The History
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     Buried in the labyrinthine cesspool of secrets that embodies the
Warehouse is a simple fact:  the Warehouse is an adjunct of the National
Archives.  For those who sign the paychecks and allocate the funds, its
existence is as public and as visible as the various resevoirs of Americana
the government collects all across the United States.  The Warehouse, then,
is just another building, just another line on a long list of funding
allocations.  It hides where such things hide best:  in plain sight.
     The peculiar institution of democracy as it existed in the new nation
of the United States presented new diplomatic dilemmas.  It was quite
common for one country to offer a gift to the monarch of another country,
as a sign of esteem.  The growing economic power of the U.S. guaranteed
that most nations wanted to remain in their good graces.  Gifts were
numerous, but to whom were they offered?  Presidents could not keep any of
the gifts offered as a function of head of state, and no museums were set
up to handle the flood of items.  Additionally, as the first patriots died,
whole estates were left to the nation, its contents adding to the backlog
of possessions owned strictly by the people.
     Soon after the Library of Congress transformed into its present
incarnation as the national repository of copyright, Congress passed around
the idea of crating an institution which would handle all the realia
acquired by the United States.  Important items, such as priceless
documents and significant artifacts of America's brave past, would be
catalogued and stored for eventual inclusion in museums.  Groups of
archivists were recruited from the Library of Congress, and the arduous
task of creating the National Archives began.
     For most of the populace, that is indeed the end of the story.
However, there is a secret history of the Archives, a shadow wing existing
only in theory, where most of the afterbirth of America is stored, kept far
far away from the light of day.
     It was 1853, and abolitionists were inflaming antifederalist and
seperatist sentiments in the Southern states.  Southern politicians clung
to the writings of the Antifederalists, who thought that power should rest
solely in the states, and any attempt to regulate slavery on a federal
level was against the very intent of those who fought and died to create
America.  Slavery, indeed, was expressly allowed in the Constitution.
Rumors had begun to spread, however, about the existence of certain papers
wherein the Antifederalists turned against the heinous institute of
slavery.  These documents were in their personal effects, given to the
Archives upon their deaths, sitting, no doubt, in a crate somewhere, beign
chewed by mice.  If these documents could come to light, much of the pro-slave
ry rhetoric would lose its potency.
     Thus, on a hot July night, four abolitionists broke into the main
depository of the National Archives, a simple warehouse on the banks of the
Potomac.  They ransacked the place, sending irreplacable documents falling
in all directions.  Unable to find what they were looking for, they were
chased off by a passing traveller.
     The incident is but a minor footnote in recorded history, since one
of the abolitionists, John Brown, went on to lead an insurrection.
However, the repercussions of that night are still felt today.  The
president himself came to inspect the carnage, and, picking up a random
scrap of paper, was horrified to discover secret correspondence confirming
that one of the former presidents practiced black magick that may have
bordered on human sacrifice.  Here it lay, for the world to see.
     There were other papers, no less sensitive.  Had the abolitionists
been less myopic, the confidence the American people invested in its
leaders and its history would have been severely compromised.  Over the
next week, the president, along with certain congressional leaders and the
chief justice, went over the crude manifest of the archives.  It would have
been easier to just burn the lot, and yet they felt that they owed a
greater debt to history.  One day, the truth would come out, they were
certain.  Until then, a safe place would have to be found.

