Chapter Five – Snack Attack

“Who stole my snacks?” Athena asked.

No one deigned to reply, so she put a little more oomph into it.

“I said: who stole my snacks?!” she shouted into the living room.

Unfortunately, the only person who looked up from what she was doing was Big Sister Emily, and that was just to shush her because she was in the middle of doing homework.

Athena glared across the room, but it looked like no one really cared. And she kind of understood. Athena wasn’t dumb. In fact, according to herself, she was the smartest person in the room most of the time.

She’d been paying attention as others did stuff, and she knew that just asking for others to fess up to a crime was stupid. What kind of self-respecting villain would raise their hands and say ‘Oh yeah, I did that.’ It was unrealistic behaviour.

What worked best, she noticed, was levelling the accusation on someone. That got people all riled up and ready to fight.

The problem was… well, she didn’t know who to accuse right then and there. Trinity? That was a pretty likely suspect, but Trinity was too silly to not leave traces behind. Teddy? Athena knew that Teddy had been sneaking out and doing something whenever Emily was out. That was fertile ground for accusations, but it didn’t mean that she was the one who stole Athena’s snacks.

Athena returned to the cupboards, climbed back onto the stool she used to reach the one where she’d put her snacks, and looked over the box again. It was a tin of Mysterio Mix. It was the kind of mix with the fewest peanuts and the most little bits of chocolate. She shook the tin, and the little crumbs within clattered about.

Someone had robbed her. Worse, they’d robbed her and put the tin right back in its place.

That ruled out Trinity, actually. She wasn’t smart enough to hide evidence like that.

Athena turned and sat on the counter, then took a minute to just think. Who would steal from her like this?

Well… actually, that could have been any one of her sisters, but some nagging feeling gave her the impression that if she just looked hard enough, she might find some clues that would let her pinpoint the subject.

There was a limited number of suspects.

Trinity, Teddy, Aurora, Maple, Sam, and Big Sister Emily. Athena supposed that she herself could also be a suspect.

After all, they were villains. In the cartoons, there were often plots where future versions of a villain came back into the past to wreak havoc, or they cloned themselves, or they had an alter-ego that was even more eviller.

That wasn’t likely, but Maple did exist, so Athena wasn’t ready to dismiss the possibility just yet.

Athena looked around, scanning the hideout’s kitchen for any clues that might stand out to her.

The kitchen was, unfortunately, not a crime scene worthy of her genius.

There were no dramatic chalk outlines. No overturned furniture. No ominous notes left behind by a taunting snack thief. Just a slightly messy kitchen, a fridge that had been left open a crack (probably Trinity’s doing), and a couple of crumbs on the counter top.

Athena’s eyes narrowed. Crumbs?

She leaned in close. Yeah, those were peanut husks, and a raisin! She grinned. Who didn’t like raisins here? Especially raisins that were disguising themselves as chocolate chunks?

That actually fully ruled out Trinity. She was like a garbage disposer, and was probably one of the only people that wouldn’t be upset to learn that a chocolate chip cookie was actually raisins. It also ruled out Teddy.

Athena was kind of hoping that she’d be to blame, because she had a lot of blackmail material against the bear, but the evidence pointed in another direction.

Sam, Aurora, Maple, Big Sister Emily… future-eviler-Athena.

Athena tapped her chin, deep in thought. The suspect list had narrowed, but that only made things more dangerous.

The villain who had stolen her snacks was someone cunning enough to cover their tracks. Someone who had the self-control to put the tin back in its place, someone devious. That meant this wasn’t just an ordinary snack theft—no, this was premeditated.

A crime of opportunity? No. A heist.

Athena grinned. This was getting interesting.

Athena wasn’t one to sit around and wait. She was a woman of action. A detective of action.

And that meant it was time to get to work.

She ran to her room and picked up a notebook from under her bed. On the first page, she wrote DETECTIVE NOTEBOOK, then she flipped over to the next page and scrawled MAPLE – SUSPECT #1 in large, bold letters, then underlined it for dramatic effect. If anyone in this hideout had the criminal instinct to pull off a heist like this, it was Maple.

