The two girls eventually found an inn, and Myra crashed for a couple of hours while Shera rested in her own Shera way. Once again, Myra didn’t sleep long, and when she woke up, she was starving. She changed into something casual and found Shera outside on a bench, quietly observing a stray cat.
“H-hey!” She said, a bit startled at Myra’s approach.
“Ya all right?”
“Oh, I-I never saw you in that dress before.”
“Oh, this?” She twirled around, letting the light blue fabric catch in the wind. “I thought I’d pack for warmer weather.” She took the other girl by the hand and pulled her up from the bench. “Let’s get breakfast.”
“Can we get seafood?”
“Absolutely.” She pulled Shera along in the direction of the market district. “I know a spot we can eat with a great view of the bay.”
“Have y-you figured out how we’re going to get access to investigate Emmett Massiel’s house?”
“We have a whole city to explore and you wanna get down to business, huh?”
“Ah…”
“Well, I have!” She grinned and pointed a thumb at her chest, very proud that she’d gotten the whole detective thing figured out this time. “Didn’t I mention? Before we left, I talked to Aurora Ferara, and she introduced me to her friend-slash-boyfriend-I’m-not-sure Sky Mishram who works here in the Halnya Times, and he has connections that can get us in as a favor for my useful information on the Unkmire talks. Though it’ll probably take a few days—Sky has to check out the information before he trusts us.”
“What’re we gonna do until then?”
“C’mon, let’s get some food in my stomach so I can think, and then we’ll discuss.”
Shera allowed Myra to treat her to breakfast, but she didn’t let up for long. Myra supposed she couldn’t exactly blame the other girl, though. She had volunteered to ditch class for a month solely on Myra’s word, after all. It made sense that she wanted to see Myra being serious about all this.
“Almost all the victims live in the city, so I figure we can try to check them out. See if any of them are acting suspiciously or whatnot. I thought we could start with Judge Krasus.”
“How are we going to meet him? He’s th-the most important judge in the empire, isn’t he?”
“Well… I actually have a pretty good reason to see him,” Myra said. “I told you that he handled my father’s trial, right?”
“Y-you might have mentioned it, but I probably forgot among the unceasing deluge of information. Does that give you a reason to see him, though?”
“Actually, yes.”
When her father had been chucked into prison, Myra had become the plurality shareholder in the entire burnt husk of his trading company. That wasn’t really a good thing. All that was left of the company was a pile of contracts and a couple of theorems in Abstract Space that were mostly just worthless or even worth negative. In theory, she could try to revive the company, though she certainly didn’t have any interest in doing so. However, her stepmother certainly wouldn’t be deigning to bother with it either, making Myra the de facto operator of the company if she chose to be.
Furthermore, Judge Krasus had set a bunch of restrictions on how the assets could be used. Myra figured she just had to make up some questions about what these restrictions meant and it was a legitimate excuse for an appointment.
◆
“He doesn’t give a shit.”
“W-what?” Myra stammered at Judge Krasus’s secretary.
“That’s what he says. Quote, ‘I don’t give a shit.’ If His Honor had given a shit about any particular asset left in that flaming heap, he would have seized it out of the company instead of giving it to you. Ergo, he doesn’t give a shit, and he has no need to see you.”
“B-but the documents he sent me said that I need approval for various—”
“That was last week. This week, he doesn’t give a shit.”
“So I don’t need approval for anything.”
“That’s right.”
Myra’s mouth hung open as the blunt secretary walked away.
“C-c-c-can we get th-th-that in writing?” Shera called after him.
The secretary stopped. “Excuse me?”
“C-can we get it in writing?” Shera repeated, clearer this time. “A signed st-statement th-that he doesn’t give a shit.”
“Cryptographically signed,” Myra added.
The secretary let out an impatient sigh, but he acquiesced. Rolling his eyes—no, rolling his head—he retreated into the back of the building.
“Great idea, Shera. There’s no way he’s gonna put that in writing, so he’ll have to see us now.”
“O-oh!” She seemed surprised at this conclusion.
“Is… that not what you were going for?”
“I j-just thought it was normal procedure to get stuff in writing.”
Myra patted her on the back.
They had to wait an hour to see the judge. When they saw him, he was in the middle of writing something, his attention firmly at his desk. Myra silently waited for him to finish, and she ended up waiting an uncomfortably long time.
When he finally spoke up, he leaned back and made direct eye contact. “Myrabelle Prua-Kent.” The judge had a loud voice that boomed around the room, though his body language was at ease, somewhat at odds with his volume, and he seemed to draw out each syllable. “I see you want to succeed in your father’s disgraced company.” He paused, his fingers tapping idly on his desk. “Why?” It was the most drawn-out syllable of all.
