form.
ESTIMATED VALUE OF LOST PROPERTY: Ask her family.
Ten
Admin is Not A Dirty Word
Admin in a workplace like Chronos College might refer to a variety of places and people. It might mean Sara from accounting and payroll, who always remembered everyone’s birthdays and tax file numbers.
It might mean Ethel from the front desk, who took vindictive pleasure in telling students their essays were due in three days before the actual due dates, just to make them sweat.
It could mean the Admin Office, the central hub around which all travellers, students and professors revolved, even (especially) when closed.
For Ruthven, most of the time, Admin meant the “helpful” AI that constantly told him he was making errors on his requisition forms and other Media Archive related paperwork. At least, he hoped it was an AI. If there was a real person out there who devoted so much of their energy to making his life more difficult, he didn’t want to know about it.
Most days of the week, any administrative problem that could not be solved by a paper clip, access to the photocopier or an industrial strength Band-Aid, inevitably ended up on the desk of Melusine.
Melusine from Admin was a beautiful woman. It was the kind of beauty that people described as ‘striking’ or if they were really being truthful, ‘intimidating.’ She was hovering around fifty years old, and carrying a few more kilos than she had in her own glamorous undergrad days (she had studied Performance and Theatre Design, not that anyone ever asked), and yet her beauty was more luminous than in her youth.
‘Intimidating’ was a good word for Melusine. ‘Scary’ wasn’t inaccurate. On a good day, she made Professor Boswell look like (forgive the comparison) a pussy cat.
She wore shoulder pads. Shoulder pads. No one had worn shoulder pads in the workplace for two hundred years, and even then it was a recycled fashion that everyone agreed was a terrible idea.
Her desk was so tidy it hurt the eyes. The only thing in the entire room that smacked of anything other than 100% business was a black stoneware mug shaped like an Egyptian sphinx. It had the words ‘wish you were here’ written jauntily in the side in DIY silver sharpie.
She was also, as if this was not daunting enough, a Founder of Chronos College, and Oxford’s mother. One of his mothers, at least. Ruthven had never met the apparently even more glamorous and efficient Celeste Oxford, who worked on another campus.
“Let me get this straight,” Melusine said now, leaning back in her comfortable, ergonomic chair. Behind her, the complex and colour-coded web of The Schedule unrolled as digital wallpaper in a slow but pointed loop to remind anyone who visited her office that Melusine was responsible for deciding everything that happened here at Chronos College.
Pertinent to the scene about to unfold, it reminded them that The Schedule was planned out meticulously weeks or even months in advance. Wiggle room was a mythical construct that Melusine refused to acknowledge. Personal requests were almost always met with an icy stare… and yet she was capable to responding to an actual crisis faster than most people could draw breath.1
Today, Melusine glared at Oxford and Ruthven. The latter felt his face grow hot as embarrassment poured over him. That was the Melusine Effect. Somehow, it didn’t seem to bother Oxford at all.
Professor Boswell had failed to be convinced to join their ragtag crew. Monterey was still either napping or in hiding from Boswell for some reason Ruthven did not quite understand. Lovelace was so furious about Boswell’s rejection of the call of adventure that she was doing angry laps of the roof of this building. No one knew where Nero had vanished to, though at the rate he had been shedding lately it was entirely possible that he was now spread thinly across every surface of the campus. Fenella, still horrifyingly emotional about this whole business, had gone to the toilet at one point and not returned.
Ruthven couldn’t blame her. He wished he’d thought of that. He did not like being the centre of attention. Being part of a reckless group of troublemakers with a wild idea was one thing, but now there were only two of them left. He couldn’t exactly drift to the back of the group to avoid notice. He didn’t like being thought of as difficult — not when his department was widely regarded as the most disposable whenever budget time rolled around. He preferred for most people at Chronos College to forget that Ruthven existed at all.
He hadn’t known Cressida all that well outside the footage in the Media Archives; she certainly would not remember him. He didn’t have a stake in this. Even now, he was fighting the urge to dive under the antique rug and scuttle out of this office on his elbows.
Being friends with someone who was determined to do the Right Thing was the worst.
Melusine from Admin glowered at them both. “Clement,” she said, adding to the bizarreness of the situation. No one ever used Oxford’s first name. “You wish to add some kind of dramatic personal rescue mission to my schedule. Using Chronos College resources. Based on a brief burst of pixels spotted on a lost television artefact…”
Ruthven stared sideways at Oxford, expecting him to launch into the ‘call to action’ speech he’d been practicing since they first spotted Cressida in 1964. But faced with Melusine and her dramatically tidy desk, Oxford looked like a wallaby caught in the glare of headlights. He said nothing, merely gaping a little.
“Wait,” said Ruthven. Oh, no. What was he doing? Speaking up? That wasn’t like him at all. “What do you mean personal? Cressida was lost during an official mission.”
Oxford only offered Ruthven an alarmed widening of the eyes which either meant ‘keep going, you got this’ or ‘please shut up this instant.’
“Indeed she was,” said Melusine after the tiniest of pauses. “Considerable resources were poured into her rescue effort. The budget for that semester never recovered, and neither did the tenth century.”
“They were looking in the wrong century!” Ruthven argued.
He was getting fired up now. What was happening? Oxford’s sidelong glance now appeared to give off mildly impressed vibes, which only made things worse. Feedback like that would only encourage Ruthven. Why was no one stopping him?
“And,” Melusine continued sharply, unhappy about being interrupted. “Which of our current missions do you think we should reschedule for this little outing? Oxford here is supposed to be in the Court of George II with Nero next Thursday. Monterey and Lovelace — who I see didn’t bother to get out of bed for this meeting — are due in Caligula’s Rome. Don’t get me started on Tunbridge and Ptolemy’s intense British Raj schedule for the next four weeks. Do you know how badly it would affect our funding reconciliation if we started adding extra missions based on spurious evidence? Do you know how much grant money we could lose? The Founders are not an inexhaustible resource.”
“What if we didn’t use a scheduled operative?” broke in Oxford, finally locating his bottle. “We have a qualified, experienced and entirely available traveller right here. His schedule is wide open.”
“What?” Ruthven said explosively.
“What?” said Melusine at the same time. She managed to simultaneously convey her outrage at Oxford’s suggestion and her deep annoyance that Ruthven agreed with her. A master scheduler at work.
Humiliation burned the tips Ruthven’s ears. “Was this your plan all along?” he demanded of Oxford, who looked only a fraction as ashamed of himself as he should be. “I don’t have a cat.”
“He doesn’t have a cat,” Melusine insisted at the same time, and looked even more frustrated at being on the same wavelength as Ruthven.
