A wall of indifference is the hardest to break down," Ronan mused, swirling the dark liquid in his coffee cup. They were back in the quiet corner of the same coffee house as before, the air thick with the smell of roasting beans. "But every wall is held up by pillars. We just need to find them."
They split up. The plan was to attack the problem from two different timelines: Ronan would tackle the present, Liam, the past.
Ronan spent the afternoon in the smoke-filled halls of the Coppersmith's Gambit, a tavern frequented by off-duty Guardians and city officials. He didn't ask direct questions. He played cards, bought drinks, and listened. He felt the [Probability Currents] swirling around the gossip, the faint threads of luck and misfortune. He heard whispers of Kordo, the guard from the estate. A man drowning in gambling debts who had, three days ago, suddenly paid off his most aggressive creditor.
With a target in sight, Ronan made a subtle move. He found Kordo's creditor, a hulking man named Silas, boasting about his winnings. As Silas threw his dice for a new game, Ronan, standing a few feet away, gently focused his will. [Fate's Knot]. He didn't guarantee a specific outcome, he just… nudged. The dice tumbled, wobbled, and settled on a catastrophic failure. Silas's boastful roar turned into a groan of disbelief. A few minutes later, having lost a significant sum, his mood was sour. It was then that Ronan casually approached him, offering to buy him a drink to soothe the sting of "bad luck." It didn't take long for the disgruntled Silas to complain about how his luck had turned, and how he wished he had more clients like that guard Kordo, who just yesterday had paid his entire debt in crisp, new banknotes.
Meanwhile, Liam descended into the silence of the city's Public Atheneum. Unlike the Great Observatory, this archive was open, but it was a labyrinth of forgotten knowledge. He wasn't looking for a specific book, but an absence. A pattern. He spent hours poring over the municipal records for the Central Pumping Station disaster.
He found the original incident report, a thick tome bound in dark leather. But as he turned the pages, he noticed something was wrong. Certain pages were newer than the others, the paper a slightly different shade of cream, the ink a fraction too black. He ran his fingers over the text. The official conclusion read: "Cause of failure: Mechanical fatigue due to negligent maintenance by Chief Engineer Alaric Vance."
But beneath the official entry, Liam's heightened senses, attuned to the echoes of time, felt a ghost. A whisper of a different story. He focused, touching the page, trying to hear the [Temporal Echo] of the ink itself. It was too faint to form an image, but he could feel a deep, resonant wrongness. This was a forgery. A historical cover-up written over the truth. Someone, long ago, had gone to great lengths to erase what really happened.
That evening, they met back at Ronan's office. The air was heavy with unspoken revelations.
"Kordo was paid off," Ronan stated, laying a small, marked coin on the table. "The day after the burglary. He's part of a cover-up."
"So is this," Liam said, placing the research notes he had taken from the Atheneum next to the coin. "The official report on the Pumping Station disaster is a forgery. Someone rewrote the history of that event."
Ronan looked from the coin to the notes, a slow understanding dawning on his face. "This isn't about a single theft, is it?"
"No," Liam replied, his voice grim. "It's about erasing the past. And it's been happening for at least ten years."