"I'm telling you," the cute but... somewhat off little girl in the knee-length robes said. "I used my last spell healing Ms. Buggy's burned arm and—ah, healer, whatever artificer made that salve needs to go back to his apprenticeship."

I'd met the girl while I was out patrolling. My first patrol, actually. Honestly, at first, I thought she was a case 53. She wasn't 'ugly,' not really, but there was something distinctly off about her. She said she was ten but she seemed somehow both too short and too thin to be ten. She had east-Asian features, kind of, mostly, but I wasn't sure that was right because something about the shape of her face was slightly off. Like her chin was too much one thing, her jawline too much something else... For sure her bright green eyes were just slightly too big.. Also, her ears were pointed and she had at least two fangs or... Tusks? Some kind of sharp tooth was poking up between her lips.

Right now the PRT's medic was treating a cut on the girl's cheek while we waited for Armsmaster to come back.

One thing or another had led to us fighting Lung. He was gonna kill children, we didn't really have a choice. I was going to tell the little girl to run, but then she made golden fire rain from the sky and Lung didn't much like that. I'm pretty sure she's a trump of some kind because she pulled out several tricks during the fight. Between her doing something that really cooled him off, the sudden rainstorm, and the bolts of energy from her fingertips... Honestly, I felt a little outclassed. All I did was poison him a little. This city was lousy with spiders.

Then Armsmaster showed up and one thing led to another and we were on our way to PRT HQ to talk about joining the Wards. Honestly, it was something I was dreading. Part of being a hero, for me, was to get a bit of control over my life after the Hell of Highschool and signing up for teen drama, rules, schedules, and adults who don't remember what it's like to be teenagers seemed to be rather counterproductive in that regard and I wasn't sure how I was going to talk my way out of it.

"Well," the medic said as he affixed a bandage to the freshly cleaned cut, "healing magic or not, you're fixed up now."

"Thank you," the girl said as she stood up from the examination table and let herself fall to the floor, landing on her feet. Then she grabbed the old-fashioned leather backpack she'd taken off when she hopped on the table in the first place.

"Now, there's just one thing I have to ask you," the medic began. "Do you have any... Weird symbols on your body? Like, say, the Greek letter omega?"

The girl shrugged. "The runic sigil of an ancient malevolent Orcish demi-god is magically tattooed to my back but I'm pretty sure that just a sign of my sorcerous heritage."

"Oh... Kay," the medic said. "I'm gonna go see if Armsmaster is on his way back yet." And then the medic left.

The little girl walked over to the corner I'd been standing in and extended a hand with a smile. "We never got properly introduced, I'm Ashley Beestinger, Prodigy Sorceress and Junior Intern Loremonger for Acquisitions Incorporated. It's nice to meet you and I'd like to be friends." Was that her real name?

I took her hand and shook. "It's nice to meet you too. I don't really have a name yet."

"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard," she said with complete sincerity. So yeah, that was her real name. "so, uh... I've noticed you looking at me... Your body language... You think I look weird, don't you?"

"No," I said quickly. I mean, she was a bit odd but it worked for her.

"It's fine. I'm a Mongrelfolk, I'm used to people looking at me like they've got no idea what I am."

"Ah... Mongrelfolk?"

"You know... Mixed breed?" She said. "A hybrid of hybrids? A little bit of everything?" She hed her hand over her head. "Touch of dwarf?" she gestured to her ears. "Smidgeon of elf?" She opened her mouth and touched a finger to one of the small fangs in her lower jaw. "Taste of orc? I've also got a bit of gnome, halfling, goblin, and some really distant gith and drow that I know of for sure but those all don't really have things I can point at and say for sure come from that."

I blinked behind the lenses of my mask. "So, basically you're a little bit of everything?"

"Yeah," she said with a smile. "Most people get used to it after getting to know me. I'm one of the lucky ones. Most Mangrels are a mismatch of features and some of them look like horribly deformed goblins. I at least have it blended together so it looks even enough. I could probably pass for a short elf if I had too."

