Terra Nova Research Base, Antarctica.
RAIN-2536: “USS Argo”
Published in 1930 [updated in 1945]
Having science fiction writers among our ranks is always a mixed bag; heck, having people of creative backgrounds at all is a mixed bag. On one hand, you have people who would try different solutions in their heads before attempting to do anything, saving people around them and avoiding deathly traps or artefacts. On the other, working with them goes on the line of trying to herd crows or cats, as the creativity powering their minds produces more artefacts. Giving them the means to produce even more fuel for their stories doesn’t help either.
Regarding the great man himself, Jules Gabriel Verne is responsible for the recovery of twenty artefacts and the creation of seven different ones, most of them taken from his books and one from his personal life. Each time he created a work that involved means of transportation or mechanisms, the blueprints became entangled with magical energy, which meant that when these were built, even as prototypes, the artefact gathered proprieties written about them. The books that took proprieties into the real world are “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea”, “Five Weeks in a Balloon”, “Around the Moon”, “Robur the Conqueror”, “The Steam House”, and “The Mysterious Island”. The list of artefacts and the particular proprieties are listed under the Verne File in Archive City.
After Verne’s death in 1905, Alice Athenida went to retrieve the remains from his state and found designs for a new flying machine that took from every other of his inventions. After her arrival, she went to retrieve all the parts needed and, with the help from Hephaestus and Brigid, built what we know as the USS Argos. It held the prefix “USS” due to being the only country which agreed to register the blimp as a way to transport. Not even Germany, with the support of Count Von Zeppelin, wanted to deal with it.
Using mechanisms, parts, and even metal from the failure to retrieve intact the Baltimore Gun Club Projectile went into build the new machine. As the other artefact were dismantled and not destroyed just part of the energy carried to the new device, while most of it remained in the old shells.
It was long overdue in an extensive reform plan made by Ms. Alice and Mr. Verne back in 1880 to have a small flotilla for transporting the retrieved artefacts back to the Tower. After the retirement of both, the idea was scrapped on grounds that no one on their sane mind would want to operate the projected ships. The only one built before the project being discarded was the aforementioned Argo, and, due its inability to land for more than a day, threw a wrench to the original idea. With no one else knowing how to interpret the design to dismantle the ship, turned into a “permanent loan” to Hermes, messenger of the gods.
From 1910, year on which the Argo was built, to 1923, the airship was on a loan to the god. After that, with the return of Ms. Alice as the new overseer of the Terra Nova Research Base, the Argo became part of a dozen of different ships, trains, and cars of the renewed flotilla. Overseer A. designed a new way to use the Argo as a floating office, as with the damaged suffered to the Overseer’s Office after her arrival.
[Update, 1945]
The Argo worked as a floating office between 1923 to 1939, when it was required to help transporting magical beings out of Europe during the Second World War. It was taken from RAIN by The Bureau to perform this duty, and worked on it until the end of the war. In 1945, with the change on airspace regulation around the world after the war and the Zeppelin disaster, the Argo was docked permanently at the Bureau Building in Greenlight Base. The burning of the building at the end of the same year ended with the winning streak of the airship and the scraps were sent to storage at Terra Nova again.
Lucky for us, the burning of the main hull of the airship didn’t destroy it. So, we hadn’t had to deal with the potential of having a person who was the embodiment of everything related to the works of Jules Verne. I know how that sounds, but it’s not really a compliment; especially not after what happened to Yggdrasil.
Ariel Bonheur, Chief Archivist.
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