"Somehow, this being in a shoebox doesn't surprise me. Even Holmes' office is bigger, and that's ALSO a shoebox."
- Ema Skye, "The Painting of the Lordly Tailor Shrouded in Mystery"
The Department of Malignant Mysteries is a Japanifornian department primarily concerned with investigating and solving "impossible" cases. In actuality, the department is the barely-legal remains of a precursor organisation that uses state-sponsored spellcasters to solve crimes where magical activity was suspected to have taken place.
History
The story of the Department of Malignant Mysteries begins properly with its precursor, the Department of Malignant Magicks.
Operating from the beginning of the 1700s to 1903, the Department of Malignant Magicks was a state-sponsored group of investigators specialising in magical and magic-adjacent crimes, brought to existence to subvert events like the Salem witch trials happening at the time. When the Magic Regulation Act passed in 1890, The Department of Malignant Magicks was slowly phased out of both public perception and operation, until the department was officially disbanded in 1903.
Twenty years later, the Department of Malignant Mysteries was founded, with much the same members, though now with lessened power thanks to the Magic Regulation Act. Struggling with funding and obtaining the now-required licences for spellcasting, the department slowly became a thing of ridicule as a grandfathered-in state-sponsored witch-hunting organisation.
Today, the department employs no licenced spellcasters, and has no legal power to make criminal arrests, and is primarily focused on investigating crimes with magic, then working backwards to create a sensible, non-magical explanation to be supplied to law enforcement offices and the public at large. Due to this, the department boasts a subpar performance officially closing cases, however, department head Misty Clue claims that the department has "managed to solve all cases presented so far".
Agents
The personnel of the department is inconsistent, consisting between 2 to 7 agents at any given time. The department struggles to recruit and keep talent due to its infamy, its lack of funding, and the necessary and unclear prerequisites for hiring. The head of the department, Misty Clue, has previously been accused of nepotism due to her hiring and firing of agents based on their "latent magical abilities". Since its inception, the department had not been able to provide clear and concise evidence what makes one eligible for hiring, and has faced multiple employment discrimination charges.
Per the department's own description, agents are equipped with up to three spells a day oriented around investigation.