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Message:: [QUOTE="lordmarcovan, post: 3126549, member: 10461"]... Back inside his utility room, the homeowner lays the old strongbox atop the muddy coveralls he had worn when he first filled in the hole earlier.  Completely forgetting to change out of the clean clothes he has on, he eagerly sets to work on the box. He is about to permanently ruin the good clean shirt he is wearing, and normally would face a scolding from his wife for that, but by the time she sees the ruined shirt, that will have become an utterly unimportant detail and will be overlooked.  Their lives are about to change. He goes to his toolbench and selects a small jigsaw.  He uses this to saw into the rusted old lock, seeing no other way, really - though he still tries to do this as carefully as possible, leaving as much of it intact as he can.  He tries very hard to restrain his curiosity and growing excitement. Even after its shackle is sawn through, the old lock remains stubbornly affixed to the side of the box, fused in place by more than a century's worth of rust. So before the homeowner gets his big flathead screwdriver out to pry the box open, he uses some steel wool and a brass wire brush to attempt to make the hinges and hasp of the box as free from encrustation as possible.  Maybe the hinges will still work after their outer layer of rust is cracked through. While working on the hinges and the exterior of the top of the box, he brushes the green encrustation from the brass plaque on top, and notices some engraving there, beneath the thick patina. At first he can't make any sense of the design.  Eventually he realizes it is lettering of some kind, though a bizarre, overly ornate sort of lettering, almost like one sees on monogrammed antique jewelry. There are three initials there, in a ridiculously curlicued sort of Victorian font, which would be difficult to read even if it were freshly engraved on new metal. He's puzzled by the initials and fails to make any sense of the old script, thinking they look almost as though an alien civilization had carved them.  (Klingon?  No, the font doesn't resemble Klingon at all, though our homeowner, raised on late-20th century American pop culture, thinks it does.  He laughs at himself.) He does not recognize that it is an Old English font with many extra flourishes. Nor does he realize that the initials read "C S A", if in fact they do.  (We do not and cannot know this for certain, either.) ...[/QUOTE]

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