#warehouse 13

Because I was thinking of a scenario with Myka going on this whole spree, trying to get Claudia to make a time machine (assuming she gets out of the hole, and Myka escapes the police, and the astrolabe was hidden prior to their arrival) and paralleling what Helena tried after Christina died

She knows it won’t change anything, she has the evidence, the facts that have been stated and demonstrated, yet is far too in live to care. And the world is already in such a horrid state so if inevitably we decide for a reset, it wouldn’t be too bad, right ?

"𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒃𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒆𝒇 𝒊𝒏 𝒂 𝒔𝒖𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒏𝒂𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝒔𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒄𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒆𝒗𝒊𝒍 𝒊𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒏𝒆𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒂𝒓𝒚; 𝒎𝒆𝒏 𝒂𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒒𝒖𝒊𝒕𝒆 𝒄𝒂𝒑𝒂𝒃𝒍𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚 𝒘𝒊𝒄𝒌𝒆𝒅𝒏𝒆𝒔𝒔."

-𝑱𝒐𝒔𝒆𝒑𝒉 𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒓𝒂𝒅

Reality is a strange thing. Fragile. Every day the sciences find new evidence that shows our understanding of existence is narrow and limited. After all, there's a reason the saying ‘Fact is stranger than Fiction’ exists.

And it’s time to learn those strange truths.

Every little bit of myth and folklore has always had underpinnings of truth. But it runs so much deeper. Those things that go bump in the night have real form. The flickering shadows have eyes and ears. Demons, Angel, Vampires, and Lycanthropes may just exist right alongside you.

How you came to the recognition of it is up to question. Whether or not you were born into the strange. Or stumbled in and found yourself awed. Or. You heard those stories and took up arms in order to burn out all that you deem wicked.

Welcome.

"𝑼𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕𝒖𝒂𝒍 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝒃𝒆𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒎𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒏𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒔𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒗𝒆𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒅𝒓𝒂𝒈 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒂 𝒘 𝒂 𝒚"

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Everyone here has a role already written. He doesn't.

Frost still on his lips, Miles Avery wakes wedged between Plinth 7's empty pedestal and an unnamed bronzed alchemist, a manila tag swinging above him: ITEM UNKNOWN, ORIGIN UNKNOWN, DOWNSIDE PENDING. He counts fourteen seconds of patrolling boots before he dares move, then flips the tag and finds his own handwriting: DO NOT LET THEM SHELVE YOU. Behind his sternum, a bronze astrolabe ticks warmer with every lie, cataloguing anything he touches and stripping the downside out of whatever he's holding — though none of it makes him stronger. The cover story he feeds Artie Nielsen is only sixty perc…

📖 Read FREE — no paywall, new chapters daily → unwrittenrealm.com

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📖 Chapter 1: Chapter 1 : Wake Between The Plinths

Miles Avery didn't move.

Something was in the air above his face. A tag. Manila, roughly three and a half by two inches, swinging on nothing — no string, no hook, no visible mechanism. Just swinging, in a building that had no discernible draft. The handwriting on it was stamped, not written. Official. Block letters in a dark ink that looked older than the paper.

[ITEM: UNKNOWN. ORIGIN: UNKNOWN. DOWNSIDE: PENDING.]

He'd seen that format before. Every Tuesday night for three seasons, on a television in his Wicker Park apartment, the exact same tag format, the same amber light, the same—

A voice, dry as old paper.

"Everything in this Warehouse is catalogued, Mr. Avery."

The air itself seemed to carry it. No echo, no direction — the sound arrived the way light arrived, from everywhere at once. "You are the first thing in a hundred years that isn't."

His chest was warm.

He pressed his palm flat against the granite and held very, very still.

The warmth sat behind his sternum, nestled against the bone — not the warmth of exertion or fever but something older than either, like a coal that had been banked for decades and found, suddenly, a new source of air. He thought: that should not be there. He thought: I know exactly what that is. He thought: do not panic, do not panic, do not—

The tag flipped.

On its back, in handwriting he recognized — his handwriting, the particular slant of his lowercase e's, the way he never closed his a's — were four words:

[DO NOT LET THEM SHELVE YOU.]

He didn't remember writing it. He hadn't written it. He was twenty-five, he'd been sitting in his apartment two hours ago watching the first season finale on his laptop, and he had never in his life been to South Dakota, and the handwriting on the back of the tag was absolutely, unambiguously his.

