In the bustle of the Crossings, where a thousand alien species travel and shop and eat and grenfelz and !*!f!^ every day, it's not always easy to provide streamlined and efficient customer service.

At least, that's what Dairine Callahan told herself as she took a deep, centering, non-entropy-increasing breath through her nose and attempted to address the Crossings Records customer service representative again.

"Look, can you just give me authorization for my manual? You don't have to get the documents manually or do anything, just give me the authorization number."

The representative, a glistening fist-sized dodecahedron on three skinny towering legs that put it at least a foot higher than Dairine's measly five-two, waved two of its ten feathery feelers at her. This translated on its touch-screen desk to "Processing. Please hold...Request denied."

"Come on!" Dairine yelled at the Ysad, stamping a foot in what she knew was a childish way. She'd had to wait hours on hold, then had been passed through four different agents before she reached this current one, who seemed about fifty times thicker than the previous ones. And that was truly saying something. If Sker'ret had been in town, he probably would have been able to get her through this nightmare of petty beauracracy much more easily, but unfortunately he was in the middle of an interventation on Rirhait C and his broodfather had just given Dairine the evil eye. Several of them, actually.

"Do you have any further requests?" the representative signaled politely.

"Yes, whether I can kick your slimy blue anterior angle!"

"Processing...please hold...request denied."

"Ahhgg!"

"Should wait until Sker'ret returns," Spot said from his vantage point. The little wizardly laptop had gained tiny metal legs at some point during his many "updates" and was using them to cling tightly to her back and extend an optical sensor over her shoulder. Luckily he had converted to an ultralight plastic/chitin hybrid, so he wasn't ruining her t-shirt, but Dairine didn't have the patience to be grateful for these small mercies.

"I only have two months left in summer break, Spot, and I still haven't chased down any of the leads I have on Roshaun. I don't have time to wait for Sker'ret to finish up on Rirhait C and get me the atypical transit records when this rickety tripod could get me in the record room in five minutes!" she snapped, flinging her wavy red hair over her shoulder with an exasperated noise.

"You are not authorized to access this level of information," the Ysad signaled. "Would you like to apply for higher status?"

"How long will that take?"

"Processing..."

"You know what? Fine. I'll do it, but if this doesn't work, I'm going straight to the nearest planet to find myself some B.E.M.s! If Mr. High-and-Mighty Stationmaster doesn't like it, he can just go twiddle his hyperfoam structure!"

"Request not recognized, please repeat-" the Ysad began. Spot, seeing Dairine's head was about to explode, quickly put in, "She will apply for higher status."

"Request accepted. Please fill out form 21 section a through theta, implement routine 5q subroutines 4[g] through 4[ii] and submit to agent at window 112."

Dairine attempted to fortify herself with another deep breath before picking up a pen and getting to it.

Some time later she slumped, head on the table of one of the sleazy little dives that infested the Crossing's fringes, her grey eyes closed. Spot sat quietly next to her on the pleather booth, humming "Dataaaa..." to himself.

"On hold again," Dairine commented in a dead voice to her laptop. She toyed with the little buzzer that would tell her when it was her turn to visit window 112 again. "He better be really grateful, is all I'm saying. Honestly, I'm thinking he should get down on his knees and swear that he will never, ever crunch a lollipop again. Or maybe I should get him to stop wearing gangster shirts over those parachute pants...or give him a buzz cut...or- Spot, are you listening to me?"

"Yes, Dairine," the little laptop said meekly, poking a sensor up over the blue glass table

"Were you listening to me before?" Dairine said shrewdly.

"No. I was communing with the Crossings' computer network. Several of them are semi-sentient."

"You know, I should really be annoyed with you-" She broke off as the waiter, an otterlike creature with six legs, brought her blue milkshake to the table. Dairine tasted it and grimaced- obviously when they said 'milk', they didn't necessarily mean 'from a cow'. Still, it was sugar and she figured she deserved something sweet after this headache of the day, so she took a long pull before continuing, "-but I'm out of energy for it and I'm actually kind of curious about your whole 'dataaa' thing."

"It could be considered analogous to ingesting food or drink in humans," Spot said after a moment.

"Huh. Well, that's surprisingly innocuous," Dairine said. Really, the 'milk'shake wasn't too bad after all, similar to Thai iced tea. She'd have to make a note of this dive's location for the next time she was stuck in the seven circles of customer service hell, she mused. It wasn't often that she found blue food she actually liked, despite Kit's enthusiasm for the stuff.

