It is my dog's custom never to reveal his findings in full until he has completely placed all of the pieces of the puzzle together perfectly. Frankly, the entire case still seemed perfectly incomprehensible to me, and I will recount the various facts involved for ease in the reader's understanding of this most singular study in crime.

First, there was the missing backpack, accidentally called home through a highly expensive teleportation call from the Hive. There were many measurements taken by my dog and I in the vicinity of the incident, followed by a short journey into the Coffee Secrets of @Jessica Moon, and finally the invasion of a swarm of rather large wasps on campus, culminating in the tragic loss of Tanglewood Dorm into a sink hole.

While I could make no sense of such a seemingly unconnected series of strange circumstances, my dog was at ease, resting on his therapeutic dream yoga bed. When I suggested a walk to help clear our senses, he let me know he was expecting a package that would arrive at any minute.

"Knock knock knock"

My dog raised an eyebrow, asking me to answer the door.

It was a large envelope, addressed to my dog, sent by Dimensional Express. I signed for it and laid it on his bed. Deftly he held it down with one paw and tore it open with his powerful canines.

Inside was a note, addressed to my dog. It was written in Waggle Dance script, the fine strokes of the combs and hairs on the hind legs being dipped in a special ultra-violet ink, which then sketch out the various moves of the dance which make up the Bee language. I could see that it was signed by Hive Queen 23594Xd, which was in fact @Biolet's mother.

I will reproduce it here in its entirety:

* * * * * * * * *
Dear Sir,

It is with the deepest and most sincere gratitude that I write you today. Where I felt there was no way forward, no light in the darkness of my situation, you have given me hope of a second chance, so that I may undo what has been done and make things right again, for both our worlds.

Though it astounds me how you knew such things that were only known to myself and no others, all the facts you presented in your letter to me were absolutely correct. The unnatural siphoning off of riches from the Hive, the offer by the Wasps that I was unable to refuse, and the methods I was instructed to use in which to puncture the dimensional walls between our worlds to allow the Wasps to enter it.

Your suggestion, then, that I examine the deepest, most forgotten understructures of the hive, lead me to the discovery of all of the syrupy, golden wealth that we had thought lost! Imagine! All this time our Hive has been as productive as ever, and yet we were tricked into thinking ourselves poor. This plot did indeed bear the stamp of those evil Wasps, who had used this ruse to force me into an ill-advised confederacy, and took advantage of the fact that the walls between your dimension and ours was especially thin at the very place our Hive is built.

Upon this rediscovery of our lost treasure, I have effectively bought the Hive back from the bank, and cancelled the arrangement with the Wasps. We are now a prosperous and self-sufficient hive once again, and I have made sure that the portal between our worlds is closed once more.

You have our most unwavering gratefulness, and we are forever in your debt.

HRM Hive Queen 23594Xd

* * * * * * * * *

After reading this explanation of events, all the disparate elements came perfectly in to focus. I congratulated my dog on his successful completion of such an extraordinary case, but found him somewhat more melancholy than I would have imagined.

"What's the matter boy?"

"Woof."

It seemed while matters were solved for Biolet's mother, and for the integrity of the dimensional fabric between our worlds, there was something even more sinister lurking behind these events. How did the Wasps learn that Biolet's Hive was the weak point between dimensions? Who orchestrated the siphoning off of the hive's riches? Who devised the ingenious method of wearing down the walls between the worlds? Some dark entity, pulling strings from a distance, manipulating the situation but just off stage, beyond the reach of interdimensional law. Who is this lurker in the shadows?

"Woof!"

It is @Kevin, the Nicest Dog in the World. The St. Bernard of crime.

I'm afraid my mother has gone and done something rash.

I knew she was worried about losing the Hive, that she couldn't afford to keep it up and didn't know what to do. So I forgave her if she was getting into the nectar a little too deep now and then.

But I noticed she had the smell about her all the time. That sweet, perfumey smell. At first I chalked it up to her age, and that I hadn't visited for quite awhile, and maybe she was starting to get that "Old Queen Bee" smell about her.

And then I noticed she was so heading down into the basement all the time. Sometimes making excuses about looking for something, sometimes when she thought I was asleep in my cell. So I followed her.

Down, down the winding, spiral combs, deep down into the pulsing, ultra-violet blue center of the Hive. The smell of nectar became overwhelming, like there were great pools of it. But there was also an unfamiliar sound--a thin, metallic buzzing that grew louder and louder as my journey brought me to the shocking, horrifying truth.

Wasps. Here, in the Hive. Hundreds of them.

My mother began her communicative interpretive dance--the only way we communicate with the Wasps. They gathered around her, enormous, 5 times her size, but I could just make out her symbolic dance language from my vantage point.

DIMENSIONAL SPECTRUM WEAKENED STOP PORTAL NOW COMPLETE STOP CONTINUE THROUGH THIS GATE STOP DIG HOLES STOP BURROW THOUGH TIME SPACE STOP YOU WILL FIND THE WARM LAND STOP MY DEBT IS NOW PAID STOP

The Wasps looked at each other with their enormous compound eyes, turning their heads and waving their antennae. Then they swarmed towards a large hole in the combs and began scrambling over each other, buzzing even more loudly, working their long legs and wings and pressing their bodies through the hole.

