poemtry and prose

"I am telling you Daniel, you are wrong. There are four hundred and twenty known objects of mass destruction in the world and that is not including the bombs and the missles and the normal means to blow this planet to kingdom come," The one with the shirt and tie said.

Daniel rolled his eyes, "If you had read The Moldy Tome, you would have realized that combining green mold found in caves with gold and bronze flecks in a beaker produce a gas that is invisible but extremely deadly, which brings the new GRAND total to to 1000 items out there that we need to find and lock up in the locker." And to add to the effect, Daniel stuck his tongue out at the other twin.

They did not notice Andrews and Autumn standing in the hallway. Instead they continued walking slowly down the hallway, oblivious to what was around them and their surroundings. "Ahem, gentlemen. If I could have your attention for just only a second, I have someone I would like you to meet. Then you can get back to your bickering about who knows more than who" Andrews said, hoping to quell the bickering just long enough for them to notice himself and his new guest. "Daniel and Darius Holloway, I would like to introduce you to Autumn Chase."

The two men stared at each other and then down the hall at Autumn. Autumn could see that the boys were more familiar with books and knowledge than they were experienced with interpersonal communications and the art of being polite to the girls.

"Um, hello there Autumn," he said. "I'm Daniel. And that is my brother, Darius. It is, er, nice to meet you. Um, boss, what is she doing here. We never got the memo that a new recruit was going to be in the office today."

One adjusted the glasses perched on his nose and waived at her. Autumn waived a small and timid, wave back to them. She watched them twitch nervously in their prescence and Autumn thought it best to stay silent and not say anything. Instead, she moved a bit closer and behind Andrews and turned her attention more over to the library off to her right. She hoped that she wound get to spend some time in that room, she loved the rustic atmosphere and thought that it would be the perfect place one, like her, could lose herself in a good adventure or mystery novel. Not that her life had begun feeling like an odd combination of both of those. She let out a halfhearted sigh and turned her attention back to the conversation between the three men.

"Yes Daniel, I know that. Autumn is not a new recruit, yet. She is merely an observer to our operation, at the moment. It was in her store that they found Steven's body and the black onxy figurine of Quauhtli. I thought for her protection that she would be better off being in our hands rather than exposed and out on the streets, waiting for Blackstone to get his hands on her. Plus, she found something in the store, a presesnt for you two that I need you to get started right away."

Darius's eyes light up and grew wide, "What type of present, sir? Is it a new item to experiment on? Will it add to the knowledge we already possess?"

Andrews took the book out from under his coat and held it up to the twins to see. Their eyes walked over every inch of the journal, and Autumn could see that they were eager to get ahold of the book and uncover the secrets therein. She continued to remain silent, taking in the sights of the two new people in front of her and the surroundings.

"It is a new book," Daniel said eagerly. "And here I thought I had read and seen all twelve thousand known esoteric books. But this one, this one is new to me. But it is no matter, I probably already know most of the information contained within."

Darius continued his brother's thoughts, "It is not exactly new brother. It is a more recent journal. And from the looks of the cover and the yellowing on the pages, it appears to be a very old journal. If you asked me, I would place the book itself's age at or near the 1950's era, when leather bound journals were popular in that era. I wonder what sort of information is inside. May we have the book, boss?"

Andrews gently passed the book over to the twins, "Sure. Have at it boys. There is very little in there that I can read. I know bits of it are written in Latin but there are lots of hieroglyphs in the front of the book that do not look at all familiar to me."

Daniel grabbed the book first and started flipping through the pages, "We will do our best sir. I am sure, as you are quite aware, me and Darius here, know over two hundred languages both alive and dead, in various styles from picturistic to arabic. And I can tell from just an initial flipping through of this book, that we should be able to uncover its secrets in no time. I am relatively sure about it."

"Just how long do you two think you can decipher it?" Andrews said, focusing on the task at hand.

"I would probably guess... oh... let us see here," Darius started waving his hands in front of him as he performed some obsure and intricate calculations in his head, "About two to three hours. Give or take fifteen minutes."

"Then I guess you two better get to work. This is top priority. The information contained in this book could help us pinpoint the exact whereabouts of the item we need before Blackstone gets it. And it may also tell us about the item itself, any activation passages, special powers or traps to avoid when we go to retrieve it."

The twins stared at each other, looking for the leg up on the other, "Yes sir," they said in unison and they started wandering back down the hallway to their room.

Darius turned to look at Autumn over his shoulder, "It was very nice to meet you Miss Chase. We will stop to give a more proper introduction when we are able to, after we get our hands on this book and I finally set my dear brother straight that a third of the information he thinks he knows is not unique but copycat information gleamed from textbooks."