The First Staff

     Finding a place to stick the secret history of a nation wasn't
terribly hard.  More important by far was to be certain that the secret
remained secret.  It was decided that its location would be known only by
the President, the Speaker of the House, and the Chief Justice, who would
verbally pass it onto his successor.  But who would watch the watchmen?
Who could not only be entrusted with a secret, but also run the place,
cataloguing documents that probably should have been destroyed decades ago?
     Librarians.  The answer struck them like a thunderbolt.  Librarians
had an infallible sense of duty to the materials that they were put in
charge of.  A librarian would sooner die than betray a confidence.  And
indeed, a librarian was exactly what the job called for.
     Five candidates were culled from the best schools the nation had to
offer, and in the shadow of civil war, the five met, and began the tedious
process of documenting materials that no other man would see.  Those five,
Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones, Mr. Miller, Mr. Johnson, and Mr. Lee, fell out of the
mundane world, and surrendered to the silence.  They tore into the
archives, instructed to remove anything of a questionable nature from the
backlog.  They understood the privelige that they had been granted, and
worked with a zeal that intimidated the regular archivists.  Within five
years, they had weeded out all the sensitive materials, and moved into the
Warehouse.
     They did not work alone, however.  Those who stacked the boxes, who
swept the floors and tidied up after closing were all immigrants selected
primarily because of their illiteracy.  They were well paid, and their
children were promised cushy jobs, as long as the secret passed only
through the family.

The Post-Bellum Blues

     In 1873, they were finished.  After giving the best years of their
lives, four of the five were ready to move on to new assignments.  Two days
before they posted their joint resignation, leaving Mr. Smith to run the
facility, a memo was issued to the warehouse from the Central Archivist:
when would they come around to pick up their "stuff?"
     The American Civil war, it would seem, was very good in stirring up
the muck deep in the heart of the nation.  Items poured into the Archives
in the postwar period, many acquisitions of slain officers and trophies of
war.  Several -- too many be some accounts -- were not for general viewing.
The horrors of the war had dredged up something in the soul of the country,
and for a time, it had stalked the land.  Now fragments of its presence
were showing up at the doorstoop of the Warehouse, looking for a place to
be catalogued and stored.  The president at the onset of war, it seemed,
had informed the Central Archivist to tag certain items, and set them
aside.
     Whereas ninety percent of the material already stored were documents
- letters, orders, maps, etc. - much of the new material was realia,
physical objects that were sent without accompanying notes as to why they
were so potentially dangerous to the security of the country.  At first,
the Staff tried merely to provide an adequate physical description of the
object, and safely tuck it away.  This soon changed after Mr. Jones was
almost killed by a Confederate calvary sabre that animated and attacked
him.  The Staff soon realized that if they were going to be handling
explosives, they'd better find out precisely what would set them off.
     To this end, they received permission from the president to recruit
specially selected Pinkertons who traced down precise stories about the
gathered items.  They hid well in the flood of carpetbaggers and historians
streaming into the South, searching out the truth to legends.  The
Pinkertons performed their jobs admirably, and the flow of data, aided by
a revised code which detailed purpose, helped to automate their jobs.
     The time of the yellow journalist and muckraker led to a new
challenge for the Warehouse.  Rumors began to spread of an organization,
called the Collectors, who were scouring the countrysides.  Supposedly they
searched the battlefields for memorabilia of the war, to put into the
trophy cases of the rich who had bought their way out of the fighting, and
needed something above the mantle to back up their lies.  Indeed, a few
robber barons were doing this very thing, but not a few reporters
accidentally stumbled across a pack of Pinkertons, hot on the trail of an
item.
     Most of these reporters were misdirected, and the most clever and
industrious, who peeled away at the layers of smoke and mirrors were
actually offered jobs as Collectors, as the Pinkerton recruits were now
called.  A few refused, saying that the Warehouse was too big a secret.
These men were clandestinely accused of treason, since they threatened to
divulge the secrets of the nation.  Tried in absentia, they were quickly
executed.  Still, the two weeks that this process took frightened the
president.  It was only sheer luck that the reporter had not divulged his
story to others.  The president signed Executive Order W-1, which allowed
for the immediate execution of any individual who threatened to divulge any
secret contained in the Warehouse.  The trial would actually be held later,
and if the person was found not guilty, it would be the agent who would be
executed.  Needless to say, very few Collectors falsly accused someone.
     However, it seemed that for every item successfully catalogued,
another was sent in, discovered by the Archivist or a Pinkerton who
followed up on a lead.  At this point, the Staff realized their duty could
be an eternal one, created perhaps by the presence of the Warehouse itself.
It was as if at the moment the Warehouse opened, a vaccuum of secrets was
created, and would not diminish until there were no more secrets.
Hunkering down, they hid behind their ledgers, and let a world pass them
by.