She looked at the sleeve of my costume, the one that'd been singed when I took a hit from Lung. "Let me get that for you." She waved her hand over my arm, I felt a gust of warm air, and then the singe was gone.

"I thought you were out of spells?"

"That was prestidigitation," Ashley explained. "It's really more of a cantrip than a proper spell. Really prestidigitations are tricks so minor that calling them cantrips is an exaggeration. Just minor tricks that a lot of arcanists pick up when they're getting started practicing magic. Once you get to the point that you can cast proper spells, most people who started with them can just improvise however many of them they want, if they started with it or take the time to learn how from someone who did." She smiled. "Anyway, the point is that I can work minor tricks like that and my other cantrips as much as I want, as natural as breathing. It's only full spells that I need to rest between castings."

"Okay..."

"So I have a question," she continued. "Where are we?"

"PRT ENE Headquarters," I explained. I got a blank stare in response. "Brockton Bay?" Nothing. "New Hampshire?"

"Oh," the child said. "The home of the Darkmagics. Got it. Could have sworn I was plane shifted or something, this makes it so much easier to get back home."

She opened her leather backpack and reached down into it and... Apparently it was bigger on the inside because she leaned halfway into it to the point that it rested on the floor with her leather booted feet kicking in the air before she leaned back and fell out holding a leather-bound book, a jar of ink, and a feather quill pen. "My haversack has a defect. The stuff I want isn't always on the top," she shrugged. "It was half off, you get what you pay for."

She sat on the floor and started writing in the journal.

"You're serious about the Sorceress thing, aren't you?"

"Why wouldn't I be? I have a rich mystical bloodline that lets me bend reality to my will. It's a super rare talent, especially bloodlines like mine, not something you joke about lightly. Now uh, I don't want to be rude but I've got this magic journal that lets me send letters to people I know but I can only send so many words a day if I want to get answers back so I need to think carefully about this."

I had to stop her. I had to explain that this place was not anything like what she was used to, a world apparently called Faerun.

A week later I was looking at my Wards contract, which had been negotiated in part by the owner of the mercenary company that Ashley interned for via her Journal. I wasn't sure why exactly it had me listed as an Intern with Acquisitions Incorporated, why there were so many acid pit related clauses, or why my surname was listed as Hebert-Beestinger in the legal text. All I knew was that I was getting paid a ton and that I couldn't get in trouble for anything short of murdering someone in cold blood so I signed it.

"Ashley... Axebeard... Beestinger," the little girl said as she gave her own signature in ink with a quill pen.

"Axebeard?"

"It was my original surname before I was adopted, so I kept it as my middle name," she explained. "It's dwarvish. A lot of elf and dwarf in Grandpa's side of the family. And you had Beestinger added to your name in yours because Great Grandma Rosie just kind of adopts people for reasons. I knew you were gonna ask."

*End*

Inspired by a recent conversation about translating Ashley's concept to a D&D setting, which eventually turned to a discussion of Acquisitions Incorporated

I don't have a set of stats for her... Mostly because Mongrelfolk don't have 5e stats, but an accurate depiction of Ashley would be a level 3 Divine Soul Sorcerer with an "Evil" divine ancestor. For this alternate version, I dropped the "symbiote" angle and played up the "Apocalypse" angle's equivalent. Unlike the main, Marvel bassed Ashley who doesn't know she's from a bastard line of Clan Akkaba, what the symbol on her back means, or even the majority of her ethnic background, Ashley Axebeard Beestinger knows quite a bit about her ancestry and takes pride in being a mix of more or less everything, including God. Her divine Ancestor might have been a malevolent Orcish Demigod, but being part God is still kind of cool. When converting from Marvel to D&D, an unusually intelligent Orcish Demigod makes the most sense to me for converting Apocalypse, since D&D Orcs by default tend to have the extreme "survival of the fittest and punish weakness" philosophy that Apocalypse is defined by.