Central Park was a nice place in the daytime.  In Archer's opinion, it turned utterly miserable at night.  At the time Archer's taxi pulled up, it was somewhere in between it's transformation.  A few vagrants milled about with bottles of wine.  Some moody, tired working folks headed to or from their shift.  The young assassin stared up at the commercial tower across the road from him as the taxi drove off.  A few bodies crissed and crossed his path before he headed over the road, to the looming office block.

"Archer," Sam, the receptionist greeted.  Archer threw up a hand in leui of a wave.  "Lost your bike again?"

He had.  Yesterday, he'd crashed the motorcycle while chasing down his target.  The whole thing turned into a footrace and massive circus, Archer had forgotten where he'd even left his vehicle.  The young man looked at the receptionist and shrugged his shoulders as he passed., then entered the elevator which was already waiting for him.  As the doors were shutting, he smiled, unable to think of any smart remark or quip he could make to sound like a badass.  The truth was he should've been using a car, as he could actually drive those without nearly killing himself.  But it just wasn't nearly as cool as riding a motorcycle.

[i]She always rode a bike.[/i]

Sam shook his head disappointedly and went back to some work he was doing.

The elevator arrived at one of the classified floors, (Archer had to put a code in to do so,) and the doors opened to a giant, open office space; a room strewn with lines of desks arranged in different shapes and sections.  It was busy, as always.  Half a hundred people on phones, making international calls, interdepartmental calls, agent-to-agent, national government... there were a lot of conversations and arguments in the air.  A man called David, veteran assassin, was walking around with a SPAS shotgun, trying to get someone to help him fix it.

"Archer!"

"Shit," Archer muttered.  He didn't even get a chance to make a coffee.

The big office adjacent to the open-plan floor - the bosses office - was at the end of the room, and there was the boss man, red-faced and staring right at Archer.  

[center][img]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8e/J.K._Simmons_as_J._Jonah_Jameson.png/220px-J.K._Simmons_as_J._Jonah_Jameson.png[/img]3
[i]Above: Sergeant Walter Daniels, Head of the Field Operations[/i][/center]

"Get your ass in here."

Archer carried himself with a head held high on his walk of shame, getting a few looks from colleagues as he passed them.  Some looks of pity, some derision, some amusement.  "Alright, Guv," he greeted as he walked into the office of Sergeant Daniels, the department head.  He hated his boss.  Such a fucking try-hard, who'd go to an early grave with blood pressure issues if he wasn't careful.

"Don't you 'alright, Guv' me, you little piece of shit.  Do you know how much damage you caused with that shit show yesterday!?"  It was admittedly messy, but what was one supposed to do when a nonhuman serial killer just decides to book it above ground and run around in the daylight?  Archer was about to explain as much but got cut off as soon as he opened his mouth.  .  "500K, Archer.  Half-a. Fucking. [i]Million.[/i] Dollars, Archer!  That's the bill for the damages; repairs, compensation, hush money, media spin... all because of your fucking idea of what it means to be an agent!"

The tirade of abuse went on for another ten minutes.  Some fresh new lines, sure, but mostly the same old stuff; how Archer was incompetent and never should've been allowed to become a fully fledged agent.  How he costed the company untold thousands with his bull-in-a-china-shop antics.  How he was on his last warning before being sent to work in the Antarctic for the rest of his life.  Nothing Archer did was good enough for Daniels.  A neutral assessor would totally understand why this was the case.  According to Archer, everyone just hated him because he was English.

"Listen, forget the succubus.  We've got other people on it now.  We need you for this."  Daniels dropped a massive file onto the desk in front of Archer, who thumbed through the pages looking for pictures.  "Word around town is; It's a Lycan.  Particularly nasty one, too."

"Jesus Christ," Archer exclaimed when he finally found a picture of a victim in the pages.

"Yeah, it's not good," Daniels agreed, sparking up a cigarette and going to his window to look out on the city.  "I dunno, Archer, I think this might not just be any old Lycan.  I think it's something big.  We're getting calls from Italy.  The Vatican are getting themselves involved."

Archer's eyes lit up.  "The [i]Vatican[/i]?"

"Yeah."  Daniels noticed Archer's reaction.  "Don't get excited, they're not sending your fucking mommy over."  Archer deflated, but tried to hide it by being angry at the insult.  "Oh, you thought [i]she[/i] was coming back?  Save your hopes for something else."  That one hurt.  A lot.  Archer decided he'd had enough of this shit, grabbed the huge file and turned to leave.  "Everyone's got their eyes on this one, Archer, the whole world.  The Assassins, Vatican, Templar, Shogun... everyone is watching us right now."

Archer paused his exit to look at his boss who turned away from the window to give weight to his last words.

"Don't fucking screw this up."