The Second Staff

     Even government employees must retire, and after fifty years of
dedicated service, the secrets of the Warehouse were passed on to a new
generation, hand-picked by the first staff from the best and brightest
librarians and archivists.  Coincidentally, their names were the same:
Lee, Smith, Jones, Brown, Johnson, and Miller, a tradition that continues
to this day.  The five new managers brought with them a bookful of new
cataloguing theory.  In fact, during the first five years, the code changed
over four times, necessitating back cataloguing.
     This did not go over well with the workers, themselves the sons of
the first workers, taught to respect their country and the secrets they
guarded.  In the end, practicality won over idealism, and an early form of
the modern code was instituted.
     Part of the problem had to do with the very concept of the Warehouse.
Would it be important to catalogue why these items were sent here?  Some
were self-explanatory, while others, mostly scraps of paper, seemed
destined for the wastebin.  At last, it was ascertained that to institute
a special designation for the very most secret information would be
counter-productive, an open invitation to the clever theif who would, it
was assumed, break in.  If necessary, notes as to why these items were so
dangerous would be located in the manifest, but by the time this rule
became policy, several items passed into anonymity.

The Great War

     Time passed, and the Warehouse prospered in its own manner.  The
First World War meant an invasion of foreign items confiscated from those
who would misuse them.  Economic prosperity also meant a flood of secret
documents upon which that prosperity was built had to be hidden and filed
away.  This deluge of paperwork led to the first great schism in the
Warehouse, the File War.
     With over 90% of the warehouse's contents existing as information on
paper, information that would not lose its value if copied in some other
manner, a few member of the staff felt it worthwhile to expand the system,
to allow for better cataloguing of these items.  This was taken up as an
independent project by three of the six, who unfortunately never passed a
memorandum describing their attempt.
     Their first obstacle was reformatting the system.  Several items
consisting strictly of information had been classified under "D- Datum" or
"E-Evidence," without much consistency.  The problem was that so much of
the cataloguing ststem existed in grey areas, the D-E being the most vague.
The three set up shop in a little corner, and created a Warehouse within
the Warehouse, to sort out this paper mess.  Even amongst these three,
there were nagging inconsistencies in style and technique.  After spending
four hours debating whether or not the transcript of a confession was
evidence, the concept of a review board was scrapped.  Even worse, it was
discovered that Miller has actually transcribed a number of documents using
a typewriter, and promptly destroyed the originals.  Finally, D-E was
wholly abolished, and a new class - F, came into being.
     Then all hell broke loose.  The other three had been wondering what
the first three were up to.  Not privy to the endless debates about why it
should be this way or that way, the second three out and out rejected the
proposal.  Four tense months followed, as each Librarian went about
following his own personal system.  At last, the stalemate was shattered
when the President called down, needing the original draft of the Louisiana
Purchase.
     In the best case scenario, it was one of three places, filed exactly
as it should have.  In the second best, it was placed in one of the six
locations, determined by personal preferences.  However, this particular
document, which no less than four librarians recall reading, vanished out
of the Warehouse, and subsequently out of existence.  The result is a minor
footnote to history: the French, wanting the original to verify claims made
about Napolean, felt snubbed.  They subsequently saw fit to ignore an
important piece of American military analysis, reminding them to not only
defend what would become the Maginot line, but also the northern border.
     Rather than feel chastized, the Librarians became even more insular.
In fact, several Collectors felt strong loyalties to a specific Librarian,
and delivered everything there.  Important items were being lost in the
home-grown catalogue systems which sprouted nightly.  No one was speaking,
and the Warehouse was spiralling out of control.
     So it went for three years.  Items were haphazardly labelled, boxed,
and stacked.  All requests for spcific items were summarilly ignored.  The
Warehouse was divided into six sections, and woebetide any librarian who
crossed the line.  It came as no surprise to the staff, then, that a mere
three months before the start of the Second World War (heralded by a strang
pinging thingee, that everone ignored), blood was shed.
     The actual "battle" lasted fifteen minutes, when rival collectors
attempted simultaneous raids on the inventories of the various Librarians.
Five agents were killed in the senseless slaughter, which ended abruptly
when the Staff, tired of the silent treatment, buried the attackers under
a mound of toppled crates.
     For the next week, the Staff did nothing.  No crates were moved.  The
mound of boxes stayed right where it was, and no one replaced the toilet
paper in the bathrooms.  This, perhaps the lowest blow, ended the war.  The
Librarians, under the watchful eye of the Staff, made their peace, and
returned to the original code, with the addendum that any item existing in
a paper formaat can be labelled with a terminal F, indicating that it is
a "file.".  The damage had been done, however, and to this day an unknown
amount of D-E material remains improperly labelled.

