Annabeth and the Nine Step Career Plan

Step 4

Investigation

Annabeth's last hour and a half of work on Friday is comparable to, well, definitely not hell, but perhaps something just a few notches below. In the last twenty minutes, she checks the clock no less than thirty-four times and scrolls through several meters of documents she's already read thrice over. When the clock finally strikes five pm, Annabeth is already in the elevator, fingers tapping impatiently against the opposite arm, and waiting for the familiar ding signaling the lobby floor. Hardly one to waste time, she switches shoes as she descends, heels for a more comfortable pair of sneakers. At exactly five o' six, there is not a single trace left of her in the LexCorp building.

A sense of relaxation washes over Annabeth the second her feet cross the impressively designed threshold of the Metropolis Public Library as if her body is glad to relinquish the last of any subconscious worries stored within. The smell of paper, fresh and old, and the sound of hushed whispers are things she has intimately memorized. In the same way that Percy is most himself in the sea, the library is Annabeth's domain.

Although she is weeks into her summer at Metropolis, this is the first day she's been able to find time to sneak away to the building. Even so, she knows exactly how the library is organized, where certain genres and sections lay hidden, and lets her feet instinctively guide her to the architecture section where she piles a few odd books into her arms. She walks deeper into the building, passing by students flipping through goliath-level textbooks, elderly folk squinting at the small vertical titles, and a man who smiles at her as he re-organizes a shelf. Annabeth pauses at another section on the way to snag yet another book before continuing on.

When her feet finally come to a standstill, the door before her reads Microfilm & Microfiche Room in fading brown letters. She shifts her haul of books to one arm, pushes on the handle, and shoves the heavy wooden door with her shoulder. Instantly, a thin layer of dust enters her nostrils. The room looks, smells, and tastes like it hasn't been opened in years, despite the empty trash can revealing that it has been cleaned recently. Annabeth marvels that it feels like she's been taken back decades in time. The walls are a peeling beige color, and the lights overhead are minimal and manual, unlike the rest of the motion sensor-activated library. Several metal file cabinets line the walls, the kind that jam and create a racket with opened, and in the back of the room atop a creaking wooden desk sits the film reader, an enormous bulky computer setup with a flat, lit space under the monitor like a microscope. Invented back in the eighteen thirties, microfilm and microfiche had been used for mail, espionage, and information access when printing had been a labor-intensive and expensive task and was adapted for record preservation, especially for newspapers, up until the nineteen nineties.

Annabeth sets her books and backpack down on the floor and gets to work, starting at 1980 and rifling through tens and eventually hundreds of film rolls, viewing the images under the light. There are no windows in the room, making it hard to tell how much time has passed, but when her stomach begins to ache, Annabeth knows it has been several hours. The process is tedious: carefully pulling a roll out of its protective casing, positioning it under the camera, and adjusting the output until the pictures are legible on the screen, only to find nothing of interest.

A few rolls into 1993, she hits the jackpot. Local Teen Wins School Engineering Contest. Then, a few rolls later, Local Couple Found in Car Crash. The next couple of years are fruitless, but 1999 and 2000 provide Annabeth with another few usable newspaper articles before the number of film rolls fizzle out, the 21st century paving the way for computers to more easily record and store information.

Early on, Annabeth had realized that Lex Luthor had had any private or real information about him scrubbed off the internet years ago, making it difficult for her to do any worthwhile research into the man. Fortunately for her, the city library is very thorough in record keeping and fortunately for the city, Annabeth is very thorough in digging for skeletons.