Museum Workshop

A cluttered back room wedged between storage vaults and restoration studios, where half-finished projects share space with dated reference books. Fluorescent panels flicker unevenly across workbenches cluttered with bone tools, solvents, and fragments of statues wrapped in acid-free plastic. The air smells of aged oak and cutting compound, thick with the static charge from decades of handling artifacts. Large serviceable fans strain against the room’s sealed windows, attempting to push out the museum’s institutional inertia. A single high-intensity lamp hangs over a wheeled cart bearing the recovered statue, its modern alloy glinting under the artificial glare despite its century beneath the sea.