Daniel glaired at his brother and poked him in the arm, "Not unless I can prove that it is you who is wrong first brother. And why do you always make me look bad in front of girls? It is no wonder why we do not have dates over the weekends. Because of your badgering and making everyone feel less than superior to us."

The twins faded around the corner, heading into some unknown room. Autumn turned to Andrews, "Are they always like that? The incessant bickering, I mean."

Andrews placed his hand on her shoulder and pushed her into the great library. "I am afraid so. They are twins, as you can tell. Both born with an extraordinary genius. They received their first doctorates when you were probably graduating high school. They know they are so similiar and it drives them nuts. Being so competitive is the one way they can attempt to seperate themselves from one another and find some way to be unique."

"I will say this," he continued. "I have never met anyone who is smarter than those two. When they say that they will crack the code and information in the book in two to three hours, I know they mean it. Now, I am sure you want to peruse the books in this library, so let us drink some coffee and chai and you can look over all the books in this room."

Autumn was puzzled with how he referred to the books in The Hive's library. "Do you mean that this is but a small fraction of books you and your organization own," she questioned. "As in you have more than one library?"

"Yes, this is but the smaller of the two libraries we have here. The twins practically live in the other library, which is over a hundred times as big as the one you are staring at. I would take you there because I can see that you want to explore The Hive a bit more but I know that they would hate a disruption while they know I have given them a tight deadline to please me. But do not worry, I promise that I will show you what wonders and books that we have here at The Hive. It is quite the museum. Too bad the government has classified this facility as top secret, otherwise I would like to open it up to the general public so that they could see all the wonderous items their world, imagination and creativity came up with. But they would have my rank and hide unfortunately. Let me take your coat. Come, let me show you where the kitchen and facilities are and you can ask me more questions. Sound like a deal?"

Autumn nodded and followed Andrews blindly through the maze of rooms. Deep beneath them, down two stories underground, the twins locked themselves in their vast library of books and scrolls and information. They poured over the new discovery, carefully examining the possibilities and origins of the new book. They were under a great pressure and both wanted to look good in front of Andrews. But more importantly, to Autumn, who they both found very pretty and smart in the high school bookish sort of way. They had spent the first twenty minutes of their research carefully photographing the book under various lights and techniques. They also carefully took some samples of the ink and pages to get an accurate date of when the book first came into existance.

"Daniel," Darius said. "Why do you go ahead and get started on translating the Latin after the book is done scanning in? That way I can work on the hieroglyphs and run these samples through the analysers and whatnot."

Daniel threw his brother a look, "I know what you are trying to do, dear brother and it will not work. You are trying to get me to translate the easier of the two known languages of the book, so that when it comes time to present Andrews with our findings, you can take the bigger credit for cracking the harder language. You did it to me the last time and I will not stand for it again."

Darius laughed at his brother's paranoia, "Wow. You really are paranoid. It is no wonder you were born exactly a minute behind me. You cannot admit to yourself that maybe the reason why I am giving you the chance to read the Latin is because you prefer Latin over the lessor forms of writing? At least, that is what I remember from our days in college where I was strugging to remain even pace with your ease of knowing the language. Do you remember that dear brother?" He looked at his younger brother in playful disgust, "Perhaps I am more concerned with the lack of time we have to decipher all these words. And thought it faster if you took on the Latin and I handed the more complex words while multitasking with placing the exact age of this book."

Daniel pushed his glasses back up on his nose and stared rather angerly at his brother, " I am sorry brother. I misjudged your rationale. Let us work together for just this once and see how fast we can get at the knowldege here. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

A hush fell over the room as the two brothers sat down at their work stations and opened the individual files that contained the scanned images of the books. Daniel preferred to do most of his translations with a pencil and paper. It made him feel closer to the translators and scholors of olden times. That and he felt that he could make a more accurate translation as he wrote it long hand with his own neat and organized penmanship. Soon enough, Daniel fell under the hypnotic syntax of the words and started almost absently translating the text he was reading as if it were second nature.

His brother, put the two test tubes with their samples into the seperator. He typed a few keys and selected two different tests on the machine's workstation. The gyroscope hummed as it spun up to seperate the paper properties from the ink. A timer displayed the time the machine would take to decipher the age of the inks and paper. They had ten minutes before the machine's timer would beep at them.

Darius, then moved back over to his workstation. He loved technology. His workstation had two monitors sitting side by side on top of the desk. The left monitor contained the images of the fresh scan while the right had open a word processing program. On his desk, sat two volumes of thick books, their green faux leather covers glinting off the small bronze stemmed lamp that also sat on his desk. The title read "A Sampling of Hieroglyphic Lexicon, Your Guide to the Picturesque Languages of the Prehistoric World". The pages of the book had darkened with lots of use over the past decade.

