1. Beyond the Veil

Case# 417-6.84-[US.10024]

The Detective’s Investigation – September 2024
Detective Carter stands at the corner of West 81st Street and Amsterdam Avenue, scowling up at a cloudburst that seems to mock him. It’s past midnight and rain falls in cold sheets behind him – only behind him. In front of the detective, the pavement is completely dry. Carter takes a few slow steps forward, crossing the invisible line where rainfall stops abruptly between the two streets. He reaches a calloused hand out into the empty air: wet, frigid droplets pelt his fingertips on one side, while the other side remains eerily rain-free.

Carter has seen bizarre crime scenes in his 20 years on the force, but nothing like this perfect weather boundary. The sharp divide between wet and dry asphalt is so precise that a parked taxi is drenched on its back half and bone-dry at the hood. “This has got to be a prank… or some faulty sewer steam messing with the air currents,” he mutters, squatting down to inspect the line on the ground. His skepticism is instinctive – magic and miracles don’t land in a police report – so there must be a scientific explanation. He snaps a few photos on his phone, making sure to capture the exact line where rain meets dry concrete, and taps out a message to a friend at the meteorology unit asking if any freak weather inversions were reported tonight.

Despite his gruff disbelief in the supernatural, Detective Carter trusts evidence, and something here is off. He notices that no wind disturbs the rain’s strange cutoff; the downpour falls dead straight as if held back by an unseen wall. There are no subway grates or heat vents at this curb that might cause a localized updraft. Carter runs his fingers along the brick facade of a nearby building at the border – it’s cool to the touch, no heat differentials. “Hmph.” He scratches the stubble on his chin, perplexed. For all his pragmatism, the veteran detective feels a prickling at the back of his neck, the kind he gets when a crime scene hides a threat he can’t see. But then, for no apparent reason, the rainline collapses, and the drops resume their normal path.

In the morning, Carter, still bothered by what he had observed, decides to visit the bodega owner across the street who might have witnessed the event. The man calls Manny from the back, who was on duty that night. Manny insists he saw a flash of blue light at the corner just as the rainline appeared and didn’t want to get involved with the supernatural as he kisses the cross on his necklace before scurrying back.

Blue light? Lightning? That detail doesn’t fit any ordinary explanation and deepens the detective’s frown. He spends the day chasing down CCTV footage from other nearby shops and buildings. Sure enough, late-night video shows a blurry figure in a dark hooded jacket standing exactly at the rain border moments before it formed. The person then looks around, and walks away calmly toward the Hudson, and as soon as he is gone, the rain resumes its natural path across the street. Carter pauses the video on the stranger’s face, but the angle is poor – all he sees is a partial profile illuminated by a flicker of bluish light. It’s not much, but it’s the first real lead. Whoever that is, he was at the epicenter.

By noon, Carter’s desk is covered in city maps, each marked with an X at the site of unexplained weather incidents. He connects dots and finds they cluster around the Upper West Side. One incident per week for the last month: a sudden, gust-free, unnatural stillness in Central Park, a lightning bolt from a cloudless sky over a brownstone on 83rd, and now this rain anomaly.

Each report is unexplained and each time witnesses mention a lone figure nearby. Carter circles an address that keeps popping up in his witness interviews: an old apartment building on West 82nd – the building happens to be on the same block as three of the incidents. “Novaire…” he reads the tenant’s name aloud from the lease records, the same name a nervous super gave him when asked if anyone strange lived there. That prickling on his neck returns. Just a man, a weirdly lucky man messing with the weather… There’s got to be a rational angle, he tells himself. Still, Carter loads his pistol with a fresh clip before heading out that evening to check Apartment 7B at Novaire’s address.

Across the city, another man had stared into the same storm—though through a very different lens.

