Winston readjusted his glasses and wiped the sweat from his brow with his sausage-fingers. Damp half-moons had formed by the armpits of his shirt. Across the table from him sat a girl with wavy ginger hair. She was looking around with arched brows and questions dancing in the fields of her eyes. At either shoulder stood two guards, the full-face visors of their helmets reflecting a distorted view of the room. It was a barren affair, with only one door, and, on the ceiling, a halogen light behind a frosted glass disk. 

The girl had been brought from her holding cell after she was judged safe enough to transport without serious restraints. Still, after her outbreak in the infirmary, Winston was nervous. He wasn’t even supposed to be involved with debriefing or interviewing, but they had somehow roped him into it; apparently, the regular guy was too ill.

He cleared his throat and began flicking through the folder on the desk, about to speak, when she beat him to it.

“You’re so dark.” She said, with a genuine wonderment. 

“I’m sorry?” Winston spluttered, caught quite off-guard. 

“Your skin,” she clarified, “I’ve never seen anyone with skin so dark.”

“Well…” Winston paused, uncertain as to what he should say, “It’s quite common.”

“Really?” The girl nearly shrilled, evidently quite excited about this revelation. 

Winston began to relax; she wasn’t so intimidating. “Oh yes. There are plenty of people just as ‘dark’ as me, or darker.”

The girl’s face formed an ‘O’. She took a deep breath, and then asked a question he could feel she had had behind her lips from the moment she arrived.

“Am I in Tír na nÓg?” 

Winston, whilst he didn’t understand the question, could feel its gravity, and saw the hopeful fire burning in her eyes, and he knew what she wanted the answer to be. He could not bring himself to destroy that hope.

“Yes,” he said hesitantly, “but-”. The girl pounded her fist onto the table and screamed in delight. The guards and Winston recoiled, the guards reaching for their Tasers reflexively, but then she began laughing manically. The kindling fire in her eyes had exploded into electricity.

“I never thought I’d make it,” she was saying, “Part of me doubted this place even existed, but here I am. More fool me.” She sighed deeply and reclined, content, with a large grin splitting her face.

“Well, yes, as I was saying, most people call it ‘Earth’, and it has different regions and places within, so I doubt you’ll ever heard it called,” he couldn’t remember what words she had used, but added, quick enough to avoid suspicion, “that.” 

“Ah, ‘Earth’,” she said, trying the word out. She figured it came from the daoine sídhe, the people of the mounds.

A crackle cut through the silence, followed by some fuzzy words came from the radio clipped to Winston’s breast pocket, “Winston, be back in the global surveillance department by nineteen hundred hours.”

He depressed the rubber button on the side and spoke back, “Roger.”

The girl starred with wide eyes. “Is that black box magic?” 

He thought about telling her it wasn’t magic, and trying to explain how it worked, but he realised he didn’t even know, “Yes, there are many things that work with similar sort of magic on Earth.” Mallaidh was suitably awestruck. 

A guard readjusted his gun, an apparent cue, for Winston straightened up, and the butterflies returned to his stomach. He began sorting through the folder, but couldn’t seem to find what he was looking for, as he kept backtracking. 

“Can you help me?”

Winston paused and looked up at her over the rim of his glasses, which had slipped to the tip of his nose. There was something in her voice that tugged at his heartstrings. He closed the folder and rested both his hands over it. 

“What’s your name?” He asked softly.

“Mallaidh.” She answered, her name almost sounding like “Molly”. 

“My name is Winston, and I’m not very important here; I’m a smaller part of a larger whole. Nevertheless, there is a chance we might be able to help you. What is it you need?”

Mallaidh leaned forwards, consciously trying to supress the anxiousness she felt, knowing that she could still fall at this final hurdle of her journey, but it escaped, manifesting as rapid finger movements and the fidgeting in her chair. 

“My mother is very ill, and I was told that the Tuatha Dé would have magic that could heal her.”

Winston’s breath caught. He took of his glasses and began cleaning them with a cuff as he considered his words. His eyes looked imploring into the mirrored visors of the guards, but then they started shooting resentful daggers when he realised he would find no trace of humanity behind them. It would not be necessary to break the charade yet, he realised, but that didn’t make it any easier to tell the girl she might not get to save her mother. 

“It is possible that we might have a cure; you would have to describe the state of your mother to some special people.” He replaced his glasses, “The real problem is getting you back; you were brought here by a series of events that are, for the most part, a mystery to us.” Mallaidh was surprised at this; if something was beyond the eyes of the gods, then it must hide in the thickest of shadows.  

“That brings me to my main point,” Winston went on, “Earth is probably very different from your home. There are other people like you ‘visitors’. My purpose is to try and make you familiar with the more different aspects of life here.”

The session lasted perhaps another hour; there were questions, starting of very basic and becoming a little more philosophical towards the tail end. Winston had shown her pictures of various contraptions, such as ‘cars’, ‘planes’ and ‘mobile phones’. As far as Mallaidh understood, they were metal beasts, tamed to perform as set purpose. A brief history was given, but didn’t go back more than a hundred years, and only touched on key events. Mallaidh was interested in this, as she had always wondered what the gods had been doing since the time of legend. Winston also explained how the corporation, which Mallaidh deciphered as ‘clan’, he was part of wanted to help her and the other ‘visitors’ to get back home, and elucidate the roots of their arrival. 

At the end, Winston offered something called ‘coffee’, which Mallaidh accepted graciously, not wanting to offend. He spoke into his little, black box again, and got a crackling response of confirmation. She would get it once back in her room.  

The two guards then blindfolded Mallaidh, which Winston stressed was just ‘standard procedure’, so she complied; again she was scared to offend the people who could heal her mother. Both guards escorted her, taking a twisting and turning path, far longer than she suspect was necessary. There was a whirring sound, and then they removed her blindfold. She turned just in time to see a polished metal panel slide shut, becoming seamless with the wall. 

The new room was a clash of alien and familiar; metal panels made up the walls and ceilings, housing tubes of halogen lights, casting the room in bright white light, but the floor was oak boards, and much of it was covered in near-threadbare furniture, all facing inwards towards a central rug that really tied the room together. There were small lamp-tables next to each seat, and held either worn paperback Penguin Classics, or glossy magazines. There were two oil paintings of scenic fjords, presumably in Norway, that made up for the lack of any windows, or at least tried. 

Mallaidh sat down in a floral armchair, sinking into the time-softened upholstery, and regarded the room, well aware she was quite alone. Her hands ached to grip the reassuring heft of Fragarach, but she had not woken up with it, and she had been too giddy with the thought of a cure to ask about it. It was likely it had been taken as sacrifice for her entry into Tír na nÓg, and she could invoke the anger of all the Tuatha Dé if she asked for it back.

The panel slid open again, and through the entrance stepped a meagre girl, who offered a single word, “coffee”. She placed it on the table next to the armchair and left hurriedly, eyes always at the ground. The door slid shut, and Mallaidh was alone again.

The coffee was a creamy-brown liquid in a pleasingly corrugated cup, made of an indiscernible material. Even if she had missed the wisps of steam rising from its surface, she could still feel its dull heat in her fingertips when she picked it up. She took a small sip. It pinched her lips, and sent bitterness throughout her person. She spat it back into the cup and set it down, working her mouth to get rid of the foul taste. She did not like coffee.