Celestine checked the cameras she’d installed in the cafe again, cycling through them on her desktop screens. They all seemed to be working as intended, with video and audio coming through clearly and giving her a good view of the place with multiple angles.

She smiled to herself, leaning back in her comfortable computer chair in her dark bedroom. The security feeds provided most of the light at that moment.

It hadn’t been hard to install the cameras. She’d gone to the cafe the other day with an official looking mall uniform and a stack of paintings, claiming she’d been told by management to swap out the existing art. No minimum wage employee was going to think twice about that, so she was able to install her pictures with their pinhole cameras hidden in the art.

Sure, it wasn’t the most ethical thing to do. But she had a mystery on her hands, and she couldn’t stand leaving it unsolved.

There had been strange things happening at the Oakdale mall, for quite some time. What those strange things were, that wasn’t quite clear. People were disappearing, and reappearing, none the worse for wear—and wondering where their bewildered partner had been. The story that had piqued her interest was something a woman posted online, about how she’d gone to this cafe with her husband and then gone shopping throughout the rest of the mall.

Twenty minutes later, she’d gotten a phone call, and answered it to hear her husband wondering where she’d gone and why she wasn’t at the cafe—and then looking up to see that the man she’d been with was nowhere to be found.

It was bewildering. It also wasn’t a crime, exactly, so police weren’t getting involved (besides, since when did police actually solve crimes anyway?). But even if the stories weren’t 100% consistent, it was clear that something along these lines had happened many times before, in and around this mall… and in particular, around this cafe. Celestine had spent enough time trawling social media, pulling together what hints she could—now it was time for some more direct investigation.

She watched the videos for a while, switching between live feeds every so often. The mystery may have been intriguing, but the video sure wasn’t. So far as she could see, it was an ordinary cafe. People came and went with coffee and baked goods. A pair of girlfriends, either romantic or platonic, chatted about whatever at a central table. A college student worked on their homework in the corner. Stuff like that.

Celestine yawned, leaning back in her chair with a big stretch. One of the girlfriends, a nice-looking blonde whose name Celestine hadn’t overheard, said she needed to use the bathroom. The other one, a redhead by the name of Francine according to the latte order she’d answered to, waited patiently for a few minutes. Eventually, the blonde left the bathroom, and she and Francine walked out of the bar, still chatting and laughing together.

It was so uninteresting that Celestine almost didn’t notice when, a few minutes later, the same blonde left the bathroom a second time.

She blinked, and leaned forward and paused the video. She rewound to a few minutes before, just to check that she’d seen the girl leaving already. She had. And then she wound forward again, to see the same girl back in the cafe, looking around for her friend.

Celestine steepled her fingers, a small smile growing on her face. Now this was worth the boredom.

How had someone come out of the same bathroom twice, and gone in only once? Frustratingly, it was the one place she hadn’t felt comfortable putting up cameras—she had some standards, after all—but she had gone in to look around the other day, just for the sake of being thorough. It had been a normal looking women’s bathroom, maybe big enough for four people maximum, and notably lacking in, for instance, a cloning machine.

Was it possible that it was someone else who happened to look similar? She swept back and forth in the video timeline a bit, looking for people who fit the bill, but at a glance there wasn’t anyone with even close to that face, or those blonde tresses.

She tapped her chin.

What if it wasn’t someone who happened to look like the blonde girl? What if it was someone who looked similar on purpose—like an impersonator?

She wound back twenty minutes or so, pulled out a pencil and paper, and started keeping track of who went in and out. She marked down when people entered, and then checked to see when those same people left. After all, if someone had apparently left twice, then mathematically speaking there were either negative one people in there… or someone had gone in and not apparently come out.

Everything checked out for a good long while, every entry pairing with an exit, and she finally reached the point of blondie entering the bathroom. And then, a few seconds later, the mousy college student who’d been sitting in the corner stood up, packed up their things in their bag, and walked to the bathroom too.

Celestine squinted. She didn’t know why yet, but her instincts were telling her that this was the one to watch.

Her instincts were right. A few minutes later, blondie came out. And then came out again, a few minutes after that. But the mousy college student didn’t reappear. Not after five minutes, not after ten minutes.

And not only that—she watched a gaggle of four teenage girls enter a few minutes later, filling out the maximum capacity of the bathroom. She switched her feed to the camera nearest the bathroom, and heard four flushes not long afterwards. There wasn’t enough time between the flushes for any two of them to have come from two people using the same stall, one after the other.

The college student had vanished.

Celestine smirked. This was what she lived for.

By now, Francine the redhead had returned back to the cafe, looking almost as confused as blondie did when she showed up. Celestine listened to their conversation for a bit—just long enough to confirm what she already knew, a lot of ‘where did you go’ and ‘what do you mean where did I go, you were with me’. Then she rewound again.

This time, she watched the college student. She hadn’t been sure of their gender before, but now that she was watching closely… she still wasn’t sure. They were dressed unobtrusively and androgynously, easily blending into the background of human activity in the cafe as they did their homework.

But now that Celestine was watching closely, they didn’t seem to be doing homework after all.

Their eyes were fixed on Francine and blondie. They watched the two girls like a hawk watching rabbits. Celestine heard blondie say something, and then watched as the ‘student’ mouthed the same words to themself a few times in a row, as if practicing how to say it. Then blondie would make some expression, and the mousy ‘college student’ would raise their hand to their face, blocking it from the view of most other patrons—and then mimic the exact same expression.

They took notes in a breakneck-speed scribble that Celestine couldn’t really decipher, particularly not through the low resolution of her pinhole cameras. What might those be, she wondered? A stenographic record of Francine and blondie’s conversation, to better stay in character? At one point, they sketched out a pretty good drawing of blondie’s face, then wrote captions by her hair, her eyes, her chin: were they working out the best way to physically match each part of the girl’s body? Oh, the things Celestine would do for five minutes with that notebook! Her mind was already churning with the possibilities.

Celestine watched, again, as blondie stood up from her table and walked to the bathroom. After a few seconds, the ‘student’ packed up their stuff—quickly, but not so quickly that they appeared to be hurrying—and walked to the bathroom too. And if Celestine’s cameras weren’t deceiving her, they were walking with the exact same gait as blondie.

Celestine let out a breath, and leaned back in her chair again. It was exhilarating—she felt like she’d just watched a master performer at work. And she’d learned more about this mystery than she could have dared hope from just a few hours of footage.

Of course, for every question that had been answered, a dozen more had sprung up.

She reached out and touched the screen, caressing the frozen image of the impostor. “Who are you?” she whispered.

For a moment, she considered going back to install extra cameras in the bathroom, and to hell with the ethical problems… but no. She couldn’t do that, and not even because of the ethical problems, either.

Celestine leaned forward, smirking, and tapped the image. “I’ve got to meet you for real,” she said. “My little cryptid.”