Yutten Turse casting magic in the style of Caravaggio, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.

  Overnight there was another unauthorized entry into investigator offices. This time, Z?rgiebel’s videocameras were completely disabled. Every copy of the previous recordings, including several backups Z?rgiebel had hidden in safes, was stolen.

  Yutten first thought Chandrian might have talked to someone, but Z?rgiebel insisted they picked the information up from him. He was enraged and despondent at the same time. Yutten left in a hurry.

  She supposed it might still be possible to access the recordings via Divination, although that might depend on whether their material basis had been destroyed. Anyway, there was probably nothing further to learn from them.

  The only remaining lead was the archive, she thought. Presumably something had been removed. Or maybe just examined?

  No, that seemed unlikely. Then again, it also seemed unlikely that their old archive might contain anything that would justify the extreme measures taken here.

  Anyway, if they only wanted to look at something, they would probably have gotten a long way just by sending a formal request.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  She knew that a direct Divination into the (presumed) burglary itself would be too risky, but indirect searches should be safe. When she tried general archivist magics such as getting an overview of archive activities during the past month, however, there was no entry for the night of the intrusion.

  It was not clear to her how obfuscation magics work, and she was dismayed to discover that they appear to hide specific events from general information gathering magics, making it seem as if it never happened.

  Annoyed, she went down to the basement and entered the archive. She thought that if her magic wouldn’t serve her maybe her eyes would.

  This was quite optimistic, because the investigator office in this part of Mikla was several thousand years old, and the amount of stuff that had been archived over the millennia was quite impressive.

  They never threw anything out, but on several occasions, Transmuters had been brought in to expand the archive another floor into the ground. Afterwards, a Conveyer team transported everything one floor down, so the oldest stuff was at the bottom and the most accessible floor was available for recent cases.

  Yutten knew it was a shot in the dark, but she was angry and needed to release some energy, so she started walking around. There was a huge central staircase, and after a few hours she had walked down several floors, her anger starting to dry up. This was pointless.

  Then, down a corridor she saw a slightly ajar cabinet door. She walked over there and saw a row of ancient electronic storage devices. One missing. Gotcha.

  It was a section of material relating to the era of the Glitter. The remaining storage devices contained information about various cases where people had touched the Glitter and then gone criminally insane, creating lots of trouble and lots of work for investigators.

  There were seven remaining devices, each relating to one specific person who had been damaged by the Glitter. But when she dug up information about the Glitter cases belonging to this investigator district, she found eight cases. The device with documents and media relating to one Benoit Canardo was missing.