The Archivist is part serpent, part cat, with avian flourishes – and yet not quite any of these things. Zie has the refined aloof head of a serpent, set on a long and quite flexible serpentine neck/body. The neck/body shades into a lean quadrupedal torso, built along feline lines: sleek flanks and muscular limbs, at once playful and predatory. Zie is furless, covered all over in what might be scales or might be tiny, close-knit feathers; though the color and patterning of zir scales changes day by day and even hour by hour, apparently at random and certainly outside of zir control, they maintain a kind of healthy iridescence. Zir spine is extremely flexible, even more so than a cat's; indeed, the general movement of zir body has a serpentine fluidity. Zie has quite a long tail –- it is difficult to discern its exact length; when in motion, it weaves and sways in elaborate curves, and when at rest it pools in mobius coils. Zir eyes are the round solemn eyes of a snake, usually gold but shifting unpredictably to copper or silver.
The Archivist is a member of the Department of Time Stabilization, and is the primary caretaker of the Specialized Collection of Pararchaeological Artifacts, the main repository for the Department for Parachronotic Research and Retrieval, which operates out of Delta Sector. In zir youth, zie was a chrononaut for the DPRR, but, as is frequently the case with those who spelunk into alternate timelines, zie found more and more that zir own timeline was disrupted. Zie entirely forgot more than one lover -- which rather offput future potential lovers -- and once returned to find that zir childhood had been altered (rather than having been raised in a creche in Up, zie was now the thirdoffspring of a clan of Top aesthetes). When zie returned from a harrying mission to find that zir own name had vanished from not only zir memory, but the memories and records of everyone and everything in the Mess, zie decided that it was time to retire.
Zir Collection contains many peculiar things, and though zie is retired, other chrononauts add continually to the collection.
Zie is a mask.