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“Now is a great time,” he told Olivia firmly. “One moment.” He grabbed a sign that he kept just inside his office, hanging it on the door to indicate his absence. “And now nobody will wait around for me.”

“What a gentleman,” Olivia said dryly, with an almost odd air of amusement. “You’re such an odd one.” She gestured to him to come walk with her.

Augustus raised his eyebrows at them. “Am I?”

They nodded, tossing their hair over one shoulder. “I’ve always found you quite the mystery, Pennywright. You’ve got that mysterious husband you brought to that one work party, but you live alone, you never talk about your past, you publish the strangest things.”

“I hope at least people do talk about my work, even if they think it’s strange,” Augustus said demurely. “If you aren’t making a scandal in academia, are you really doing any work at all?”

“Hah! You’re right about that. I have a paper I’ve just refined and turned a draft in,” Olivia said. “I’m hoping that it’ll make waves too.”

“Oh, what about?”

“I’d love to talk about it later,” she said brightly, gesturing. “We’re here.”

Before he could ask anything more, Olivia knocked on the door. “Soren? You in?”

“Yes—Liv? Come on in.”

Liv? So they were friends? Augustus thought back to earlier when he’d asked Olivia about Soren, and realized that they hadn’t indicated their level of closeness to him or not. He’d known they’d interacted some, which is why he thought to ask them for an introduction, of course. A bit surprising to be on nickname terms, though, given how new Soren was to the school.

Olivia opened the door and waved, then gestured toward Augustus. “I’m not staying,” she said brightly. “But I thought I’d introduce you to my colleague, Augustus Pennywright. He’s a Doctor of Conjurations, specializing in Planar Research, so you two should have plenty to talk about.”

Soren’s face jerked up, expression going almost blank with surprise. Too much surprise, Augustus thought, but he wondered what his own face was showing. That level of familiarity was hitting him again, a strong spark of I know you that he hadn’t been able to brace for. 

How was he going to do this? Just … have a conversation about things? He was tired of trying to be delicate. Okay with being ominous, though, and mysterious. Perhaps he should even be direct. Not too direct, if it wasn’t working—he didn’t want to be kicked out of a second office today!—but he needed to know what was going on with Soren. He needed to.

“Professor Pennywright,” Soren was saying, in a sort of airless, faint tone. “It’s a pleasure to meet you properly. Do come in.”  

“I—” Augustus’s voice didn’t seem to want to work correctly. He cleared his throat. He was suddenly desperately aware of the mug he’d stolen sitting in his satchel, since he’d not had time to go home yet. He’d better not open that in front of Soren, just in case he spotted it. “Yes, I’d love to.”

Olivia’s brows seemed to be disappearing into her hairline. “Well! I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said, and showed herself out, waving, heading down the hall. She had to have an incredible strength of will to just leave while she was radiating that much curiosity.

 Augustus shut the door behind himself and came closer, pulling up the spare chair and sitting across from Soren, the desk between them. For a moment, there was just a charged silence.

“I know you,” Soren said.

Perhaps Augustus could bluff a little. “Of course you know me,” he said airily. “What do you mean? We went to school together. I was wondering if you’d come and say hi.”

A hungry light seemed to spark in Soren’s eyes and he half-stood, leaning over his desk. “Wait, you remember? You remember? What do you remember? Who were we to each other? What did we do, Augustus?“

“Well, we—that’s—” No. He couldn’t bluff around this. He didn’t have enough details; he’d have to straight up lie, and then he wouldn’t be able to get anything from Soren at all. He sighed slowly. “No. I don’t remember. I was hoping you did, and that you’d tell me.”

“Fuck.” Soren didn’t seem like someone who’d swear often. Augustus was pretty sure Soren had always been too uptight for that—although the man across from him didn’t look uptight. Just uneasy, a bit sad, stressed. Soren slowly sat back in his chair. “Then how…?”

“I saw a picture of us together.” That was true. Augustus didn’t have to say he’d broken into Soren’s office to do so; he tried not to look at the turned-over frame still on Soren’s desk. “Our class picture, I suppose.”