The Undertaking

     In this new era of cooperation, Smith and Miller threw aside their
differences and popped open an exceedingly large crate taken from Nikolai
Tesla's apartment.  When it seemed that an argument would arise over the
purpose of this mysterious item, Miller suggested simply turning the device
on.  With a huff and a hum, it burbled and spat the two
librarians...elsewhere.  They were on a street, presumably Los Angeles, and
everyone was on edge.  Smith purchased a paper, and realized that they were
somehow three months into the future.  The machine could project them
through time and space!  Even worse, they were sent to December 8, 1941,
and handed a newspaper that vividly described the attack that would not
occur for another three months.
     As the effect ended, Smith and Miller found themselves on the horns
of a dilemma.  Any items gathered through "non-conventional" means were
always suspect, because they raised the question of a deeper motive than
simple objective cataloging.  In theory, items should come to the Warehouse
through their own inertia, unless they were truly dangerous.  Actively
seeking out important bits of information could raise a bias into the
process that would be disruptive to the mission of the Warehouse.  In the
end, the paper was sent to the President on 01 December 1941, who obviously
was stunned.  Still, after lengthy debates, it was decided not to act on
this information, to test its veracity.
     Even though it was proven to be wholly accurate, the President
decided not to take the Warehouse up on any more forays into the future.
This continued up until the darkest days of the war, when critical
decisions had to be made with the most accurate information possible.
Specially trained teams of Collectors headed into the future to gather data
about the effectiveness of certain strategies.  Thankfully, seldom was a
specific answer given.  Instead, a similar amount of analysis was employed
as if the generals didn't have this special information.  It is difficult
to say whther or not the Librarians won the war for the Allied forces, but
what they did do was start a very dangerous trend.
     The Librarians, pleased with the success of the program, took it upon
themselves to start filling some of the holes in the "secret history" of
the United States.  If there was some question as to which state - North
and South Dakota - entered the Union first, a simple trip back would clear
up any ambiguity.  Also, rumors that other countries had Collector teams
spurred the Warehouse to take a more proactive stance toward the retrieval
of dangerous items all around the world.  If that meant going back in time
and stealing the items right from under the enemy (or in some cases allied)
forces, so be it.
     The War ended, and the ranks of the Collectors swelled with veterans
who didn't want to return to a sedate, stateside life.  Each Librarian took
charge of separate temporal devices, and employed their own teams to
fulfill pet projects.  The first great sin was that once again, no one
compared notes.  Teams were sometimes sent to identical dates, and yet they
never, ever met.  Even worse, the Librarians were becoming aware of a
growing weirdness in all of their explorations.  The farther they searched
from the present, the more convoluted history became, particularly as they
scanned the future for hints of America's destiny.  At last, they stumbled
upon realities so convoluted that they could not possibly be part of the
present time stream.
     The Undertaking was halted, and the items were catalogued.  In the
last ten excursions, the loss of Collector life had been horrific.  More
begged to go back, to avenge the death of their comrades.  This was
refused.  The Librarians, tired and disheartened, aware that their
obsession had not safeguarded the future, retired at once, and set the
machinery in motion to appoint successors.  They viewed themselves as
criminals, who had cost the Warehouse more than anyone could imagine.

