“Miss Nebulo! I am so happy to see you! I swear, weird things were happening!”

  “Calm down, Heldion. You’re pale like a sheet. It looks like you saw a ghost. Breathe in and out, Buddy”

  I arrived at the restaurant as soon as the night watcher’s shift ended. He had submitted dozens of reports throughout the night about strange occurrences and suspicious activities. I trusted in my employees and especially in this one. Heldion used to be a youth who was often around the restaurant before he grew up and earned himself the position of night watcher at the main location.

  He was a lad who had known me when I still wore the Glown costume–Like many of the current employees, as a matter of fact. If I didn’t believe them to be trustworthy, I wouldn’t be paying them.

  “Miss Nebulo… It’s just that… I will probably sound crazy!”

  “I read all of the reports you sent, I know some of the details already–Even if your typing was a bit all over the place”

  “S-Sorry, I was a bit panicked…”

  “It’s fine. Let me see the S.C”

  S.C was another of Leton’s acronyms. It just meant ‘Security Computer’ and was the standard term he would attach to computers that were not only attached to a specific structure, but that were intended to perform protective duties, such as surveillance, or sometimes even more direct means of defence.

  Naturally, the S.Cs installed in our restaurants were nearly the best of the best available, only lacking certain capabilities which Leton had deemed a bit too much for just protecting a restaurant. Nonetheless, a night watcher’s main tool of work was a rather powerful machine, so only the most trustworthy could be left to handle them when no one else was around.

  Heldion led the way to the security office–Which was tucked away from the rest of the restaurant, pretty much impossible for someone other than an employee in the know to find or wander into. The door to it always needed to be locked, as well.

  On the way there, I looked around to try to spot some of the anomalies I had read about, but nothing was to be seen.

  The security office was actually a large room, featuring a wide, tall window which appeared as a mirror on the other side–It was mostly intended for the day watcher to keep an eye on the activities taking place inside the main dining area… The S.C was much similar to a big, square box in its shape, requiring quite a lot of parts on the inside to fulfil its functions.

  The main one was naturally to use the cameras, they were the backbone of the security system and had a whole slew of functions to deal with all sorts of issues and the like.

  I took a seat in front of the computer. Heldion looked over my shoulder like he was scared that something was going to crawl out of the screen.

  “Let’s check what the camera recorded during the night…”

  One thing they did was store what they saw, so if, for example, a thief was caught on the feed, it could be shown to authorities to prove that the crime had indeed happened, and allow for the culprit to be served the appropriate punishment in a timely manner.

  The computer couldn’t store an endless amount of ‘data’ as Leton would call it, so the recorded videos would have to be extracted and put on tape at the end of every week… The computer could easily handle a full month of footage, but I told my watchers otherwise so that they wouldn’t slack on it. The tapes were all kept in a secure compartment. Only the night watchers and I had a key to open.

  My fingers dexterously moved across the keyboard–It felt like I had done this my whole life.

  “...Huh”

  “W-What is the matter, Miss Nebulo?”

  “The footage was erased”

  “What? I swear I didn’t do it!”

  “Relax, Heldion. You’re way too on edge about this… Have you been having trouble with your catfolk girlfriend?”

  “Well…”

  “Oh? Did I hit the nail on the head? I knew it wasn’t like you to start freaking out like this. What happened? I thought you too were doing great”

  “We were doing great, until… Ah, I feel quite embarrassed talking about it now, but a new neighbour moved in next door, and it’s an antelopefolk woman who is rather… Huh… Let’s just say she has a tendency to vastly underestimate what a person’s personal space is–But it’s fine! My girlfriend is just a little upset, but I am doing my best to avoid the neighbour, even if she seems to do her best to run into me”

  “Well, aren’t you quite popular with the beastfolks, Heldion?”

  As I spoke, I did a few things on the computer until I got access to the logs, which documented basically everything happening on the computer, including the deletions.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Looks like our deleter doesn’t know too much about how computers work. They figured out how to remove the footage, but also not really… I can get it back right about… Now”

  I rubbed my chin. One thing we twins shared was a certain sense of paranoia, which was often unfounded, but that always came in handy at times like this. Manoeuvres like deleting footage might appear to be something anyone could do as long as they had access to the computer, but it couldn’t be further from the truth.

  To actually delete something, you needed to go through a second step, which required a password to be typed down… Technically speaking, this meant that the culprit could indeed be Heldion, but by just being logical for a second, it would make no sense for him to send report after report during his shift, only to present nothing.

  I knew him quite well. He wasn’t the sort to pull a prank like this, and by now, he should have a clue about how the computer functioned as a whole. He knew very well that there were things he didn’t have access to.

  Anyway… It couldn’t even physically be him. The time of the deletions was indicated. They happened while he and I were outside the restaurant. It seemed like someone had managed to hook themselves onto the structure’s computer and attempted to subsequently erase evidence of something.

