A/N: My original character Joanne, the Warehouse pilot, who has a bit part in a couple of my other works, has always kind of wished for an artifact-hunting adventure of her own, so I wrote this to grant her that wish. Special thanks to KJay99 for the beta work, and LadyNRA for the heaps of encouragement! I appreciate you both, very much.


Taking a sip of coffee strong enough to impart a caffeine high to the dead at twenty paces, a casually-dressed woman sat at the lone table in the sparsely-furnished room, reviewing charts and studying a radar screen on her laptop computer. Periodically, her mind drifted to the football game she was missing, but Mrs. Frederic had personally visited to request that she come to work, and there was just no way you said no to that woman. Not if you valued your life, anyway, which Joanne did, very much. Which was why, as soon as her presence had been requested, she'd only paused long enough to tug her favourite player's jersey off and pull on a more respectable blue t-shirt before grabbing her gear and hustling to the airfield.

After a quick glance at the current score online, she shifted her focus from the game, and back to the task she'd been called in for – taking Artie on a quick artifact-hunting jaunt to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Wavy hair cascaded over her shoulders, blocking her view of the chart spread out to her left for a moment before she responded by expertly braiding it without taking her eyes off the array of information she needed to process. Joanne smiled, but didn't look up from her paperwork when she heard the door open, and what sounded like a drunken pack mule stumbling into the room.

"Still haven't learned to pack light?" she asked her companion. The sound of grumbling was drowned out by the racket of luggage being dropped on the floor near her seat, and a carry-on bag being dropped onto the table, creating a breeze that shot her weight and balance chart halfway across the room. Knowing that it had been intentional, she simply turned to look at the man standing just slightly outside of smacking-range.

"I'll pick it up," Artie muttered, already moving to put things right. More grumbling and complaining came along with, as he stooped to fetch the sheet of paper. "Floors should be higher than this."

Joanne laughed at the unexpected, nonsensical complaint as she stretched out her hand to take the page Artie offered. "Thank you," she said, more genuinely than her troublesome colleague probably deserved. She nudged the chair next to hers, indicating her expectation that Artie sit down next to her. When he did, she handed him a luggage scale.

"Why do you bother with weight and balance when it's just the two of us?" Artie asked as he weighed each bag and gave her the values. "The plane seats, what, five? I seriously doubt that my overnight bag is going to push you out of the envelope."

"First, it seats seven, not five. Second, I do my paperwork because it ought to be done, not because I can't tell on sight when my bird is unbalanced." Artie rolled his eyes at his friend's response. He was as big on following procedure as one could be, but Joanne's habit of crossing every t and dotting every i bordered, in his opinion, on "certifiably insane" territory. Then again, he would be the first to admit, that was perhaps a prerequisite of working at the Warehouse.

"How's the weather looking?" Artie asked, glancing at the screen that displayed radar data. Joanne didn't look up until she was finished with her calculations and had flipped to the page with her route on it. Glancing at the chart unfolded on the table before her, she mentally correlated the route with the weather.

Joanne hummed and tapped a finger against the southwest corner of Kansas. "We're going to have to go further south, probably, than I've laid out here. It's not on the radar yet, but their dew point is climbing at HQG, and pressure's dropping faster than the governor's approval rating. And it's like that at several points north, too. That's going to turn into a squall line on me, I think."

"What's HQG?" Artie asked.

"Airport," Joanne answered, pointing at it on the chart. Artie rolled his eyes at that.

"What city?" he asked, making the intent of his question more clear. Joanne looked up at him for a second, then turned back to her work with a shrug.

"No idea. A city we're going to fly south to avoid, that's all we need to know about it today." Joanne fell quiet as she went over the automatically-generated route, making edits as needed to account for current conditions. "Why are we going to Albuquerque?" she asked in a quiet moment, between tasks.

