where all my interests come to consolidate

Tim doesn’t know what to do with all these boxes of statements, he just starts filing them by year without even reading them because he doesn’t know what an archivist does. It’s not like the last one is here to tell him. Sasha is just laughing at him and being no help whatsoever because he’s the boss now and he hasn’t given her anything to do, so she’s just gonna sit at her computer and play games until he does. Jon and Martin are in the background having a one-sided rivalry romance, which is to say, to Martin it’s a romance and to Jon it’s a rivalry. Tim and Sasha are taking bets on which side of the sliding scale it’s going to settle on. Elias is banging his head against his desk.

Elias finally asks Tim specifically to do follow up on a number of statements (because there’s no point in being subtle now, he’s just going to pick fourteen good ones and throw them at him) so Tim reads through the damn things and puts together lists of everything that they need to look into.

“Jon, can you check out this thing with the apartment filled with meat?”

“Yeah, no problem”

*the next day*

“Ok, I staked out the apartment, took pictures, broke into the landlord’s office to get the tenant records, got Sasha to hack the subject’s financial records, checked all the newspapers around that time-”

“Ha, ‘steaked.’…..Wait you did what?!”

(Season 2 Jon is just a more feral, paranoid version of researcher Jon, you can’t convince me otherwise)

Elias wonders if he should have picked Jon instead. Shit. He jumped the gun. Fuck. Now it’s too late, he’s committed. Balls. 

Another few months pass. Tim and Sasha are keeping a tally of how many crimes Jon has committed (and how many crimes Martin has been an accessory to. Sasha owes Tim five quid every time Jon gives Martin a begrudging (but perhaps fond?!?) thank you for helping with whatever their latest B&E was.) Now the hot goss is on whether or not Elias is banging a Lukas to fund the Institute. 

Elias: What if I just killed Tim?

The Worm Siege happens, but Tim comes out alive and also marked, and Elias is losing it because so does Jon. FUCK!! Elias keeps trying to arrange unfortunate accidents for Tim, but he keeps surviving them and coming out marked by another Entity, which would honestly be fine for Elias if it weren’t for convenient coincidences that keep landing Jon in trouble and getting him marked by the same Entities at the same times as Tim, sometimes for completely unrelated reasons!! He can’t have two Archivists, DAMMIT, one of them has to GO!!

They find Gertrude’s body in the tunnels. It is concerning. It is fucked up. Is Tim as concerned about the implications of this as he should be? Probably not

Jon: Oh God, you don’t think someone is going to try and murder you too, do you??

Tim, sighing: Someone already did, Jon. The worms??

Jon: Don’t think worms use guns

Tim: Fine then, are YOU going to murder me?

Jon: No??

Tim: Sasha?

Not!Sasha: N̶̲̼͙̻͠O̸̧̡̧̩̖̹̭̥̬̗̮͓̗̐̔̑͑͆̕

Tim: Perfect. See it’s fine.

Jon and Tim get sent to company mandated yoga therapy for their worm trauma. Their instructor is huge and all his bones crack when he moves and no one is sure if they’re supposed to be replicating that??? It’s really unsettling and terrible, and after class Tim asks what got him into yoga, more out of nervous politeness than anything, and he is immediately trapped in a drawn out, one sided conversation about this man’s childhood (and a CURSED BOOK APPARENTLY?? FUCK?!??) and Tim literally cannot do anything but scream internally as this drags on for twenty minutes while Jon lurks awkwardly in the lobby because they carpooled here. Then their instructor says something about hearing that Tim has nice bones, and Tim is immediately peeling out of there at breakneck speed, shoving Jon along like “I think that guy is a serial killer run!!” 

Elias wonders how much brain damage he’s giving himself, and how much damage he’s slowly doing to his desk.

Tim starts to suspect something is up with Sasha when Martin offers to help Jon move some boxes of files around in the back of the Archive and he doesn’t say no, holy shit, but when Tim points it out to Sasha, she doesn’t seem to care even though the Slow Burn JonMartin Office Romance is the only thing either of them have really cared about for the past several months (they once spent almost a whole night drunkenly arguing about whether Jon and Martin would be good for each other or just enable each other’s bad habits.) However, being a reasonable person, Tim assumes Sasha is just traumatized from the worm thing and starts trying harder to cheer her up and include her in out-of-work activities. Not!Sasha is decidedly not happy about this, and thus she is forced to endure many weeks of after-work drinks.

Meanwhile Jon is not ready to give up on the possibility that someone might be trying to kill Tim. He rules out Sasha as a suspect as one of Tim’s oldest friends, and he wavers back and forth on Martin because while Martin is definitely acting weird (a person? being nice? and trying to take care of him after a very traumatic event?? unrealistic, blocked) it just doesn’t support the idea that Martin is trying to kill anyone. Who does that leave? Elias? Maybe???

Elias: shit

Jon and Martin start going down into the tunnels and looking for any evidence that might be helpful. They’re not as sneaky about it as they think they are, but Tim doesn’t care because for him this just means he’s probably already won this bet, suck it Sasha. 

