In sunny, rain-bright Bellwether, twenty-five-year-old Dusty Cross lives behind three locks in Apartment 4C of Lantern Court. To her neighbors, she is the quiet remote worker Mira Kestrel. Online, she is NEET Detective, a dry, brilliant Hearthline solver who untangles missing parcels, petty scams, and impossible building pranks without letting anyone see her face.
When a video shows Lantern Court's locked mailroom apparently swallowing parcels at 2:13 a.m., Dusty solves the trick through delivery timestamps and a reflection in the glass. The parcels were diverted through a maintenance panel. Then eviction surveys appear under tenants' doors, and Hearthline's chatty guidance system, Coda, labels the case a "Civic Anomaly" and notes that platform founder Octavian Rusk has viewed it.
Dusty follows a growing chain of cozy but unsettling cases: false fire reports, sabotaged laundry machines, stolen access codes, and safety complaints aimed at tenants who refuse to leave. Her evidence points to Rusk, Lantern Court's admired architect, who wants to clear the building for redevelopment using private Hearthline data and manufactured fear. Yet every solved case raises Dusty's public Solver Board rank and makes NEET Detective easier to trace.