The Lazarus Trust

• Like the Aeon Society or the Ponatowski Foundation (or, more mundanely, the National Geographic Society), the Lazarus Trust is an explorer's club and funds expeditions into the world, charging them to bring back stories and knowledge to spread to society at large. This includes tales of life with desert tribes and cross-Alaskan sled rides, the finding of strange jungle plants and excavations of archaeological ruins.
  • These expeditions are also often charged with bringing back artifacts from their explorations, which the Trust's employees examine. Many items are later seen in the hands of places like the British Museum or the Smithsonian Museum, but just as many are not.
  • No one's entirely sure what the source of the Lazarus Trust's funding is. The three known sources are membership fees, sale of artifacts to museums and sale the Journals, but these couldn't possibly add up to provide the resources the Trust has to dole out to its employees.
  • Trust members are each charged a different rate for their membership and neither wealth nor social standing seems to decide what that rate is - rich men have been charged pennies, while poorer men have had to mortgage their homes to stay on the rolls.
  • Membership in the trust gives the member rights to the Trust's libraries - which are store to a considerably vaster collection of knowledge than just the Journals - and to the offices' facilities, much like any gentleman's club. Membership also gives the member the right to participate in the larger, more elaborate, less dangerous field expeditions.

• The Trust's main offices are in New York, Paris and Cairo, though they have smaller, branch offices in cities throughout the world; Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Delhi and Johannesburg, Rio de Jenaro are just some examples.
  • Each local office has agents who collect interesting news stories from the area around them. When a series of similar stories seem to have some substance behind them, the office wires to the nearest main office to have an investigative team come check it out.
  • A few of the larger, more distant local offices have their own investigative teams. The one in Sydney, for example. This doesn't keep them from calling in a more seasoned team if they need to.
  • Each main office has several different teams it can call on and it's rare for more than one team to be "at home" at any given time.
  • The Lazarus Trust is more than happy to fund expeditions its employees wish to take for personal reasons, provided that the Trust sees a return on its investment, in the form of a full accounting of a discovery for the Journals and, often, an artifact.

• The Lazarus Trust's archives' earliest membership records date from 1831, but the records make no distinction between new and existing members - the Trust may have been founded in that year or it may be older.
  • Similarly, no member or employee can say when the Trust was organized or who, in fact, did the organizing. It's 1924, after all, and none of them are quite that old.
  • Even the highest ranking members of the Trust, the heads of its main chapter houses, don't claim to know the Trust's leader personally, or even to know his identity - they call him "The Quiet Man" and speak of him only in hearsay (i.e. "I heard that The Quiet Man is happy with your work.").

• The Trust publishes a seasonal almanac, called /The Lazarus Journals/, containing stories of events, findings and expeditions around the globe. Stories are expected to be complete and detailed accounts, including photographs and technical drawings and footnotes referencing archived film or artifactual evidence where possible.
  • The Journals are sent to all members of the Trust in good standing and to each of the Trust's local offices. They are available for all others to purchase. Typically larger public and university libraries buy them; individuals who want to own copies usually become members of the Trust.
  • According to the Lazarus Trust's archives, the Journals were first published in the Winter of 1831 and have never missed an installment since, not even during the war. However, Rabbit is sure that he saw a book of the same title in Cairo in 1821.
  • There are only two known complete collections of the Journals: one in the Paris office and one in the New York office. Local office, private and library collections have all proved incomplete and, as the Journals are never reprinted, the only way to finish an incomplete collection is to find a lost copy of a volume or to take one from someone else.

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Terra Occulta