“Um… I was just trying to explore my options? Your Honor.” Oh, am I supposed to bow? She bowed.
“You realize,” he said, “You can just start a new company, if you’re business-inclined. You could make a fresh start. I can’t imagine what in that husk is worth salvaging. If you know something I don’t—” He tilted his head and left the implication unsaid.
Myra definitely did not know anything he didn’t, and she struggled to find something to say. She had prepared a couple of odd technical questions about the more mundane, understandable aspects of her father’s trade services, but they had gone clear out of her mind at this moment.
“At any rate,” the judge continued, “I did not have an impression of you as business-inclined. If I recall, you’re a talented student in magecraft and runes, is that right? I cannot imagine why you would choose to throw that away for this pile of junk.”
“You… you looked up my academic history?”
“Obviously, I did my diligence during the trial.” He stood up, seemingly just to stretch his legs. Myra was always kind of surprised by how short he was. Not that he was tiny or anything—he was about Myra’s height—it just seemed at odds with his projected presence.
“Listen, Myrabelle. I will sign off on anything you’d like regarding your father’s company, so long as I do not suspect foul play.” Wow, that says nothing. “If you insist, my first advice would be to turn your father’s heap of glorified pinky promises into real contracts. I could even point you to some lawyers who specialize in that sort of thing. It would give you some real legitimacy and assure any partners you might want to work with. However, my primary advice remains the same. You should let this go.”
This would almost certainly be an emotionally charged argument for Myra if she gave half a fuck about any part of his fucking company. She was here for ulterior reasons though, and she certainly didn’t give a fuck about the financial instruments that symbolized her father’s betrayal of his nation, his business partners, and his family. She didn’t care about the way the judge had insulted her father’s business practices. No, she didn’t give a shit about any of it. She didn’t fucking care fucking at all. She was here for her ulterior motives, yes.
“Th-thanks for your advice,” she said, her advice cracking like Shera’s for some reason. “I had a second question—do you know where I can buy braces for my clothes?”
His face twisted in confusion. “Braces? You’re looking for a binder?”
“N-no! I mean like a wire mesh through your clothes. Something that can be locked into place.”
He continued to look supremely befuddled. “What on Zyarth for?”
Myra had learned just about what she’d come to learn. But the judge was still standing up, and there was still one more opportunity. She dove in for a hug.
“What in the blazes are you doing, girl—?”
Nope. No skeleton wire mesh thing.
“I was just—well, you just gave me some advice, which I thought was kind of you, so I thought it was socially appropriate to—”
◆
Suffice it to say, the judge wasn’t buying Myra’s spontaneous and inexplicable sign of affection, and while he couldn’t make anything of Myra’s sartorial inquisition, he was quick to summarily kick them out for bothering him.
They eventually met up with Sky Mishram, and as they expected, he got them the ‘in’ they needed. Specifically, he helped them arrange to meet with the late sage’s heir and the administrator of his estate, Hazel Ornobis.
Hazel Ornobis, Imperial Sage of Magical Infrastructure. Another one of the victims.
Without her imperial robes, Sage Ornobis was nearly unrecognizable, in business clothes that were upscale but otherwise unremarkable, her hair down and her makeup softer.
“P.I. Prua-Kent, I presume?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s me.” Sky must have really talked her up. “That’s me. And this is my partner, Shera Marcrombie.”
“The reporters at the Times spoke highly of you. I’m grateful to have an additional pair of minds on the situation.”
Apparently, Sky Mishram had claimed they were private investigators. Well… they did investigate. And they certainly weren’t public investigators, so…
Well, I guess so.
The sage started walking. They had met in a public area downtown, but they were headed into a very upscale neighborhood near the tower.
“I apologize if this is a personal question,” Myra started. “What is your relation to Sage Emeritus Massiel? I understand that you’re his successor for the position of magical infrastructure, but I was surprised to find that you were also his heir?”
“He didn’t have any children,” the woman explained somberly. “But he was like a father to me, in some sense. He taught me everything I knew. Of course, I’m sure if your reputation is anything to go by, you already knew that.”
Oh god, what did Sky say about us? “We had our suspicions,” Myra said mysteriously.
The older woman sighed. “Many times I wondered if I wasn’t off the mark, confusing a purely academic mentorship for a closer bond—but then everything was gifted to me, so perhaps he did think of me like a daughter in the end. Or maybe he just got used to thrusting all the hard work off onto me.” She laughed darkly.
“So, it sounds like you knew him well. Do you have any opinions on the official story?” Myra asked.
She sighed again. “I’ve looked into everything. I could not see any grounds to doubt the official story, bizarre as it is.”
