The car screeched to a halt, and Claudia's head lurched forward to smack against the seat in front of her. She swore quietly, one hand cradling her skull and the other fumbling for the door handle, as Artie threw open his driver side door and hopped rather ungracefully onto the dirt road. Steve followed suit, striding briskly after the shorter man, and Claudia trailed after them at a distance.
The two men stopped just short of where the road met the grassy field. With eyes shaded against the low sun, they stared in incredulous silence. Claudia crept up beside Steve, and joined them in reveling at the curious juxtaposition of a grounded Boeing 747 in the middle of nowhere. Littered around it were pieces of scrap metal, in various stages of rust, as was the airplane itself.
"Well. That is indeed a commercial jet in the middle of a field of junk," Artie finally muttered, "Which, I might add, was never previously seen at this particular location."
"Plane looks old, like it's been through a lot, or it's from way back when," Steve added, "Do some artifacts try to follow each other to the Warehouse?" He glanced furtively at Artie, whose eyes were unreadable behind round-lensed sunglasses. Steve scratched the peach stubble on his chin, and scrunched his face against the sun, exaggerating his skepticism. "Can we even fit that in the Warehouse?"
"In my experience, artifacts tend to move away from the Warehouse, rather than toward it," Artie said, "They don't like to be seen, don't like to be found, they hitchhike on people, and this seems to be...overwhelmingly not the case." Both men almost simultaneously scratched their chins in thought, and upon noticing their synchronicity, they lowered their hands abruptly with thinly veiled discomfort.
"Why do I get the feeling that this warehouse is a capital W, filled with importance, more-than-just-an-ordinary warehouse?" Claudia asked.
"Claudia, please - we're working," Artie replied curtly.
The girl wrinkled her nose and sank down into a squatting position, focusing her already waning curiosity onto the gravel-dirt combo of the road. She was growing uninterested in the continued ponderance of yet another absurdity in an already bizarre morning. Her bitten-down nails picked tiredly at the tiny pebbles, until the more organized portion of her brain directed her hand to arrange a cluster of them in a neat, rounded pile.
Claudia sat back on her heels and glanced up lazily, across the field at the old plane, and back down to the pile of pebbles. Slowly, her eyes widened in disbelief at the bits of gravel, until she hurriedly flicked her gaze back and forth between the field and the rocks.
"Probability."
Artie and Steve turned at the sound of Claudia's voice to look down at the girl, who was sitting in the dirt, still donned in her pajamas.
"You know the um - that thing, about planes made out of junk, from a tornado," she added, her expression now frantically pleading. They remained silent, until Artie removed his sunglasses to reveal an utterly exasperated gaze.
"Claudia - we need you to focus here, and if you are not in the appropriate state of mind, then we can't entertain you."
"Listen to me," Claudia stumbled to her feet, her socked toes catching on the elastic cuffs of her sweatpants, until she righted herself, "You get tornadoes out here, right?"
"This is South Dakota, yes," Artie murmured.
"It is statistically impossible for a tornado to go through a junkyard, and randomly whip together pieces of junk to form a fully functional passenger plane. Someone said that, that's a thing," she exclaimed.
Steve's expression remained blank and uncomprehending, though recognition slowly dawned across Artie's features. He snapped his fingers and pointed at Claudia, mouth agape.
"You're suggesting that the airplane itself is not the artifact, and instead we have an artifact that makes impossible, theoretical circumstances into reality?"
"Yeah, that. It's an analogy someone threw out about a century ago," Claudia shrugged.
"And, that might explain why we have two identical-looking Claudias who claim to have completely different lives?" Steve ventured. Before either could reply, Artie turned briskly on his heels and headed back to the car, where he extracted his black carpet bag. He drew the mint-tin videophone out from its contents, and flipped open the lid.
"The game is afoot, Stevey," Claudia said with a smirk, which quickly turned questioning. "You do go by Stevey, right? I'm going to call you that anyway, regardless of whether you want me to."
Steve winced. "My high school girlfriend used to call me that, before I figured out I liked guys."
"I retract my previous statement," Claudia said quickly. Steve let out a short laugh, as Claudia felt her face redden..
"You usually call me 'Jinksy,' and I'm fine with that."
Claudia gave a wry smile, and turned her attention back toward the logical improbability sitting out in the field before them. The sounds of Artie's frantic conversation over the video device punctuated the otherwise serene morning air, at first urgently matter-of-fact in addressing Leena, and then voice rising in volume after he switched the call over to Pete and Myka.
"Artie's a pretty high-strung guy," Claudia remarked in a low voice, "Kind of dotty, too. Absent-minded professor type."
Steve snorted in amusement. "You could say that."
"So, what's his story; does he have a wife, or kids?" she glanced over at Steve, and quickly added, "Or husband, or partner, whatever works..."
Before Steve could reply, Artie snapped the video tin shut, and called over toward them.
"We're going in," he announced, "Be careful in approaching the plane, in case another tornado manifests. We'll take a quick look in the interior, and - Claudia!"
Claudia jumped at his sudden cry of alarm, and whirled around to face him.
"No, behind!-"
Artie's shout was cut short, as an object with the shape, size, and texture of a football collided with the back of Claudia's head, though the resulting noise upon impact sounded considerably more metallic than that which could have been produced by a regulation football. Sparks burst into in Claudia's vision, and the sound instantly drained from the world, swirling down some neurological pipe in her mind. A panic-stricken Steve reached out his arms to catch her before she fell, but she careened in the opposite direction, the horizon spinning, before she crumpled onto the dirt road. One arm, bent awkwardly at the elbow, encircled the small pile of pebbles she had made - the little mountain resting in the crook of her arm.