Look. It was not Protego's fault. Not really. There were always inherent risks in experimental items, and he couldn't account for every possibility. He'd be a paranoid mess otherwise, and while paranoid people were usually very good for business, that wasn't true when the paranoid person in question was himself. Ergo, he was utterly blameless in this.

Really, if you thought about it, the blame should be leveled at the chap who'd commissioned Protego to create a giant--and mechanical--guard spider. Relatively giant. It was still about the size of a particularly large rat. It wasn't really Protego's usual thing, but he'd give anything a try for the sake of a sale, so here he was playing experimental engineer, making a fake-spider that was intended to... scare off intruders? Honestly, he neither knew nor cared. Not his business what anyone did with the things he sold them.

The problem was, when Protego had come downstairs to his workshop in the back of the shop that morning, the spider wasn't there. It wasn't in the rest of the shop. It wasn't anywhere. And on the one hand, it might have been easy to think someone had stolen it, there was nothing else missing, and if someone was going to steal anything from him, a half-finished spider was definitely not the most valuable thing in the shop by a long shot. It was, however, probably the only thing in the shop that could walk out of its own volition.

So, Protego had been walking the high street, searching and looking down alleyways and popping into shops to discretely ask his neighbors if they'd seen anything abnormal. He'd started down near the Post Office, and was making his way west and had just reached Gladrag's. It was still quite early, when most businesses on the high street were opening their doors, so he entered the shop to find it still empty of customers. "Good morning!" Protego called, in his customarily cheery voice, to the shop attendant. "I have a bit of an odd ask."

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