I ultimately decide to wait to learn any of the spells in the back of the book. Right now, the Isekai SWAT Team in the building behind me needs my brand new expertise.

I’m still hoping that the crime doesn’t involve like twelve homicide-and-zombifications and I’m not about to walk back into a room with a pile of human corpses in it. I would really appreciate it if the necromancer is the kind that spawns skeletons and zombies out of thin air or empty dirt, like a unit in a real-time strategy game, rather than the kind of necromancer that starts with living people.

I haul myself up off the bench, stretch, and consider the relative merits of taking the grimoire with me versus dropping it back into Agnes’s backpack. I don’t have anywhere to put it so it’d be taking up a hand, but also, I’m probably going to want to have it for reference, if only to see what spells are available… I decide to take it with me.

I wait for Ji to come back around on his patrol route, practicing the exercise spell while I wait. At some point someone hung a curtain over the office’s entrance to replace the door that was eradicated earlier. I’ve gotten a couple more casts in when he walks around the corner of the building. “Hey there,” I say. “I got the Gift working but didn’t want to just barge in.”

Ji nods approvingly. “Commendable caution. I will lead you to Agnes. Follow.” He sweeps through the entrance and I follow.

The corpse pile is still a corpse pile, no movement to be seen. The desks are still in neat rows except for the area where they were shoved aside for the corpse pile. The desks do look like they’ve been very carefully ransacked; every pile of paper is neatly stacked and aligned despite Ji’s earlier aerodynamics, and there seem to be more piles per desk than I remember seeing when I arrived. The exception is near the front door, where Heather and Agnes sit together at a nearly-empty desk to pore over a thin scattering of documents.

Heather immediately looks up and greets me. “Whitney! You have the Gift?”

“Well,” I say, “I got through the exercises and managed to cast a small spell. So I guess I have it now?”

“Perfect. Time for introductions.” She shoves her chair back and stands up, followed by Agnes, and walks around to stand with me in the open space by the door. “Heather Townsend. Call me Heather. Bureau of Isekai Affairs Supervisory Special Agent, in command of Team Twenty-Four. I have a minor Intrusive System Gift. My build focuses on intelligence and dexterity, with a variant on the classic ranger skillset that can use its skills as if bureaucracy was a natural environment.” My eyebrows raise; that’s an impressive gimmick. She grins, seeing how impressed I am. “I wanted to work for the BIA since I was a kid, and now here I am,” she concludes, before turning to Agnes and gesturing for her to introduce herself.

Agnes bounces to her feet, which I swear shouldn’t be possible with how much metal she’s wearing. “I am named Agnes, Priestesss of Koze, She Who Follows, and Special Agent. I allow Her to intrude on our fragile reality where I can share a fragment of her Power and become inevitable.”

“I’m guessing you were responsible for the door, then, and that’s how you’re carting around all that armor?”

“It is so!” She laughs. “When violence is necessary, I am our team’s first and strongest shield. My spirit fails if I channel too much of Her, but ere that eventuality…” she shrugs expressively. “She is also gifted with destruction, as you witnessed Her visiting on the undead earlier. With great focus She may apply herself to tasks in abstraction, so I am often called upon to assist Heather with paper and pen.” She shrugs. “Koze dispatched me to this land following an accident with my home plane, and I wandered for months before finding myself in service to the Bureau and the Republic.”

“Makes sense,” I say. Agnes seems done so I turn to Ji.

Ji bows. Like, actually bows. Not very deeply, but, xianxia much? “This Special Agent of the Bureau of Isekai Affairs is Long Ji, an initiate of the Cloudy Dragon Sword Sect despite the great distance I have traveled from its halls. I recently broke through to Bone realm, allowing me to safely refine my muscles and blood. I have already refined my eyes and several internal organs that are irrelevant to those outside my sect.” He folds his hands into his sleeves. “Tactically, this Special Agent disables opponents, strikes targets of opportunity, and serves as a reserve force to be deployed at need.”

“Nice to meet you, Initiate Long Ji.” God I hope I pronounced that correctly. He doesn’t seem too unhappy, so hopefully I got it?

Liv takes the next turn, having walked out of one of the hallways in the back to drop a piece of paper on Heather’s desk. Now that I’m not looking at her from the floor I see that, in addition to the musical instrument across her back, she has a heavy rapier and an array of small knives on her belt. “Liv Thompson! Extrusive System Gift, Bard-Rogue. In fights I keep overwatch, call shots, and get crits, with some area buffing and debuffing and minor battlefield control to fill the rest of my time. More importantly,” she smiles, “I’m the girl to go to when you need a joint cased, a mark conned, a perp grilled, or a party crashed.”

