Russ set his box back in the open slot. “Let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time here, we’ll need to go somewhere else to figure out where the vase could have come from.”
Serenity stared at Russ. Was this illusion strong enough to warp memories? If it was, approaching it directly would probably not work. “What about the other boxes?”
“Other boxes?” Russ looked at Serenity blankly.
“The ones in the photos.” Serenity hoped Russ would remember. Clearing an illusion with a mental effect was already going to be difficult enough; if it was removing memories instead of blurring them, it would be far worse.
“Oh, those! Wait, there were three boxes; why did we only check two?” Russ’s gaze seemed more focused; good.
“Illusion. A nasty one; it seems to have a mental component. Do you have a way to…” Serenity trailed off as he realized that Director Collins had left, talking to “Mr. Latimer” as though he hadn’t stopped when Serenity spoke up. In fact, she hadn’t reacted to Serenity’s presence since she picked up the box. “You are protecting yourself, aren’t you?”
“Always,” Russ agreed, “But there’s more I can do now that I know I need to. Why don’t I take these two boxes back to the table while you figure out how to break the illusion?”
“It’ll take some time,” Serenity warned. “Something this complex needs to be taken down carefully. I don’t think this is the work of someone who’s just been through the Tutorial. There’s power here, but it’s well-used power. Someone who knows what they’re doing, not just someone using a newly-earned Skill. I suspect it’s been up for a while, too; that means someone is recharging it.”
“Probably whenever they come in and steal more.” Russ pulled the box he’d just set back on the shelf out. “Almost has to be an employee or someone who’s hypnotized an employee. I’ve seen it before, but I wasn’t expecting it here. I can feel it now; it’s a very subtle push, slightly warping reality in your mind so that you don’t even notice it’s changing. Nasty.”
Serenity nodded and turned back to the illusion. He could unweave the spell, but that was always fiddly, since he didn’t have the Illusion affinity. In this case, his Mind affinity would help, but it would mostly depend on his Arcane affinity. He wasn’t certain how good it was, since it had disappeared from his Status, but he certainly didn’t feel like he’d lost anything. It was still an option.
It would be easier if the spellcaster had used a keystone or other physical focus. Serenity rarely did because they were weak points, but many casters swore by them. He would freely admit that they made spellcasting easier and more efficient until you were good enough to work without them, but after a certain point they became a crutch.
Serenity started searching the shelves for the opposite of what he’d seen so far: something that was actually there but that the illusion didn’t show. If you were going to use a keystone for an illusion, making it easily visible was foolish. Someone might move it or, worse, realize what it was. That wasn’t likely here, but he was still confident the keystone would be hidden if it existed.
It took almost two hours for Serenity to search the room thoroughly. As he was doing so, he found not one but seven different objects that were visible to Eyeless Sight and not his own eyes; most were hidden by illusory boxes.
Serenity started checking them all for magic. Six of them radiated magic that Serenity suspected was tied into the spell (or more likely spells) keeping the illusion in place. The seventh wasn’t, and when Serenity took a good look at it, he realized what it was.
The seventh object looked like it had been shoved to the back of a shelf when a box was placed in front of it. It was an empty mousetrap. Serenity chuckled and shook his head; he probably should have expected something like that. There were always things that got stuck behind shelves.
The next step was spell analysis. He needed to know which spells each keystone was used for and how many there were. He also needed to know if there were any spells that weren’t linked to a keystone, and if they were established in an order that would mean an alarm or explosion if they weren’t taken down correctly.
It went far faster than the slow search Serenity had done to find the keystones. Serenity knew all sorts of tricks, and he checked for them, but the spells were very straightforward. If anything, they were a little sloppy; it was clear that they’d been set up as they were needed and not in an organized, pre-planned array. It was obvious that whoever set them wasn’t worried about them being found.
Serenity went over to where Russ was sitting with the two boxes. He absently noted that they were labeled Solomon vases #1 and Solomon vases #4. It looked like the inventory was right about that much. “I’m ready. Should I take down the illusion now?”
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Russ nodded, but his words didn’t match the motion. “How long will it take?”
“Ten minutes? Maybe fifteen. That’s for the whole set; the first illusion should be down in closer to five minutes, but I need to space them out a bit to manage the mana outflow and prevent caster backlash from alerting whoever set the spells.”
“A moment, then.” Russ pulled out his phone. “Director Collins? Thank you for your escort this morning; can you please come down to the basement again?”
