A/N Diane Duane remains mistress of this universe, which she has graciously allowed us to play in. I thank her for that.
There are things nobody tells you about being a Senior.
Oh, they warn you about the obvious things, all right. But they don't tell you about Rebecca, the timid little wizard with brown pigtails from Vermont. Carl and Tom awoke one early morning to find her at their back door three months after they'd first met her, clutching a stuffed panda bear to her pink pj clad chest with arms dotted by cigarette burns. She flinches when Carl holds up his hands to slow her rapid speech, making him shove them in his pockets as she starts crying again. It takes two hours to get the full story, another hour to contact a Wizard working for Social Services in her home state. These days Rebecca lives happily in New Mexico with her aunt, and Carl and Tom have a contact system for emergency personal in every state in their jurisdiction.
They also don't tell you about Sfwnsae, the unstable being from two universes over who took a stab at Tom and another advisory as they tried to sort out a problem with his erranty. Tom got a shield up in time to keep the claw from actually puncturing him, but not fast enough to avoid a deep gash along the length of his lower stomach. Later that night Carl, who got home before it fully went away, let his partner convince him everything's okay, because both of them needed to hear it.
Or about Mitchell, the college boy from Ohio who was using a local worldgate to mask his transfer spells whenever he slipped into people's homes and stole their things. It took Carl nearly a week to catch him, and a whole lot of power to cut the spell while both keeping the worldgate stable and sealing the boy's powers. He put the week on a time slide to avoid missing work, but the power cost left him so woozy and disjointed that Tom called him in sick for a couple of days anyway. The week after that, Mitchell got himself killed trying to burglarize a house the normal way, and Carl refused to stay home because he knew if he thought about it too much he was going to start throwing up again.
The other thing nobody tells you about being a senior is that even if somebody had told you all of these things, you would still take the job anyway.