“That being, he killed himself in his sleep,” Myra confirmed.
“Yes… Sleep-casting is rare, but it’s not unheard of. Emmett was not in the habit of casting laser-based spells, but I’m sure he was capable of doing so.”
“Is it possible that he was awake when he did it?” Shera asked. “That the s-security system said he was still asleep, but maybe there was a mistake?”
“There are two things wrong with that,” the sage said coldly. “One, that he would intentionally commit suicide. And two, that a system of his own making would give an incorrect report.”
“The report also said the house was empty except for him. Is it true that he lived alone?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Were there any regular visitors, a servant or anyone like that? Other than perhaps yourself, I mean.”
“He didn’t have any servants. I didn’t make house visits that often. If he had other personal friends that visited, I can’t say. He knew a lot of people.”
Emmett Massiel’s mansion was two stories of exquisite masonry. It was surrounded by thick shrubbery and vines that almost looked overgrown, but still had an aesthetic balance to it that must have been intentional. The inside was extravagant, with lush carpets and tasteful artwork scattered throughout. They climbed a wide, spiral staircase to the top floor where the bedroom was.
The corpse had long been removed, leaving a charred hole drilled halfway through the mattress.
“According to the report, the laser was from this corner of the room up here.” Myra cautiously floated herself up to the corner, holding her arm out to trace the ray that the laser must have made, looking down its length with one eye closed. “Seems to check out,” she confirmed, as if knew anything about laser scorch forensics.
“Should we take a look at this alleged security record?”
The security system was in the sage’s office, down the hall from the bedroom. The office contained a large oak desk in front of a wide, vine-covered window, and the security system was in a stack of unassuming drawers on the left side of the desk. The top drawer stored a stack of blank pages and an enchanted quill. There was a gap at the back of the drawer—it seemed that filled pages could move to the next drawer down, where the log was kept. In the bottom drawer, there was a radio, which presumably could call for help when necessary.
Myra took a look at the latest records. The day before the loop, Nov. 5, didn’t have anything suspicious, and Nov. 6 was just about what she’d been told.
Nov 4, 9:02:54 PM - Emmet Massiel - Falls asleep
Nov 5, 6:45:02 AM - Emmet Massiel - Wakes up
Nov 5, 6:02:05 PM Emmet Massiel - Leaves property.
Nov 5, 7:30:30 PM - Emmett Massiel - Enters property.
Nov 5, 9:12:23 PM - Emmett Massiel - Falls asleep
Nov. 6, 1:09:23 AM - Emmett Massiel - Casts spell: Spatially coherent light beam, 13.4 kilohorsepower. Master Bedroom; Origin (6.3 m, 4.1 m, 2.8 m); Direction (Polar angle θ = 2.1234 radians, azimuthal angle φ = 0.52 radians)
Nov. 6, 1:09:23 AM - Emmett Massiel - Dies (Cause of death: Spatially coherent light beam directed at heart)
Nov. 6, 1:09:24 AM - Security System - Send alert to Imperial Police
Nov. 6, 1:20:30 AM - Phone - Rings
Nov. 6, 1:34:56 AM - Phone - Rings
Nov. 6, 1:50:02 AM - Phone - Rings
Nov. 6, 2:05:44 AM - Phone - Rings
Nov. 6, 2:12:16 AM - Phone - Rings
Nov. 6, 2:24:11 AM - Unknown (א) - Enters property - Assigning ID א
Nov. 6, 2:24:12 AM - Unknown (ב) - Enters property - Assigning ID ב
Nov. 6, 2:30:18 AM - Phone - Rings
Nov. 5, 2:30:25 AM - Unknown (ב) - Answers phone
Nov. 6, 2:46:36 AM - Unknown (ג) - Enters property - Assigning ID ג
It went on like that for a while, with various ‘unknown’ individuals showing up, presumably police officers and investigators. She checked the logs for earlier days, and it went on like that for a while. The last person to visit Massiel’s house was Ornobis, approximately five weeks before the loop started.
“Man, this really doesn’t have anything we didn’t know from the report.”
“How does it know who cast the spell? Th-that should be impossible.”
“That’s what I said!”
Unfortunately, it didn’t look like it would be easy to answer Shera’s question. Myra had hoped the security system would be rune-based so she could just read how it worked. Unfortunately, it seemed most of it was implemented via some arcane definitions in Abstract Space, attached to some relational, set-theoretic interpretation of his property. In retrospect, it was obvious that the Sage Emeritus of Magical Infrastructure would organize his system that way, but interpreting it would be quite a stretch for Myra. The best she could tell was that it seemed to get most of its information from some source that she couldn’t wrap her head around at all.
