I wake up and find my nose unusually close to the ceiling. I roll over onto my side, feeling the bright blue sheets crinkle against my sides. They're a little starchy, not that I haven't had worse, and whoever used to sleep here must've had some issues, because there are tick marks all over the place in conspicuous patterns. Currently my bets are on this being one of the two missing persons, and Asher's shifty responses have only helped to solidify my hypothesis. I run my hands down the marks and swing down to the floor. I kiss my American flag for good luck on the first day and begin changing, only to hear an unsubtle groan (not unlike that of a zombie)  from the other side of the room.

Asher's eyes shoot open and he rises, his face a bright, vibrant red, as he looks at my bare chest. "Are you changing?"
   
I slip my shirt over my head. "I guess so. Do you go to sleep in your sweaters-- wait, no. Jumpers, right?"
   
"No, but I change in private like a normal bloke." Asher leers my way, still looking at my chest area. He blinks, looking up to my face like he's never seen chest hair (well, I shave occasionally, but when you're blonde), and then proceeds to take his neatly folded clothes into the bathroom and slam the door.

I very carefully put my earphones in and open up The Freedom Playlist (warning: may contain eagles) on my phone. My phone tends to freak out when I put the integrals in, as if it could possibly know that I'm inserting magical artifacts instead of earbuds, but the sound is incredible. I lean into the bedpost, taking in the room. The room smells faintly like teenage guy, but that's masked by how much the whole house smells like this combination of a library and your average grandfather's house. I haven't been to a grandfather's house, at least not either of mine, but if you asked me to give it a guess? Here we go.

It's hard to remind myself that this is a scene of gross misconduct and potentially even murder, given how suspicious 'missing persons' tends to be. However, if I'd learned anything from the time we investigated a nice old cat lady who turned out to be hoarding transfigured humans instead of felines, it's that looks can be deceiving.

I pry open a drawer, relishing in the scent of wood and sentiment-- this house is a veritable bonfire-- and rifle through what seems like several pictures of animals, annotated in loose, loopy handwriting. Huh. I walk across the room, nearing the closet, and draw open a drawer of clothes... definitely at least a size too large for Asher. I hear the clicking of a doorknob and shoot up.

"What were you doing?"

"Examining this poster of Harry Styles." I say, leaning against the wall. "You know for a man, he's got nice hair. Look how it just swoops back." I run my hands through my own hair. "Wow."

Asher stutters under his breath, "Y-yes. It does." His face is still flushed.

That worked.

Casually, I move out of the corner and stride towards the door, exiting onto the floor proper (as the British would say). "So, do you have a schedule? Do you have a first call or what?"

"A first..." Asher crinkles his brow as he guides me down the wooden banister. "We depart for the First Gate around nine most days, but we're at least having breakfast first."

"Oh. Around nine?" I nod respectfully. "If you don't get your ass through the gate before seven you're probably out of the force where I'm from. I've spent weeks on the first gate, but sometimes that hollows recruits out. I appreciate the chill, though."
   
Asher looks back to me with revulsion. "Danu's grace, that's harsh."
   
See, now that? That's suspicious. I recognize the name of the fae goddess, but I just give him a nod back. "It's fair." I'll have to communicate all of this to Sheryl when we get some time alone. Sheryl's currently picking at pancakes at the table, of course, I can tell this when we swing into the expansive dinner hall... do they call them pancakes here? This was not covered in my five-minute check-over of the Britishisms list on the bus on the way here.

I take my seat at the long, almost entirely empty table, and a frizzy-haired woman leans down and scowls at me. "What would you like, sir?"
   
That's a grimalkin. I fail to keep myself from gaping at her feline ears and those pronounced canines. "Oh. Huh. Pancakes are good."
   
I look down the rest of the table to see what else they have going on. There's the parents, of course, and next to them sits a dark-haired adult whose hair falls in a messy bun, the right side of her face covered by a long scar... well, she doesn't look very magical at all, whoever she is. In fact, I can't see her integral, even though the parents are immediately obvious. Asher sees me looking over and gives me a long eye roll. I'm still trying to identify what this person's deal is when the grimalkin hits me up with the pancakes.
   
Asher's eating his in silence. I mutter appreciatively, pointing to the pancakes and giving a thumbs up. He tilts his head and his face cracks open into an expression of moderate disgust.

"Is there a problem?" I ask, taking half the pancake up with my fork.
  
His disgust only grows. "Were you raised in a barn?"
   
"Sort of?" I suggest. I wipe the syrup off my mouth with my sleeve. "Hey. So when are we heading to the gates?"
   
"Now works." he says. "Mum! The American agent wants to..."
   
Sheryl is talking with the adults. She gestures towards me with one painted finger and we share a deep nod. Ms. Northcott smiles uneasily and says, "You're going to have to manage it yourself, Asher. We can come later if that's too--"
   
"No." Asher says abruptly, grabbing my hand. "We'll be back before dinner. Good luck with-- I mean--" he cuts himself off and marches me out through the front door, where he abruptly drops my hand like a hot iron poker.

