Dear Ms. Rashid,
This letter is of utmost confidentiality.
I am writing to you as a representative of the British MI6 Time Travel department. This department will be create in your future, but has more or less always existed through time and history. Its main purpose is to study history, but recent developments have changed its goal.
First of all, let me give you a bit of background. In your time, the global belief is that should we ever be able to time travel one day, it will be with through the help of a machine, or a vessel. But in truth, there is no such thing. We discovered that a marginal amount of humans have a very specific genome which, with the help of some genetic mutation, can allow them to actually travel through time. Time travel, however, is very fragile. The existence of a time traveler at a specific time and date is based on their own awareness. They need to be aware of who they are, what they are, where they are, and "when" they are. Their awareness of such is what allows them to be who they are at any time. You may realise now that in the unfortunate event of a memory loss, the traveler's existence can be compromised.
As mentioned before, the amount of travelers is marginal. And recently, we have lost contact with one of our best agents: Agent Ariel. We have not been able to contact her, and she has failed to report during the weekly meetings for a while now.
Aperia — a country in Central Europe that has yet to exist for yout — is one of the very few countries to also have a Time Travel department. Their only agent, Agent Hermes, had the same duty as every other agents: study history, and report back without affecting anything. However, Agent Hermes, through his countless travels through time and space, started to become more and more unreliable. We believe he made some unfortunate encounters that changed his integrity. After a while, he stopped reporting to Aperia's TTD, and started using time travel for his own benefits. Luckily, Agent Hermes' existence at any time but his own is very weak, making it difficult for him strongly influence any event. It is, however, not impossible for him to have any effect, and as you may be aware, the tiniest change can have the greatest consequences.
Agent Ariel has often collaborated with Agent Hermes. Knowing him better than anybody else, she volunteered herself to counteract his misdeeds. Unfortunately, it would seem that he learned about her mission, and was somehow able to learn who she was before becoming an agent. A traveler's existence being solely based on their own knowledge of themselves, this sort of data is extremely confidential. How he obtained such information is still unknown to us, and we are still trying to find out how he did.
However, that is not to be your main concern for now. We believe that with this information, Agent Hermes has been able to erase past events in Agent Ariel's life, deleting her memories if you wish. This prevents her from being aware of herself, which means that she now only exists in some sort of time and space limbo.
We are reaching out to you, because last we heard of her, she was in London in XAB:13, which corresponds to 2013 in your year standards (year standards have changed over time, we could simply not base the date system of the history of Life and Men on a fictional event about a fictional character). But more importantly, you are her direct relative. As I have mentioned before, an agent's existence is based on their memories and their own awareness, but it is also based on their ancestors' memories.
If our understanding of the situation is correct, you will need to experience, for her, the event/memory that has been prevent/broken. The TML is a part of your brain (yet undiscovered in XAB:13) that holds information transmittable through lineage. Her existence is connected to yours, and despite her being in a time and space limbo, she continues to exist through you. If you were to experience memories similar to those she has lost, they will start existing in your TML, and thus Agent Ariel's TML again. Our hope is that she will then be able to regain awareness of herself, of her own memories, through yours.
We thought Agent Hermes was going to destroy one her biggest memory, such as her wedding or when she was proposed to, but that is not the case. He was smart enough to destroy, alter or prevent events that were important, yet not obvious. We still have no clue as to which memory or event was erased, but we believe it is related to the content of the cryptex you have received. It would seem that it encloses something dear to her, which talks about or represents some place, person or thing, that meant something to her. We also do not know the password. If you do not know the principle of a cryptex, it is a device that can hold information, but also contains a vial full of vinegar, that will break and destroy the content of the cryptex if the wrong combination was to be tried. It is also X-ray proof, making it impossible to be scanned.
Thankfully, all hope is not lost. Ariel left a clue: «5 places filled with good memories». In the appendix to this letter, we have attached an explanation on how to find these memories.
You will understand that because your memory is connected to hers, only you can understand what these clues refer to. And only you reviving the crucial event will make her conscious and aware of herself again.
We sincerely hope that you will be able to construct Agent Ariel's memory again.