“I saw that too. I’ve kept a copy with me,” Soren murmured. “Is that it? I remember a bit more than that.”

Augustus didn’t have to say that he didn’t remember more than that. “Tell me,” he said, simply.

“It’s not much,” Soren admitted, scrubbing hands through his tight curls. “It’s just flashes. The doctors considered it a period of insanity, and perhaps it was. I don’t know. But I’ve got fragments. I recognize your face from when you were younger. I have dreams sometimes.”

Augustus used to get dreams; he’d had Em protect him from them. “Yes?”

“There’s a beast. A beast beyond,” Soren said, haltingly.

The Beast Beyond. Augustus had a chill run through him at the title, though he couldn’t say why. An ominous name, he supposed. Perhaps the research assistants were right and you didn’t become a professor unless you were very capable of ominous and mysterious statements. “Tell me more.”

“I can’t. I don’t know. I think we used to be friends, you and I.” Soren said, and for some reason he seemed to get a bit flustered at hearing himself say it. “The two of us. Maybe there was a third as well. I sometimes remember someone else, but I don’t think I liked him very much. I think I was jealous of him.”

Augustus thought of the third person in the picture, the one his younger self had been leaning on. He thought of Soren, too, superior, remote. Nothing like the person he was talking to right now, but nevertheless, he knew Soren. He knew him, he felt close to him in a way he couldn’t remember feeling close to another human being. He knew Soren must feel the same way, given how openly he was talking. “I don’t remember him. Go on?”

“I think that we were in classes together. Conjuration, of course.”

“Of course.” 

“And I think we tried to do something we shouldn’t.” Soren made a face, obviously hearing himself say something so very vague. “I think we summoned something. And it shattered us. At least, it shattered me.”

“I don’t think I left school or took any breaks—did you?” As if he didn’t know.

“I did. I did not handle whatever happened well, I suppose. I needed time away, and came back later to finish my degree, after I had become … calmer,” Soren said. It was clearly embarrassing to him, and he sounded slightly defensive, so Augustus raised his hands, shaking his head. He wouldn’t touch it further. Not right now, anyway. “If you didn’t have time off, Augustus, what did you do? I had an entire breakdown!”

“I don’t know. I finished my schooling, I suppose, or at least I got a degree. I don’t really remember much of it early on. More towards the end. I suppose I was on auto-pilot, or just losing my memories as fast as I gained them, or simply blocked off whatever it was that happened and carried on,” Augustus admitted.

Soren sighed, eyes lowered. “I could envy that.”

“I don’t envy what you told me, for sure. I’m sorry to hear it.”

After a moment, Soren shook his head. “Thank you. I don’t know what we could have summoned. It could have been demonic—if you don’t have the proper wards, it goes badly. But it doesn’t feel demonic. I have my soul, and I’m alive, and a period that your mind cannot handle is not … traditional. I think we found something out there beyond the planes. The thing from my dreams.”

Augustus nodded slowly. “I think so too. I’ve been studying. Trying to understand more of what happened to me. Were you also studying that?”

“I tried to leave it behind. Just live my life,” Soren said. “But I don’t know if I can. It haunts me.”

“I suppose academics are terrible at ignoring a mystery,” Augustus said gently.

That earned him a smile from Soren, even though it was only a faint one.

“But,” Augustus said, still gentle, “why did you come here? I know you’re a recent hire. Surely you were working somewhere else first.”

Soren swallowed. He said, “I saw your name on a faculty list. And I recognized you with … such intensity that I knew you must have some answers for me, somehow. I pulled up my roots and did everything I could to get hired by that dreadful von Beekeeper. But then I saw you around and somehow just … couldn’t bring myself to talk to you.”

“It was mutual,” Augustus admitted. “I wonder if something was actively trying to sabotage the meeting. It could have been the thing we did, the thing we called, or just our own minds trying to save us from a second mistake. Perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” Soren said. “I do feel like … things are clearer even now. If we overcome whatever this is, if we work together, maybe we can figure this out. I already feel closer to remembering … something.” That last word rang with frustration. 

