I picked a door at random and started examining it. There should be some kind of bypass or other kind of manual override short of bashing the door down, what if somebody hit the area with anti-magic or dispelled the locking mechanism or something? ... Okay, I said there SHOULD be. There certainly didn't seem to be. Okay, in the middle of a wizard school, I can see why they'd think that, but really. Well, bugger. If I had to go all the way back out of the school and get replacements for a couple of my little widgets, we probably wouldn't even get back today. And Julia wouldn't be happy, she'd been complaining enough about how long things had been taking. It's my fault it took them months to find me?

Of course, there was one simple thing I could do, but it's not as much fun as being sneaky. I knocked on the door and did my best to look official.

"Yes?" a voice asked.

"Maintenance. Checking locks."

The door opened, revealing a wizard. Well, duh. He looked around, then looked down when I coughed. "Who are you?" he asked.

"Maintenance," I repeated, "We gotta check all the locks on this level. Some students have been running around with a new cantrip that reverses locks, locking professors in their offices. Hell of a lot of trouble for everybody. So we've gotta go around changing things so their cantrip won't work."

"Again? They just fixed everything last week!" the wizard exclaimed.

"Yeah, well. If you guys would stop teaching them so well, maybe they wouldn't be able to do it. Now, 'scuse me," I said, pulling my most complicated looking gadget out and peering in close to the door.

The wizard sighed and looked over my shoulder. "Is this going to take long?"

I turned my head and looked up his noes. And at him. "That depends, you been messin with unapproved changes to this thing?"

He looked shocked. "Me? I am a Professor of Temporal Anomlies, I have many more pressing things on my mind that a mundane door lock! The very idea!"

In other words, he didn't know how it worked. "Well then, that depends. How often am I going to be interrupted by stupid questions?"

The wizard snorted at me, looked offended, then stalked back to his desk, where he was seemingly playing... yes, he was playing a tiny game of golf on it. I turned back and inspected the lock, muttering under my breath and waving my gadget for effect. The actual lock mechanism looked fairly normal, this bit slides into the doorframe, etc. But there wasn't a keyhole or anything like that. Just a smooth plate on both sides. Magic, of course, I'm sure. I touched the outside one, nothing happened. Probably set to detect some kind of item, a ring or badge, or maybe just recognize people. I touched the inside one, click. I nodded to myself. Good. Required, I thought, so people wouldn't get stuck in rooms in a fire or invasion of Beasties from Another Dimension or something like that. No good way to pick it, though, without being able to mess with magic. And my magic-messing-with stuff was all out of commission.

I judged I'd taken long enough, much longer and the wizard would start to get suspicious. I made a few more waves and pokes with the gadget, then stepped back from the door. "You're all set now. 'Least till they come up with something new next week. It might be sticky the first couple times, just smack it if it is."

The wizard looked over at me, then turned back to his game of golf, lining up a shot. I'd basically left his notice, I was just some maintenance ferret, after all. I shut his door, then slid a little wedge under the end. Might be sticky the first few times. Whistling happily, I walked back toward the stairs. A cat walked past me, carrying a stack of papers. From the age and harried appearance, I'd guess an intern. He carried the papers to one of the doors, then knocked. There wasn't any answer, so he sighed and opened a flap next to the door. He put the papers in and shut the flap, then looked carefully around, eyed me until I waved at him, then darted off before somebody else could find something for him to do. Curious, I lifted the flap after he'd fled. There was a decent sized compartment back there, but it was empty. Magic again, of course. Interesting.

The down stairs let me out on the far side of the level from the door. Julia ambushed me with questions before I was even halfway around. "Well?" she asked, "Do you have your plan?"

"Well," I said, "the people who made these doors are either idiots, or don't think anything magic can ever go wrong."

"So did you find a way in or not?"

"Yes, and no. The locks are magic. And we don't have whatever the magic key is. Would have to drill through to the mechanism."

"And you're going to get to the yes part when?" she asked, sarcastically. I've been a good influence on her.

"Ah, that part. Well, there's these flaps beside the other doors. Which they use to put papers and stuff in, for when the professor's not there. "

"So...?"

