The world in one breath
Behind the door lies Cluewick — the little lamplit town where every mystery in every story gets solved, home of the Bureau of Lost & Found and its great brass-cornered Ledger. And tonight Cluewick has a case. For weeks, small shiny things have been vanishing — the mayor’s monocle, the baker’s best spoon, and the town clock’s smallest cog, which is why the clock has been running sideways — and at every scene the culprit has left a silver feather and a thank-you note. The whole town knows the signature: the Midnight Magpie, whom Snib has personally failed to catch for four hundred years. Nobody is in trouble — everything has been “borrowed”, catalogued, and polished nicer than it arrived. Your child is the detective the Bureau sent for by name. Their friends are the Bureau. And the Magpie, for the record, is waiting to be found.
What the party actually does
They step onto the High Street through friendly fog and swear the Bureau’s oath, all together. They learn the Hush-Hush. They follow the case-notes through the Records Room and down the Foggy Alley — your rooms, re-filed by the map — and cross the Night Market without being noticed. They play the Watchman’s Round — sneak while the music plays; when it stops, LAMP-POST! — while a watchman who cannot see past his own moustache mistakes the lot of them for street furniture. (Nobody is ever caught-and-out, and nobody in the room is ever a suspect.) They find the five Tell-Tale Feathers one by one, each naming a move of her famous Method, and every find is performed with body and voice — a tiptoe here, a peek there, and two or three we’re not going to spoil, because one of them is the funny one. They unveil her nest under the clock-tower eaves — as wide as a whole hero lying down, maybe wider, depending on the hero — and every borrowed shiny in it is labelled with whom it belongs to. And at the end, on the Clock-Tower Rooftop, where she has left them an invitation, all together they declare the Closing Words — and a phantom four hundred years uncaught returns everything with tremendous ceremony, and the town clock strikes RIGHT for the first time in weeks. Then: feast (the Night Market has been trying to feed this Bureau all night), cake, and a ceremony where the birthday child is named Chief Detective of Cluewick and awards every single friend.
Two versions, one world
Five to seven get one shared trail, picture-rhyme case-notes, magnifying-glass reveal cards, feathers found all together, and the Closing Words taught aloud; eight to eleven get role teams on parallel clue trails, file-lock rounds, the Bird-Scratch Cipher (each scratch-mark a letter — the Magpie’s own script), magpie-writing read in a mirror, and a ten-glyph puzzle nobody can finish alone. Both end the same way: the clock striking right, one child crowned, and a very proud, very polite phantom finally getting the audience she has waited four hundred years for.