Charlotte Ritter in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Watson Doyle in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Chapter 1: Murder in the red barn

  Twin Peaks Township, Confluence dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)

  “Pretty grim place, huh?” Watson gazed disapprovingly at the interior walls, which were painted blood red and black and covered in strange symbols.

  “Some people like a bit of darkness in their lives, I guess.” Charlotte was communicating with her partner via a Transmission flow, which allowed them to share not only thoughts but also experiences and feelings. It was everybody’s preferred way of talking these days. Going with full Transmission meant you had to taste everybody’s moods, which could be tiresome, although enhancement flows tended to smoothen the rough edges of it; Charlotte and Watson were currently sharing a flow of Acuity, Perk, and Spark. Watson was pretty stable, anyway, he did not bring too many unpleasant emotions to the mix.

  “People have strange urges, I’ll grant you that.” Watson had never visited establishments such as The Blood, the only off-grid club in Twin Peaks. Off-grid meant that you had to take down your automated Transmission security while you were on the premises, opening for the prospect of danger and excitement.

  Jonathan Harker had been missing for three days now. Apparently, he had entered The Blood at about midnight Nonidi, and an alert had been raised when he had not reconnected for the group meeting the following afternoon. This morning, the case had landed on the top of Charlotte Ritter’s assigned tasks and priorities list, and she had taken her partner, Watson Doyle, and his dog familiar Sherlock with her down to the club. The management was not present but had sent passcodes to allow the investigators access.

  Sherlock was occupied sniffing up one of the columns supporting the ceiling, apparently just because he liked the way it smelled of people’s sweat. Watson always included Sherlock in his Transmission flow, claiming that the familiar contributed energy to his magic work, so Charlotte was getting used to having the dog’s perspective on the cases she worked. Which was sometimes helpful, although Sherlock tended to get distracted easily. She added some Focus to their enhancement mix.

  While Sherlock prowled the premises, seemingly concentrated on something not very relevant to Harker’s disappearance, Charlotte and Watson raised a Divination flow to look at the situation on Décadi, just over midnight. They followed Harker around, noticing nothing especially noteworthy for a while, often speeding through stuff that looked unimportant. Then, around 02:30 in the morning, Cabaret Nocturne’s Dance or die was starting up and a young woman approached Harker.

  "Hey, I’m Celeste,” she said. “How’d you like to waste some time?" Smilingly, she dragged him out on the dance floor. Charlotte thought her moves were rather mediocre, but Harker obviously found her very attractive. Twenty minutes later they headed outside and disappeared by conveyance. Their destination was obfuscated.

  “Find out where they went and we probably have him, don’t you think?” Watson was looking bored. Another spoilt brat who was making work for people by failing to take minimal responsibility for themselves. Too busy enjoying some erotic adventure to check in with his group.

  “Probably, yeah,” Charlotte started saying, but Sherlock whined in protest. Communicating by sharing his emotions and desires, he wanted to go back to when the two humans met, when he had noticed something weird. Watson humored him, like he usually did, although Sherlock was frequently confused. But not this time. At the point when Celeste had introduced herself to Harker, another woman sitting nearby was staring at her, aghast. Sherlock was picking up a strong smell of fear from her.

  “Well, that’s interesting. Good boy, Sherlock.” Sherlock exuded vindication as Watson petted him. “Let me see who these women are.” He used their images to set off Divinations and search through the ether at the same time. The fearful woman was easy to identify – she was called Keyleth Ashari and there was nothing out of the ordinary about her. Celeste, on the other hand, appeared not to exist at all. There was nothing available on her until she manifested outside The Blood at 02:06 on Décadi.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “That’s strange. She must be wearing an illusion, no?”

  “I guess so. Must be highly skilled, then.” Charlotte was getting the impression that this was not a simple case after all. Her blood churned with excitement. Nothing exciting had happened in this town since, well, forever. She Divined Celeste’s image to look for illusions but found nothing. No apparent signs of obfuscation, either, and no identifiable traces. She looked at Watson. “We might finally have a use for that thing of yours.”

  After the Revolution, when the different fields of magic had been opened up for everybody, people had started learning and experimenting with all kinds of magics and combinations. Charlotte herself had expressed somewhat conventional tastes in this regard – she was in Diviner school when it happened, and expanded her curriculum with obfuscation and obfuscation detection, which could probably be regarded as her specialty, while also packing mean cancellation and alter flows. As an investigator, furthermore, she had worked a fair bit with trace magic. And like most people, she had also mastered the basics of all the different fields of magic, just for convenience and to be self-reliant if she should ever need to.