She decided to ask their host if she knew.
“I believe it’s based on the origin point of the spell,” the sage said.
“Okay, but how is that possible?” Myra asked, still confused as ever. “The origin point would be inside his body! The security system shouldn’t be able to detect anything in his domain!”
The sage’s eyes flickered. “It is a device of Emmett’s own invention. He was always cagey of the specifics. I presume it is some clever inference based on environmental factors.”
“W-what environmental factors?” Shera asked.
“Maybe it’s measuring aura usage…?” Myra suggested. “Like, it could measure the depletion of certain elements in the space around Emmett?”
“Wouldn’t it need a measurement device?” Shera asked. “Like, something physically present near his body?”
“Yeahh… it would.” Myra knew all about those constraints after all the work measuring the aura inside the event hall in the last loop. “Maybe there’s a network of, uhh, aura-measuring pollen in the air throughout the house?”
“Ma’am, is there a n-network of aura-measuring pollen?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, growing impatient from their speculation. “Besides, aura depletion doesn’t work that way.”
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In exactly what way it did work, she didn’t clarify, but in any case, it left them without an answer to their question. God, I should call Iz about it…
Wait, doesn’t the house have a private phone? I could actually do that right now.
“Is it all right if I use the phone? I have a contact who specializes in this kind of thing.”
“Be my guest.”
“I-I’m going to inspect the system a bit more,” Shera said.
So Myra called Ralkenon University from the private line while Shera continued to inspect the system. The secretary agreed to summon Iz, though Myra knew it would take a while for her to call back. In the meantime, Myra took a closer look around the manor.
The sage had seemed to go off on her own, rummaging through some drawers in the sitting room on the first floor. “Are you looking for something?” Myra asked.
“Yes. Emmett’s will left one trinket to the imperial prince. I was supposed to collect it today.”
“What is it? I can keep an eye out for it.”
The sage bit her lip. “It’s fine. Focus on your investigations.”
“If this was important enough to leave in his will, it could be relevant to my investigation.”
“Ah—” She looked increasingly uncomfortable at the line of questioning. “I very much doubt it.”
Annoyed, Myra continued looking around the house, though she tried to keep an eye on the sage while she did so. It was hard to do that without being obvious, though, so she mostly didn’t.
She found the door to the basement. It was boxes upon boxes and looked like it would be hell to walk through, let alone rummage about. She didn’t envy Hazel, if the woman was going to have to sort through all this—
She struck gold faster than she expected. Only moving one or two boxes uncovered a large glass case. The lid was tied shut with yarn that wrapped around the entire case in a complex knot. It resembled a secure door she’d seen in the last loop, but she still didn’t know exactly what it was or what kind of protection it gave. Inside the glass case was a pillow, suggesting a deep respect for the contents.
On the pillow was a golden wristwatch with a wristband made out of tiny gold links. It ticked silently, displaying the correct time.
“There it is.” Hazel Ornobis had followed her into the basement. There was an edge in her voice.
“Is-Is this what you were looking for?”
“Indeed.” She eyed Myra suspiciously, but she didn’t say anything. The case was by far the most distinctive thing in the basement, so there was hardly any reason to question Myra’s interest in it.
“Do you know how to get the case open?”
“That’ll be a problem for the prince.” She spread her arms and hefted the entire case up. She hesitated, then decided to place it in one of the crates. “Listen, the prince—” She hesitated, then switched tracks to a different sentence. “Well, it must be rather sentimental, whatever this watch is. I just didn’t expect it to be in something so large.”
“I’ll be discreet about it, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”
She smiled weakly. “Thank you.”
◆
Myra had the idea to check Massiel’s spell books for a laser spell. If she could confirm that he knew the spell or what kind of context he used it for, maybe it would shed a bit of light.
But Emmett Massiel had been an academic through and through. He had a lot of books. Even if you filtered down to just the spell books, it was still an intimidating pile. She flipped through anything that looked like it had an engineering focus, but nothing caught her eye.
Though she wasn’t looking for it, she stumbled across an address book full of contacts. She pocketed it to comb through later. If nothing else, it would be useful for tracking down the other imperial sages.
When Iz finally called her back, Myra asked her about the security system, and her very confused friend confirmed that it was “flat-out impossible” for any automatic system to detect the origin of a spell through basically any means short of “some wild breakthrough.”
“Hey, can I ask another question, Iz?”
“Yeah…?”
“You know that spell you were talking about to help find books in the library? With the book element?”
“Huh?”
“You know, that spell you learned in your elemental composition class?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Myra? The class only just started.”
