WHAT IS THE ARCHIVAL DIVISION?
This is the home for washups, has-beens and never-weres too weird to be useful elsewhere in the Foundation. Their remit: closing cold cases with limited resources, outdated tech, and their one-of-a-kind talents. Under the watchful eye of a living legend, the chief librarian Olympia, the Division ventures through genealogical records from lost ages, restores abandoned machines in shuttered sites, and cracks forgotten ciphers in buried tongues. They are the archaeologists of invisible histories, investigators of buried mysteries, and curators of the Foundation’s legacy.
WHAT ARE THEIR STORIES?
ARCHIVAL DIVISION AND THE WRATH OF CAPTAIN NEMO1
You Can Say Hi – Meet Chessaline Broad, whose skill at murder is matched only by her unwillingness to let it define her!
The Slow Bullet – Meet Adam Saxon as he demands to unretire, then follow Captain Nemo's return from the Moon!
Visions of Bodies Being Burned – Meet Bharath [REDACTED] during his morning exercises, then travel with the Division to the Shadow British Museum, to which Nemo has been trekking across the ocean!
Zatoichi – Nemo’s capture was merely part of a century-long gambit to infiltrate the Museum and take back his secrets! Adam, Barry, and Chess must stop him… but did he really shoot first?
SCP-6190(Through an Arbor, Darkly) - Captain Nemo’s spaceship is on a collision course with Buckingham Palace at ten percent of the speed of light! Luckily, the Archival Division has the solution. Firing Barry at it from a very large gun.
ARCHIVAL DIVISION IN THE BELGIAN CARCOSA2
Blood Beneath the Leaves — Witness the fall of Carcosa from the heavens. Learn what happened to the boy adventurer and his dog who dared to penetrate her heart.
Tintin and the Long Twentieth Century — Boy and dog march through time. The Foundation conspires. It has happened before. It will happen again.
SCP-8620(Tintin and the Carcosan Affair) — The Archival Division track Tintin back to Carcosa, only to be sucked into a civil war that the Foundation simply never saw coming.
WHO ARE THE ARCHIVAL DIVISION?
Meet Adam Saxon. Formerly among the Foundation’s finest counterintelligence officers, he elected to undergo cerebral redundancy surgery to optimize his survivability and cognitive capacity. When the surgery itself became redundant, Adam was incentivized to early retirement – until his lack of direction hijacked his sense of duty and returned him to the fold. He’s still coping with being stashed into Archival.
Meet Bharath "Barry" [REDACTED]. He hosts a pyrophoric pluripotent parasite: a divine tardigrade whose most prominent party tricks are making Barry ignite like a thermobaric weapon, then restoring him to perfect health from little more than a scorched finger. His passions include foreign languages, historiography, and comic books. Don’t get him started on REAL TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL.
Meet Chessaline "Chess" Broad. Trained from childhood by the PENTAGRAM to eliminate wizards; from adulthood by the Foundation to fix what the US government called upbringing. All things considered, Chess is surprisingly well adjusted… as long as her eyes are open. Asleep, her hands are the devil's playthings.
Meet the REAL TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL: a comic book and parody magazine that has been releasing issues since before World War 2. Somehow, someway, it remains the most reliable chronicle of the secret histories behind the Veil; everyone who is anyone has a subscription, even if they have no idea who delivers it or cashes their subscription checks.
Image modified to conceal colors unsafe for human eyesight! — Ed
HOW DO YOU WRITE FOR ARCHIVAL DIVISION?
The Archival Division is most obviously a love letter tto public, pulp, and genre fiction like the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as well as comics such as Hellboy and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Special mention should go to The Venture Bros, whose characters treat the absurdity of their universe with total sincerity, and struggle to self-actualize themselves within the drama of their comic reality, using their references and pop culture knowledge to reinforce the sense of community that these misfits and malcontents cultivate while hating each other for a living.
Beyond that, the Archival Division is focused on closing ancient histories and uncovering secret histories. They catalog old records, scour old files, and research culture, history, and especially historiography. Chronicling a past full of antimemes and amnestics is like trying to fill a bucket full of holes. The truth is out there, but has to be hunted, baited, and trapped.
Image modified to conceal symbols unsafe for human eyesight! — Ed