Augustus nodded slowly. Perhaps they could. Perhaps they shouldn’t, though; perhaps he should simply take what he’d learned and bring it back to Em. He didn’t feel in control of this situation with Soren; it felt like he’d taken his hands off the reins and the horses were picking up speed, throwing him around in the trap. 

“You’ve come into things at an odd time,” he said, half to put off feeling pressured to answer right away. “I’m sure a lot of it is simply departmental nonsense, but things have been strange.”

“Oh?” Soren asked.

Augustus summarized in brief, telling Soren about the book disappearances, the things Fitzfleming had said, even von Beekeeper’s recent pressure on the department. He didn’t mention how odd Yujin had been acting, half out of an attempt to hide his using Yujin to dig up information on Soren, and half to protect them in case they weren’t involved at all in any of this, somehow.

Soren was frowning. “Very odd,” he admitted, and there was a bit of that old, familiar coolness in his voice now. “Do you believe it’s related or that it’s tangential? It does seem that whoever is doing this is taking materials that can be used to research the same thing we’re studying to find out more about. Things beyond the planes.”

“Yes, though truthfully, most of the things they could steal from me would be about that,” Augustus said. Not all, though, he had to admit; the rest wasn’t his active research, and it wasn’t cutting edge, but he had plenty of work about demons, and even about other ethereal spirits. And some of the books had involved those too—in terms of creating definitions, at least.

“We could ask Olivia,” Soren suggested. “They’re working on something similar,” 

“Are they?” Augustus asked, almost forgetting himself in his surprise; it might have been better to play it out as if he were familiar to hear more about it, but oh well. “Why would a specialist in Contract Law be studying non-planar entities?”

“I think she’s writing a paper about it,” Soren said. “Perhaps I misunderstood, but she’d asked me a lot about my research due to her interest. I imagine she might be interested specifically because our lack of definition for them means that if there is anything out there, the Spiritual Contract department doesn’t have any terms around them to help confine them.”

“How very odd,” Augustus murmured. But he was aware that if Soren and Olivia were friends, questioning it too much might make Soren defensive. “Well, never mind that. Let’s get back to your situation. I haven’t told anyone about my memory loss. Who knows for you?”

Soren seemed reluctant for a moment, but slowly shook his head. “Beekeeper likely has some idea, since he would probably have looked into my … public historical record, but he hasn’t said anything about it to me if so. Olivia knows, since we’ve chatted a lot over drinks, and have become close. I thought they might have some insight given our similar field. They didn’t, unfortunately, though they’re interested in helping me find a solution at some point. Nobody else should know, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t. My … recovery period was public record at a hospital, and besides that, if I’d gone to school with someone during that time period, I wouldn’t necessarily remember them. They, however, would remember me.”

Augustus hadn’t had anyone approach him, but by the sounds of things, he’d covered his own loss with more aplomb than Soren had been able to. 

“Do you want to work with me to try to figure this out?” Soren said. “We could talk more. You could come back to my apartment and we could see if we could figure this out tonight …”

Oh! Oh. Hm.

Well, Augustus wasn’t sure. This did seem like a proposition, which seemed awfully sudden, but Soren seemed awfully hungry for Augustus. Some shared thing he couldn’t remember, perhaps. It wasn’t that he didn’t find Soren attractive, mind, he thought Soren was gorgeous. But there was a lot there that he had to sort through before he’d be willing to potentially get involved. Then again, that might be one way to get more of Soren’s … essence.

He could also invite Soren back to his place very easily. Not that he could just summon Em without prep work; obviously, it was a whole process. But he could probably find a way to distract Soren if he wanted to have him there for it. Literally tie him up, perhaps. Still, that also felt like it’d be a betrayal of this connection Soren had clearly made with him and wanted so badly. Plus, he’d have to reveal his whole demon husband situation to Soren unless he were very careful. 

On the third hand, he already had the mug. Maybe he should just say he needed time to think, and take that mug back to Em along with the story he’d just gotten, and see what Em could make of it all.

[What should Augustus do? Comment with details.]

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Augustus had very little time to react. But—he couldn’t run all the way back to Fitzfleming’s without drawing attention, and even heading back to his office so quickly might be noticed, especially if it looked like he was running from the research assistant block.