The Academic’s Investigation

Professor Adrian Sloane adjusts his rain-speckled glasses as he steps around a puddle on the Columbia University campus, entirely preoccupied with the impossibility he witnessed. Last night, he had been gazing out his office window in the History Department when he noticed rainfall pounding one half of the quad while the other half stayed perfectly dry under clear skies. It reminded him of an old myth – Odin’s weather spell that protected only the god’s chosen warriors – except this was no legend. It happened right there on Broadway and 116th, visible from his window. Adrian’s heart had leapt at the sight. After years poring over musty books on mythology and quantum theory, he finally saw a real glitch in reality with his own eyes. “No one at the university would ever believe me,” he murmurs with a wry smile, recalling how the rainline vanished the instant he ran outside to investigate. It was as if whoever or whatever caused it didn’t want an audience.

Sloane isn’t a detective or a meteorologist – he’s a scholar. Ever since he was a child, Adrian would be fascinated with stories, reports, or even his own experience with things that should be impossible – a book on his shelf that he distinctly remembered leaving on the table, a brief deja-vu where the world around him lagged half a second. These distortions were minor, but he noticed them. And now the distortions are getting stronger, more deliberate. Standing under the campus archway, umbrella in hand, Adrian feels a subtle tug in the air, like two magnets pulling at each other. Someone is tampering with the fabric of the world, he thinks excitedly. The crisp line in the rain last night was the latest and most obvious sign. “It’s precise… controlled,” he whispers, marveling at the idea. No natural phenomenon could produce such a clean division of weather – which means someone did it. And if someone can manipulate reality like that, Adrian needs to find them.

He spends the next day in the library, combing through obscure references on weather magic, reality warps, and historical miracles. His fingers skim over a medieval chronicle describing a town spared by plague due to a wizard’s dome of protection, and a sticky note in the margin (left by Adrian’s younger self) reads: physical proof unknown. Adrian chuckles under his breath at how skeptical he used to be. Now, with increasing evidence of modern reality shifts, he scribbles new notes feverishly. Each anomaly in the city – time glitches, localized storms, gravity lapses – might be connected. He cross-references news clippings and finds a pattern centered around the Upper West Side, much like Detective Carter has, though Adrian’s approach is more… esoteric. One article mentions an “unusually sudden clearing of clouds” above a particular apartment building. Another report from a neighborhood forum talks about residents feeling a “strange pressure in the air” around West 82nd Street. Adrian underlines that street name in red. His research also uncovers an old map of Manhattan with ley lines – invisible mystical energy currents – one of which runs right under the Upper West Side. Coincidence or not, Professor Sloane takes it as the next clue.

That evening, Adrian Sloane ventures out with a leather satchel slung over his shoulder, containing two ancient talismans and a printout of the anomalous events map he pieced together. The rain has stopped, leaving the city glistening. He follows an intuitive trail, a gut feeling sharpened by… something. At each street corner in the Upper West Side, he pauses and closes his eyes, trying to feel the subtle vibrations of reality. At 79th – nothing. 80th – a faint buzz in his mind. By West 82nd, the air practically hums around him. Adrian’s breath catches: the sensation is strongest here, undeniable that he’s near the epicenter of the disturbances. As he steps closer to a particular old apartment building, one with a rusted fire escape and ivy crawling up the facade, the streetlights above him flicker. Unusual energy saturates the atmosphere. Sloane places a palm against the building’s front door and feels a slight warmth, as if the bricks themselves remember the reality shifts that took place inside. “This is the place,” he says under his breath, heart pounding with a mix of fear and anticipation. Whoever lives here – Novaire, according to the mailbox – might hold the key to understanding his own intuition.

The Confrontation

Detective Carter arrives at the apartment building just as Professor Sloane is deliberating how to get in. Carter, ever pragmatic, gained the building superintendent’s trust, he wasn’t on the force anymore, but he’s convincing enough to have been lent a spare key to 7B. He notes the bespectacled man loitering by the entrance and narrows his eyes. “Adrian, what are you doing here?” Carter asks gruffly. Adrian, caught off guard by the sight of the man that helped him out a few times, a friend even. While tracing his fingers over a carved doorframe sigil he thought might be magical, stammers, “Oh! I, uh— I’m here to see a friend.” The detective isn’t convinced – Sloane isn’t exactly the type that drops in for a late visit, what with the stack of old books peeking from his bag and that anxious expression. Carter grunts, “This friend wouldn’t happen to be named Novaire, would he?”

