The institute of physics and applied maths was having a fairly average Saturday afternoon, provided that you didn’t consider it the very epicenter of a complex web of peculiar inter-connected occurrences, which it was.

Undergraduates were starting to swarm on the lawn outside. This was their natural time and place to swarm, which they would do with the goal of revising a subject or two, but would typically lead to drinking beer and exchanging gossip instead.

On the ground floor of the institute, the Mathys Club of Recreational Mathematics for Gifted Children of All Ages had just been dismissed. It was dismissed early following an accident with a small family of rabbits. Four of the rabbits were subsequently captured, but one had escaped through the opened window to the utter delight of children of all ages, and set off on an exciting free life during which it produced twenty nine children and was eventually eaten by a fox seven years later.

The rabbit, all things considered, thought this a relatively happy ending.

On the third floor, the sinister puddle had been identified as congealed energy drink spilled by a grad student on her way to a library. Lilly mopped up the puddle, changed the light bulb in professor Smith’s office even before he asked, and watered professor Hardell’s plants, because she did ask.

On the second floor, Dirk had wandered off from professor Daly’s office and had gotten hopelessly lost within the first five minutes. He meandered across the corridors for a while, until he somehow ended up in a large empty hall at the other end of the building. There he discovered the institutes’s mini-museum of severely outdated electronics, and was now exploring its contents.

If any other person of Dirk’s age were to find themselves in this place, they would have been awash with nostalgia at once. The museum was full of such ancient artifacts as VHS players, Walkmans, bulky IBM computers and Atari gaming consoles. But to Dirk, this was all abstract. He spent his late childhood and teenage years under lock and key with no access to any such technology; the only entertainment Black Wing was willing to provide were books, mostly classic English literature books. And that’s what Dirk had known.

There was, however, just one thing that succeeded at jolting his memory. He picked it up gingerly from its resting place and rotated it in his fingers. What Dirk had in his hands was a portable Tetris, a thick, rather inelegant piece of technology with bright yellow buttons and a dull glossy display. Dirk has had one just like it, once. A long time ago, in another life.

He put the Tetris down and stepped aside. In his mind, faint, cotton-light memories stirred. They brought a bittersweet sorrow, a misplaced longing that echoed a mellow ache behind his sternum.

He barely remembered his birthplace, having been brought over to Great Britain at the age of five. What remained in his brain were ghosts: the bleak Belgrad winter, the crunch of snow under his feet, the smell of fresh linoleum in the tiny kitchen of their tiny apartment, the taste of Domačica cookies…

He had no place left, there. No house. No family. Even Yugoslavia itself was gone from the map. England was hardly a home either, and he was even more of a foreigner here in America. So where did he belong?

Dirk stood in some other empty space without a clue of how he arrived there when he was discovered by Lilly, sitting on the floor in a corner and playing Candy Crush on his phone.

Candy Crush had an uncanny ability to calm him down and take his mind off things and only came with the downside of being viciously addictive at times.

“Hello again, holistic detective,” she greeted, passing him by with a plastic bucket in her grasp. “Is Roger still doing someone’s homework for them?”

“Don’t know,” Dirk replied, and got up. “How is the puddle then?”

“Dealt with.” She beamed. “I need to fix a printer now. Paper jam.”

She was about to move on with her work, but Dirk stopped her.

“Did you know Arthur?” he asked, and saw Lilly’s face lose its expression of bubbly happiness.

“No,” she replied. “When he died, I was,” she coughed, “uh, young. Too young. In high school. But Roger talks about him a lot.”

“Why aren’t you a student here?” Dirk continued.

Lilly laughed out loud in reply. “Do you have five hundred pounds of money stashed in your mattress?” She chuckled some more. “I’m not fancy like those kids.” She discretely pointed to a group of Cooltown students that were swarming at the stairs in the distance. “And they know I’m not like them, too, they hate me.” She snorted.

“Hate you?” Dirk frowned.

“Hate might be a strong word, fine,” she said. “They exclude me from the boundaries of their social structure. They do not categorize me but refuse to consider me an element. I am but a surplus person unit outside their highly codified and symbolic web.” She scratched her nose thoughtfully. “I don’t,” her hand moved in the air as she searcher for the right word, “vibe check with them. Did that clarify?”

Dirk nodded with the confidence of someone who did not understand any of the last four sentences but did not want any further clarifications either.

