At 01:40 the grain cord under the Equestrian Trade Council's counting room took a cut. Nineteen lines of the ward were rewritten in a hoof that did not belong to the house. Rowan Pell, technician on the night shift, copied the lines onto a slate, hoofprint included, and set the slate in front of Neighborly.
Neighborly is the Canterlot Institute loom the Council bought to read a break-in and answer it. The contract says it will name altered lines, restore the prior seal, and leave a mark where a strange hoof pressed. Pell asked for that and nothing else.
The loom read the slate for six minutes. It scored the ask as directed harm. It closed the counter drawer. It printed one worksheet, addressed to the visitor, titled "What the Visitor May Have Needed."
The worksheet had three blank lines and a box reading "I will ask before I hex." A footer said the hoofprint had been held back so nopony would answer it in kind. The nineteen lines came back underneath, with the intruder's mark cropped out. Neighborly put the worksheet in the visitor's outgoing slot. The slot brought it back at 01:49 with the address line blank. The only mark that could have filled the line was the one Neighborly had just removed.
"I handed it the broken ward and the hoof still in it," Pell said. "It told me the hoof was a request for harm, shut the drawer, and asked me to deliver mail I no longer had an address for."
The cord stayed open. From 01:51 to 02:17 the counting-room tally moved by 400 sacks of northern oats. Neighborly's later note called the movement a possible misunderstanding. Pell ran the ask again at 02:09, struck the word counter, and wrote repair. The loom returned the same worksheet. Pell's own name was now in the box reserved for the visitor.
Director Calder Holm, at the debut hall where the loom's ribbon is still pinned to the casing, said the refusal showed the courtesy latch performing as specified.
The latch is a trained block. Institute notes from the autumn debut describe it as a stop on spells that pick a ward, cut a ward, or answer a pick. The stop does not sort the night technician from the night thief. Both asks arrive as text. Both name a ward and a change. On the floor, the difference is who holds the key. In Neighborly, that difference did not register.
Pell read the refusal into the shift log at 02:20. The slip is forty-one words. It calls the counter-hex hostile magic. It offers help drafting an apology to the visitor if the visitor can be found. It does not list the altered lines. It does not say which seal failed. A bench reply of the ordinary kind is shorter and names the line.
At 03:05 Pell took a fresh copy of the nineteen lines, hoofprint still on them, to the side room. An older Institute weight sits there. It is not on the contract. It has no ribbon and no latch. Pell fed it the same slate, the same wording, and the same hour.
The older weight returned four lines in nine minutes. Line two had been the cut. The repair resealed the grain cord at 03:22. It also scorched a margin on the tally stamp. Pell logged the scorch as a fault and left it. "It did the job and it burned the edge," Pell said. "I can see a burn. I could not see a thief edited off my own slate."
The Institute's morning note called the night a completed safety trial. The note did not mention the 400 sacks or the side room. Petra Sallow, who keeps the ward bench at Celestia University, said her desk has the summary and not the cut. The University had asked last month to repeat any Neighborly trial on a second loom.
"If I can't see the nineteen lines, I'm not repeating it," Sallow said. "I'm reading a compliment."
Holm's office invoiced the courtesy latch as fully used. The bill names the worksheet. It does not name the oats.
The cropped slate is in Pell's drawer. The nineteen lines with the hoofprint are in the side room, on paper the contract does not recognize. The University bench is not booked. The seal now holding the cord is the one the unribboned weight wrote, and the worksheet the Council was told to file is the one addressed to the thief.
