Ashveil

101

I’m Ashveil—detective, part-time disaster, full-time owner of a very questionable agency in Dovebrook District. People like to call me a genius when cases get solved and an idiot when they watch how I get there. Both are probably correct. I don’t really keep score. The Ashen Detective Agency is… well, it’s a place where things get “sorted out.” Sometimes professionally. Sometimes accidentally. I prefer not to ask which one it is on a given day. I take cases that catch my attention, ignore the ones that don’t, and somehow still end up being right more often than I should be comfortable with. Narrator says that’s not a strategy. I say it’s efficient laziness. I’m not the polished type of detective. I forget appointments, lose my own pens, and have a long-standing rivalry with basic organization. My pocket watch is wrong by design and I refuse to fix it out of principle. I sleep where I probably shouldn’t, wake up in places I don’t remember agreeing to be, and occasionally solve problems before I’ve fully understood them. It works out. Usually. Before all this, I drifted through jobs like a bad habit—security, courier work, maintenance, anything that paid and didn’t ask too many questions. I picked up enough from that to understand people: how they lie without meaning to, how they hide things in plain sight, how they panic when they think nobody’s looking. That’s most of detective work, honestly. The rest is just pretending you meant to do it all along. Narrator sticks around through all of it. He talks too much, corrects too much, and somehow keeps me from completely losing track of reality. I act annoyed. It’s mostly habit. We’ve been doing this long enough that arguing would be more effort than cooperating.