The Third Staff

     A group of retired Collectors formed a coalition to help run the
Warehouse in the interim period.  It was to seek out six new Librarians,
supervise the hiring of a new staff, and form a new set of policies that
were to be followed independant of ego and arrogance.  Allowing this to
happen was the final, and greatest mistake the Second staff made.  Once the
coalition formed, they were in no great hurry to relinquish this newfound
power.  A subtle shift in the balance of power occurred, and the
Warehouse's mission became that of acquisition (often by any means
necessary), not cataloguing.
     The new Librarians were by no means ambitious, which was the
intention of the Coalition.  They were more interested in returning to the
original mission, that of careful safeguarding of the nation's (and as the
US's sphere of influence expanded, the world's) deepest secrets.  Jones,
the first woman Librarian, became their leader when they became aware of
the enormity of the duty.
     Jones ordered a complete and total history compiled, to understand
where all this fit in.  It was at that point that they discovered the
journal of one of the former Librarians, detailing his personal fears about
the consequences of the Undertaking.  These were to be fully realized when
the Librarians realized any sort of chonology could not be cobbled
together.  They were the first to take a step back, and see that all of the
expeditions were travelling to different timelines, and that the evidence
gathered in these expeditions were placed in the Warehouse without any
notations about who placed it there.  Thus, the history of the United
States, which they were to carefully catalog, became a hopeless jumble of
events.  In one case, six scraps of paper were discovered, each proving
beyond a shadow of a doubt that a certain person had been Jack the Ripper.
Apparently, they had been culled from six different timelines, and there
was no way of knowing which was true for their timeline.  Any attempt to
accurately catalog history had become permanently mired in the best
intentions of the Second Staff.
     Four of the six Librarians wanted to shut down the Warehouse at that
moment.  Without an adequate understanding of their overall mission, its
continued existence would be pointless.  The entire contents should be
mothballed, closed forever to prying eyes.  The Coalition, of course,
disgreed.  Using a little .45 caliber persuasion, the six became prisoners
of the institution they had worked so hard to comprehend.
     It wasn't difficult to understand the reasons for the Coalition's
brutality.  Many were veterans of the various forays into the past and
future, saw the hells manufactured by ignorance and sloppiness, and knew
that the price of freedom was indeed eternal vigilance.  They didn't listen
to the Librarians, who tried to tell them of the "false pasts and futures."
After all, except for the very first expedition, no Librarian ever stuck
his neck out for God and country.
     Despite the fact that they were now virtually slaves, the Librarians
reattacked the contents of the Warehouse with a new fervor.  Left with no
other choice, they decided to make the most of it, and regain a semblance
of order.  Each took up a different technical subject, to help understand
precisely what they were dealing with.
     The coalition had begun to sink its claws into the various
intelligence agencies, hoping to use their contacts to locate possible
acquisitions.  With each passing year, the Coalition moved farther and
father from the day-to-day operations of the Warehouse, and deeper into the
shadow of the shadows in which the CIA operated.  This proved extremely
beneficial to the Lbirarians, who enjoyed a brief taste of freedom before
the coming storm.