The set had been given to him from his mother and out of all the books they had at their disposal, Darius loved these books the best. He cracked his knuckles and opened the book to the section on Middle American hieroglyphs. It was a hunch of his that the language that was written in the early pages of the book were from Mexico or Syth American descent. And he was never wrong with his hunches.

Twenty minutes passed and the machine processing the paper and ink analysis went off. Both twins looked up from their desks and lept for the print out that was just now spitting out from the printer. They started at the results and nodded to themselves, "So we were right. The book itself was manufactured in the 1950's. While the first ink set was used around that time to pen the hieroglphs and the second set was created more recently, say a few years ago," Daniel exclaimed.

"Andrews will be very pleased to hear this," his brother agreed. "Now, let us finish translating the book so we can give him exactly what he needs."

Another two hours passed and finally Daniel put his pencil down. He had finished with his translations, "I am done Darius. How are you doing?"

Darius nodeed in agreement. Yes, I am done as well. Let us sync up and format our findings and then head back upstairs to give our presentation. From what I gather, this is some of the most interesting information that I have also come across. It is very detailed and it predates a lot of the earlier information that we thought we knew about in the Mayan culture."

"So it was the Mayans who created it," Daniel said as he furiously typed notes into his word processor. "I have found notes that explain exactly what the scepter does and how it is activated. It is a very deadly device indeed. I am surprised that it took him this long to uncover it and what it did. Let us hope that Steven did not uncover this information before he hid the journal. Otherwise we can consider all hope lost."

They worked together for another half hour, coordinating the information and piecing together their presentation. Daniel grabbed sheets from the printer as their complete translation of the entire journal started to spit out. They had provided accurate scans of the original with some modified notes on the pages to help Andrews solve or decipher writings that would be important to him on his trip. Darius wore a fancy headset and was speaking to a travel agent, planning the best route to get them to their destination. He booked a flight for two, giving Autumn the psuedo identity of being Andrew's neice. That is, he assumed that Graham Andrews was going to take the young woman with him. If not, that ticket could easily be transferred over to Linda, who was en route back to the Hive from her post in Seattle. Darius wrote down a few flight notes into his word processor and had those sheets printed out.

Darius lifted three copies of their findings off the printer. He moved over to a corner of their office where a book binding system had been set up. First, he took the loose papers and had the system punch them. All in all, he estimated that they had compiled about 500 pages of data that spaned almost three or four thousand years and written by a team of four or five different esoteric and mad but brilliant thinkers around the world. He had hoped that one day he and his brother would be able to compile their notes and present it to the public to gain the recognition and fame that their doctorates should receive. After all, what they could tell people about the world the truely lived in would spark revolution in many scientific areas of thought. He then grabbed a black, plastic combed binding and set that on top of the binding machine. He pulled a long, grey level back and it carefully snapped open the bindings. Carefully stacking the papers up, making sure they were perfectly aligned, he gently rocked the ream of paper onto the open coil. And then, he closed the comb back into place by pushing the level back. Darius folled the process two more times and he was finished. Once again, all their hard and prompt research was ready to go help Andrews rush off to save the world.

While Darius was binding thier reports, Daniel rushed around the scroll cases looking for maps and other visual aids. He breathed in the dusty air and smiled as he thought about how pefect he and his brother had it. They loved their jobs and thought that what they did was the perfect match for both their eccentricity and intelligence. He returned out of the stacks of scrolls, his arms cradling five scroll cases. Armed with these maps and the three bound copies of their discovery in their new bound spiral notebooks with clear plastic covers on it, the twins hurried back upstairs to report their findings.

"So what is the score now Daniel? Or has all this work on Latin dulled your senses and quenched your thirst for competition. Because you know, all the work on the hieroglyphs has helped me gain a lot of new knowledge. That and I think this book definately adds to the estoteric knowledge. When we are done with our presentation, I think our first order of business is to catalog it and safely store it back on the stacks. And if Andrews is right, and can find the sceptre in time, we shall have yet another item to add to our fine collection of items that no one will ever see or find or try and use against mankind," Darius asked his brother. "So, do you know the total score or should I consider this to be a forefit on your race to best me, your elder?"

Daniel rolled his blue eyes as far back into his head as he could manage them. "You taunt me Darius. I think it would be best if we continued this game of yours after we make our presentation. And I think you know better by now to think that I have forgotten what our true score really is. However, seeing that you need a quick recap from last count, I believe you claimed that there were 448 items in existance that could be used against us. However," and he tapped his forefinger to his head, scratching an itch, "However,I think I am in the lead with five hundred known mystical items and tweleve thousand and one esoterical books. That is, if you are correct and we are now including this journal that the young and quite striking young lady found in her store," his brother replied folding his arms smugly over his sweater vest.