“Oh!” Fuck! “I mean—ahhhh—the spell you’re going to learn this month. In your class. It’s on your syllabus.” But also since this happened it’d be nice if you do your thing and deduce that I’m a time traveler because I acted weird on the phone.
“Oh, okay… umm… what about it?”
“Can you tell me how that spell works? Or where to learn it?”
“We haven’t learned it yet.”
“Yeah, like can you ask your teacher or something?”
“Can’t you just look it up?”
“How is she going to look it up without the library-searching spell?” came a faint voice through the phone.
“Cynthia! I didn’t realize you were here.”
“Hiii.”
“Cynthia, can you convince Iz that I need her help because I think this spell is supposed to be really new and advanced? It uses some astral element I’d never even heard of and I know you were joking, but I genuinely don’t have a clue where to look it up.”
Iz made a long sigh, probably exaggerated for the sake of the phone. “You need it soon?” Iz asked.
“I’d owe you one.” I already owe you far more than one. “Please?”
◆
They made a complicated arrangement to call again in a couple of days since it would otherwise be pretty difficult for Iz to reach Myra. Then she went to check up on Shera, who told her that the sage had already left.
“Oh, I thought I might’ve heard her leaving while I was on the phone—Damn, I still wanted to see what I could get out of her.” She told Shera all about the golden wristwatch, and Shera told her what she’d learned about the security system.
“I f-figured out how to query it for more information,” she said. “Once you get the hang of the relational algebra, it’s not that hard. Look.” She held up a sheet of paper like the ones from the desk. Drawn in the same dark red ink as the records she’d seen earlier, it was the outline of a human being. It was female, and extra marks around the wrist, cheeks, and ribs suggested a bony figure. Inside the outline, parts were shaded with what looked like charcoal. The shaded area covered the head and chest. Myra slowly realized it was an outline of Shera, specifically.
“I re-enabled the system and cast some spells to see what would happen,” she explained. “The shaded area is what the system identifies as the source of the spells.”
“But you still don’t know how it determines that area?”
“No, but I think I can get a picture for this laser spell record.”
She closed her eyes and pulled some kind of abstract switch, and one of the quills on the desk began inking a picture on another piece of paper. The new picture was a top-down view of a bed with a man lying on it. Again, it was just a vague outline, but the outline was kind of lumpy, conveying wrinkles and saggy skin. Once the outline was complete, the quill set itself down and the piece of charcoal floated up to the paper. Myra expected it to shade in the upper body, similar to the first picture of Shera.
The charcoal positioned itself above the head and tapped down gently, barely leaving a speck in its place.
The girls looked at it in confusion while the charcoal put itself away.
“Uh… is it broken?” Myra asked. “Why isn’t it drawing anything?”
“Um…” Shera scratched her head.
“Maybe the record was damaged or erased?” Myra asked. “If you were a culprit, and you knew about the security system, you would try to erase the record somehow, right? Maybe that’s what they tried to do, but they did it wrong.”
“I couldn’t find a way to modify the records, but I d-didn’t look too hard.” Shera squinted at the parchment. “It can’t possibly be that the origin of the spell was localized to—what, this small part of the brain?”
“What part of the brain is it?”
“Let me ask.” Shera activated something again, and the quill returned. With a dashed line, it drew a small shape around the speck. It labeled the shape, Temporal lobe. “Does th-that tell us anything?”
“No,” Myra said. “What phase of sleep was he in?”
“Slow-wave.” Shera didn’t need to ask the system this time, so she had probably looked it up already. “That is when sleep-walking happens, for what it’s worth.” Is sleep-casting the same? It probably is.
“Where did the laser strike again?”
“His chest.”
“Can you also show the laser trajectory?”
The quill added the laser trajectory, which went from the bottom of the page to the chest. It also drew a gaping hole in his chest, where the laser burned through him, quite unnecessarily.
“Huh,” Myra said, scratching her head. “That… that doesn’t tell us anything. I thought they might line up or something.”
Shera only shook her head.
“I take it you didn’t figure out where it gets this information from, did you?”
“It’s f-from the ink.”
Myra blinked. “The ink? Like the ink from the line art? I thought the quill was driving.”
“It’s the ink. I c-can’t sense it, either. It has domain protection.”
“Wait, the ink is organic?” Myra had heard of plants with domain protections—they’d been discussing them recently in light of the trees at the crater site—but she’d never heard of a liquid with those properties.
Myra looked around the desk. “Where is—”
“It’s in the drawer, at the back.”
Myra found the ink well just where she said, sitting in a cup-holder slot. There was a small nozzle near the top of the drawer, evidently used to refill the well. “What’s behind this thing?” She pulled at the drawer. “How do you get this drawer out?”