It was at that moment my mother saw me, and turned white.

We were sitting in our dorm room when my dog suddenly looked to the door, ears raised. I heard nothing, but soon enough the sound of work boots clomped down the hall and we heard a quiet knock. My dog looked at me as if it were expected, and nodded to me to allow the visitor in.

It was @Janitor Pete, the thoughtful yet not entirely socially awkward school handy man. But his regularly cool demeanor seemed somewhat shaken.

"As you know, the ground beneath the school is filled with tunnels. Maintenance tunnels, secret passages... There's the grotto underneath the administration building where the Spongiform Unimind lives, and ancient passageways to the deep deep down of the Underearth. But now there's bugs."

"Bugs?" I asked.

"Big bugs. With wings. And thoraxes and chompers and stingers. They're burrowing everywhere, hollowing out more tunnels. It's already like swiss cheese down there, but if these bugs keep at it we could see it all start to collapse."

"That's terrible!" I exclaimed. "But we're not exterminators, just a Psychic Service Dog and his trainer."

"Well, yes, that's true, but they're not just holes. They have a temporal element. Sometimes a new batch of holes show up, but they appear to be worn and old. Then they'll be gone the next day, and I'll catch some bugs in the same place just starting to dig. I'll scare them off, but find them a short time later crawling out of holes that just appeared, but should have taken them days to complete. I just can't figure it out."

My dog had been listening intently, then ran to the window and hopped up and put his paws on the window sill.

"What is it boy?" We both joined him at the window and peered out across the school grounds.

"Woof!"

Suddenly, across the commons, we saw the entirety of Tanglewood dorm shudder and sink beneath the ground. There was a cloud of dust, and then nothing but an empty space where the dorm had just been.

Janitor Pete looked on in horror.

"Woof!"

"I believe we'll take the case," I said.

Watch your step! There's a big temporal sinkhole that's opened up in the courtyard. I've put yellow caution tape around it, but until its gets filled up by the time reconstruction crew it's going to be dangerous. Please stay well away from the edge of the hole until it's fixed up, everybody!

I've been patching up little time holes for weeks. If you find one, don't let it grow! Report them immediately to the Psychic Facilities Dept. and we'll put it on our list.

Have a safe weekend, everyone.

It took a while for my mom to get around to it, but she's worried about losing the Hive.

For days she just wanted me to eat and eat and make small talk and go through my stuff and see what I wanted to keep and help her clean out the attic. But finally, one night when she had had plenty of nectar, she let me know the reason for calling me back home.

"We just can't keep everything up any more. We're underwater--it's taking more to pay off the Hive than we have. We haven't been extravagant with the building. All the combs and new cell developments were necessities at the time, but we're just not taking in enough to support it. We're going to have to sell to one of the big Apoidea conglomerates. That's why I needed to see you. We're moving out."

It was a big blow. All my life the Hive had been there. It took care of all of our needs, and seemed eternal. Even during the Doomsday Years with the Wasp cartel, the Hive never stopped producing. So to hear it wasn't something my mom could just lay her way out of was almost impossible to believe. What would she do? Where would she go? Downsize to apartments within the new multi-use structure the Apoidea was sure to put in? Move in as the resident failure at some distant relative's? Build something up in a tree?

She didn't seem to have a plan, but wasn't in a state to try and reason it out.

I have been thinking the very same thing, @CywrenPoet! About a writing group. I need somewhere to place down the details of my dog's investigation into the mysterious case of @Biolet's missing backpack, so that the facts can be recorded as they may be of interest to the general public.

As my dog's predeliction for coffee is well known, it was of exceeding good fortune that the trail would lead to @Jessica Moon's interest in Coffee Secrets. A meeting was arranged at the table that sparked Jessica's interest in coffee, and as he began to lap at the stains I saw him enter that peculiar fugue of his while enjoying the taste of his preferred beverage. On many a night I have seen him in this state, his eyes half lidded and his tongue hanging out, deep in his binge-induced intellectual revery. After many minutes of silence he was able to recount this strange tale, which I will relate here in its entirety.

Some years ago, during the clock making craze that swept the school, a group of seniors dubbed themselves The Absent Clockmakers, and they were obsessed with measuring time in the past. Without first-hand experience in the passage of time, how could they accurately gauge its movement? Did it pass at the same rate? What proof did they have? Could it be meaured?

At great expense, they acquired a chronal sample of the past, from a Dutch craftsman of somewhat shady repute. The sample was contained in a small iron chest. Upon opening it with a skeleton key (provided by the Dutchman at considerable additional cost), they immediately created an extreme low pressure time zone, creating a small temporal typhoon in this very room. Books and papers were disheveled and a small French press was overturned, resulting in the same stain my dog had been licking!

Using their notebooks, couch pillows, magazines, and small animals found in the room they were able to plug the hole before bringing the whole building down around them. After the situation was stabilized, however, they discovered that their highly accurate clocks were missing three and a half minutes! While this could lend credence to their theories, they were unwilling to tempt fate further and abandoned their interest in clocks, turning instead to a study of afterschool cartoon watching and making nachos.