"Would you believe Bugs Bunny's carrot stick?" Artie asked with a chuckle, getting a laugh from his friend in response. "No, I'm joking, we already have... anyway, some artifacts from the earliest settlements at Albuquerque have turned up, and a couple of them are imbued with... with a fairly strong survival instinct, I guess you could say. I want to pick them up before anybody realizes the historical significance, and it gets tougher to snag them." Joanne nodded at that, slightly puzzled at Artie's suggestion that the Warehouse did, in fact, contain a cartoon vegetable, but she opted to let that one go, for sanity's sake.

"That why you've packed for an expedition?" she asked, nodding towards the pile of luggage without even looking at it. She still wasn't sure how big the pile was, mostly because she knew it wouldn't matter anyway as long as every item's weight was accounted for properly on her paperwork.

"The artifacts are still at the dig site," Artie said by way of explanation. "In fact, I was hoping that you might, that you could help me with retrieving them." Joanne's eyebrow shot up at that.

"I'm a pilot, not an agent," she shot back almost without thinking.

"It's retrieval of artifacts sitting in a crate, unsecured, at an archaeological dig site. We rent a jeep, drive up, grab them, and get out of there. I don't even need – it's an hour's drive from the airport. I just didn't feel like making the trip alone." Joanne snickered at that. If there was one thing she'd learned about the Warehouse in her years working as Mrs. Frederic's personal pilot, it was that nothing about artifact retrieval was simple, neat, or quick. But she'd always been curious, and the thought of a unique adventure appealed to the adrenaline junky that hid beneath her professional exterior.

"I'm guessing that's why you suggested hiking shoes," Joanne mused, more to herself than to Artie, who grunted in the affirmative in reply anyhow. She fished in her pocket for a keyring, and held it out towards her travel companion. "I've got about ten or fifteen minutes of paperwork left to do, if you want to go get settled. I want all your luggage," she said, glancing at the pile, then freezing when she saw all of it. "Artie, where... my orders were out and back, no overnight stay. What is all that stuff?"

"Overnight bag, just in case," Artie said, pointing to the duffel Joanne was accustomed to him hauling on board, before shifting his focus, and hers, onto the next bag. "Maps, reference material, and tools. Artifact retrieval gear. Emergency supplies. And my carry-on bag." Joanne gazed, bemused, at her friend. She considered reminding him that the regents' planes come with survival gear appropriate for the kinds of things that tend to come up in the artifact business, but stopped herself. Another glance at the weight chart confirmed that there was no particular reason, on her part, to get bent out of shape about over-packing, and it would take far longer to get rid of the excess than it would to simply load up and go. She shrugged and handed over the keys.

"If you think you need it all, go load it all in the aft cargo compartment. I need to get the last of this paperwork filed, so I'll be out in just a few minutes." She bit back a laugh, watching Artie try to scoop everything up. Obviously, he'd counted on her being willing to help him schlep his quarter-ton of equipment, but she had no intention of enabling his habit. By the time she strutted out to her plane, flight bag in one hand and backpack over her shoulder, Artie was just shoving the last of his stuff into the cargo area she'd specified. It was nearly full.

Shaking her head again, Joanne simply boarded the plane and tossed her own bag down into an unneeded passenger seat. She paused to buckle it in by its straps before proceeding to the flight deck, smiling to herself as she remembered the day she'd learned never, ever to just lob a backpack into the passenger cabin and take off, as if it were the back seat of her personal car. Mrs. Frederic had looked disapprovingly at the unsecured bag, but said nothing, and Joanne had written it off as the woman's standard disposition, until the artifact they were transporting had suddenly gone haywire, producing more turbulence than Joanne had ever experienced in her life. In a plane that she normally flew with three fingertips, it had taken all she had to keep the craft aloft.

By the time the artifact had been brought back under control, Joanne's pack had slammed around half the cabin, its zipper giving out, dumping the contents of the bag out all over the place. Mrs. Frederic hadn't said a word at their fueling stop as she helped Joanne pick up the scattered clothes, but she smiled knowingly and made a point of buckling the bag into its seat, subtly making her point to the then-new staff member. That – and not to pack your best silk undergarments on a trip with your boss – was a lesson she would never forget.


A/N: I know, I know, it's a weird place to leave y'all hanging, but the best place for it is waaaaay far along, so I just had to pick a spot for a chapter break!