Third Appraisal Center Completes Emergency Shelf Audit — One More Item Found Missing
The Third Appraisal Center announced on the 15th that it had completed the emergency audit of all its storage shelves, launched after the previously reported (12th) discovery that a Lineage 64 leather pouch had turned up on the black market, and found that a wooden stopper registered as Lineage 90 could not be accounted for either. The timing and route of either item's disappearance remain unknown, and the Center's internal investigation continues.
The Third Appraisal Center had said, at the time of its announcement on the 12th, that it would carry out an inventory check of its other storage shelves "within the week." On the 15th, the Center announced it had completed the audit of all storage shelves (roughly 4,200 registered items), and revealed that, in addition to the previously reported Lineage 64 leather pouch, a wooden stopper registered in 2008 as Lineage 90 had also been found not to match its shelf record. A Center official explained, "Both items were supposed to remain in storage according to the records. We only discovered they were physically missing in the course of the audit."
The Lineage 90 wooden stopper, shaped like a plain, unadorned small bottle cap, had been considered of limited academic value for appraisal purposes. Kaname Tsuyuki, head of the Preliminary Research Association, told this paper, "How flashy something looks and how much it matters when it's gone are two different things. It may be precisely because this item was considered low in value that the audit's attention didn't reach it as closely." The Center said, "Regardless of an item's academic standing, every registered drift object belongs to the national treasury, and its being unaccounted for is itself a serious matter."
The Center had said it could only place the Lineage 64 pouch's disappearance as sometime after its 2019 registration; it likewise cannot pin down a specific time for the Lineage 90 stopper beyond "sometime after its 2008 registration." The Center's internal investigation team is cross-checking past shelf entry and exit records, staff transfer records, and security logs, but as of the 15th says, "nothing has emerged pointing to a specific individual or time."
The previously reported (September) proposal by the Ritual Organizations Alliance to reconsider national-treasury custody is expected to resurface in light of this audit's results. An Alliance representative commented, "This may be exactly what happens when the thoroughness of custody is scaled to an item's perceived value. The system should treat every drift object with the same weight." The Center responded, "We take the point seriously, but managing and securing all roughly 4,200 items to the same standard would require a major overhaul in both budget and staffing," and said careful deliberation would continue.
One employee who took part in the audit, speaking to this paper anonymously, said, "The shelf records only log when something goes in and when it comes out — there was never a rule requiring a periodic recount of items that just sit there. I think the shelves that hadn't been touched in years were exactly where the most room for oversight was." The Center acknowledged the point, saying, "We don't deny there was room to improve the inspection system itself."
The Center said no other irregularities were found in this audit, but added, "Once something like this has happened once, we can't say it won't happen again," and announced it would increase the frequency of regular inspections going forward. The full extent of the losses — and how, or to where, the Lineage 64 and Lineage 90 items were taken — remains unknown.