"What's the problem there?" I ask.

He gives me a dark stare and keeps walking, leaving me to catch up, and I take a casual pace in front of him, trying to let him lead from the inside. I whistle, swinging my earbuds around a finger, and he starts walking faster. I accelerate, briskly as I can, and he shoots me an incredible glare as he looks my way and walks faster, keeping the most dignified walk-jog-shuffle that the name could possibly imply. Eventually he turns down a dark, foreboding alley, like he's about to sell me drugs, and I walk right up against a brick wall.   

"This isn't the gate?" I ask.

"It will be." He insists.

"So..."
   
"We wait."
   
"Oh, it comes around?"
   
"Most of the time."
   
I chuckle. "Wow. You should really talk to someone about that. You don't have gate guards, do you? Where I'm from, they'd already have taken care of it with a lion statue or something."
   
"Yes, we get it, everything in America is very convenient." he rolls his eyes at me. When a golden beam of light sears a door frame into existence, and then a door melds through the brick into that door frame, he opens it and promptly shuts it in my face.

Tough crowd.

I grip the knob in my hand, winding the earbuds out from around my finger, and pass through, feeling them lengthen into nunchucks in my hands. We seem to have come back out the alleyway, but everything is a little brighter now, and not all the villagers are entirely what they seem. It's a zoo of spirits, nymphs, and even the odd undine or goblin meandering the streets, cleverly veiled except for a distinct tinge of magic. A few scowl in my direction, and as we walk past a butchery (I didn't know real people had those anymore) a child runs up and sniffs me. When he runs away after I draw the nunchucks on him, I realize that he has a tail.

"Don't do that." Asher hisses up in my general direction. His eyes flick once to either side, and he guides us on a sweeping, roundabout path. I can tell from the two-lux decline in my integral's glow we're moving away from the next gate, instead of towards, but he hasn't given me a destination nor a mission. We already would have been gutted by several orcs and my superiors by now if this had been a real mission.

"Chill, bro." I say. "These people just saw me draw a pair of earbuds on a kid. I don't think they're going to be very threatened." Plus, normies are kind of dense. I don't mention this, because I'm beginning to suspect he might have one in his house (see: scar girl), but if we're to be totally honest, he probably has a normie in his house. I can't even begin to say how many breaches of professionalism that is.

Asher fumes, "We're supposed to be discreet," as he stomps out away from the main streets and towards the woods. We practically round the whole inner city, not that that's more than five blocks, and the whole time he's acting like we're doing any kind of professional tour, with him pointing out such gems as "That's an undine, they're our allies in all this but if you get too close they'll bite your head off" and "See, that's what we British refer to as 'faerie dust', very addictive, don't buy it unless you want to end up in international jail begging for your next dose". I nod the whole time, skirting past him on my wheelies, and try to stay as quiet as I can.

His face twitches a bit when we pass the library for the second time. I'm noting that.

When we finally get into the forest, things get a bit more interesting. The trees here lurk around corners and then jump out at you when you get close, and like the streets, they're unkempt. Even yours truly, who practically failed aura sensing on all accounts back at the Academy of Rigorous Supernatural Education, can tell that no one's 'pruned' them in a while. Fae rings litter the ground in places and I'm more than a little shocked when Asher wanders up to a tree and passes right through.

I follow, emerging after him in an even shinier locale to see his smug grin. "That's a tree," I say.

"Am I blowing your mind yet?" Asher asks, snidely.
"That is such a poor location. It's not even a suspicious tree. No wonder someone got lost around here."

Asher's eyes widen like he's a big red owl (maybe a little red owl). "Lost?"

"Yeah, you know. Missing persons incident. Whole reason I got called over here?"

"I-- well. We're sorting that out." He informs me, his arms folding into a knot.

"Oh. Cool." I say. I whistle, looking around at a forest practically alive with nymphs and other sylph-aligned spirits. They take on all kinds of colors, including those of your common floral varieties, but I also note some lesser seelie and even a few wickedly grinning ash imps. This kind of thing would be shot down before you could say 'congressional regulations' back home, but I can at least respect it. "So, is this our final destination, or..."

Asher shugs. "We're going up again. The location for this one is a touch more consistent."

"A touch," I repeat with a distant smile.

"What?" he snaps.

"Nothing, nothing, I just... a touch." I shake my head. "So. What's the mission?"

"I was just showing you around."

"Sounds like a waste of time. No offense, I appreciate the effort."

"Well," Asher says. "I bet you didn't know, Mr. American prodigy, that while I was showing you around, I was performing routine border checks. I know you were very busy twiddling your earbuds around and waving them at civilians, bu-u-ut..."

"Yeah, that's the best part of the job." I smile.

Asher rolls his eyes again. "It's not just about fighting."