When it became obvious that she couldn’t force it out, the two of them decided to just take apart the entire side of the desk. Myra resisted the urge to just slice it open with an easy cutting spell, and Shera observed that the side panel was designed to be removable. The screws were on the inside, though (a feature in woodworking that was often considered a sign of class because it required a mage to screw or unscrew).
Working with screws—while not exactly the most challenging task asked of Myra in the past few months—was still more difficult than she’d remembered it being: It required her to apply a substantial amount of torque purely telekinetically, without any physical leverage. After fifteen minutes of frustrating sensing, they popped the last screw out, and the main board, with nothing to hold it up, fell outward on top of an unprepared Myra.
At the back of the drawer, attached behind the nozzle, there was a tube that led all the way out through a hole in the back of the desk.
“For fucks’ sake! We could have just moved the damn desk and gotten in from the back! God, help me pick this up.” They dragged the desk across the floor. Indeed, the tube came out the back of the desk and led into an equally sized hole in the wall. Whatever was inside the wall seemed to be just as un-senseable as the ink tube itself.
“O-okay, we need to figure out h-how to get inside the wall,” Shera said.
“Shera, you’re sure that sage left, right?”
“Y-yeah?”
Myra reached into the hole and ripped the wall off with her bare hands, The drywall broke off easily, revealing the wood frame underneath. Soon they had a substantial square hole they could look through.
“What the hell?”
There were vines in the walls. They were a striking red, thick as her wrist, and adorned with thorns. Twisted and interlinking, they densely covered all the area she could see. There was a small mechanical device that was clearly some kind of extractor that processed and produced the ink. As far as she could tell, shining a light into the cramped space, the vines seemed to cover the entire wall and beyond. It probably surrounded the entire manor. There were leaves, too, bulky, with veins in irregular shapes, though they were very sparse, spaced roughly by the meter. Why are there even leaves somewhere so dark?
Myra looked for a spot that was spare on thorns, and she touched it with a curious finger. It was rough and itchy, and it was very, very sad.
“What’s it like?”
“It’s—” Wait, what the fuck? Myra blinked in confusion. “It’s, uh, I think it’s sad?”
“How c-can haptic sensations be sad?” Shera reached it out to touch it and flinched. “Oh! It’s—It’s sad.” She moved her hand away. “It’s like being stuck with a reminder of something you’d rather forget.”
Myra shivered.
“Well, it m-must be observing the entire manor,” Shera said. “Maybe some kind of spontaneous anomalous phenomenon that he found and brought here to use for his security system. Or maybe it spawned here, because of the vines on the outside of the house.”
SAPs tended to be conceptually connected to the environments they spawned in, so that didn’t seem entirely unreasonable.
“Do you recognize those leaves?” Myra asked. “I feel like I’ve seen them before.”
“Oh. Maybe we should check the library.”
◆
They did one last sweep of the place for anything unusual, and Shera figured out how to add themselves as authorized guests to the security system so it would be easy to get in again (just in case someone re-enabled the system). Their next destination was the university library at the Gemstone Institute of Arcane Theory and Craft. University libraries were generally open to students, even foreign students, or at least that was the case in Ralkenon.
At any rate, they didn’t have trouble getting in. They beelined for the botany section and flipped through a book on leaves.
It wasn’t hard to find what Myra was looking for. The leaves resembled a very peculiar and well-known leaf called a camera-leaf.
All leaves absorbed light through a process called photosynthesis. The camera-leaf was unique in that it could absorb a record of its entire surroundings via this process. It was possible to extract that recording through various means—usually by taking the wood from the camera-leaf’s tree, pulping it, and pressing it into a thin paper sheet. If done right, the recorded picture would show up in full color on the sheet. The practice was called photography. The process was quite technically involved, though, and camera-leaves were pretty rare, native only to a few areas in Miirun. As a result, it was mostly practiced by well-funded artists, journalists, and researchers. Everybody else had to make do with portraits.
“I guess it makes sense you’d want to employ something like this in a security system,” Myra mused. “But that vine was something else. And it definitely wasn’t absorbing light.”
Shera suggested that maybe it was some kind of aura-absorbing equivalent. In the end, though, there really wasn’t much to conclude other than that it was probably some anomalous phenomenon with a hitherto unknown ability to detect spell origins despite the casters’ domain protections. They certainly didn’t find anything like it in all the library references, so they were unlikely to get any more insight into the irregularity with the charcoal shading.
