OOM: WHERE IS ARTIE NOW?
Artie Nielsen, it turns out, is a damn difficult man to find. At first, Claudia's a little worried that he might've died, between then and now. Twelve years is a long time, after all, and it's not like he was the youngest guy in the world back when Joshua was after that grant.
She can't turn him up in any college systems, though, which is the weird thing.
In between visits to the lab - despite the risk and reality of the nosebleeds, it'll be worth it in the end if she can just figure out how to unstick Joshua - she keeps running searches, and finally pulls up his name in connection with... some kind of warehouse out in the Badlands. More than a little weird, but she can roll with it; the place has one epic server, so there's got to be some way to get a message to Artie.
...Except the place also has one raving bitch of a firewall. Claudia puts what feels like a solid week into trying to get through the thing, but nothing she knows is enough to do the trick.
And then, out of the blue, Professor Reynolds emails her, just wanting to say hi and see how she's doing. It's like some kind of Joshua's Old Professors Reunion. Double weird, since Professor Reynolds gave Joshua the compass in the first place, if she remembers right.
She figures, what the hell, it can't hurt, and emails back. She doesn't go into the exact details of the warehouse, considering she doesn't know what all's back there yet, but she does say she's got to talk to someone on the other side of the nastiest firewall she's ever encountered, and she didn't turn up an email address. (Which... she did, but this isn't really the kind of thing she wants to say in an email. It's gonna sound crazy enough in person, until she can demonstrate it.)
Professor Reynolds sends her a few suggestions; Claudia makes note of them, thanks him for the tips, and tries them after her next trip to the lab. ...The day after the next trip to the lab, since apparently nosebleed + first day of period = REALLY BAD IDEA.
The good news is, it seems to work. It'll take her a few tries to really get to the bottom of things, enough that she'll be able to get in and talk to Artie, but it's a start.
The bad news... is that she finds out just enough to know that Artie hasn't done a damn thing about Joshua since 1997.
Okay, now she's pissed.