Nevertheless, appearing right outside the door would be too suspicious even for him. He quickly turned and sprinted down the hall to round the corner, waited a few moments until he heard the door open and close, and then came back around casually. Yujin seemed surprised, and Augustus fixed a similar expression on his own face, which he allowed to melt into a smile and a wave.

It wasn’t the least suspicious thing he could do, but he was trading one suspicious option for another, and he was fine with being a little suspicious. 

After all, apparently Yujin thought he was ominous or whatever anyway. He still wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or annoyed by that.

“Sir? I thought you were going to talk to Fitzfleming,” Yujin said, coming over. “Was she out?”

Augustus didn’t have to pretend to be annoyed about this. He wrinkled his nose, shaking his head. “Unfortunately, she was in. She didn’t want to talk to me, though. She kicked me out.”

Yujin seemed to let out a breath at that. “Well … that’s better than it could be,” they said. 

“What do you mean?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a lot to tell you,” Yujin said. “Maybe not here.”

Augustus nodded. Everything was falling into place. “Let’s go for lunch, my treat,” he declared. “I have to eat something quick before office hours anyway.”

Yujin seemed surprised. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure the last time he’d treated them to anything. Maybe a coffee a few months ago? It couldn’t have been longer than that, could it? But then again, hadn’t it been to warm up from the snow? Maybe it was longer than he’d thought. “Sure,” Yujin said, after a moment. “I’d love lunch.”

The best place for lunch was The Magician’s Appetite, a little café just off campus—but very near the professor office block, since he’d be cutting it close to get back. Augustus gestured to Yujin to walk with him and began leading the way there. “What do you have after this? Just working on your own things for a while?”

“Yeah, for the afternoon,” Yujin said. “Nothing too exciting, I don’t think.”

“Anything else later?”

“Why, do you need me for something?”

Hmm. Avoidant. Then again, he’d probably be the same if his older professor was asking about his hobbies, when Augustus was Yujin’s age. He was fairly sure he had not had good hobbies back then. “No, not at all. I just realize I don’t ask you much about your life, and that’s wrong of me. I know I demand things from you at all hours, and I don’t want it to impact your life in a negative way.”

Yujin didn’t seem to know how to react to that, watching their feet as they walked. “O-oh, that’s …” 

To Augustus’s surprise, he found he meant what he was saying. “I’ve noticed you’ve been very antsy since the break-in. And that’s understandable. I’m on edge too. But is there anything I can do to help you?”

Yujin almost jerked their head around, staring at Augustus with eyes that Augustus realized were quite uncanny, with an unusual white line around the edge of their dark irises. Had he never looked them in the eye before? “O-oh. I … thank you.” They sounded genuinely moved, almost a little choked, and turned away again quickly, ducking their head again. “I’ll be fine, I think. Nothing like a robbery to put you on edge.”

One they’d committed, or one they’d stumbled over the end result of? Or both? Interesting that they were so moved, though. 

They arrived at the café before he could decide how to follow up on that, and they both placed their orders at the counter before going to sit. Yujin placed a remarkably large order—an amount of food that Augustus would have for dinner, and he never skimped on his own meals. He didn’t comment on it; he was curious if the extra snacking had some sort of magical origin, of course, but Yujin was a young adult and people needed to eat to live. Heaven knows Augustus enjoyed doing so, and people who had decided it was their business to make comments about it were the bane of his existence when he was younger. “Now,” he said as they sat. “Tell me what Feather told you about Soren Kincaird.”

Yujin nodded, doing so, continuing to talk between bites as their meals arrived.

The gist of it was that Soren had gotten his undergraduate degree at the Twent College of Arcane Arts, as Augustus had assumed. He had taken seven years to get through the program, because he had a gap in the middle. He got his Doctorate at Jollifer’s University after another two-year break between degrees. Both were good schools, with excellent reputations, and to Feather’s understanding, he’d done quite well at both.

