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

  Chapter 4: Are you shivering?

  Twin Peaks Township, Confluence dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)

  Charlotte could feel how disturbed the others were. She was disturbed, too. Hoping for an exciting case, she’d ended up with – whatever this was. The invasion of the body snatchers. An Elder on the prowl.

  She felt cold. They all felt cold. Charlotte winded back the Divination and they watched through it again, in silence.

  “We need to be sure.” Truman tried to regain some of his swagger, but mostly failed. “Before we send this upwards, I mean. What do we need to loop? I want to see who Celeste really is. Let’s start there.”

  They went back to the point when Celeste and Harker arrived in the apartment, then looped through traces from the presumed obfuscation. It was not too difficult. “This person either doesn’t know about loop magic or is not very concerned about getting caught,” Watson declared. Charlotte had heard him the first time, but Watson tended to repeat himself when he thought he had something important to say.

  Canceling the obfuscation, they found themselves looking at the face of an old man. He seemed relaxed, like everything was under control and nothing could go wrong. Charlotte stared into his eyes for a long time, feeling a little scared. As if she was gazing into an abyss, but the abyss was also gazing into her.

  Eventually she shuddered and looked away. “We should see if we can find out where he went. And where he came from, earlier.” Using Watson’s loop to get past the obfuscation was the easy part. Then, for the first time ever outside of a school setting, the three of them looked at the trace of an unknown magical flow. Something they could not identify. It was not conveyance, although it did contain some of that. Nor was it dimensional magic, precisely – not a flow known to the Confluence, at any rate – although it contained quite a lot of that, mixed in with the conveyance and many other magics.

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  “Unknown magic. You don’t see that every day,” Truman said. None of them had any idea of how to trace the destination. This was way beyond their capacity.

  Just to be sure, they went back to the street outside The Blood and repeated the procedure on the magic that had brought the old man into Twin Peaks. They found the same thing.

  Truman called up his superior, who was in a meeting, but who accepted the call when Truman called it an emergency. “Mr. Z?rgiebel. Sorry to interrupt, but you really need to see this.” He replayed the highlights from his memory, using Recall. “This woman called herself Celeste but is actually an old man. He seems to be using life force magic to take over the young man’s body. His name was Jonathan Harker, now presumed dead.”

  “Fuck,” said Z?rgiebel.

  Fast forwarding to the point where the man left, Truman continued: “This is not a conveyance, or at least only in part. It’s mostly dimensional magic, although apparently not a flow known to the Confluence. Unless it’s so secret investigators can’t even identify it.”

  “I see,” said Z?rgiebel. “Dimensional magic would normally leave the body behind, though. That’s my understanding, anyway.”

  “Mine, too,” Charlotte interjected. “Sorry, sir, I’m Charlotte Ritter. I investigated this case along with my partner, Watson Doyle.” Watson said hi. “We have only spent a few hours working the case, so it’s as fresh as it can be.”

  “It’s good you got in touch without delay. Did you get a visual on the old man?”

  “Of course,” Charlotte said. Truman showed him.

  Z?rgiebel recognized the face immediately, although it was decades older than what he had last seen. After the Revolution, he had spent lots of time, with plenty of help from both Diviners and Abjurers, to get to the bottom of who had broken into his archive. This was the man. “It’s an Elder,” he said. “I recognize his face.”

  “We thought that might be the case. Seeing the life force magic.”

  “The Immortality Ritual.” Everybody had read that book. Good thing, too. “How did you manage to break through his obfuscations? Was it just the three of you?”

  “Ah,” said Watson. “That was loop magic, sir. We were able to trace his magics after just a few iterations. My impression was that he is probably not familiar with loop magic. We took all the precautions, sir.”

  Z?rgiebel was familiar with loop magic and the restrictions on its use, although he had never seen it meaningfully applied to a real case before. He felt proud that his investigators, even in a small place like this, were such competent people. “This is great work,” he declared. “I will push the case further up the system immediately. Someone will probably get in touch with you for a full debriefing. Until then, please leave everything as it is.”

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