Adrian straightens, clutching his umbrella. There’s no use fibbing; he nods cautiously. In that moment, both men realize they’re on the same hunt, though neither fully understands the other’s motives. With a silent agreement (and a fair bit of mutual suspicion), the unlikely pair head up the creaking stairs together toward Novaire’s unit. Carter moves with a seasoned detective’s confidence, one hand near his holster, while Sloane follows, heart thumping, mentally rehearsing a calming charm in case things get hairy. The hallway of the 7th floor is dim, lit only by a single flickering sconce. At apartment 7B’s door, Carter pauses to listen. Inside, there’s a frantic shuffling sound and a muffled curse. He’s heard that kind of noise before – it’s the sound of a suspect about to rabbit.

Adrian barely opens his mouth before Carter slides the key in and shoulders the door open. They find Novaire in the center of a modest living room filled with overflowing bookshelves and scribbled notes plastered on the walls. He looks up in alarm, eyes sunken with exhaustion. Novaire’s shirt is untucked, his hair disheveled. A faint blue glow crackles from the object at his fingertips. Adrian’s eyes widen at the raw magic energy in the air – it’s the same frequency he’s been sensing, now intense and concentrated. “Stop! Don’t move!” Carter barks, training his gun on the disheveled man, though his mind is reeling at the sight of literal sparks of light dancing in the air.

“Blue light. Same as Manny’s story, same as the CCTV footage. Carter’s gut clenched—this wasn’t a coincidence.” For a split second, Novaire’s form flickers and blurs, as if he’s about to vanish into thin air. A swirling halo of blue light begins to coil around him. Sloane screams in excitement: “Is he… is he’s attempting to teleport?”

No, you don’t!” Carter growls, stepping forward, torn between tackling Novaire or shielding his eyes from the blinding light filling the room.”

Adrian, on the other hand, is transfixed, the academic in him dying to see it succeed, but he knows he shouldn’t.

“He’s too weak… he can’t maintain it,” Adrian realizes aloud, shouting over the crackling sound, his scholarly mind recognizing the telltale signs of fatigue. Novaire’s face twists in pain and concentration, sweat streaming down his temples. The light around him sputters chaotic. In a final flash, the energy collapses with a static pop, and Novaire drops to the floor, unconscious, before he can disappear.

For a moment, the only sound is all three men’s heavy breathing – Novaire’s ragged and shallow, Adrian’s rapid with excitement, and Detective Carter’s stunned into a rare silence. Carter’s gun is still raised, his heart hammering. He just watched a man nearly wink out of existence like a damn ghost.

“What just…” he mutters, lowering the firearm slowly. The detective’s rational mind races for an explanation. “Projectors? A trick of the light? But no… no tech he knew could make a man flicker like that.”

Across from him, Professor Sloane kneels beside the collapsed Novaire, checking his pulse and the dilation of his pupils like a practiced medic. Adrian’s hands are trembling, not with fear but with awe. This is it, he thinks. This is the person who’s been rewriting reality. And right now, that person is utterly spent, lying at their feet, powerless.

Novaire, pale and barely conscious. His lips move as he tries to speak, but only a hoarse whisper comes out: “I… didn’t… mean… to…” His fingers twitch toward the object in his palm before his eyes roll back in exhaustion.

Carter exhales, lowering his gun, but his eyes wide open. He and Sloane exchange a look— half disbelief, half grim understanding. This wasn’t over. Not even close.

In the hush of that Upper West Side apartment, with reality itself seemingly torn open and now sealed shut again, the gruff skeptic and the learned academic find themselves unexpectedly united.

Both men stand at the threshold of a new chapter – one that will demand they question everything they know about their city, and about the very nature of what is possible.

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Curious? Find companion pieces, further exploration, chronology, and field notes in the Behind the Frame section, or consult the Table of Contents.