Feather hadn’t know the cause behind either of the gaps. She’d pointed out (Yujin said) that undergraduate school could be hard, especially in arcane arts, where you had to have such a strong mastery of multiple fields even to move into magics. He could have had an ailing parent, or have been sick himself. She wasn’t going to pry into her professor’s past like that.

Beyond that, there still weren’t too many specifics. He’d  worked at Twent prior to this job, but abruptly left. Feather didn’t know why—maybe von Beekeeper had found a way to lure away a promising professor, or maybe something else. Feather had added—something Yujin said they found interesting, and Augustus had to agree—that Soren had apparently come to this school due to “personal reasons”, which he hadn’t told Feather about. She’d thought it was weird, but not enough to pry into. 

Soren’s personal research appeared to be in the space beyond the planes, “which I thought was interesting because it’s sort of what you’re working on too, just from a different angle,” Yujin said. “He’s apparently working on a paper about why nobody has ever successfully summoned anything from beyond the known planes, and if it means there’s nothing out there after all, just a void. But Feather also said that none of the stolen books ended up in his office, so it doesn’t seem likely that he’s the thief. She said that Fitzfleming had asked after one of them, though.”

“Fitzfleming again,” Augustus said, finishing his meal. “Suspicious.”

“Definitely,” Yujin agreed. “You said she kicked you out? Did she say anything first?”

“She said she disagreed with me academically for personal reasons,” he said slowly. “And it would be better if I were in a different field. But that just is Structural Spiritualism talk. Perhaps.”

Yujin shook their head. “I don’t like it,” they said. “But it’s not evidence either. Unless you think it’s enough to take to the authorities?”

“I don’t know,” Augustus admitted. He sighed, pushing his plate back. “Thank you, Yujin. I’ve got a lot to think about. I’ve got to go but … listen.” He made eye contact with them again, deliberately. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

They seemed to tear up, blinking rapidly. “I … no, not really,” they admitted in a small, airless voice. “I’m dealing with a personal issue right now. But I will be fine, and I don’t want to talk about it. It shouldn’t affect my work. Okay?”

He didn’t have the time to push now. He had to get to his office. “Okay,” Augustus said gently. “But if you ever want to talk to me, I’ll listen.”

Yujin didn’t answer, so he just got up, patted their shoulder as he passed, and then hurried to his office.

Olivia was already waiting outside when he got there, arms crossed, tapping their foot. She lifted her brows as he hurried up. “Your doors say you have office hours now,” she said, with no greeting. “Are you sure now’s a good time to go meet Kincaird?”

[What should Augustus do? Comment with details.
If you go with Olivia, you’re likely to meet Soren. What do you want
to ask him about, and how do you want to approach the meeting?]

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Augustus had almost never been so tempted to commit mischief, and he had certainly gotten up to his fair share before. It would be so funny to take the book and put it back in his office in an obvious place, just to watch Yujin sweat. Yujin did know that he had keys to their study room, sure, but he never used them (given that it would be incomparably rude to go through Yujin’s space while they were out), so they probably wouldn’t even think about it. It’d be very ‘murderer hallucinating bood, that guilty stain and proof of your crime’ of him to do. And there’d probably be some real data he could get from Yujin’s reaction.

But … however fun that option was, he knew the more cautious idea was likely to just put the book back where he’d found it. If he needed it later, he knew where it was, and it allowed him to hold back from confronting Yujin with the information he had. He still had an incomplete picture of what was truly going on here, and being able to choose when to reveal that he knew Yujin had the book would likely give him more options. Besides, he probably didn’t need to absolutely torment his poor assistant to get answers. 

Regretfully, he carefully wedged the book back in behind the side drawers, and gently slid the middle drawer shut. Then he headed out of the room and locked back up—leaving no sign of his passage.

Now, to go eavesdrop on the tail end of Yujin’s conversation with Soren’s research assistant, Feather St. Saint. 

Augustus continued along the hallway of the  research assistants’ study room block, keeping an eye out for the names next to the doors, since he wasn’t familiar with where she worked; he’d only just happened upon her name when he saw the shared workroom door open down the hall, and a vaguely-familiar research assistant exited, coming back this way.