The amber lights above Aisle B-3 pulsed. Somewhere at the end of the sector — sixty feet, maybe eighty — something moved. Boots on granite. Steady, unhurried. A rounds-walk.

Under a minute, he calculated. If they round the aisle.

The voice had stopped. The tag went on swinging.

Miles catalogued his situation the way his mother had taught him to catalogue a primary source: identify the object, establish its context, note what was unknown. Object: him. Context: Bronze Sector, Warehouse 13, the fictional-turned-apparently-very-real government artifact repository in the South Dakota Badlands. What was unknown: everything else. Including how. Including why. Including what the warmth behind his sternum was doing to his heart rate, which had leveled out to something calm in a way that felt less like composure and more like the calm was being imposed from outside.

He looked at the bronzed figures on the plinths.

Plinth 7 was a man in Victorian dress — cravat, waistcoat, standing at a slight angle as if caught mid-turn. Plinth 8 was a woman in a high-necked blouse, hands at her sides, face turned toward the far wall. Neither of them was breathing. Neither of them was H.G. Wells — he knew what Wells looked like, and these weren't her.

The footsteps were getting closer.

He had not, he noted, made a sound. The motion-triggered lights had come on when he arrived — however he'd arrived — but they hadn't cycled off. The whole aisle was lit. Whoever was walking would see the light from thirty feet out.

Twenty seconds. Fifteen.

The tag still says pending.

That was useful. That meant whatever system had tagged him didn't know what his downside was yet. Which meant the system didn't know what he was, entirely, which meant he had — possibly, provisionally — a narrow window in which to establish what he was before someone else made that determination for him.

The warmth clicked. Once, like a gear catching.

Behind his sternum, something settled into a slot he hadn't known was there. A warm precision. A sense of — not rightness, exactly, but of fit. Of a key turning in a lock it was made for.

He'd read enough intake forms to know what came after the click.

[TETHER: 1]

The Manifest hung in his peripheral vision for two seconds, no larger than a Polaroid, and then folded away — neat, unobtrusive, the way a well-organized index card returned to its proper drawer. The tag above him kept swinging. The footsteps were twenty feet from the aisle end.

Miles didn't stand up.

He pulled himself onto his side, slowly — no sudden motion, nothing that would read as threat, nothing that would read as flight. He pressed his back against the base of plinth 8, in the gap between its stone pedestal and the cold bronze woman's feet, and he curled his knees up and he made himself as small as the space allowed.

The amber lights threw long shadows at this angle. His shadow flattened into the base of the plinth and disappeared.

The footsteps slowed at the aisle end.

He heard the agent — not an agent yet, Miles, you don't know — stop. Heard them scan the sector. The amber light pulsed once, twice, in the particular way that meant the motion sensors had registered and were idling. He held his breath and watched the tag above him sway in a draft that still didn't have a source.

Fourteen seconds.

The footsteps moved on.

Miles let out his breath in a controlled trickle. He stayed against the plinth for another thirty seconds, counting, then he pressed his palm flat against the granite again and felt it: the cold radiating up, the dry air on his face, the distant pulse of the building's umbilical from somewhere deep in the structure, a slow heartbeat the Warehouse ran on.

He had maybe forty minutes before someone found him here who wasn't going to be deterred by a shadowed corner.

He had a cover story that was roughly sixty percent true.

He had a warmth in his chest that had just introduced itself.

Don't let them shelve you.

He looked at his own handwriting on the tag, floating in the amber air above a Bronze Sector plinth in a year he had not been born to, and he accepted the directive as the most useful piece of information available.

Then he started calculating how to stand up without looking like he'd been hiding.

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📖 Chapter 2: Chapter 2 : Pass For A Trainee

Artie Nielsen read the same line three times before he looked up.

Miles had been watching him do it. Not staring — cataloguer-register, low and peripheral, the way you watched a primary source for what it wasn't saying. Artie's desk was a topographic map of crisis management: folders in three separate piles that obeyed no apparent taxonomy, a half-eaten plate of fudge at one corner, a green-screen terminal cycling through what looked like inventory headers in amber text. The man himself wore a cardigan the color of old newsprint and had the posture of someone who had been arguing with a filing system for the better part of thirty years and was losing.