"On further thought, however, it could be more accurate to compare it to the act of sexual reproduction," Spot continued in a composed, meditative tone of voice. Dairine spit the shake all over the table.

The Powers were merciful, though, and saved her from having to make some reply to that little statement; a voice whistled behind her, "Dharinn! How wonderful to see you here!"

"S'reee!" she said happily, turning to meet the little smiling eye of the whale hanging next to the table in her personal inch-thick water bubble. Though Dairine didn't know the Senior for the Earth's oceans too well, her sister Nita had been close friends with S'reee for a few years and Dairine had bumped to the whale often enough to know what a wonderful person she was. It also helped that the interruption made it possible to pretend Dairine hadn't heard Spot's disturbing revelation.

"What brings you to this part of the Crossings?" S'reee asked politely, drifting downwards a bit to avoid catching her dorsal fin on the low ceiling.

"Well, I'd be gone already, but I'm on hold. Some idiot at the service and information desk decided I wasn't 'qualified' to access atypical transit records," Dairine grumbled, standing the coin-shaped buzzer on its edge. S'reee chuckled, a thick bubbly sound.

"Poor Dharinn! But you should have just asked me: I'm a Senior, you know! I can give you authorization right now. I'm just heading home after a Crossings to Indian Ocean worldgate consultation so I have plenty of time."

"I love you, S'reee," Dairine said ferverently.

S'reee chuckled again and made a 'follow me' gesture with one fin. One short trip back to window 112 plus a now very helpful customer service alien later and Dairine found herself with the entire atypical transit record from R.E. 376 to the present day loaded into her manual.

"So, cousin," S'reee said as they began the hike, or in her case float, back to the transit branch for Earth, "what do you need the records for? Hopefully it's nothing too illegal."

"No...well," Dairine said, and cleared a suddenly tight throat. "Do you remember, on the Moon a couple months ago-"

"Ah, I should have known," S'reee whistled. "The Wellakhit prince. Have you had any success?"

"No. I have a few leads, though, and I've begun to trace a line of research that looks promising." Dairine spoke as clinically as she could, as if this were just another job that needed doing, but the truth was, she had a hard time not choking up when she thought about the day Roshaun had vanished in a blaze of Sunfire and desperation. She could feel the ghost of the Sunburn even now: she had shared a lesser portion of his burden, channeling a tiny bit of white-hot plasma to burn back the encroaching dark matter, and even that secondhand glimpse had made her feel like she was turned to ash where she knelt.

S'reee gave a soft whistle of encouragement. "And may the Powers be guiding you in your search, cousin. Call on me anytime you need anything...ah, there's our gate."

"Thank you, S'reee, I will," Dairine said sincerely, stepping onto her transit circle. S'reee swam into place a few circles away and began to describe a graceful circle, scripted words in the Speech glittering gold around her fins and fluke. Dairine dropped her own transit spell around her and sighed with relief as the Crossings vanished, replaced with her own backyard.

The clock in her room was showing 1 a.m. when Dairine hissed, "Yess!" and stabbed a finger triumphantly into Spot's screen.

"Ow," Spot commented, giving Dairine pause for a moment. When did he grow a sense of humor? But it wasn't enough to distract her from her exultation.

"That's got to be it, Spot," she told the little laptop, thumping a fist into her Star Wars bedspread for emphasis. "Same date, same time, same general location as when Roshaun vanished- and it's recorded as a 'lifeboat' wizardry. I haven't heard of that before, but I think I can guess what it means and that's that Roshaun was smarter than he looked." Just to be sure, she opened a new tab in Spot's Manual interface and ran a search for the spell type. It was a little-used variant on a general personal protection spell. Apparently, it would run in the "background" in order to sense when its wizard was at the end of his or her reserves and then promptly teleport them to a preset safe location. It was really quite clever, but had fallen into disuse since it could only be run as an add-on to a large working due to the way it drained power.

For Roshaun, though, power drain hadn't been the issue, it had been controlling the amount of power he was recieving, so this spell was a perfect fit. "Got to be it," Dairine repeated. "I could just kiss that Stationmaster for being enough of a control freak to record all atypical transits."

"I don't think he'd appreciate that," Spot said.