It would be too obvious now if Augustus stopped and listened, and there was nothing in the hall that he could pretend to be occupying his attention with. Instead, he continued down the hall, nodding at the assistant as they passed each other—he was one of the ones who Augustus had eavesdropped on at dinner, Olivia Spiders’s research assistant, River Brooklake. He continued down the hall until a glance back showed that Brooklake had disappeared into his study room, then looped back quickly to plant himself outside of St. Saint’s room, leaning against the wall and straining to listen.

“—did you need all that for anyway?” a young woman, who he presumed to be St. Saint, was asking. Augustus had clearly missed all of the sharing of biographical information, but Yujin was going to report that back to him anyway.

“I wish I knew,” Yujin said ruefully. “My boss wants to know, so here I am. I don’t know that it’s actually about the missing books, he said it like he was trying to get one over on me, but I can’t figure out what else it’d be about. Unless he’s into Kincaird and is trying to get information to increase his chances or something.”

“Wait, missing books?” St. Saint sounded alarmed.

“Yeah, haven’t you heard? Most everyone is talking about it at this point, Pennywright’s been going around talking to all kinds of professors about it. Someone stole a bunch of his books. I was the one who noticed, actually. It really freaked me out,” Yujin added, voice dropping into an uneasy tone.

“Why? ‘Cause what if you’d been there?”

“Yeah, exactly! I was in on my day off to drop off a paper for him, and like, I do that sort of thing all the time. I’m always in his office at weird hours to help find him things or put things back at his request or making notes for him while he’s off calling his mysterious husband. What if the thief had shown up while I was there?”

“You’d probably just have scared them off?” But St. Saint sounded even more uneasy now, likely imagining being in that situation herself. “But …”

“Right, we don’t know. This person could be armed.” Yujin’s voice dropped lower, so Augustus had to strain to hear. “And if it’s one of the other professors, they wouldn’t want it to get out that they were a thief. They might get dismissed. You know half the people here wouldn’t think twice about murder.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Damn, Yujin. So which books were taken? Was it all one subject? Kincaird studies the same field as your guy, so someone might try to get into his office too.”

“Shadows of Fear in the Fearful Shadow, or whatever it’s called, by Mahogany Mahoney. And some small folios and books about planar entities? It’s hard to say exactly since I was just noticing that things were missing in most cases, rather than remembering what was supposed to be there. But they seemed to all be about planar creatures and what places they come from.” 

A pause then, probably them sharing their reactions through expressions alone. Augustus noticed Yujin hadn’t mentioned the missing ghost book, though technically it might fall under that vaguely descriptive umbrella. 

Yujin continued finally: “Part of the reason I was so freaked out is I’d just dropped Fear-Shadow off the day before, so it was just such a narrow window that the thief could have broken in. Anyway, keep your keys on you. I’m pretty sure someone got ahold of mine and either used them or made copies. Hoping they didn’t have copies, though, that’d mean they could get into my study too.”

“You armed?” she asked.

“I’ve been carrying a knife now, yeah. Not that I know it’ll do much good. Anyway, you think someone’ll target your boss too?”

“I don’t know!” St. Saint sounded pretty freaked out. “Kincaird hasn’t built up much of a collection since coming to this school, though obviously he has some books of his own. Did you say Shadows of Fear from the Shadow Fear … uhhh, that’s not the full title. But like. That one?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Fitzfleming asked last week if Kincaird had a copy of that!” 

“Fitzfleming did?” Yujin asked. “Oh no, my boss is talking to Fitzfleming right now. I hope he’s okay.”

“Should we—check?”

“I don’t know. If they were fighting, I guess the whole school would know about it,” Yujin pointed out. “I’m sure it’s fine … I’ll go there right after this, though. I was going to meet him again anyway. It’s weird that Fitzfleming would want it, though, right? She doesn’t really work in that field. She’s all about the spirits of this world.”

“Yeah, I thought that too,” St. Saint said. “But then again, she did recently write that paper about maintaining the academic divide of earthly spirits from unearthly ones, I just figured she might want to write an addendum or something.”