The office smelled like figs and old paper. The neutralizer, Miles knew, carried a fig residue. He had known that from the show. He hadn't anticipated that it would be strong — not unpleasant, but present, a smell that seemed to come from the walls themselves, as if the building was slightly ripe with the chemical cost of keeping a hundred years of supernatural objects from eating each other.

"Mr. Avery." Artie set down the printout. "Sit. The Regents' email — I read it. Lattimer's referral — I read that too. I am not pleased. I am also not surprised. Sit."

Miles sat.

He was in the chair across from the desk, which was closer to a folding chair than an office chair and had clearly been placed there by someone — Pete, probably — in the ten minutes between Miles's extraction from the Bronze Sector and this interview. The chair had been positioned with military precision relative to the desk. Miles appreciated the geometry.

Pete was in the doorframe with a mug of coffee so bad the smell had preceded him down the hall. He'd been cheerful during the escort — you wandered in through the loading dock, buddy, which, how, I need Artie to explain that to me later — in the way Miles understood was Pete's conversational default, the steady warmth he ran at for strangers before the vibe system turned on. The vibe had turned on approximately four minutes into the walk. Pete wasn't unfriendly. He was just also, quietly, watching.

Myka stood at the terminal with her arms folded and her eyes on Miles's hands.

She'd been watching his hands since he sat down. He wasn't sure what he'd done with them yet. He folded them on his knees, university-interview posture, and let Artie take the next move.

"Library science," Artie said. "University of Illinois. Archival work." He looked at the printout. "Private historical society. Chicago."

"That's right."

"And the Regents found you — how."

Not a question. Miles had prepared for this.

"The email said something about a conference listserv. An archival methodology conference in Madison, last spring. I presented a session on pre-1920 artifact provenance documentation." All true. "Apparently someone from the Regents' network was in the audience." Also true, in the sense that a hypothetical someone might have been. "I got an email three weeks later asking about my background and whether I'd ever worked with physically anomalous objects." He paused at the natural pause in the cover. "I said I had. My uncle collected estate-sale objects from the 1800s. One of them gave my cousin a forty-minute hallucination of being on a ship."

Artie made a sound. Not exactly a sigh — more the breath someone made when they weren't surprised and had decided not to be visibly unsurprised.

"And you decided, yes, I want to work for the organization responsible for these objects."

"I decided I wanted to work somewhere my cataloguing background was applicable."

"To objects that try to kill you."

"My undergraduate thesis was on the Radcliffe Camera finding aids. Objects that try to kill you seemed like a lateral step."

Pete, in the doorframe, made a noise that might have been a laugh. Myka did not change expression.

"The name," Artie said, "is not on my list."

Miles kept his hands folded. "I understood from the email that the Lattimer referral would cover the formal intake process."

"The Lattimer referral." Artie looked at Pete. "Your mother."

Pete's mug stopped halfway to his mouth. "My — she did not—"

"Apparently."

"I didn't know that."

"I am aware you didn't know that." Artie set down the printout. "She does things and then doesn't tell you."

"She does things and then doesn't tell anyone," Pete said.

"This is true."

Myka's weight shifted. "Mr. Avery." Her eyes came up from his hands to his face. "You said provenance documentation. Pre-1920."

"Yes."

"What's the difference between an object's provenance and its accession history?"

Myka Bering, age thirty-two, ex-Secret Service, photographic memory. She had asked the question with the particular flatness of someone who already knew the answer and wanted to see how he arrived at his.

"Provenance traces who had the object and when," Miles said. "Accession history is internal to the holding institution — what the object was assigned, where it was logged in, what its in-house catalog numbers are. Provenance is external. Accession is procedural. They can conflict, and when they conflict, provenance usually wins." He paused. "Usually."

A beat of silence.

"Hm," Artie said.

It was the Artie-hm, the one that started a sentence instead of ending it. Miles had braced for it.

"Cookies?" Pete said.

Everyone looked at him. He held out a plate — there was, in fact, a plate of cookies on the counter behind him that had appeared without Miles noticing, which meant either Pete had brought them or the B&B had some kind of ongoing cookie-deployment system that Miles did not yet understand.

"Pete," Myka said.

"What? Kid's been standing in a Bronze Sector for forty minutes. He looks like he could use a cookie."

"He was in the—" Myka stopped. "Why were you in the Bronze Sector?"

Miles had three answers prepared. He used the one with the best available evidence.

