The Arrhazon Government Archives maintained a searchable and sortable database of every snippet of public information generated over millennia. Along with the database, it retained the actual original file, some old paper records, but mostly one time electronic tablets.

Lzrehae N’seseh was into her 29th year of employment at AGA, and she had seen the good and the bad in government. During the relatively short stint of Brellian as Chief of Government, she had been removed from her post as head of records processing, for no women were allowed to be in government employ, except in what Brellian saw as subservient and trivial positions. Since Lzrehae was tasked to view and process the most secretive of government documents, she was one of the very first removed in the purge of women from Arrhazonan government.

When Brellian fell, the Minister of Archives wasted no time in placing a call to his very capable former employee. Lzrehae was thrilled to get the call, and equally thrilled to accept re-employment in her former posting.

What Lzrehae failed to appreciate was the incredible mess created after she had last worked in Archives. There were fourteen full and enormous warehouses and one half-full warehouse of unfiltered, uncategorised, not uploaded, and not catalogued documents. Brellian’s lackeys, for all their overall disorganisation, kept records of virtually everything. “Ah, job security!” she laughed silently at the task ahead.

Lzrehae had toured the huge warehouses the day before, and she harboured no illusions of getting things processed quickly. Not only had she been cut from the staff, but prior to Brellian, 75% of the 150 processors were women. They managed an efficient flow of documents in, documents out. With little proper processing done during the Brellian disaster, she needed far more than 150 staffers to tackle the horrid mess. In fact, Lzrehae intended to request hire of another 150 tasked to backlog, while setting her for the most part reconstituted staff to work on maintaining new document workflow. “Njesera will be thrilled when that proposal lands in front of him later today!” Lzrehae thought.

The laid off women of her department were scheduled to return at the beginning of the following week. Since there was no indication of priority on the warehoused items, the best approach was simply to take one carton at a time, see what is in there, and get it processed.

Years. Lzrehae fully appreciated the time frame involved, and knew there was no other way, although… perhaps some of her most seasoned employees could be tasked to prioritise the warehoused items, while newly trained staff could work with current documents. The idea had just occurred, and it made sense. Lzrehae would seek approval for someone to run the current document staff, reporting to Lzrehae. For her part, Lzrehae would oversee all of processing, but be fully immersed in the backlog, on location in the warehouses.

Later that day, she met with Njesera in his office. Lzrehae spend an hour outlining her planned approach to the acres and acres of unprocessed documents. Njesera had greatly missed the very capable manager sitting in front of him, and was thrilled to have her back. He was unsure what he would have done had she not accepted his invitation to return.

As usual, Lzrehae made perfect sense, and already had a detailed plan forming in her very capable mind; Njesera trusted her judgement implicitly. Given the government’s state of chaos that existed once Brellian sank his claws into government, Njesera knew he would have little trouble getting funding for Lzrehae’s huge staffing request, and so he gave a conditional OK to begin looking for the new staffers.

Lzrehae thanked Njesera for his show of confidence and support. The meeting was over, and she headed back to her office to begin the initial write up for posting the 150 new positions.

She was sure there would be countless surprises ahead, and Lzrehae was right. Documents would be uncovered by one of the yet to be hired staffers fully 12 years after Lzrehae’s return to Archives. And the newly uncovered documents would leave the employee sprinting and screaming across the warehouse in search of the still fairly young – at 77 – and quite mobile Lzrehae. That unknown in the moment surprise within hours would once again stun and rock the entire world.