This seemed to satisfy my dog immensely, and I saw the corners of his mouth turn up in that particular smile of his when he feels a solution to a mystery is at hand.

After spending some final quality time having his belly scratched by Jessica Moon, we immediately returned to our dorm room, where he assured me the final pieces of our puzzle would soon present themselves.

Hey, I'm new and would like to remain anonymous. I was wondering if someone would like to do some sort of writing group? Sorry if it sounds stupid, I just usually get my energy the best from writing. Also, I was looking into being a Mercury Messenger, but I don't really know how to sign up, so... Yeah...

Apparently, there are no incantations, concoctions, or psychically charged card tricks with enough power to reverse a time jumble of this magnitude. Believe me, I would know; I've read every resource available to me within this dimension at least 3 times (even the magic number cannot help me here). Almost everyone else here has either devolved into incomprehensible insanity or disappeared without a trace, and I had already begun to accept my dismal fate when I was interrupted by a pulsating light in the corner of my room. At first, I thought it was just another reality distortion, but the eerie voice echoing in my mind made me reconsider.

"Reach into the backpack, eyes closed, and grab the first item you touch," it commanded. Immediately, I thought back to the purple-haired child's story about @Biolet's bag and realized that this must be the same being she had described. The voice sounded slightly more exasperated, though, as if it had been continuously repeating this menial task for a very long time. I did as I was told, and pulled out
a faded book titled "Expanding Horizons." The contrast between this seemingly ordinary thing and the situation at hand was almost laughable, but the voice seemed strangely surprised at this new development. "Page 28," it finally uttered, and then the whole room exploded into a burst of light even more powerful than the first.

The force of the blast threw me to the ground, and I lost my grip on the guidebook, sending to across the floor. Once I stopped shaking, I crawled over to it and was surprised to find it open to page 28, which was titled "Temporal Troubles." The book's condescending author poked fun at my considerably dire situation, but then prescribed a triple application of thyme (apparently irony can also fuel magic). I needed to drink a pint of thyme tea, burn thyme leaves to release their aura, and rub thyme's essential oil on my temples in order to return to my proper timeline. Luckily, the potions master dematerialized a short time ago, so I was free to raid her cabinet in search of a suitable amount of thyme.

The whole time I was performing the ritual, I could almost hear the book laughing at me, which was unnerving but also strangely comforting. At the end, I blacked out and woke up with a splitting headache and "Expanding Horizons" cradled close to my chest. I was so relieved that there were no rippling distortions or jumbled thoughts that I actually shrieked, and my homecoming was met by the disgruntled protests of my rudely awakened classmates. Although I was grateful that it had transported me safely back home, I was both wearied and intrigued by this newfound handbook. I decided to learn what its other pages contained, but they were all blank when I ruffled through them; the book was apparently not ready to disclose all of its secrets quite yet.

My dog has always barked at the vacuum cleaner, but he never told me why. Now he says it's central to the issues surrounding @Biolet's backpack, as well as the anomalies being experienced by both @Briar Rose and @Klarya.

We know that Biolet's mother's call caused her backpack to teleport back to the Hive. Biolet would have been teleported too if she'd been wearing it at the time. Teleportation isn't allowed within the phone spectrum because it's unsafe. Sending that much data over a phone is like a snake swallowing a boulder--it's likely to tear the whole spectrum apart. Not to mention push your data overage charges through the roof.

The electrical interference created by vacuum cleaners could rip the universe apart too--if vacuum cleaners were the size of planets. But even at their small size they create enough of a disruption to make dogs bark. Dogs hate disruptions in spacetime. And now we've got a rip growing in ours, causing Briar Rose to get mixed up in time and things to thump around Klarya's dorm, all thanks to Biolet's mom's innocent call.

My dog is putting his formidable powers to work on solving this problem now. And when he gets this deep into a case, he's all about coffee. He seeks out the strongest, most exotic coffee he can find and laps and thinks and laps and thinks. He needs an extra special brew for this one, a secret brew. So he's going straight to @Jessica Moon.

Going back to your home town can be a mixed bag. I left the Hive because I wanted to get as far away from it as I could, not because it was a terrible place but because it was so boring. But whenever I come back I realize I kind of miss it. The warm familiar hum of the place. The combs extending in banks as far as the compound eye can see. The regularity of the hexagonal cells, the smell of fresh wax and propolis coming from the new structures. And of course the pulsing ultraviolet glow coming from everywhere.

When I was younger and getting into trouble, it seemed like we ran into a Drone around every corner, just waiting to bust us. Now I hardly see them anymore, not even at the nectar bars on every corner. There's sure a lot more of those than I remember.

But there are some parts that never seem to change. Like the wide entry ways to the inner portions, and the broad avenues that lead right to the neighborhood I'm headed for, near the center of this whole superstructure. I squeeze through the old familiar hole and into the luxurious domicile I know so well.

"Darling!"

"Hi mom. I'm home. Happy Valentine's Day."