“Mm,” Yujin said, in a kind of pained voice. “It’s probably just that, but everything looks suspicious now. Fitzfleming and Pérez know that I’m the one who sources books for my boss, so they’re always bothering me about what I’ve got hold of. So I’m surprised Fitzfleming didn’t ask me first. Even Spiders got in on harassing me recently.”

“Spiders?!”

“Olivia.”

“Ohhhh. I thought—”

A snort. “Yeah. She was really questioning me about my boss and what he’d been up to lately. If I’d noticed anything weird.”

“Like you’re doing with mine?”

“Yeah, but I get paid to do it and you’re not going to tell anyone,” Yujin said. “Otherwise why would you have answered my questions?”

“I guess I can keep it under my hat,” St. Saint allowed magnanimously. Augustus tried to decide if he should be worried about that. “So had you noticed anything weird about your boss?”

“Yeah, I mean … I guess I have. But I didn’t tell Spiders that. And the problem was …”

“… the problem was?” St. Saint prompted, when Yujin didn’t continue.

“It’s nothing.” 

Oh come on, Augustus pleaded silently.

“No, seriously, what’s wrong?” St. Saint asked, apparently alarmed by whatever she was seeing.

“Sorry … I’m fine. They just said something that read as kind of … threatening me,” Yujin said hesitantly. “But professors do that all the time. I don’t think they even know they’re doing it. Even my boss does it. And, like, Pérez threatens me whenever we talk. It’s like he needs to do it to live.”

“I’ve noticed that about Pérez,” St. Saint agreed. “It’s like those sharks that have to keep moving to breathe. If he’s not superior and ominous at least once every sentence, the curse will get him.”

“You probably don’t get to be a professor unless you like being ominous,” Yujin said with a tone of finality. 

“Kincaird doesn’t tend to be ominous,” St. Saint said. “Or he hasn’t been yet, anyway. You sure you don’t want to stay for another cup of tea?”

Yujin groaned. “No, I should be going. I need to go rescue my boss from Fitzfleming, I guess. And I don’t want to take too long with it, I’ve got a date later.”

“Well, cheers,” St. Saint said.

That was the sound of Yujin’s chair scraping back. Augustus took a step back from the door, trying to decide what to do. Should he act like he’d just shown up and was waiting for them, or run all the way back to Fitzfleming’s? Or go to his office and pretend like he’d been there since Fitzfleming had kicked him out early? Or just… avoid Yujin, to give himself more time to think?

If he did talk to Yujin now, what should he ask about—beyond getting the obvious rundown from them about Soren’s personal history, like he’d asked for already?

Also, Augustus was becoming rapidly aware that he needed lunch, but he’d used up a bit more time than he’d meant to. Olivia would probably be heading to his office relatively soon to come introduce him to Soren … 

[What should Augustus do? Comment with details.
Also, yesterday I posted a summary of all info learned to-date — check it out!]

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Hey all! Bad migraine today, so I’m afraid I’m having a break night! Take the chance to get caught up on all the crazy investigating we’ve had Augustus doing so far, and buckle in for a wild ride on Augustus’s bad decision academic rollercoaster. Please turn in your Day 14 Suggestions by October 16, 4 pm PST. Don’t worry — if I need to go a few days late to get us to a satisfying ending despite having a break here and there, I totally will!

QUESTION TIME
We’re at about the halfway point through the month, and so far Augustus has come across a variety of things: Missing research, certain fellow professors or research assistants acting weird, his demon husband noticing someone calling from the material plane to the unstudied void beyond planar space. A helpful summary of the things you’ve learned so far can be seen below the cut. Totally optionally (i.e., if you’re caught up and feel like it) feel free to discuss in the comments what you think might be going on based on information you have so far–and what you think Augustus might start to suspect because of it. No turn-in deadline on this, it’s just a casual midway point chat if people feel like doing it!

[Please read the instruction post before commenting]

One way or another, he was going to be pushing his professional boundaries with his research assistant, but it was so hard to decide which act of boundary-pushing to do. Augustus supposed that he should pick the more lucrative option—so it came down to whether following Yujin or slipping into their empty office would net him more information.