“The party face,” I conclude. “Nice to meet you, please don’t use your Charisma score to suck my brain out through my ears.”

She laughs. “Don’t worry, my System, the Saga, doesn’t have one of those! It’s extremely Extrusive. One of the reasons I picked it, actually, getting licensed for mind-affecting is super unpleasant.” She holds up a hand and wiggles her fingers. “Instead, I have a load of perception, good dexterity and alacrity, and a couple skills for picking up on information and responding to it. It’s why I’m also the sneakiest person here,” she says slyly. “It’s easy to not be seen when you know exactly where everyone will be looking.”

Heather picks up the introductions again. “Bob’s not here so I’ll introduce him quickly. Bob’s another cultivator. He’s primarily our medic. He also fills in for utility since we lack a real spellcaster. For example, he’s away right now because he finally tagged our perp with a tracking art.”

“Sounds like you’ve been playing whack-a-mole with this guy for a while,” I say.

“Yes.” Heather says bluntly. “He’s a Visitor with a mid-high-end Necromancy gift. He’s got here about fifty days ago, got in deep with one of the region’s bigger gangs somehow, and is causing major problems.”

I ponder. “They probably give him boltholes everywhere, ugly. What’s his value to them? Contraband monster parts? Drugs?”

“Or something else his necromancy helps with. The Bureau of the Guard is working on the organized crime angle, we’re being direct. We tracked him to this town five days ago. The local guardsmen thought a worker at this office was a middle manager for the gang, so we got a warrant, staked out the office and the manager, and hoped they met up.” She grimaces. “Today is a market day, so that didn’t pan out. We don’t know why he chose today, but we hope that the paperwork will tell us something.”

Market day is probably their equivalent of a weekend, so that answers the question of why the office is empty. It must be a pretty messy place if they just left all their papers out over the weekend, though. Or maybe industrial espionage isn’t a problem here?

“Out of curiosity,” I ask, “Why is Isekai Affairs still involved? He sounds like he’s pretty well entrenched.”

“Our mandate includes Gifts,” Heather explains, “and we need to figure out what his can do and get it under control before it proliferates. A particularly lucky or unlucky Gift can easily destabilize a nation.”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay, a plague of mafia necromancers does sound like a horrible situation.” A thought strikes me. “Are Gifts… ‘balanced’? Or ‘fair’?”

“Not as such,” Agnes says. “But today’s Gifts are plentiful and new Gifts rarely distinguish themselves from the crowd.”

Natural selection, yep.

“The last major new Gift was the Scroll,” Heather says, “from a Visitor in the Kingdoms about twenty thousand days ago. It’s one of the Big Five now, the Bureau of the Economy loves it.”

“What about those cultivators-that-aren’t-Cultivators over in Wynforte?” Liv asks.

Ji dismisses the question with a sweep of his hand. “It replaces System and Magical Gifts for melee combatants, but it has not affected their economy or government.”

Heather brings the conversation back on topic. “What we need from you is utility magic.”

“That makes sense,” I say, nodding. “It does sound like you’re suffering from not having a spellcaster.” Honestly, given that they spent most of their flexibility on investigative capabilities and Agnes, Liv, and Heather seem to be abusing combat builds for utility, I’m understating it. A Dungeons and Dragons party with their composition could be considered crippled. “Which is where I come in,” I guess. I focus and address the group. “I’m Whitney Ismael. I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy novels and, after bouncing around in various subfields of computer science and mathematics, I ended up as a software engineer. I’m good at, uh,” I take a moment to think of how to contextualize this, “using mathematics to design automated paperwork that’s really fast and predictable, so fast that it can sort of do magic without being magic? And then organizing people to build the designed system.”

I see people nodding, looking like they’ve understood what I said, and decide that that’ll do.

Heather, seeing no questions, continues. “Our perp uses undead as lookouts and traps and likes to destroy evidence,” she says, “so long-range magic detection and analysis is an immediate need. We can’t pin him down because he has a flying undead mount. Bob and Liv have some ability to detect his traps, but we’re being too reactive.” She sighs. “We need to be able to detect and disarm his traps if we’re going to get ahead of him.”

“Detect Magic, can do,” I say, already thinking about different ways I could approach the problem with a four-hour horizon. Probably no time for basic research. Learn to read fingertip magic vibrations? Maybe there’s a spell in the back of the book? “Can I borrow some magic items to test against?”