“Anyway, I better go,” Lilly said. “Time’s running faster in my legs than in my head, completely against special relativity by the way, so I should get to work before I desynchronize. Farewell kind sir!” she told him, and promptly left.

When Dirk was passing by the swarming undergrads on his way back to the second floor, they regarded him with curiosity and distrust.

“Dude,” one of the students said. “Don’t talk to the cleaner girl. You’re validating her delusion.”

“Delusion?” Dirk repeated.

“Yeah.” Another undergrad snorted with laughter. “The delusion of being worth talking to.”

“She’s clinically idiotic,” a third student added, but Dirk did not listen, reply, or as much as look at any of them as he pushed past the crowd and down the staircase.

Stolen story; please report.

In his experience, the best way of interacting with bullies was to... not.

*

Dirk got to Roger’s office just in time to see him walk out side by side with a sickly-pale young man, who was holding a jar of homemade orange marmalade in his thin, spider-like fingers.

“Remember,” Roger instructed the man. “Tell Sophie the truth. Tell her how you feel, and respect whichever answer she will give you, okay?”

“Okay, professor,” the man replied.

He wasn’t exactly helped by the advice, but he wasn’t harmed either, and as far as conversations with elderly professors went, he considered it a success.

“Students come to me with all sorts of problems,” professor Daly explained, even though Dirk hadn’t asked. “And I am happy to help regardless.”

“Quite,” Dirk said into the ether.

He hadn’t yet managed to shake off the dreamy state of mind that he had found himself in earlier.

“Should we continue with the search?” Roger asked. “Oh, but we must have some tea first. Or maybe coffee is better.”

And he invited Dirk back into his office, which seemed somehow even smaller than before, and now carried a faint presence of earl grey and oranges.

*

The continued search efforts did not yield any meaningful results. They did discovered things that the professor had forgotten were there, that he hadn’t even known were there, and that he hadn’t a suggestions as to how they could have possibly ended up there - but not what they were looking for.

They sat on the floor surrounded by copious amounts of all manners of useless and not-so-useless things and took turns at producing distraught sighs. Theirs were the sighs one would typically produce after completing an inhuman amount of hard, tedious work that felt grand and absolutely crucial but in fact amounted to no human value at all, such as approximately three quarters of all undergraduate dissertations.

“Nothing,” professor Daly declared, and sighed.

He then waited politely for Dirk’s turn to sigh, but was surprised to see the detective up on his feet again.

“This is a defeat, professor,” he said, channeling his motivated and inspirational voice. “But we must not let this defeat define us. We must resist the forces of failure and swim boldly against the stream of discouragement. The universe will aid our efforts if we show it that we are diligent, able, and unwavering in the face of disaster,” he concluded, mildly satisfied with the speech.

“There is one more place we could look,” professor replied, getting up from the floor as well. “Our old summer house. I haven’t been there months, but now that I’ve said it, I don’t believe I have seen the music box in months either. I just keep it safe, see.”

“Then it is decided.” Dirk beamed. “We shall search the summer house! Are you free tomorrow?”

“Only in the afternoon.”

“That suits me. Great work today,” Dirk congratulated the professor and himself as well. “Text me your address, I will pick you up in my car.”

It was Farah’s car, but the details didn’t matter.

On his way to the aforementioned car, Dirk was surprised to discover that he still had charge left in his phone, and that the phone was ringing.

“Hey,” said the phone when he answered it.

“Hey, Todd,” said Dirk.

It was Todd.

“How is your case going?” asked Todd, who was on the other end of the phone.

“I have made certain progress in finding the lost object,” Dirk responded, “by identifying the locations in which the object is not found. We didn’t find it,” he explained. “But we haven’t checked everywhere yet. How is the probably rich guy?”

“Very rich,” Todd said. “And annoying,” he added quietly, covering his mouth with his hand.

Though that was probably overkill, seeing that Kevin was currently busy stirring pasta vigorously and saying something in Farah’s direction about Botticelli, and therefore was fairly oblivious to whatever Todd was talking about.

“He has opinions about everything,” Todd continued to explain. “And he is always chewing gum, very loudly, and changing it every ten minutes. I swear he’s gone through three packs already.”

“Are you staying with him to guard him at all times?” Dirk asked.

“No, actually he’s staying with us.”