Well—ultimately, whatever Yujin and Feather talked about, he was supposed to get all the details anyway. He could always quiz Feather later and see if Yujin had left anything out. However, he couldn’t easily guarantee finding another good time to check out Yujin’s room without arousing any suspicion. So better to do this one now; if he were fast enough about it, he still might be able to eavesdrop on the tail end of the conversation.

Not if he wasted any more time though; he produced his keys quickly, unlocking Yujin’s door and slipping inside.

Augustus’s first impression of Yujin’s study room, now that he looked around it, was messy. It wasn’t terrible—he hadn’t been much better at that age, and for all he had a several-year-long gap in his memory, he remembered both before and after it fairly well. But Yujin was clearly too busy to bother to keep everything nicely organized in this room, and it showed. It didn’t read to Augustus as if they’d been throwing things around or any similar frenetic activity; there were just too many mugs and plates, too many stacks of paper, crumpled pages that had missed the garbage can.

These he checked first, in case Yujin were disposing of some kind of evidence, but they seemed to be notes on Yujin’s own research, which was primarily about the summoning of human spirits who had moved onto the realm of the dead. It was a very popular field of Conjuration research as it both allowed for the possibility of the permanent movement between planar realms based on certain statuses of being, and also the possibility that the things which returned were not human spirits at all and merely were very good at pretending to be them. But the crumpled garbage papers were half-finished pages on what was clearly their current paper that they were hoping to have published, so Augustus carefully re-crumpled them and deposited them, wincing, outside the garbage bin where he’d found them.

Next, he checked their desk drawers. The first few turned up nothing notable—snack stashes, papers, writing supplies, and so on—but the main center drawer gave him pause. There were magical materials here; spools of copper wire, chunks of quartz, sticks of charcoal and chalk, bundles of herbs. That wasn’t theoretically unusual for a research assistant to have access to. However, since the research assistants didn’t have individual workrooms, they had a public workroom that they shared, with materials stocked in it by the university itself. They shouldn’t be taking it out of the workroom, as their study rooms were nowhere near as well warded. Augustus wouldn’t attempt most practical spells in his office, and that was still better set up than an assistant’s study room. 

  Augustus made note of the materials he found there in case he could cross-reference them for some intended purpose, and shut the drawer carefully again. It jammed a little, so he reached further back and found that, in the gap between the drawer to its right and the back of the desk, a book had been placed. It was invisible when he’d opened those drawers, but it was accessible from this one, and must have shifted as he’d examined the materials.

Very carefully, he extracted the book … only to find that it was one of his: the book about ghosts and possessions from the perspective of material-vs-spiritual analysis. He frowned, putting it down, and began a more thorough investigation of the room.

It made sense for Yujin to have a copy of this, but he was very sure it was his copy; he knew that scratch along the back cover where he’d carelessly left a knife on it a year or two back. It made sense for Yujin to have wanted to borrow it, though why they wouldn’t just ask, he had no idea. If the rest of the books were here, too—

They weren’t, though. Augustus checked under rugs, under chair cushions, behind the rest of the drawers, checked for loose floorboards, and of course searched the shelves. There was only this single book here out of all his missing research. 

Why had so many books been stolen, yet Yujin only had one? Had Yujin taken all of them and somehow since got rid of them, but had decided to keep this one? Had someone planted this here to frame Yujin? Or had Yujin borrowed (or stolen) just this one coincidentally and were worried they were going to be blamed for all the others going missing as well?

Whatever the reason, nothing else seemed out of place or unusual here, minus all the snacks and dishes implying that Yujin’s been surprisingly hungry lately. They were a young adult, though, and he remembered how he‘d eaten in his early twenties. 

Augustus knew he should head out now if he wanted any chance of overhearing the end of Yujin’s conversation. But the real question was: Should he take his stolen book back with him to quietly return it to his shelf, or to confront Yujin with it? Alternatively, should he leave it here? And if he left it here, should he slip it back into its hiding place make it look like nobody had been here, or should he leave it out on the desk to really fuck with Yujin? Or— 

Well. The opportunities were endless.

[What should Augustus do? Comment with details.]

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