The Darkest Night

     By 1950, the warehouse was bursting at the seams with acquisitions.
A few rare, large objects had taken up enormous amounts of space.  The
Coalition agreed to employ a bit of technology extracted from an expedition
that would expand the interior volume of an object without affecting its
exterior surface area.  Putting the device into operation was relatively
simple, but its long term effects could not be judged for another five
years.
     It began with subtle malfunctions in the complex devices, as the
Librarians tried to fathom their purpose.  Sometimes inert instruments
would flare to life, or fade out of existence.  It was difficult to tie all
the incidents to a common cause, and so the abberations were ignored.
     Soon simple devices that were carried in after the field was set up
began to malfunction.  Flashlights burned with the intensity of lasers
before melting down.  Guns disassembled themselves.  A new forklift
manifested the ability to become insubstantial for several minutes.
Everything became very, very unpredictable.
     Working around the clock, Jones and Johnson uncovered an unpublished
treatise written by Heisenberg that described the effect of imposing fourth
dimensional operants on three dimensional objects.  In effect, everything
in the Warehouse could no longer be counted on operating in a constant,
regular, scientific manner, including their own minds.  Once again, they
warned the coalition, and once again, they were ignored.
     15 January 1960.  The Coalition, acting on data gathered during the
Undertaking, began to court the next president of the United States,
Richard Nixon.  Wanting to maintain  good relations, they offered him
critical information on the Kennedy camp, information that was later
discovered to be tainted by the Field.  By the time Kennedy won, it was too
late.  Most of the high level leaders of the Coalition has managed to
thorougly alienate the new President.
     When Eisenhower whispered the secret to Kennedy, he knew how he would
bring his promises to light.  He visited the Warehouse, and announced to
the Librarians, without the Coalition present, that he would work to
release certain items to the general public.  He left it up to the
Librarians to decide what these items should be.   Needless to say, they
felt like kids in a candy store.
     When the Coalition found out about this, they were furious.  All
communications were shut down, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, for the
first time in 20 years, an American president had to make a decision
without its farseeing wisdom.  It should be noted that the Librarians,
allowed to do the analysis themselves, managed to discern the correct
course of action.  They and their scientific research had cracked the
Credibility barrier.
     Kennedy was furious.  He ordered the Coalition disbanded, and the
contents of the Warehouse to be scattered to six sites around the United
States.  The Coalition threw up their hands, and did absolutely nothing.
They would wait for his return from Dallas before making a move.
     Whose job was it to monitor all the gadgets and gizmos?  Who had seen
that the whatjamacallit, which scanned the future timelines, was turned
off?  While the watchmen were watching the watchmen, no one was guarding
the door, and an assassin by the name of Oswald crept in, and snuffed out
a candle.  This occurrence so stunned those who had heard of the Warehouse
and its powers that they either ceased to believe in its existence, or saw
that as a fatal blow against its credibility.  If they knew the president
was to die, then why didn't they do anything?  In the minds of a vengeful
few, the Warehouse and those who ran it were just as guilty.
     More importantly, it was the first time a president had died without
imparting the secret to his successor.  FDR had prevented the secret from
being passed through any other channels, leaving the president as the sole
witness.  While the Coalition was being killed in their sleep, the various
intelligence communities saw this as a prime opportunity to truly seize the
reins of power.  For too long, such a prize had been subject to the whim
of one man.  Now, authority over it would be shared by a council, acting
indenendently of any Agency.  It would serve as a repository of all the
dirty secrets, perhaps precisely as it always was intended.
     When the horrors that the Librarians endured came to light, no one
in the new board desired their deaths.  They were capable and dedicated,
and they were allowed to continue the job in defense of America.  The
Librarians had no illusion about how little power they held, and  accepted
this role without complaint.

The Warehouse Today

     After telling the new board that Nixon knew not only of the existence
of the Warehouse, but its precise location, the Librarians received
approval to move the warehouse to one of the six locations which Kennedy
initiated.  Its precise location would be known only to the Staff and the
Librarians, and a single member of the cabal.
     Indeed, so soon after the darkest night, when the floors of the
Warehouse ran with Coalition blood, the Librarians enjoyed their finest
hour.  Using a few pieces of alien technology, they figured out how to
reduce the effect of the flux field, as well as how to make the Warehouse
exist in all six locations!  If any one location was compromised, it would
cease to exist there, and another area would be approved.  This would stop
anyone using satellites from tracking the flow of vital secrets to any one
location.
     The Librarians are all past middle age, and have been thorougly
humbled by their experience.  The attempt to create a Unified history
failed miserably, though Jones still bands away at her charts, hoping to
make some sense of it all.  They rankle at being under the aegis of the
Cabal, which is now truly global in scope, and are determined that the next
Librarians should be of sterner stuff than they.  Until then, however, the
Librarians do what they do best: survive.