There was a small pause while the director spoke, then Russ continued. “No, you left us down here. We had some more things to look into, and I think you’ll want to see what we found. Alone.”
Russ shook his head and he put the phone away. “She’ll be down shortly. Go ahead and get started; it’s fine if the spell is gone when she gets here, but I didn’t want to have you start if she was away from the museum for some reason.”
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The table was a nice central location to cast from. While sitting on it, Serenity could see all of the different keystones and take them apart gently, directing the remaining magic to dissipate harmlessly. While he’d have liked to send the backlash to the caster, that would only serve to alert them that the spells were broken.
It was easier than it should have been. Much easier. Serenity absently realized that he was seeing the effect of a Skill he’d gained recently, Mold Magic. It probably wasn’t the entire explanation, but it was almost certainly part of it.
The set of spells tied to the first keystone were gone by the time Director Collins arrived. They were the most recent, so taking them apart first meant that there weren’t any strange interactions. Unfortunately, they were also over a set of the shelves that wasn’t visible from the elevator.
The second keystone was cleared by the time Russ and Director Collins reached Serenity.
“What did you ask me down here for?” Director Collins sounded puzzled. Serenity held the slowly disintegrating spells in place and pointed in the direction of the first area cleared of illusion.
Russ nodded and led Director Collins over to where Serenity pointed.
“FUCKING HELL.”
Serenity wasn’t surprised to hear the museum director swearing; it couldn’t be pleasant to know that stuff was vanishing from her museum. He doubted she would feel any better when she saw just how much was gone, but it was better to rip the bandaid off as quickly as possible. He kept breaking the spells; each one was faster than the previous, since there were fewer spells below it that might be interacted with.
When he finished the last spell, he walked over to the pair. Russ seemed undisturbed, but Director Collins was visibly fuming. “I recommend a full inventory. None of the spells was more than a month old; it looks like whoever is taking this stuff took a few boxes each time they came and tossed up another spell to hide it while recharging the older spells.”
Director Collins turned to Serenity. Her temper was clearly up, but she still managed to be icily polite. “You think this was an inside job. That someone was stealing stuff for longer than that and came up with a new way to hide it.”
Serenity shook his head. “Not exactly. A lot of what was taken has no magical significance, but some of it does. That implies it’s not the person who knows magic picking what gets taken, at least not all of it. There are several possibilities, but they all mean you need to do an inventory.”
Director Collins was not pleased about that answer, but she didn’t take it out on Russ or Serenity. Instead, he watched as she stormed back to the elevator, headed to get people to do the inventory.
Serenity turned to Russ. “Should we stay?”
“Only if you need information from them. This is going to be a mess.” Russ shook his head. “I’ve seen a few museum thefts; a lot of magical artifacts end up in museums. This one is something else.”
Serenity shook his head. “This is a dead end, at least for me. It looks like some of the missing vases are here; what we need to find are the rest of them, and we know they went through the warehouse to get wherever they ended up. I think the next step is tracing the box, but it’s going to be much harder to track.”
“Let’s make ourselves scarce, then. I need to make some calls, make sure someone is assigned to the case that’s already aware of magic. Magic that isn’t from the Tutorial, I mean.” Russ headed off towards the elevator.
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“You were right, he’s there.” Agent Smith lowered his binoculars as he spoke over the headset to Agent Jones.
Agent Jones growled. “Will you ever learn to use proper comm discipline?”
“It’s just the two of us. Stick-up-his-butt Price isn’t here to expect anything else, I don’t know why you care.” Agent Smith settled back down and started looking for Serenity again through his scope. He wasn’t happy with the gun he was using; yes, it was accurate for the distance, but it wasn’t the high-quality sniper rifle he was used to. It was little more than a normal hunting rifle with a good scope.
It would still do the job, of course, but it wasn’t his preferred weapon. That was still in the hands of the New York City police. They were being difficult about it not being permitted in the city. He knew his boss would break it free eventually, but until then he was stuck with worse equipment.
Agent Smith’s attention drifted to the man with Serenity. He had no idea who the man was, but the fact that he was helping an alien meant he was expendable. Hopefully he wouldn’t be in the way, but if he was, the collateral damage was acceptable.
“Am I go?” Agent Smith focused back on Serenity. Taking out the alien was important; it would stop the alien’s poison where it stood. No matter what, he wasn’t going to get many shots; they had an extraction plan, but it would only work if he left almost immediately after the first shot was fired. It was fortunate that the alien didn’t seem to be wearing body armor.
“Termination authorized.”