Arms & Hammer had just opened for the day when Ambrosius and Dog-Nimona arrived. Despite not being in armor, the clerk in the foyer complied when Ambrosius said he was there on ‘official business’. She told him the workshop had gotten several orders for replicas of Ballister's sword over the last few months, but she couldn't pinpoint any exact days. It would be up to him to dig through the invoices in the back office to find the order he was looking for.

Ambrosius closed the office door after the clerk left, letting Nimona go back to human form unnoticed. It would be easier to sort through filing cabinets with thumbs, after all.

“Ugh, why are they still using paper for everything?” Nimona whined as she poked through one of the cabinets.

“Paper is cheaper?” Ambrosius offered, pulling out a thick folder from another drawer.

“Paper takes up more space! And you can't ‘search all’ paper!”

Ambrosius couldn't argue with that.

Working with actual paper was a rare experience for him. He’d worked with the mercy forms the day before, but before then it had been years since he’d even touched the stuff. Everything that’d had to do with his training as a knight had been read or written on a screen of some kind. He wondered if he’d be using it more now that he’d graduated.

“Found one!” Nimona announced after several minutes, holding up a sheet of text.

Ambrosius scanned the invoice. It was indeed an order for the right kind of sword, but…

“That's too cheap for something as detailed as the blaster-sword was.” He pointed out.

Nimona huffed and resumed paging through the folder.

“Being a sidekick wasn’t supposed to involve paper.”

“You know you can always leave if you want.”

“I don’t want.”

Ambrosius remembered the question that had been in the back of his head since he’d learned Nimona was real.

“About that… Why are you helping me?”

Nimona shrugged.

“I told you - I want to see who’s behind all this.”

“Why? So you can join them?”

“Why not?”

Ambrosius picked up a new sheaf of papers from the to-search stack on the desk.

“You know you just said that to a knight. I could turn you in for treason.”

“But you won’t!” Nimona said cheerfully, dropping another sheaf of searchable papers on top of the stack. “You want to know who’s behind this just as much as I do.”

Ambrosius wasn’t amused.

“What makes you think I won’t report you afterward?”

“Uh, the fact that The Institute hung your buddy?”

“That doesn’t make them bad. They were… just following the laws.”

“And who made those laws?”

“I don’t see what—”

“And that’s your problem - you trust them too much. You’re like their gold puppet!”

That struck a nerve with Ambrosius. Of course he trusted The Institute. The Institute was Good - he’d come to that conclusion on his own. People who disagreed were just blind to the truth. Nobody was pulling his strings.

“I’m no puppet.” he glared, slamming his sheaf of papers onto the desk, “I can think for myself.”

Nimona turned. Her elbow knocked over the to-search stack.

“That’s what they want you to think. That’s why they’re the ones feeding you your information.”

“The Institute is good!”

“And who told you that?!”

The handle to the office door rattled briefly. In an instant, Ambrosius’s foot shot out and kicked Nimona’s feet out from under her, and she fell out of sight behind the desk just as the door opened.

“Everything okay in here?” The clerk asked, glancing around the small room. “Is someone bothering you?”

Ambrosius put on a fake smile and waved a sheaf of papers.

“All good! Just talking to someone on speakerphone.” He hoped the clerk wouldn’t notice his phone was nowhere to be seen.

“Okay…” The clerk left, closing the door behind her.

Ambrosius gave a sigh of relief. He glanced down at Nimona, expecting to see a furry ball of irritation. Instead, she looked remarkably chill, reading through one of the papers that had fallen on the floor.

“Hey… I think I found it!”

She held the paper out excitedly. Ambrosius’s eyes skimmed over it. Sure enough, the invoice listed a hollow sword capable of disassembly, as well as the extra costs of being a top-tier replica. It had been sold to a ‘MB’, and delivered to an address across town.

Ambrosius stared at the name on the paper. MB - was this the person who was responsible for his grief? Or were they just another pawn in this game?

“We should take this to the justice department.” Ambrosius said quickly, “Tell them what we’ve found. They can take care of it from here.”

Nimona smirked.

“What are you going to tell them? That you got here by breaking into the archives?”

Ambrosius froze. Oh no. Nimona was going to use that to blackmail him from here on out, wasn’t she? He knew sneaking in had been a bad idea - he should have just let The Institute handle everything. They would have figured it out themselves!

Before he could react, Nimona’s foot slammed into his ankles, toppling him to the floor next to her. She gave him a sly grin.

“Looks like you’re stuck with me!”

~ ~ ~

“Well, that’s disappointing.” Nimona stated flatly.

She and Ambrosius stood in front of the husk of a small burned-out building. The sky had just started to drizzle, washing bits of ash off the charred beams and twisted metal piled in heaps in the lot. The fire had been recent - this was the first rain since it had burned.

Ambrosius tugged his hood forward to cover his face more as the rain picked up. Then he noticed someone entering a nearby office.

“Hey, what happened here?” he called and pointed to the remains of the burnt building.

The person barely paused to look at him as he approached.

“Fire. Obviously.”

“Yeah, but- when? What happened?”

“Right before the knighting. Everyone inside died. Tragic.” The person closed the door in his face.

The pink dog next to Ambrosius piped up.

“Hey, maybe take the hood off next time. You look shady.”

Ambrosius ignored the advice and went back to the ruins, stepping over the caution tape strung around it. This was too convenient. Someone had to have been covering their tracks. Usually he’d leave this to the experts, but now he didn’t have that luxury. He’d need to do all the heavy lifting alone. Alone… Before all this, he’d always had Bal or his parents backing him up. Now he was alone…

His hands shook as he sifted through a pile of wet ash. He’d never planned for this. Being alone… He’d found out young that everyone always wanted some favor or the other in return for being his friend - Ballister had been the only person who’d asked nothing in return. And now the man was gone, leaving him alone.

Nimona’s voice broke in.

“What… exactly are you looking for?”

“I don’t know. Something… Anything…” He wasn’t going to give up just yet. Gloreth help him, he was going to get to the bottom of this. “This place was a business - there was a lobby right here. Then there had to have been an office over here. Maybe…” he shoved a blackened beam out of his way, “Maybe there’s a clue somewhere.”

Nimona pawed at a pile of rubble.

“A clue to what? You heard the guy; the perps are dead.”

“There has to be someone else - if Bal didn’t trigger the sword to go off, somebody else must have done it remotely. And if the fire was before the knighting, they had to keep the sword somewhere else till then.”

“Maybe they kept it at someone's house?”

“Would YOU keep an unstable weapon like that in your house?”

“Yeah?”

“Well MOST people wouldn't. They had to have had a hideout or something. Maybe there’s… I don’t know, an address tag or something in here.”

Nimona squinted, thinking.

“Well it's not like we have any other leads.” She joined the search.

There wasn’t much to find - only hardware from the building and some charred electronics hadn’t burned or melted from the heat. Then Nimona found something else - a warped, metal filing cabinet buried in rubble.

Ambrosius dug it free and yanked one of the bent drawers open. Ash. He tried the next drawer. More ash. The bottom drawer had ash too, but there was something else buried underneath it all…

He reached in and pulled out a metal key with a tag hanging from it. The plastic tag had warped and bubbled from heat, but the label on it was still readable.

“Knightly Storage, Unit 531.” he read aloud.

“A clue?”

Ambrosius smiled as he pocketed the key. “It’s worth checking out!”