The next day, Myra suggested they go back to the manor, use the private phone, and call other imperial sages at their own private numbers she’d gotten from Massiel’s address book. She had thought they might be open to talking to her if she name-dropped Hazel Ornobis, but mostly they were just put off that she had dredged up their private numbers. So they called Sage Ornobis again, but now she was put off because the others had spoken to her about Myra badgering them. Ornobis seemed to think that they should stick to reverse-engineering Massiel’s home security system and interviewing “actually plausible suspects”… whoever that meant.
They were not very far into the month, yet already they were struggling to find leads. Myra really preferred not to return to Ralkenon, and if it had just been her, she would have been content to take it easy and be barely productive in Jewel City for a month. It wasn’t just her, though. Shera was here, and Myra felt awkward about wasting her time (as little sense as that made), which meant she had to really stretch to find plausibly useful things to do while waiting for Iz to get back to her. They ended up doing “stakeouts” at the houses of Judge Krasus and the sages for a few nights, which were atrociously boring and led nowhere.
◆
One night, they met up with Sky Mishram for drinks, and they found some mutual comfort in complaining about the difficulty of sourcing.
“If it makes you all feel any better,” he told them, “I can barely get through to those folks either. Whenever the Times needs a statement from one of them, we always gotta go through some underling. If Hazel Ornobis hadn’t been personally invested in Massiel’s death, you can bet I wouldn’t be talking to her either.”
“It does make me feel a little better.” Honestly, Sky’s soothing, deep voice always put Myra at ease regardless of what he was saying.
“W-why?” Shera asked. “Th-that makes it harder to get in touch with them.”
“That’s—that’s not what I meant, Shera.”
“Anyway, I have a tip you might like. I mean, I don’t know what the hell you girls are looking for. You’ve already given me the tip of the year, and I’m still dying to know how you all know.”
“Sorry.”
“No, no, you’re good. What I’m saying is, you might know this already. But: Hazel Ornobis and Aiko Ueno, the Sage of Magical Practice, have both made frequent trips to Unkmire in the last year.”
Seeing the girls’ expression, he grinned wide. They had not known that.
“The last one was about a month ago. Now, that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for any of the others. Obviously, the Sage of Economy is visiting neighboring economies, you know what I mean? But Ornobis and Ueno barely have any reason to travel. And their trips were somewhat more… discreet.”
“That’s why you took my tip seriously,” Myra realized.
He shrugged. “Eh, it was a part of it.”
◆
The next day, there was another surprise waiting in the newspaper.
Break-in at Imperial Trebuchet Foiled Again
At 11:50 P.M., yesterday evening, alarms detected a second intrusion at the Raine Eastern Trebuchet (REaT) launch site in Kanre, Halnya. This second intrusion comes just five days after the previous attempt. A spokesperson for REaT reports that they believe it to be the same intruder. Despite the heightened security that resulted from the first intrusion, the intruder was able to counter most defenses, infiltrate REaT, and remain undetected for some time. It is believed the individual spent about 20-30 minutes in a confidential record-keeping area. Upon confrontation, the intruder wielded a small number of spherical, radioactive projectiles. Several officers were injured with radiation burns, though all are expected to recover fully. One Class B Aura-Lock barrier was damaged. The individual attempted to escape with a cabinet, but they left it behind upon escape.
We once again reached out to Jay Thrustma, momentum expert at Halnya Upper Institute of Magecraft, for commentary. Professor Thrustma does not believe that the new information reveals additional information about the intruder’s motives. However, he expressed surprise at the report of a damaged Class B Aura-Lock Barrier. “It’s certainly not impossible,” he said. “But it would require a tremendous amount of force. The radioactivity has nothing to do with it. The projectile must have been extremely fast.” When asked for a specific number, Jay Thrustma suggested, “Maybe 69 times the speed of sound.”
“Man, I… kinda just thought they’d wait until the next loop,” Myra said, her heart racing. God, who the fuck is this person? To assault an imperial military base and escape alive was one thing, to do it again when they were already on high alert—
If this is who I’m up against…
Luckily, she didn’t have that long to spend wallowing in dread. Later that afternoon, Myra finally spoke to Iz again and got all the details on the book-searching spell. Iz, who had evidently read ahead by about three weeks just to help out, had already become proficient in the new spell and was ready to explain it to Myra.
On one hand, the spell itself didn’t sound too difficult… Rather, the challenge was in fusing the constituent elements, ‘wood’ and ‘information’, into ‘book’. And Myra didn’t understand Iz’s explanation at all.
After fifteen minutes of frustrated negative progress, Iz seemed to throw in the towel. “Okay, let me put this in words you can understand,” Iz said, speaking slowly. “Kata moujur aba valak de—” She started belting out morphemes from an industrial runic script.
“W-w-wait! I need to write this down.”
