It had been a long, long day. One of the ones that left Emily staggering down to the shop on the corner for more coffee twice as often and breaking her usually healthy diet to get herself more than one slice of apple pie.
She'd arrived at seven am sharp to find a massive filing task waiting for her - new set editions of encyclopedias - in twelve languages - that needed to be entered into the library system. Then her normal load of translation work being interrupted by an emergency special project for a was dark outside her office windows now but there was still a stack of paperwork near as high as her eyebrows in her inbox.
Well, that wasn't that tall a stack she supposed. It would probably seem smaller if she picked her chin up off of her desk.
Yawning and rubbing at her eyes she sat up straighter, stretching out her arms over heard and arching her back until it gave out a few satisfying little pops. Maybe it was time to give her brain a breather and pick up something a little more personal for a half hour or so.
Sliding out of her chair Emily made her way over to the cabinet at the back of her office, pulling out her keys she unlocked the front doors, then the drawere where the kept her favourite and most special of projects. The artifact had been a curiosity when it was handed over to her a few months ago and it was still something that kept her delightfully puzzled when she most needed a little mental exercise. Translation was an arduous task for many but for Emily it was like reading words that might as well have been different colours rather than different languages. Transferring one language to another was fascinating in some ways but terribly routine in others, especially when trading between languages didn't even require a change of alphabet.
The little golden cylinder locked away in her favourite drawer of her favourite cabinet in her favourite part of her office was her own special little challenge for her tired bored mind...
About 9 inches long and an inch and a half around the artifact was for all Emily had been able to tell solid gold right down to the guts. Divided into seventeen slender sections, each engraved with different characters of an ancient formative version of Chinese that she had been slaving over translation of , Emily could spend HOURS just turning each little wheel that made up the tube and seeing what sentences she could form from the hundreds on characters. Most made no sense, untranslated words leaving gaps in her knowledge and the sheer number of combinations making finding anything genuinely meaningful a painstaking process of elimination...
Emily had taken to just spinning the wheels at random and seeing what she came up with before trying any kind of systematic method. It seemed to work better.
Settling back at her desk she stood the cylinder on it's end on the table top, pushing bandadged papercut fingers up beneath her glasses to rub her sore eyes for a moment before she began.
"Ah mon petit trésor. Quel non-sens me direz-vous aujourd'hui?"
Trailing her fingers along the side of the wheels she gave them a firm spin, watching and waiting patiently until she say each one click to a stop.
"Eh? Étrange... Ce regarde grammaticalement correct..."
One breath later Emily's desk chair was no more, and she was up to her neck in the soapy water of someone else's evening bath.
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