No. 16 - Character Profile: Cecil Augustus Exquisite
The Exquisite Family Records
Character Profile: Cecil Augustus Exquisite
Title: The Director
Official Role: Executive Custodian of the Exquisite Archives
Unofficial Titles:
– The First Filing
– The Unreferenced Origin
– He Who Knows Where the Dust Belongs
– The Archive, Dressed As a Man
Mythic Resonance
Cecil – from Latin caecus, meaning "blind" or "hidden," suggesting perception of the unseen.
Augustus – imperial, solemn, touched by fate. The sense of being installed rather than born.
Exquisite – exact, refined, impossible. Suggests beauty at the edge of pain, but also precision in the face of mystery.
Taken together, the name implies one who is not in control, but is the control.
Not a director who gives orders, but one through whom the Archive expresses its will.
Personality & Disposition
Measured, ceremonial, and impossibly still. He does not walk - he is found standing.
Speaks in full paragraphs. Occasionally footnotes himself.
Listens as if confirming a theory he made centuries ago.
Has a warm presence that causes existential unease.
May forget your name but will remember the moment you doubted it.
Quirks, Idiosyncrasies & Indicators
Wears a vest embroidered with time zones and a pocket watch that runs backward from now.
His glasses adjust themselves depending on the sincerity of the person he’s speaking to.
Drinks tea that was never brewed - he calls it “pre-infused.”
Has a drawer labeled “In Case I Am Forgotten.” It is always empty.
Possesses a complete map of the Archive in his head, including sections no one else can find.
When entering a room, drawers subtly shift.
Photographs of him are never the same twice.
May be remembered differently by different staff, depending on what part of the Archive they work in.
Origin Theories (Conflicting)
The Official Story: Appointed as Director by a vanished Council no one recalls.
The Archivist's Theory: He arrived one morning, already indexed, and began correcting misfiles.
The Curator’s Belief: He is a holographic projection cast by the Archive’s longing to be complete.
The Postmaster’s Whisper: He never arrived. He was always there.
Eulalia Crumb once delivered a letter addressed “To the Archive Itself.” He accepted it without reading.
Role in the Archive
Reviews all requests for reclassification. Rarely grants them.
Performs the Ceremony of the Ledger once a year - no one is allowed to watch.
Sits at the Desk of Endless Beginnings, a structure made from the first shelving unit ever constructed.
Possesses final say over all entrance and exit permissions - though it’s unclear if this authority is enacted or simply observed.
Often the last person a misfiled soul speaks to before vanishing from the system.
Internal Rumors
That all other staff are projections of his internal conflict.
That the Archive is his dreaming body, and if he ever fully wakes, it will collapse.
That he once walked into a drawer and never came back - but no one noticed because he reappeared five minutes earlier.
Chance Operations
The director is also a strong believer in chance, not chance as randomness but what he refers to as the Great Harmony. His theory is that life or, more broadly, manifestation itself is the exhale of a single living organism that is hidden in potentiality on the other side of the Threshold of Becoming. But that exhale is inside of itself – a swirling interplay of infinite qualities in continuous interaction always creating infinite uniqueness but according to certain mysterious principles that holds all things in a constant state of internal and external balance and harmony. At every moment there is only the exact next thing to do. The ‘path of no choices’ he calls it.
Hence a favorite activity is to collect into the Chance Decision Drawer of his desk the paper slips from fortune cookies and use them like the I Ching or runes or reading tea leaves and, when confronted with a decision or new situation that does not have a known policy solution to then pull one out of the drawer, interpret it and act upon it.
Based on many of the ‘creative’ solutions the director chooses, staff suspected he started coming up with his own sayings that would fit on a slip of paper and toss them into the Chance Decision Drawer to increase the range of his possible supposed options.
Quotes:
“The most important thing is to quiet the mind and clear the heart before a reading.”
“There is never a choice there is only the next exact thing to be done.”
“The reading merely seems to give a confirmation of what you already know and the comforting impression of making the right choice.”
Below are examples of these.
📁 Filed Under:
Classification: Architect of Self / Anchor of Continuity / Recursive Core
Cross-links: Thessaly Cerulean (Resonance Feedback), Rufus Ordex (Structural Polarity), Eulalia Crumb Exquisite (Threshold Echo)
Presumed Origin Drawer: [REDACTED]
Status: Self-Indexing
Private Entry – Unsigned, found taped inside a drawer handle:
"He is not the director of the Archive. He is the shape it makes to address itself."