She scrambled to pull open her notebook and ink so she could keep up with Iz’s description. She was using a public hotel phone, and she caught sight of a line starting to form behind her.
“Hold on, are you saying I can just inscribe this and it’ll do the fusion for me?”
“Probably… I mean, I haven’t tried it or anything.”
“What? Iz, you’re not just making this up on the spot, are you?”
“Marsha katwa aba to fur—” Iz went on. “Make a fork here; on the downwards branch, za fo erj ka—”
“Excuse me,” came an impatient voice as Myra tried to hold her notebook steady against the wall. “How long are you going to be exactly?”
“Sorry, I just need to—you know—I have to copy this down.” She shot an apologetic look at the angry people behind her, almost causing the phone to fall off her shoulder. “Iz, sorry, can you start over?”
◆
The second problem, besides the complex synthesis process, was actually finding the information element—or ‘dalet-three’ as it was officially called. It being an obscure element in the astral channel, Myra didn’t even know how to find it, but as luck would have it, Shera did. It seemed her interest in astronomy was coming in handy.
They decided to try it out in the evening when they would be able to focus on the astral channel, even if they looked a little dodgy entering Massiel’s manor at that time. Not much had changed since they’d left, though it seemed like a few more things were packed into boxes. They made themselves comfortable in the sitting room; Myra took off her shoes so she could feel the floor’s expensive, fuzzy carpet between her toes.
She set out a silver sheet where she had inscribed the diagram at Iz’s instruction. She still didn’t understand half of it, but at least she could see that two elements would go in and one element would come out. “Okay, Shera, you focus on fusing the elements, and I’ll cast.” Frankly, she had only inquired about the spell on a whim, not even thinking it would be particularly useful. But once they’d started, it was too awkward to set it aside.
Shera got to work, and Myra focused on the aura coming out of the third terminal of the runic diagram. Pulling it into her chest, she knew immediately that it had worked. The ‘book’ aura was fresh and crisp, full of anticipation and possibilities. It was romance and adventure, wisdom and knowledge. It was text, and it was subtext. It was being transported to a new world from the safety of your porch on a breezy autumn evening.
Myra cast the book-finding spell according to Iz’s instructions. First, she searched for all the books that mentioned “lasers.” They were looking for any evidence that Emmett Massiel personally knew a laser spell. In the end, the closest thing they found was a spell to bend existing lasers.
Did this tell them very much? It wasn’t exactly hard to find information on laser spells in the library. He could easily know the laser spells despite not personally owning the books. On the other hand, he owned a lot of books, and the amount of laser information they contained was statistically low.
They tried a few other words. “Time loop” didn’t get any results. “Time travel” only got junk. “Watch” had too many results. “Gold watch” and “Golden watch” got none. “Unkmire” got too many results. “Ralkenon” got too many results. “Ralkenon University of Magecraft” and “Volcano” each got a reasonable number of results, none of which were interesting.
“W-what about ‘vine’? Or ‘red vine’?”
Myra perked up at the result. “There’s one. For ‘red vine.’ It’s in the basement.”
Once again, Myra was confronted with the basement box problem that looked like a challenge she’d find in the puzzle section of the newspaper. She thought she had gotten off easy last time, so of course this time the box they were looking for was buried in the very back corner. The girls carefully moved them one by one, going top-down (for Myra vetoed several clever shortcuts that Shera suggested). They moved boxes containing bedsheets, figurines, a drum set, slide rules, financial records, and coat hangers.
The crate they finally unearthed was stuffed mostly with hiking and survival equipment, and they found what they were looking for at the very bottom, tucked in a crack between the boards composing the bottom of the crate. The book was enclosed in a protective leather covering. The covering was much nicer than the book itself, which had cheap pages, a stained brown cover, and an uneven binding.
There was no title on the cover, only an atrocious line sketch of a beaver.
The two girls sat on the crate to read through it. It appeared to be a journal, and the first entry was dated around 60 years ago.
Dear Research Journal:
I fear I have been negligent in my thoughts-keeping since the beginning of my career. Truthfully, I had been in doubt that I would have thoughts worth recording, and I pictured in my head that any journal of mine would gather dust in an old box, pages empty, serving as an embarrassment. ‘Oh, how embarrassing,’ I could picture my friends saying. ‘Emmett really thought he would fill this with groundbreaking research! How I pity the poor lad.’
Well, it is time to rectify this farcical hesitation. It is a better time than ever: I have been selected for an expedition into the heart of the Miirun wetlands. Leading the expedition is Professor Kurtwell Raine. Even now, I can scarcely believe that such a renowned explorer would select me for his team! The expedition is planned for six months.
We are going to see the largest beaver dam in the world.