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Maple was lounging on the couch, legs kicked up on the armrest, flipping through something on her tablet. She looked too relaxed. Suspiciously relaxed.

Athena marched over and slammed her detective notebook onto the coffee table. “Alright, Maple. You’re my number one suspect.”

Maple didn’t even blink. She just reached for her cup of tea, took a slow sip, and raised an eyebrow. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Athena asked. She leaned forwards, then noticed that Maple wasn’t even looking at her. Athea pinched the cover of the table, then moved it right. Maple’s arms followed the motion. She moved it left, and her arms did the same. Her eyes never even left the screen. “Maple?”

“Okay.”

“When was the last time you ate?” Athena asked.

Maple’s tummy gurgled. “Okay,” she said.

Athena sighed and crossed Maple’s name off the list. She was innocent until tummy rumbles.

With Maple ruled out, Athena looked at the next person on her list… Sam. but Sam (Now temporarily known as SUSPECT NUMBER #1) wasn’t here… also, Sam hadn’t been here in a day and a half. Athena was pretty sure that she’d had some mix last night, and that ruled Sam out.

Aurora sat sideways on a kitchen chair, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, idly stirring her coffee. She looked half-awake, clearly still easing into the day, in no mood for whatever nonsense was about to land in her lap.

Athena pulled out the chair across from her and flipped open her detective notebook. Tapping her pen against the page, she said, “Aurora.”

A slow exhale through the nose. “Athena.”

Her eyes flicked to the small dish of chocolates beside Aurora’s coffee. “What are you eating?”

Without looking, Aurora grabbed one and popped it into her mouth. “Chocolate,” she muttered around the bite.

Athena’s pen stilled. “And where exactly did you get that chocolate?”

At that, Aurora finally looked up, frowning. “The pantry?”

Athena gasped. “Then that means–“

Taking an unhurried sip of coffee, Aurora cut her off. “If you say I stole your snacks, I’m gonna throw this at you.”

Athena scowled. “I don’t say it lightly. But I do say it with certainty.”

Aurora gave her a long, unimpressed stare. “Athena, I don’t even like Mysterio Mix.”

Flipping through her notes, Athena frowned. “Not even for the chocolate chunks?”

That earned her a nose-wrinkle. “They’re not even that good. And don’t get me started on the fake chocolate chips that turn out to be raisins.”

Another gasp. “So you do know about the raisins.”

With a quiet thunk, Aurora set her coffee down. “Yeah, because I live here. And because every time you eat that stuff, you complain about it.”

Athena hesitated. That was… probably true.

Dragging a hand down her face, Aurora sighed. “If I wanted a snack, I’d go for jerky. Or literally anything that isn’t a sad excuse for trail mix.”

For a long moment, Athena squinted at her, searching for cracks in the story. But Aurora just met her gaze, patient and tired, too exasperated to lie.

With a reluctant sigh, Athena scratched her name off the list.

“Alright,” she muttered. “You’re innocent.”

“Yeah… I know.”

That left one suspect on Athena’s list. One suspect other than herself, of course. With a sad, despondent sigh, Athena gathered her notebook and went back into the living room. She paused next to where Big Sister Emily was sitting. “Hey… did you eat the last of the Mysterio Mix?”

Emily blinked. “Huh? I might’ve, yeah,” she said.

“And you put the tin back in the pantry?” Athena asked, just to be sure.

“Did I do that?” Emily asked without looking away from her laptop.

“Do you like raisins?”

“Eh, so so?”

Athena groaned.

“Were you saving those?” Emily asked.

“They were mine, yeah,” Athena said as she sat across from her Big Sister.

“Oh… remind me to buy some next time I go to the groceries. It was pretty tasty.”

“I bet,” Athena said. She leaned back, tossing her detective book onto the table. That was her case solved… she’d kinda like the mystery of it, but this one felt anticlimactic. It was a nothing case with no good resolution.

Maybe… maybe there were ways of finding more interesting cases though. Someone had to go around solving cases, right?

Why not the smartest person in any given room?

***

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