"I followed a sound. I came in through the loading dock — the door wasn't latched, I don't know if it's usually, I wouldn't know — and I heard something from the far end of the building. A kind of — hum." All true, in the sense that the Warehouse did hum, and he had heard it, in the forty-minute window between waking on the granite and Pete finding him crouched, apparently examining the base of a plinth for reasons he claimed were archival curiosity. "I went toward it. I got turned around."

"You got turned around in the Bronze Sector," Myka said.

"I ended up in the Bronze Sector, yes."

"Nobody ends up in the Bronze Sector."

"I did."

A longer silence. From somewhere in the back of the building — the Caretaker's Sanctum, the room behind the office, the room that didn't have a visible door — there was nothing. No sound. No movement. Just the awareness of it, the way a room felt when the walls were listening.

Every person in the office felt it at the same moment. Miles watched Pete's shoulders adjust — subtle, a micro-flinch — and watched Myka straighten. Artie looked at a point approximately two feet to the left of his terminal, which was the direction of the back room, and then looked back at the printout.

Mrs. Frederic was not coming out.

The absence was a decision.

"Provisional," Artie said. "Trainee on Lattimer's referral. Pending clearance." He held up the printout. "Which I am filing under protest. The protest is noted here." He tapped the page with one finger. "You are housed at Leena's. You are not to touch anything in this building unless Pete or Myka tells you to pick it up. If you see something glowing, you walk the other direction. If you see something that seems ordinary — especially ordinary — you also walk the other direction. Questions?"

"Where do I get a Farnsworth?"

Artie looked at him for a moment.

"Hm," he said, and this hm was different. It was the hm of a man adding something to a private note file that he would look at later, alone.

Pete was already pulling a brass-cased device from a cabinet to the left. He set it on the edge of the desk — it landed with a solid weight, nine or ten ounces, the hinge catching the amber light. "There's a three-letter code," he said. "Yours is AVM. Mine's PLT. Myka's is MBR." He looked at Miles. "You know what a Farnsworth is?"

"Two-way audio-video. Brass casing." Miles picked it up. It was warmer than the room, which wasn't ambient temperature — that was the artifact-cell inside, the one that never needed charging, the one the show had mentioned once in passing. He turned it over in his hand, feeling its weight distribute. "Mr. Farnsworth himself. Original?"

Pete looked at Artie.

Artie, despite himself, said: "Second generation."

Miles set it down.

"Okay," he said.

But.

There's an idea for a gifset that hasn't left me alone, and maybe one of the many talented giffers in the Bering and Wells fandom wants to have a go at it?

I'm thinking of, on the one hand, the scene from the end of 3...2...1 where Wooly and HG walk and talk, and he asks her how she does it, and she ends with "mark my words: the future is gonna be a wondrous place".

And on the other hand, the scene in the cemetery, where she says she'd hoped to wake in a different world, a better one, and Myka realizes the Bronzer was Helena's time machine - "closest I could come".

And third, Helena's rant in Yellowstone about this future with all its rotten-ness, how man has found still more ways to kill each other etc.

What this needs, still, in my mind, is a resolution moment - maybe that moment when Helena is slumped and defeated after giving up the Trident. Or something else more hopeful? Anyway, I keep thinking of these three scenes and their progression and connectedness, and I think there's something there.

Sort of an emotional rollercoaster throughout, with Myka’s anger and concern and whatever else because her friends—her family—were now endangered saving someone who knew and experienced the consequences of artefacts already.

Followed by humour, and mixed in all throughout, per usual because the show is just great like that, with things like the utter shock from Claudia when she realised she was the princess in the tower needing to be rescued. (Fargo you and your fantasies 🙄)

Then the subsequent overcoming of trauma that remains engraved in my memory forever—Myka joining the game then, once Claudia starts going down to her worst fear, the reminder of the psych ward and the fear that she was seemingly just crazy and alone yet again. Maybe that it wasn’t real to begin with.

Other than this, Pete being his typical self, shirtless, and relentlessly into Leena (of the Eagle People) who made a damn good harpy and you oughta love the bonus Leena and Claudia friendship, because no, you can’t just brute force things

Seriously though, so mad because Douglas was there when we got a prime example of why artefacts are not to be used for one’s own benefit—Hugo taking over the Warehouse, having divided his own mind with the Zoetrope and stuff—like dude, you almost died you don’t have a lightsaber in Fortress 13, Mr. I’m-Scared-of-Quicksand