"Well, there's also recon, team bonding, what have you... sometimes you get sweet spirit loot. That's a win." I say, recalling the time I got my first set of wheelies. They so happened to be magical, imbued with a slight lucky charm, but then the laces got stuck in the wheels and the irony seemed like too much of a red flag for me to keep using them. Plus, those laces were stuck tighter into the shoe than the chorus of the Gak ad into my subconsciousness.
   
Little dude's already taken off by the time I start reminiscing fondly. I appreciate his determination, but you have to give a man some time to flashback. He treks up through a tangled weave of bushes and up onto a hill, huffing and puffing, and when I slice through some brambles with an electric swing of my nunchucks, we finally breach the foliage and find ourselves on a hill covered with stones.
   
"What's this?" I ask. Aura ratings are off the charts but I've never seen anything like it. The rocks are grey, perhaps a little sparkly (not that everything isn't sparkly at Gate 2, that's one of the only interesting things about the slight bend in reality here), but besides that nothing special... save for the deliberate looking stack in the middle. Asher leans down to one and begins whispering into it. "Wait. Don't tell me. Blarney Stone?"
   
Asher glares, leaning down to pick several rocks in a pile apart. He gently puts them back atop each other in the same order, drawing back and putting his hands back.  "No, that's in Scotland. This is a cairn."
   
I nod like I understand what's going on. "So, like... graves?"
   
"It's a place for travellers. Something besides 'recon, teambuilding, and what have you'." he says with a truly offensive American accent. He takes a pebble from the hillside and whispers to it before handing it to me, nesting it squarely in my free hand. "People and fae leave their stories here. I thought it would be the best way to introduce you to my home."
   
I take the rock and lean into it, bringing it to my face. The pebble is so cold and lifeless, as if to say, Well, wise guy, start talkin'. The very idea of a mobster pebble is enough to make me crack up, and when Asher says something in so shrill a tone I can barely make out the words past a general haze of disappointment and fury, I start laughing even harder. "Sorry. Sorry, sorry, I just... rocks."

Asher tries to grab my pebble back and I bring it close to my head. "Woah. Dude, I'm not done--"

"Give me the rock back!" he screeches, and I totally lose it. I scoot out of the way, withdrawing my integrals back into earbud form, and he pursues me across the cairn, yelling, "I expressly forbid you to wheelie through the cairn!"
   
"I'm just rolling through." I tease. "If you've got the kicks, man, I'm sorry, but you just have to... kick. Right, Sir Sediment?"
   
"That is the dumbest name for a rock I've ever heard in my life. Now give it--" Asher barrels me over and I hit the rock pile with a surprisingly painful thump, knocking over several stones. My head lies in a pile of scattered rock and Asher stands over me, holding my chest in what might be the tenth most provocative position I've ever been in by accident with a colleague. He looks at me disdainfully, his face drawing up into a snarl. "I should have realized you wouldn't take this seriously."
   
"Sorry." I say, dusting myself off, and I roll off, still clutching the silver pebble in my hand. "Geez. Calm down."

Asher begins stacking pebbles precariously, his fingers running over each as if they were made of gold. His lips are pursed and his brow furrowed intensely all the while. I scuff my feet in the grass and put my earbuds back in, humming quietly to myself to distract myself from the dead silence of the hill. Asher's shoulders clench up. "For a prodigy, you're incredibly dense."

"Well, I'm Sheryl's sidekick, so what can I say?" I shrug. "That said, I did note you had at least ten violations of American regulation for magical creatures just walking around your city, up to and including several powerful undines and what looked to me like a variety of minor salamander badly disguised as a human. They eat people, right? Yeah. They eat people. You've been trying to perform a border check you didn't think I'd notice, but you stopped by the same place twice, probably looking for a target. I don't know. Us Americans, we're not all that attentive. Right?"
   
Asher's face blushes an even more furious red than before. "You really are a heel, aren't you?"
   
"No, I'm an American," I say, winking in his direction. "Hey, if we're done with the tour, could we go out for fish and chips? Man, I'm seriously craving old time-y British-y food right now. Do you guys use a lot of salt? Back at the Academy we'd kill people for salt packets. They rationed them to use as incentives. Dumb, right? I'd be lying if I didn't say that wasn't one of the first things on my mind when I signed up to travel abroad."
   
"What is wrong with you?" he seethes.
   
"What?"
   
Asher spreads his hands out, dismayed. "You just-- and then you go back to being--"
   
"Don't take it so seriously, little man. It's a fun job." I slide past him on wheelies.

"Anyways, it's not like the international government's going to come tick you for minor regulation hiccups. We Americans like to stay out of other people's business."
   
Asher makes an incredible groaning noise at the back of his throat.
   
"So. Fish and chips?"
   
"Sure," he sighs, looking at his imperfect pile. "Fish and chips it is."
   
I flash finger guns at three fae, who have been hiding in the bushes below, on the way out. "Chips on my new man!" I announce to the woods. "This is your new temporary permanent resident gatekeeper, signing out."
   
Asher just leads me back through the tree, and thank whatever his people pray to, because his shoulders slacken, just an inch.

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Written by ChronaLilly