Ok, haven't been writing for awhile (new job, things have been hectic, blah blah blah) but the muse hit me last night and demanded I write. Very rough draft but, hopefully: Enjoy.


Cassial tapped her fingers, staring at a blank scroll. It had occurred to her that she might not be using her full angelic abilities. Taking a quill pen, she carefully wrote 'Dream Manipulation', then 'Angelic senses' and 'Flight'. After a moment, she added 'Teleportation'.
Hmm, teleporting. Maybe she could find some way to teleport Ash and those other two girls into trouble. If she could find somewhere Ash wanted to go, but didn't belong, then whatever Ash got into wouldn't be directly Cassial's fault...


Ash blinked, staring at the door. 'Celestial Filing Depository' the door read, in bright gold script.
"Where are we?" Missi asked. Ash turned, surprised. Emily and Missi were standing behind her; all three of them were dressed in white robes.
"Shhh!" Ash said. Emily, more direct, simply grabbed the smaller girl and placed a hand over Missi's mouth.
"Ash, I don't think we should be here." Emily said, talking softly.
"I don't care." Ash said. She looked back at the door. "Emily... you know how much this means to me. This might be my only chance to fix the misfile."
"Ok." Emily nodded. "I'm going with you."
"Me too." Missi managed to say, around Emily's hand. She didn't know what was going on, but wasn't going to give Emily a chance to go with Ash alone.
"All right, but be quiet." Emily ordered, then released Missi.
The three women slipped through the door, looking around. The room inside was massive, easily the size of a football stadium, with filing cabinets laid out in narrow rows. Ash lead the way to a filing cabinet marked 'Humans, Women, U-Z'. There were only three files marked 'Upton, Ash'. She pulled all three out and flipped them open, looking for the one that was hers.
The first two were obviously not; she closed them and put them back as soon as she saw the line reading 'Gender: Female'. The third read 'Gender: male'.
"That's it." said Emily, unnecessarily.
"I figured. Ok, all I have to do is put this back in the right cabinet and... wait a minute."
Ash looked closer at the file, frowning. There was a white stain on the 'Gender' line, between 'Gender' and 'male'. It looked a bit like white-out. She reached out, scratching it with a fingernail. The white material flaked off, revealing the letters 'f' and 'e'.
"Gender: FEMALE!" shrieked Ash, forgetting her earlier desire for stealth. "Wait, this was the misfile? I always was a girl!"


Ash sat upright in her bed, panting rapidly. For the first time in her life, she was glad to have woken up as a girl. What a horrible nightmare! It was a nightmare... right?
"Rumisial! Rumisial, come here right now!"
"What is it?" the angel asked, bursting in Ash's room. "Ash, what's wrong."
"I just had the WORST nightmare of my life! I need you to tell me something, right now!"
"Um, ok. In Spain, most precipitation actually falls in the..."
"Something specific!" Ash interrupted. "I need you to tell me exactly what type of misfile you made with my file!"
Rumisial looked confused. "Ash, you know that already. I put your file in the wrong cabinet and misplaced two pages of Emily's file."
"Right... multiple pages." Ash took a deep breath. The file folders she'd looked at had only held one page each; that should have cued her to the fact that the filing room of her dream was imaginary. "But... my file. There's no chance that you spilled something on the page, or anything like that. You misfiled it? Definitely?"
"Yes. Why?"
"I had a nightmare that I was in the filing room... I found my file, but I'd really been female all along, and something spilled on it just making me think I used to be a male."
"Ash... I told you, it's all codes. Gender is labeled one letter, either 'M' or 'F'. There's no way I could have spilled something to change that."
"You have NO idea how glad I am to hear that."


Emily opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling of her bedroom. What an awful dream... for sure, she couldn't tell Ash about it. Ash would freak at the idea that the misfile might all be in her head. Emily rolled over, vowing to forget all about the though that Ash might always have been a girl.


Missi pulled out a notebook, writing furiously. She'd looked up 'Lucid Dreaming' on the Internet last evening and it had recommended keeping a dream diary. This dream was the most bizarre one yet; even weirder then the whole car-chasing dragon one. She finished writing out the last of the details she could remember and then looked it over. She circled the word 'misfile', then looked at the 'Team Misfile' patch she'd made. "Wrong cabinet?" Missi asked. "Then... what does my sub-conscious think the right cabinet for Ash is?"
With a sigh, Missi closed the notebook.


The next day, Ash and Rumisial came out of class to find Emily impatiently waiting for them. "Em, what's up?"
"Um... Ash? Can I speak with Rumisial alone for a bit?" Emily asked.
"Sure. Is something wrong?"
"No. It's just... I had some questions about the misfile, and I wanted to ask him in private. I, um, didn't want to get your hopes up if it turns out that... it's probably nothing."
Ash frowned. It wasn't like Emily to sound so disjointed. "Sure, whatever." she said. "Rumisial, I'll meet you at home. Em, did you want to come along?"
"Yeah, sure." Emily waited till Ash was out of earshot, then grabbed Rumisial and dragged him into an empty room.
"What did you want to know?" Rumisial asked.
"Is there any way your misfile just changed Ash's memories? That she was always a girl, you just made her think she was a boy?"
"No! I told Ash already, that's not the way the files work. The only way that could have happened was a deliberate alteration to the first page of Ash's file."
Emily sighed in relief, then frowned. "Wait, you already told Ash?"
"She had a nightmare last night about the same thing, and asked me about it."
"Ash had a nightmare too?"
"Yeah. Wait, you and Ash had the same nightmare?"
"What a weird coincidence." Emily paused. "Um... it WAS a coincidence, right? I mean, that we two dreamed something similar?"
"Um... maybe." Rumisial frowned. "Were both you and Ash in the dream?"
"Yes, but I've been dreaming about Ash a lot, recently."
Rumisial scratched his head. "Well... I don't know a lot about dream messaging, but it used to be one of the ways the Big Guy had us Angels pass on messages. If you and Ash had the exact same dream, maybe someone was trying to tell you two something."
"Wait... Missi was in my dream." said Emily. "If Missi wasn't in Ash's dream, that proves they were different dreams, right? Did Ash say anything about me or Missi being in her dream?"
"No." said Rumisial, but he was still frowning.
"What is it?"
"Well... if Ash and Missi were in your dream, and it's possible that Ash had the same dream... what about Missi?"
"Oh my god!" Emily's eyes went wide. "Then... she'd know about the misfile! Um, maybe. I don't remember Ash or I talking much about it in the dream."
"Well, let's keep an eye on Missi." said Rumisial. "Hopefully, I'm just worrying about nothing."
"All right, but let's not talk about this to Ash. She's got enough to deal with while awake, I don't want her worrying about when she's sleeping too."


Cassi sighed, putting the quill pen, and stretched. She'd been working all night and day on this list. So far, however, she had to admit that all the ideas were long shots. What were the odds, after all, the Ash would ask Cassi to send her to Fort Know or Area 51? As for Ash wanting to go to Hell... well, even if Cassi WAS allowed to transport mortals still alive to the afterlife, she'd require special permission from Him in order to do it.