"Yeah," she answered absently, fingers tapping at the keyboard again in a machine-gun like rattle as she began the second part of her search- to find out where the 'lifeboat' had landed. She read,

[Transit:: JD uncertain due to local spacetime anomoly estimated 2365.4:: Unauthorized {unrestricted} from CRP 34.56.71-2 point a-67.8 (Terra, satellite a, 'Mare Orientale') to CRP uncertain due to local spacetime anomoly via 'lifeboat' (entath 45 reference b-52) routine::

notation: blank

notification: blank

status: closed, transit completed]

Local spacetime anomoly has got to mean the Pullulus; Dairine mused, and no one else made a transit once the Pullulus was close enough to start affecting our local spacetime structure. However, the reason was that it threw off all calculations and you'd be likely to end up halfway through a wall...or in the heart of a star. He probably thought he'd be fine if that happened to him, of course...But I shouldn't get my hopes up. Still, it was hard to surpress the anticipation that welled up at the thought of finally finding him. The look in Roshaun's parents' eyes still haunted her, and even though she knew they were too good to blame her, she still felt guilt weighing heavily on her shoulders.

After all, it was in defense of a different planet and a different star, with an alien girl by his side, that Roshaun had fallen. Even though he was king of Wellakh. Even though he was sworn to protect his planet, even though he knew that this act would put his parents in danger. She couldn't help but feel that it was her own fault, that their relationship- whatever it was- had caused him to act contrary to his usual mode and resulted in such dire consequences. To find him and bring him home felt like absolution of those sins.

And if she was completely honest with herself, Dairine had to admit that even without these reasons, she'd still be looking for him. Under her "Dyslexia rules KO" pajama tee, the emerald he'd given her still sat on its gently scrolling sentence in the Speech. Absently, she slid it back and forth on the chain.

"Would you like me to search work history for a match?" Spot said, intruding on her introspection.

"What?" Dairine put her hand down and refocused.

"I also participated in that working, and I believe that Roshaun may have passed us the lifeboat spell as part of the plasma-handling routine. We may be able to find the preset destination in my archives."

"I knew you were worth what I paid for you," Dairine said with a grin. "Hit it."

Spot made a soft disk-drive thinking noise for a moment, then pulled up a spell description file. Dairine scanned through the lines of text, many of which bore a resemblance to computer code. She was tired enough that when she came to the relevent section, she scrolled right past before realizing her mistake. There it was: a description of a subroutine titled 'departure- extremis only' that wasn't part of the main spell. And the destination read "G.S. 367-49/45 3-a 34.51 (local idiom: New York)"

New York.

Roshaun's on Earth...!

Incredibly Long Author's Note: Hi. I feel like I should warn my readers what they're getting into here, because Young Wizards tends to be an intelligent, discriminating sort of fandom. *buttering you up*

Anyway, I've written a lot of fanfic and they have all been really serious and literary. Oh, I tried to throw in some humor, but mainly it was about agonizing over whether my characters were true to canon and researching every last detail, etc, and I honestly burned out. I mean, I'd spend half an hour tweaking a phrase and comparing it against a list of quotes to make sure it sounded exactly like canon, and the result was I got writer's block like nothing else. Writer's rush-hour-in-Los-Angeles. Writer's train wreck.

But then I read the Lady Moonglow's fic Have You Ever Been Loved and it cured me. It has a completely non-canon pairing, it's a mushy fluffy love story, it's got several blatant plot devices, and most of the characters are really OOC, but you know what, I loved it. To death, and even to a second reading. So, I'm following her example. This is a blatantly mushy, fluffy fic, the characters are most likely OOC, I'm not going to research anything- basically I'm going to do my best impression of an airhead. Also Dairine is not going to be eleven, at all.

Hey, you know, if DD herself can write 30 days of fanfic about Nita and Kit basically being adorable (she really did! I'm still over the moon. Message me if you can't find it, it's on her website somewhere) then I can mess with canon to make bubblehead teen romance if I want to, right? Please REVIEW and let me knooowww...*puppy eyes*

Too long, didn't read: It's OOC, I pulled the science-y stuff out of where the sun don't shine, Dairine's a lot older than eleven so that she can kiss Roshaun without me feeling squicky about it, and I'm going to beg shamelessly for reviews (Please? ;)). You've been warned.