Curtis Bellingham, museum security guard [Ring of negation]

Curtis was biding his time, waiting for the day to end. His little museum, or at least he liked to think of it as his even if he was just a lowly security guard, rarely saw any kind of real traffic outside the occasional school event. This day was especially empty, with only the odd retiree coming through. His boss had left early, and the kid in the gift shop was about to be gone, too. They hadn't sold any of the new Halloween merch, making Curtis even more worried about his job than usual. It's not like the Museum has much worth guarding.

Oh, what kind of Museum, you ask? "It's a Museum," the eccentric owners would say, "what more do you want?" But if you asked someone more polite, like Curtis, you'd learn that it's a Museum of whatever-the-hell-the-owners-want-to-display, and by virtue of being Smaltsburg's only attraction it was somehow able to keep operating. It had knick-knacks from any time or place, spanning the 20th century, it had artifacts discovered after house fires, and it had cool looking rocks found washed up on the beach. The owners decided museums were supposed to have art, right? So obviously it had art. It had art from actual, big names, worth millions of dollars interspersed haphazardly with their 12 year old grandson's series on the Study of Blue in Crayola... which only existed because it happened to be the least worn down crayon in the box at the time. In their youths the owners had been an adventurous pair, traveling the world picking up the scraps left behind by archeologists. They'd been quite the attractive pair, too, like something out of a movie. More interestingly, due to a few very lucky finds, they also made a lot of money.

But this is the start of the story and you want to know about our protagonist. Got it, I hear you. Well, Curtis had it made, once upon a time. He owned a small town bookstore and lived the Hollywood idea of a happily ever after in America. He had a meet-cute, bonking heads with a beautiful, bespectacled, clumsy professor from the nearby university over a fallen copy of Leaves of Grass, a quick romance culminating in a big Jewish wedding even though he had no personal faith, had 2.5 kids (well, actually just 2: one boy named Cory and one girl named Sandy), and an early, bitter divorce to put a nice cap on things. And in the same week as his divorce finalized, rent hiked on the store, and it was already struggling due to the rise of online book sellers. A nice story, start to finish. A perfect narrative arc, culminating in a climax, and then quickly falling action right into tragedy. He rented out his best friend's guest room, experimented briefly with alcoholism, and fell right into a security job at the local Museum, broke and alone. He lost contact with his kids, and it was at least half his fault. Half, too, because their mother moved them to the big city. He could have moved, too, or visited more weekends, even though he worked most Saturdays. Years passed, and he became a birthday/Christmas dad, but a valuable staple of the Museum, and his kids became adults. At least he's good at making the 12 year old grandkid happy by pretending his drawings are high art. He's no docent, but he's picked up enough of the vocabulary to take it about crayon drawings.

But it's the beginning a new story, now, since life can fit as many of them as you want. He'd be 46 years old next month, a couple paychecks away from a down payment on a crappy one bedroom house, and resigned to the fact that it's the most exciting thing that'll happen to him this decade.

The beginning of this story begins, though, when the Museum got a new exhibit, changing his life from anything he could have predicted. This story began when the Museum received a single, odd, silver ring.