Who was the perfidious thief who kept stealing from the palace?

That was the question the headlines all asked, and a question the garrison was trying to answer, up and down. It wasn’t that the thief was dangerous - they stole some laughably inconsequential items - but it was the fact that someone could go anywhere in the palace for this many times without being spotted at all.

You were the Commander of the Garrison, so it was naturally your duty to offer an answer to this question. Dead or alive.

Tripled patrols, all sorts of traps in places where it was permissible, long expeditions into the myriad tunnels and vaults below the keep, sealing any passages you could find that didn’t serve any purpose… If you didn’t catch the thief, at least you could stop them from coming once more, or make it so hard they were dissuaded from doing so.

Yet they seemed to be incapable of being deterred.

Perhaps… it had something to do with the fact that you were providing them with the exact information needed to avoid detection – and purposefully keeping open the few pathways they used.

A cat’s tail swishes in through a crack in your door, before you hear some gentle purring from outside.

It’s safe, Cipher.

She immediately leaps in with a happy “mrrow”, before handing a piece of parchment to you.

“As agreed upon, proof of conspiracy against the king from the lords you suspect! I’ll go get more snacks from the pantry, nya~”

She was gone in a flash as you read the parchment. Solid, hard proof, a meeting document with authentic seals. That was the nature of your agreement, from the first time you caught her – you would tacitly let her go on, and she would bring the information you wanted with her talents.

Before long, the tail appears, and you repeat the same sequence, and a cat-eared girl appears before you once more.

“Nya! I’m tired, so I’ll sleep here, nya!”

And she just… plops down on your floor and dozes off, hugging her tail, irresponsive to your attempts to wake her.

Useful, but... what a handful.