"So, this is a school for wizards. They're magic. When somebody put something in them, just a bit later, they were empty."

"And this helps us how?"

"It helps us," I explained, "because the paper slots are fairly large. I could probably fit in. I guess they put packages and maybe dinners and stuff in them too sometimes."

"This is your brilliant plan? Crawl through the mail slot?" she asked, incredulous.

"Do you have a better one? You're the one in the hurry. Give me a week to case the place properly..."

She looked around, and sighed. "Okay, so where is it?"

I hadn't figured that bit out yet. There wasn't one visible. But I wasn't going to let her know that. So I walked boldly up and knocked on the door. "Yes?" a voice asked.

"That's Bombast!" Julia hissed, "He's in there!"

"Delivery, sir. Some papers for you to look at." I replied.

"Put them in the slot and leave me alone. I'm busy," Bombast's voice replied, then cut off.

The flap opened to one side of the door. It'd been disguised as a part of the wall, probably an illusion. Didn't want to spoil the style, I guess. Still, it was big enough, so I crawled in. "Wish me luck," I told her.

"But he's in there. What're you going to do?"

I winked. "One head wizard is supposed to be enough to scare me? Yeah right. I'll get the door as soon as I can."

Julia still looked nervous, but I shut the flap, locking her out. I felt a tingle run all over me, then there was a quiet pop. I fell a short distance, and landed on something that collapsed underneath me with a crash. Papers slid out from under me, and I landed on a desk. Someone was sitting behind the desk. That someone was Bombast.

"Yoiks!" I yelled, and rolled backwards off the desk.

"I told you, I'm busy! Now get out!" he yelled.

"Why?" I asked, from below the front of the desk.

"Because I'm busy! I don't want to be disturbed!"

This wasn't quite the reaction I'd expected. I stood up, and backed away enough to see him over the desk. "Mr. Bombast, it's very important that I talk to you..."

"Not now! I'm busy!"

During all this, he'd barely even looked up from the desk. Even when I landed ON his desk. Hmm. I ducked back out of his sight, and said, "Okay, going."

He just grunted, and continued working at the desk. I snuck around the side of the desk, and peeked around. He looked to be sitting normally at the desk, but...

I darted over, and he turned and saw me. "I said leave! I'm going to call security no..." "he" trailed off.

I was right, it was just another of those automatons, like at the desk. Evidently to make people think he was here when he wasn't. He didn't even put that much work into it. Probably didn't make it himself, would have been too demeaning, or something. I put the little power sphere in a bag with the other one, then took the time to look around the office.

In general, I've found rooms occupied by wizards to either be obsessively neat or cluttered nearly beyond recognition. Sometimes both at once, in different areas. The desk was covered with papers, all in neat little piles. Well, except where I'd landed. The rest of the room was similarly neat, everything sorted out in some way that surely made sense to him. Me, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. The shelves were covered with books, mixed in with skulls, candles, stuffed penguins, and all sorts of other wizardly stuff.

Julia was still waiting out in the hallway, so I slipped out into the main part of the office. There was a desk there too, with an empty chair behind it. Evidently Bombast rated a real secretary. Who, evidently, had decided to cut out for lunch. Something about the desk caught my eye, so I hopped onto the chair and looked it over. Julia wasn't going anywhere right now. Judging from the layer of dust on the desk, it'd been quite a while since Bombast's secretary had been here. Probably either fired or quit, from what I knew of Bombast. And no replacement secretary, either. Must have scared off all of the temp agencies or something. I drew a smiley face in the dust as a present to cheer Bombast up, then went to the door. It opened easily from inside, as I'd kinda expected. Lots of work to keep people out, but once they're in, they're fine.

Julia looked down at me. "What took you so long?" she asked.

"Bombast left a double behind to cover for him while he went fishing or whatever. Had to deal with that first."

"A double?: Julia asked, coming in and shutting the door behind her, "What'd you do with him?"

"Not him," I said, tossing the sphere from hand to hand, "It. Like the secretary in the lobby. Only with legs too, so he can stick it in the closet."

And then the lights went out.