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.

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.

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.

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.

My dog has been measuring shadows. Moon shadows and sun shadows, with wooden poles and measuring tape. You should see him operate a sextant as he determines parallax.

"You know that @Biolet's backpack isn't missing anymore. She knows where it is and she's going to get it."

"Grrrrrrr....woof!"

"What's that boy? You say there's more going on here than meets the eye?"

"Woof!"

He tells me that The Case of the Missing Backpack isn't just about the backpack. It's about the space around the backpack, and what happened when the backpack went away. For instance, last week was Groundhog's Day, which is also a cross quarter day (halfway between a solstice and an equinox). That was a day when ancient people measured the length of shadows and the position of the sunrise to realize their place in the cosmos. And on days when it was too cloudy to take measurements they pulled a groundhog out of a hat and said "Hey! Look at this!" just to keep people entertained. We couldn't find a groundhog so we measured a squirrel and a possum and a raccoon and a mole. I was surprised they let us measure them like that, but my dog says that his Psychic Service Dog Vest is like a key that will open any door.

He was also very interested in @Briar Rose's perigee experience, especially in light of the fact that the perigee isn't until May 26, and that Briar Rose must be experiencing significant time distortions. He's not sure when she is, but feels it must be related.

Back in our dorm room I catch up on my homework. When I go to bed my dog is still up, sitting on his therapeutic dream yoga bed, staring out the window, deep in thought.

My dog is always excited to have an opportunity to use his skills.

We started at the location in the cafeteria where @Biolet reported last seeing her backpack. One of my dog's abilities is sensing ancient symbols, and Mayan hieroglyphs are no exception--they leave traces in the chronosphere around them. He picked up the temporal scent immediately, and we were off to the races.

First we left the cafeteria and moved out into the commons. He spent a lot of time sniffing around the trash cans, and eventually found an old ice cream sandwich wrapper that he started licking till I pulled him away by his leash. Then he trotted down along the trail till he stopped near the Rose Garden, where the roses are all thorny twigs this time of year, but the ground is soft and he sniffed around and dug a little till I realized he was just uncovering cat poop and trying to eat it, so I pulled him off that till he ran over to a light post and sniffed it and peed on it. Then he bolted off to the edge of the woods, and sniffed at some ferns and tree trunks and scratched around with his paw and then peed some more.

"Woof!"

He felt he had all the data he needed for now. We went back to our dorm room and he started making one of those visual displays on the wall where you tack up pictures and maps and connect everything with pieces of yarn showing the connections between things. Then we ran out of thumbtacks, so I'm off to the store to get some more.

It's so great to see him excited about something again. The game is afoot! Or apaw at least.

First it was @Kevin, the Nicest Dog in the World. Now my dog has to contend with Misty, the Dog with a Human Voice.

Kevin can talk too, but he's got the whole "nicest dog in the world" thing going on along with it. Misty just talks. And talks, and talks. Students are still crazy for it, stopping her in the halls or on the school grounds and asking for her opinion on things like the Reality Accident or the temporal refugee crisis. Misty doesn't really seem to know much about them, but boy can she talk.

I'm sure my dog feels like he's being ignored. There's no way you'd know the extent of his power just by looking at him. Sure, he's got his Psychic Service Dog vest that he wears around, but today he didn't even want to put it on. Maybe I teased him too much with the "Lord Sweater Vest" thing.

My dog's in a funk. He's overthinking the whole "New Year's" thing and being really self-critical about his life choices.

We saw @Kevin, the Nicest Dog in the World, at the New Year's party. Kevin was doing his "can can" dance where he gets up on his hind legs and does little kicks and the crowd goes wild. My dog just moped and walked home with his tail between his legs.

When you've seen the kinds of things my dog has seen, it's hard to be "on" all the time. But he's getting kind of obsessed about Kevin. He says that Dog Heaven is crooked, and you can pay off the Lottery Reincarnation Board for a good life--getting born into a AKC accredited breed with rich owners, all the advantages--but you get better points in this life if you start without it.

That doesn't seem to console him though. I think it's just sour grapes, but I know better than to say anything. We just sit there, staring off into space.

My dog has an arch-rival, and it's Kevin, the Nicest Dog in the World.

We're on a walk and my dog suddenly stands stock still.

"What is it boy?"

"Grrrrr..."

Kevin is up ahead with a small crowd around him, oooing and awwwing and petting his head.

For all his numerous psychic abilities, my dog can't make people like him like that. Something about him makes people's hackles rise. Not a great trait for a Psychic Service Dog.

We go home and he reads magazines for the rest of the day.

My dog has been barking at the robots. They roll around in a herky-jerky way, spitting and hissing out steam. He barks at the vacuum too, which is a weird thing for a clairvoyant to do.

The pneumatic robots are installing the gas lights and the bunting in front of the administration building:

"What's the matter boy?"

"Woof!"

"You want us to turn around?"

"Woof!"

"And dive behind that dumpster?"

"Woof! Woof!"

The gas explosion is minor, but pieces of steam-driven robots are flung for a hundred yards. Other robots swoop in and sweep them up with their built-in brooms into their built-in dust bins. I wish they spent more time cleaning up the raw sewage in the streets, or inoculating students for cholera, typhus, influenza, and malaria. Victorian Christmas is messy.