  Watson was more specialized, although he also mastered the basics of all the different fields and was pretty good at Transmission magics. His specialty, however, was a fairly obscure metamagic tool called loop magic. Like trace magic, loop magic was restricted, and he had only heard about it when he started as an investigator. Unlike trace magic, however, looping was a fairly new invention, emerging some time after the Revolution. It did not belong under any of the established fields of magic, unless you were of the opinion that metamagic should be recognized as a separate field, but it could be woven into many other magics. For instance, you could loop trace erasure magic, so that it would erase not only the zero-order trace (say, from an illusion) but also the first-order trace of the erasure magic, and then the second-order trace of the erasure used to erase the zero-order trace, and so on until a specified number of loops was reached, or some other specified condition kicked in, or you ran out of energy. The last option was not uncommon, because looping demanded lots of energy if you let it run freely.

  Loop magic was not an especially useful tool for an investigator in Twin Peaks, because nothing really ever happened here, and when something did happen, the perpetrators were consistently ignorant of trace magic and the case would basically solve itself without any need for metamagical curiosities. But Watson didn’t care. He thought loop magic was great fun and had practiced it for years, without ever having anything real to use it for. Maybe this was the occasion he had been waiting for.

  They decided to get a full overview and resolve the more conventionally approachable leads first. Four things were closed off to them for now. First, they could not trace Celeste back to where she had come from. Also, bizarrely, while her arrival resembled a conveyance when given a cursory look, that resemblance did not extend very far. However, they were unable to understand what else it might be. Third, they could not peek beneath what they presumed must be her illusionary appearance. Finally, they could not trace the conveyance – by all appearances a conventional conveyance – and find where Celeste had taken Harker. One thing they could do, however, was to call up Keyleth Ashari.

  Keyleth was at work, but took time off for their query, conveying to the street outside The Blood. Unfortunately, she was not able to help them much. They showed her the face she had made at seeing Celeste, but Keyleth said she did not know the woman. Indeed, she had no idea why she had made such a face at her, but she had been under the influence of a number of enhancements at the time, and her friends were always telling her that she had a really strong intuition. Maybe there really was something ghoulish about that woman, but Keyleth knew nothing about her and her reaction was based just on a feeling – that her rational mind failed to hold back because of the enhancements, she supposed.

  Blind alley. But maybe looping would help. The problem with loop magic, however, was that it demanded a lot of energy. Both Charlotte and Watson had stashes of energy stored away for a rainy day, but they were loath to use their personal resources for work. Instead, they called up Harry Truman, their boss. Investigator offices received a small annual allotment of energy collected via the energy tax, and here in Twin Peaks most of this was just stored up, the stash growing a little every year. They described the situation, arguing that the most important task was to trace the outgoing conveyance and thus, hopefully, discover where Harker had ended up.

  Collaborating, Truman watching via a Transmission flow, they prepared the ground for a Divination loop. Looping was a fairly new invention, so the Confluence Republic had set up rules for how to make sure nobody was observing the casting. First, you had to search for surveillance magic. Secondly, you had to wipe the immediate area with a cancellation blast, so that you (maybe) interrupt undetected surveillance and then, immediately after, you cast the looped flow with a separate loop of two layers of obfuscation as well as erasure embedded in every step. Adding a separate loop – ten iterations minimum – to every step of your main loop obviously increased the energy cost by a factor of ten or more, but the people responsible maintained that this was the cost of keeping a lid on restricted magics. You also had to notify the Restricted Magics Office before casting a loop, and they kept tabs on everyone who had been taught loop magic.

  Watson took care of all these hassles, and then they set up a Divination for magical traces targeting the obfuscation covering the outgoing conveyance, looped a hundredfold. On the 9th iteration, they found an active trace and, following the trace manually, cancelled the obfuscation it was ultimately linked to. The conveyance led to an apartment in the Red Barn, a housing complex located in a low-status area outside town. According to the ether, this apartment had been uninhabited for more than a year. After a brief discussion, they conveyed right into the apartment, boss still watching.

  It was empty. They searched around, then looked back in time at 02:50 last Décadi. Celeste arrived with Harker, who now appeared to be helpless for some reason. She laid him down on the floor, then lay down beside him, then both disappeared. The investigators waited, fast-forwarded, waited some more. Celeste and Harker never reappeared. Nobody said anything. Charlotte increased the speed, moving several days ahead.

  “I think we can probably assume they are not going to reappear,” Truman declared after some time. “So, what is happening here? Any ideas?”

  “Obfuscation, probably.” Charlotte probed it, finding nothing. “I think we’re going to need another loop.”

  “Go for it.” Truman wasn’t too worried about the cost and anyway had no other uses for the stash of energy. Nothing ever happened around here.

  On the 13th iteration, the Divination loop identified a trace. “I don’t think Celeste knows loop magic,” Watson observed drily as he nested his way back to the original obfuscation, leaving it for Charlotte to cancel. “I think she has been adding these layers manually.” They watched Celeste and Harker lying next to each other on the ground for a while, then their Divinations picked up life force emanations emerging from both. The emanation from Celeste entered Harker and that from Harker entered Celeste, then Harker got up, lifted up Celeste, and disappeared by something that looked like a conveyance.

  “What the heck happened?” Truman demanded. All three of them found themselves thinking the same thought: this looked like the thing they had read about in the history of the last days of the Elder regime. Nobody said anything.