Lab friends

So I was down in the basement lab the other day, and I opened a cupboard to find a lab creature I hadn’t seen for a while. I figured I should introduce the denizens of the lab to you all!

Photos below:

First we have Mouse. Mouse lives on the dry erase board.

Before anyone freaks out, that’s not an artifact, it’s a rock. (JAFR: Just a…you can spell…rock) In the field, everything is often so muddy it’s impossible to tell artifacts from kinda-artifact-shaped rocks, so our job in the lab is to weed out anything that’s…just a rock. Seeing as they’re either going in the garden or the trash anyway, one might as well rescue them.

In the beginning, when I first joined the company, I made Chinchilla. Chinchilla has since been lost, but Mouse is now a permanent fixture. Both had their tummies labeled at one point, as a test for our artifact labeling techniques, but Mouse is now unlabeled again, since we also checked our artifact label removal techniques. (Responsible curation of artifacts states that you do what you can to make sure anything you do is reversible, in case someone in the future needs to or wants to.)

Mouse has a certain sort of simplicity I like. My art skills were improving.

Mouse’s friend is the Toast Rock. When my minion and I discovered the Toast Rock and got the official determination on its nonartifactude, we both agreed on its fundamental toastness, though I did the drawing. The true hilarity surrounding the Toast Rock, however, comes from the fact that it caused some consternation when someone saw it from a distance and wondered if it was an actual artifact. Our lithics specialist assured them, no, the rock was just naturally shaped that way, and then related this to me later. She must have been talking to my minion about it, but when she came to me and said “Yeah, he was worried about that toast rock,” it seemed utterly out of the blue. How did she know Toast Rock’s name???

Given the controversy, we hid Toast Rock in the cupboard. I rather like it, because it’s always such a pleasant surprise to open the doors.

Hello! The Toast Rock is delighted to see you! The Toast Rock is delighted to see everyone!