  Amateurs.

  The recovered videos showed exactly what Heldion had described in the reports I had received–First of all, someone wearing a mask and dressed in black had been roaming around the restaurant, clearly trying to find a way in, only to end up walking away.

  This alone wouldn’t have been worth a report, but the mask the person had been wearing was one that was quite well-known around here. For several years now, there had been reports of a dark figure wearing a white, cracked mask prowling the city, stalking, and watching people from afar, both at night and during the day.

  The figure was suspected to be responsible for several crimes, which definitely made this break-in attempt worth a report, both to the boss, also known as me, and the authorities.

  “You should have contacted the city guards, Heldion. You know you can do this from here, right?”

  “Yes… But I wasn’t sure if this was really the guy or just someone wearing a similar mask… There have been some copycats trying to use the mask to scare or intimidate people lately, so…”

  “Next time, just have the guards show up. It isn’t your problem if a burglar was feeling cute and decided to dress up like the creeper”

  I didn’t say it, but this had definitely been the guy in person. I had spotted him a few times. He seemed to quite like watching me, but whenever I tried to ‘talk’ to him, he would just run away like a coward. It certainly put a dent into the urban legend when he escaped the moment someone actually tried confronting him…

  In any case, the bizarre stuff did not stop here, as though reacting to the attempted intrusion, the entertainment automatons had begun acting abnormally. They typically walked around during the night. The reason was to make sure their joints got movements and wouldn’t just lock due to inactivity–Which wasn’t a great reason, frankly, but again, Leton was paranoid like me, so he had given them this ability at night just to make sure.

  Besides, there was actually a better reason why they should be allowed to roam, and it was to check for malfunctions before the restaurants opened the next day. Part of Heldion’s job as a night watcher was to monitor the robots, not just make sure they didn’t knock things over or wander into the wrong places, but mostly to see if they were working as intended.

  Heldion had already notified about small issues in the past, which allowed for the restaurant to open without any risk of an accident, as the bots could be fixed up efficiently every morning.

  Since Heldion had been doing this job for a long while now, he was proficient in noticing small issues and kinks in the MI of the machines–Mi standing for ‘Mechanical Intelligence’.

  Each entertainer had their own customised MI, in the main restaurant, in particular, Leton had spent a lot of time refining them, and indeed, they definitely weren’t meant to start suddenly staring at the cameras, or remove their own face to reveal their machine skulls underneath… Neither were they supposed to start garbling utter nonsense while their mechanical eyes started glowing blood-red.

  I’ll have to check them out…

  “I don’t know what happened with them, but after a while, they returned to normal until my shift ended, and their roaming period concluded. They went back to their normal positions without any issue”

  Considering the madness of what had happened, it was indeed odd that they would just go back to behaving as intended, but this wasn’t actually the last odd thing which had been caught on camera.

  “Oh… Would you look at that…”

  I chuckled as I saw someone with a hood covering their face in the recording. By the build, I could tell that this was probably a man. He approached the back of the restaurant and, with much difficulty, pierced several thin holes in the wall until he found what he was looking for. Namely, a wire… He hooked an entire computer onto it, seemingly tried a bunch of things–Failed miserably, and then ended up just deleting the footage of the cameras, which he also failed at.

  The absolute dunce looked up at the camera as if trying to confirm that the recordings had been wiped, and then went away carrying the entire, heavy computer.

  Heldion hadn’t actually seen this since it had happened after his shift had ended, and he had been waiting for me outside instead of inside the office, where he would usually be until the day watcher showed up.

  “Have you ever seen this guy before, Heldion?”

  “Not at all, Miss Nebulo… He doesn’t look like a good frequentation, though”

  “Well… Thanks for the good job, Heldion. You can head back home and make your girlfriend feel less jealous. I’ll stay here until the day watcher shows up”

  “Thank you, Miss Nebulo!”

  I sat in the chair, tapping the armrest with my index finger.

  Someone tried to get into the restaurant’s computer, huh… It has to be her trying to get back at me, doesn’t it? What other lunatic would bother with such a thing? The plan itself, from what I had seen, was idiotic. Even if you could technically gain access to some things this way, you wouldn’t be able to get much at all.

  Their computer had probably been fried from being hooked up to the electrical system in such a poor fashion–I’ll have to fix the holes in the wall. I could leave them and try to bait something else, but I didn’t want a fool to mess something up with the wires. This is being directly reported to the authorities.

  …The day watcher came on time for his shift, and alongside him, many other employees showed up to get the day started. I stuck around for a little while to check on the automatons alongside the mechanists who had been taught directly by Leton, but neither I nor they found anything abnormal about them. They were working just fine without any issues.

  How bizarre… I hope they aren’t haunted or anything–Guess I’ll have to ask Maarkus to check on the robots.