Chapter Text
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, the gods were jerks.
The humans had done something to annoy them and they decided to get their own back, in an overly elaborate and roundabout way that made little to no sense.
The chief of the gods made a woman from clay and had his sister/daughter breathe life into her. I think that's our quota for sapphic kisses in this story. Then he had his headache/daughter make her beautiful, and got his son, who was both clever and personable to teach her to be charming and full of lies. I'll point out that "sculpture" and "teaching" are real jobs that people can do and that "vivifying" and "beautifulising" are made up things, and you can maybe judge how many storytellers are men and how solid an understanding they have of how women spend their lives.
Anyhow, beautiful-lies woman got called "Pandora" by the chief god and was sent as a gift to the humans.
Which is not okay at all, if you think about it, but let's just say that she went along with the whole "being a gift" thing, on the basis that it got her away from the gods who were, as I mentioned, jerks, and as I've said, given to making people and then treating them as property.
There were apparently only two humans that the gods intended to annoy at this point, Epimethius and his brother, who knew that the gods were jerks and was a bit suspicious of their "gift". Epimethius had possibly listened to too many storytellers because he thought that Pandora was too beautiful to do any harm; I never really understood that connection myself. In this story, beautiful things are dangerious, but given that I've told you that Pandora had been taught to be very good at lying, you'd probably worked that bit out.
So Epimethius took her in (really, what choice do you have at that point? "No, you're an obvious trap, go and starve to death on the mountainside. There's wolves.") and agreed to marry her, which might have been a bit much, but what would the neighbors think if he didn't? He had very conservative neighbors, possibly.
Like I mentioned, this was an obvious if excessively complicated trap, and the first step had worked. The gods turned up to the wedding, and rather than just getting drunk and hitting on everyone like they normally did, the chief god gave them a beautiful and mysterious box as a wedding gift, along with a warning not to open it. You can imagine that his sister/daughter gave the bride some smoldering, regretful looks over the wedding banquet if you like.
Pandora was very curious about what was inside it. So was her brother-in-law. He was suspicious of all the gods' gifts, you see, not just Pandora. That would have been unfair and mysoginistic. He found both the box and Pandora to be very mysterious, which was inevitable- the box's defining characteristic was that they didn't know what was in it, and Pandora wasn't foolish enough to be forthcoming about going to lying class or making out with the chief gods sister/daughter. Those sorts of things always made husbands and their families suspicious.
After a week or so of maddening curiosity, Epimethius's brother reasoned thus:
"The gods are out to get me. Pandora and the box are both obvious traps. The gods have warned me about the box, but not about her."
"Pandora's quite complicated. Not as complicated as a man of course, but at least as complicated as a dog." Honestly, this was pretty progressive for the time.
"So let's start with the box. I can either open it or not open it, and at least one of these things will doom me. Maybe either." The gods were jerks you see, and the brother was not sure that they'd give him a way to win.
"If I leave it shut and that dooms me, it is all on them and everyone can see that they are jerks."
"If I open it in the face of their warnings, I'm a fool who wouldn't heed them, they get to express outrage that I didn't listen to them, and in the future when they say to do things people will think it seems like a good idea."
"So I'm not going to open it, my brother trusts them, so he'll do what they said and not open it, and if Pandora opens it ... he married her ... she's a member of this household ... and whatever the doom is we brought it on ourselves." His face was a bit grey and his voice was toneless by the end of that line.
Then he ran to find his sister in law.
Meanwhile, Pandora reasoned thus:
"I really want to know what's in that box."
"It would be trivial to find out what's in the box. I could make up some story to get Epimethius and his brother out of the house, climb up on the chest to get the key down from out the roof-rushes, unlock and open the box, examine the contents, maybe take a few of whatever it is in there, close and lock it and hide the key away before anyone came back. Easy. I aced lying and deception at school."
"Also if I can't open it, I can't put things in it or taken them out, then it really isn't functioning as a box. Its more just a thing. Not useful at all. So it really makes no sense that we should get a box that we can't use as a box."
"Further, the gods said that they "gave" us this box. Not that they issued us with a box-licence for external use only." Even in those days, property rights were very confusing, and most things weren't owned outright.
"I'm only sure that I can open the box without getting found out because the gods put me through lying school."
"I think that they want me to open the box when my husband is away, and for me to be certain that I can close it before he gets back."
"I don't think you set up a plan like that if the next step is 'and then Pandora was deeply satisfied by what she found and lived contentedly with her loving husband forever.'" Her face was a bit grey and her voice was unimpressed by the end of that line.
She wanted to talk about it with someone else who was suspicious of the gods, so she ran into her brother in law.
"Pandora!" he said.
"Brother in law!" she said.
"I think the gods are out to get" they said.
"me." she said.
"you." he said.
"I think they want me to open the box when my husband is out and to feel confident that he'll never find out. I don't know what happens next, but I don't think it is 'happily ever after.' "
"I think the gods have doomed whoever opens the box and probably their family too."
Then they agreed to never open it or to allow it to be opened.
Which brings you here, of course, to Reliquary Containment site B, and our sister site, ran by my brother-in-law. The gods presumably still know what they put in that damn thing, but it's surrounded by hundreds of feet of rock and reinforced concrete now and we mixed the aggregate with enough short-lived radio-nuclides to kill any poor bastard who tried to dig it, or the clone, up.
Yeah, we made a copy so even if you do find it, you might not.