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Leila really should have had an excuse for being here -- she'd overslept, they were out of eggs at home -- but the fact of the matter was simply that she ******** loved this trashy spot of grease on the west end of campus, and sometimes the craving was too much to bear. So she'd told Eve that she was going to shorten her lifespan for breakfast this morning, and with a nod and a wave she was out and ready to stuff herself full of carbs.

She'd just had a glass of orange juice brought over when a familiar face stepped in. One of her students, and also was living with Jeremiah, if she remembered right.

"Hey! Don't think I remember your name -- but you're Mercer's kid, right? In my intro-eco section?" she called, brightly. "Get over here, let's have some breakfast."

"That's good to hear," said Leila, while sliding the menu over to Zac, "but this isn't high school. The only time I care about your homework is in class time or during office hours. Right now the rest of your life is more important. Especially breakfast. I'm buying, so take advantage."

"Look, I muck around in ripe corpses for a living," the teacher grinned, "so don't worry about weirding me out. Not to mention I was in Other Ashdown with that stupid foot. You were there too, right?"

Leila was speaking at her normal volume, which was one that generally didn't care much about being overheard. Though she wouldn't admit it, that was partly because she wanted to be overheard. If it did anything to make the town more aware of the sometimes-dangerous strangeness that hovered invisibly over it, she'd be okay with some random eavesdropper knowing what color underwear she had on when she took the ******** foot.

And yet... the thought of talking about the foot past just the mention made her feel a little cagey. "I'm not sure how many details on that I should disclose, but we have it in cold storage. After that I finally learned you can just end up in Other Ashdown for no reason any time of the day. I'm sure everyone we saw there has a story of some kind now."

A server came up to see if Zac needed anything to drink -- Leila took the opportunity to order a large pile of Ashbrowns (yes, ashbrowns) and a smaller pile of pancakes.

The little anecdote made Leila snicker under her breath a bit. Regardless of the circumstances behind which Zac came into his care, he was definitely Jeremiah's kid: chronically uncomfortable for some reason, and with deep misgivings about lying. "Well, at least there's a few people around who know the true story, right? Sorry you have to play along with a cover story, though. I wouldn't like it either. You staying safe when s**t gets weird, I hope?"

The food came to them remarkably quick, and Leila wasted no time in letting go of her inhibitions with the butter and syrup. She was dressing up her pancakes like a little kid -- it was a wonder she hadn't asked for chocolate chips or whipped cream.

"Learned anything people should know?" she asked, while being just as liberal with ketchup on her hash browns. "I haven't ended up on the other side more than once again myself. Found some kind of magical princess in a basement that time, though."

"Damn, I can see what you mean," said Leila, after accepting the phone and thumbing through the pictures. "Sunny's that pack-of-smokes girl from everyone's favorite rumors, right?" She was a bit out of the loop on some of the details. That Jeremiah lookalike, though... things kept getting weirder in ways she wasn't expecting. Ashdown was methodically revealing itself to be a sort of living fairy tale. The classical, bizarrely violent kind, not the Disney-polished PG kind. She doubted Jeremiah would turn out to secretly be thousands of years old like Pax and Heliodora apparently were, though. Or at least he'd be up front about it if he knew.

"Do town census records say anything illuminating?" she asked upon handing back the phone.