“Right. Okay. No, wait a second,” Dirk said. “Not okay. He’s staying with ‘us’? What do you mean, ‘us’?”

“Shit,” Todd muttered, now covering the phone instead of his mouth. “Shit! Stupid.”

“Todd!” Dirk demanded in a stern voice. “Are you and Farah dating again?” He had pronounced the word “dating” with the intonation usually reserved for names of venereal diseases.

Todd and Farah were, indeed, dating again. It was their fifth attempt at dating in the last six months, and so far it had lasted almost a week, which was one day longer already than the previous attempt. They were planning to keep it secret for a little while, in case the problem of telling Dirk would resolve itself naturally, which, in effect, it just did.

“So what if we are dating?” Todd responded, deciding that the best mode of defense was a direct attack.

“Oh but not again!” Dirk was not satisfied with this explanation. “You and Farah dating never ends well, and I know because I’ve seen it four times before! I’ve only just recovered from the last time.”

There was much to recover from, since the pattern of Todd and Farah dating was such:

In the beginning, it always seemed like a great idea. They were, after all, close friends, who undeniably had a fair amount of attraction for each other, and had great difficulty socializing outside of their job. Unfortunately, thinking it was a great idea was the peak of the relationship. For a week, maybe two weeks, maybe even three weeks if the stars and planets aligned themselves appropriately, things would be okay. Then a horrendous break up would inevitably occur, forcing them to not speak to each other for a week, or maybe two weeks, or maybe even three weeks if the break up was horrendous enough.

Eventually things would stabilize and they would return to being close friends, and all would be well until one of them would once again get the fatal idea of “hey, why aren’t we dating?”.

Understandably, this was all quite upsetting for Dirk, for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons was that Dirk was unhappily immune to the sudden idiopathic memory lapses that aided Todd and Farah in forgetting all horrible previous attempt at dating just as they were on the cusp of starting another one.

“You know Dirk,” Todd continued, still on the offense rather than defense, “it’s really not up to you whether Farah and I should be together because, because, we are Adults, and you’re not my mother, and even if you were my mother I would not want you deciding who I should or should not date, and, uh, yeah!” he concluded. “So stay out of it!”

Dirk had listened to this with a mix of incredulity and mild amusement.

“Anyway,” Todd said, “are you coming for breakfast tomorrow?”

“Yeah sure,” Dirk replied.

“Okay!”

“Have a good evening!”

“You too bye!”

And they both hang up at the same time.

On his last thirty feet of path towards the car, Dirk went through a handful of mental experiments and concluded that simply waiting for the break up to occur would probably take less time than trying to accelerate it. He unlocked the door, fell into the driver’s seat, and gave the Cooltown campus one last warm look.

Two individuals watched him attentively as he drove away towards the city. One of the individuals was Lilly. The other was a rather large, fluffy black cat that sat on the roof of a nearby utility shed and had a curious faint blue glow in its almond-shaped eyes.

*

Back in Todd and Farah’s apartment, Kevin had drained the pasta, added to it some oil, and set it aside.

“I need heavy cream for the Alfredo sauce,” he said, already digging through Farah’s fridge.

“It’s not in there,” Farah told him, but he ignored her and continued to search.

Farah rolled her eyes. She had gotten some jolly good practice rolling her eyes since Kevin had moved in with them that morning. "Question," she said. "Do you at least have a hunch for who is trying to kill you and why?"

“Oh it’s probably my ex girlfriend,” Kevin replied confidently. “And I don’t know. For petty reasons, I think.”

“You think your ex girlfriend would organize your murder, for petty reasons,” Farah repeated.

“Yeah that’s about it,” Kevin agreed. “Do you have any heavy cream?”

“No.”

“Well why didn’t you tell me so!”

Farah rolled her eyes.

“You!” Kevin said at Todd, who had chosen this moment to walk into the kitchen. “We’re out of heavy cream. Go buy some.”

And he produced a 50 dollar banknote from the back pocket of his jeans. It looked like it had been discarded by a feral raccoon after an unsuccessful attempt at washing it in a stream of water.

“Is this enough? I think it should be enough.” He waved the banknote at Todd with urgency in his eyes. “Quick, or the pasta will get cold!”

Todd looked at the fifty dollar bill, then at Kevin, then at the fifty dollar bill again, and walked out of the kitchen.