Elias thinks now is a very good time to pull the pin on “Sasha has been replaced by a doppleganger.” Unfortunately for…well, everyone, this pin is actually several pins all connected to their own separate grenades, which ends in Tim getting lost in some endless corridors for a bit and Jon getting framed for the murder of a spooky librarian. And the “how many marks do my idiot employees have?” total stays even. 

And let’s not forget that in canon Jon was kidnapped for a MONTH. A whole month of them just sitting around, trying to find things to do after angsting about the possibility of being skinned gets stale. They’re able to play I Spy longer than they expect (after Jon got over how dumb it was) because of how crowded with junk the wax museum is. Charades doesn’t really work when your arms are tied up, but there’s enough grime on the floors for a half-assed game of Pictionary. At some point they resort to making increasingly forced puns out of anything related to the circus, which devolves into just smashing words together that sound funny. (For months after they’re finally rescued, Tim introduces himself as the “Head Shark-ivist” which is as far he gets through the title before either he or Jon start laughing.)

When Michael shows up to kill them, Jon Listens Intently to Michael’s Tragic Backstory ™ while Tim makes tactless jokes (Hey, if Michael is gonna kill them, might as well make fun of him for as long as they have)

Tim: Ok, I bet I know how this went. You got there and Gertrude went “Hey Michael, look over there!” And shoved you in, yeah?

Jon, trying not to laugh because he very much wants the tragic backstory:

elias is like “maybe sending them into the unknowing will get one of them killed”

but they both survive and elias is sure he’s got a concussion from banging his head against his cell wall. now both of them are in a coma.

Elias is sure that at least ONE of them will die at the Unknowing. Even though they’re even on marks from Entities, he doesn’t think they can be on the exact same level of avatar-dom. He refuses to accept that. The Archivist has been a feature of The Eye for too long now, and he won’t accept that their patron will just ALLOW two of them to be running around. It has to pick a favorite, dammit! So one of them will probably actually die for realsies. Hopefully Tim since he has personal stakes in this and is more prone to acting rashly for that reason. Surely this will work.

It does not.

Jon comes out of it comatose and hallucinating vividly in his weird undead state, because he’s not willing to accept that he’s a monster yet, he just can’t and thus he’s stuck not wanting to wake up but not wanting to die. Tim doesn’t have this hang up, or at least not in the same way Jon does, and he only spends a few days in the hospital before being discharged (which the doctors can’t even be shocked about because 1. This is the bloody Magnus Institute they’re dealing with, they have special quarantine procedures for these dicks and their spooks and their WORM WOMEN, and 2. They’ve got an undead coma patient to worry about.)

So Tim has six months to deal with the fact that he’s now a walking search engine. And because Tim’s first instinct when faced with stress is to meme on it, he absolutely abuses this power in the dumbest ways possible.

Sure he can’t really control it most of the time, but that sure doesn’t stop him from trying. He ropes Martin into his shenanigans to keep him from being sad (and because he thinks Martin is spending too much time with the creepy new boss.) Melanie, eager for distractions, also gets in on it. Basira is not on board with this, but she’s outvoted anyway so it doesn’t matter. Let the shenanigans continue!

It starts with simple shit like “guess which statement I have hidden under this box” and then it turns into 20 Questions and Trivial Pursuit. Sometimes literally. Everyone wants to see how easily Tim can cheat at games now without even trying. Both Elias and Basira are banging their heads against their respective desks (or walls in Elias’s case.)

Now to back track a little, I personally like the idea that Tim and Jon manifest different Archivist powers at different times. Tim gets the classic progression, but Jon gets stuff more or less BACKWARDS, and no one really notices because Jon has been using everyone else’s focus on Tim and his decent into avatar-dom as a distraction from HIS problems for MONTHS. So Jon finally gets back and Tim’s like “I’m knowing shit pls tell me this is happening to you too” and Jon’s just like.

“Oh…about that…”

During the apocalypse Tim is constantly teasing Jon and Martin. Just me, you, and Timothy fucking Stoker. But at this point Tim doesnt care. He’s lost a lot and is tired. So he messes around!! He Knows the avatars cant kill him so he just makes fun of them and they’re in awe of the sheer audacity that they dont even try hurt him

Like damn how did this twink get so confident? From roasting marshmallows using on fire buildings and flipping off the giant eye sky god, he really doesnt care anymore.

He sings dumb songs he found on his old ipod that vaguely works (it’s pretty distorted) and Jon thinks he might strangle Tim.

Helen loves him because why wouldnt she?

Hellen: I just wanted to see the happy couple and my favorite archivist!

Tim, throwing his arm around her: YOU HEAR THAT JON?! IM HER FAVORITE!!

On the other side, our merry trio of a grumpy Jon, a trigger happy Martin, and our meme-y boi Tim set out to Annabelle’s house for wayward avatars. They are, of course, joined by many-an-avatar and are readily included in the apocalypse’s best TV show, The CCTV Footage of Elias Losing His Mind, a show starring our very own creepy eldritch monster boss and his descent into madness.

behold! a giant pile of various commissions (and artfight)

You know, every time I draw something stupid, I think to myself "surely I can't top this!" And then somehow I draw something even dumber

Flawed Ritual... Flawed Ritual always on my mind... *curls up into a ball*

Guards! Put the blond man in spandex in situations!