"I'm relieved and worried at the same time," Nita said, chin propped on hand as her grey eyes surveyed Dairine across the kitchen table.
"I know," Dairine said, snagging one of the banana slices her sister had prepared as an after-school snack. Nita gave her a look that Dairine knew meant, 'you eat my snack, you have to get me another one', but continued her thought.
"I mean, it's fantastic that he's alive and well- his parents are going to be ecstatic, did you message them yet?- but why would he be here and not contact us?"
"It can't be that he's pissed for some reason," Kit put in. The Hispanic boy, Nita's long-time partner and recent boyfriend, was lounging in the chair next to Nita, tipping it on two legs and teetering back and forth as he thought. Dairine was trying to ignore his hand casually resting on Nita's knee, but the amount of PDA that the two showed made her want to roll her eyes. It wasn't like they made out in front of people or anything- no, just always touching each other and exchanging long glances and blushing and generally being sweet enough to give her more cavities than Roushaun's lollipop habit.
"No," Dairine agreed. "Roshaun wouldn't sulk like that. I mean, he sulks, but first he stalks in and tells you exactly how wrong you are. He's not really a subtle person-"
Nita coughed to cover a smile and Dairine glared at her. "No, he is not 'like someone else we know', Neets, I know you're going to say that so just don't! Besides, he'd never let his parents think he was dead for this long for whatever reason."
"Yeah, I agree. So, the only thing that's making sense to me here is that there's something preventing him from contacting us. Did you check the post-transit status parameters?" Kit asked.
"I did," Dairine confirmed, rotating Spot's screen so that Kit could see the data for himself. "It doesn't tell me much more then where and when the transit ended and that the traveler exited with all normal functions intact."
"That's a pretty good start," Nita said, leaning towards the display and tracing a number with a finger. "It means that he's uninjured and still in a normal mode of being- not a fugue state or suspended animation or something. And you have somewhere to start looking."
"You have tried just a locator spell, right?" Kit said.
"What'd you think I am, a moron?!" Dairine said indignantly. "'Oops, I forgot, a locator, you're a genius! I can't believe I just wasted two months!'"
"Dairine," Nita said, giving her a 'big-sister' look, even as Kit chuckled.
Dairine huffed and muttered a quick "Sorry," before continuing more seriously, "They didn't work. Whenever I plugged his name, they'd just fizzle. I tried every variant I could think of- I even messed around with his name-"
"What?" Kit and Nita said together, suddenly tense. Dairine understood the reaction- plugging a changed name into a spell, a name that wasn't just a word but the complete description of their personality and mind, could irreversably change the one being named.
I thought he was dead, though- that it couldn't locate him because he was in Timeheart. Or that somehow the Lone One had captured him, or that he was plasma in the Sun- wouldn't it be more important to find him-?
However, what came out of her mouth was just, "Relax, Neets, it didn't take anyway. Besides, I didn't mess around with essential personality, just the state-of-being vectors."
"Oh, so you didn't try to change him, just whether he was alive and in the same body?" Nita said, a touch of anger in her words. "Dair, you should know better by now!"
Dairine sighed. "I know, okay? Tom and Carl chewed me out for it a few weeks ago. But I told you, it didn't take. I was trying to see if I could hit on the right name by guesswork."
"But obviously, state-of-being wasn't the problem," Nita agreed. "Well, I'll let it go for now if Tom and Carl already covered this, but you're not off the hook, runt."
"Come on, Neets-!"
"So what was the problem then?" Kit cut in.
"What?"
"If he's in a normal state of being and right here in New York, how come the manual doesn't know what to say and the tracker didn't work?" Kit elaborated, plucking his manual out of his otherspace pocket and riffling through the pages until he came to Roshaun's entry and studying the last recorded instance of his name- from that last disasterous working. "Can something that essential have changed in his personality?"
"Huh," Nita said, distracted. "That's a really good question."
"Roshaun wouldn't become someone else completely just because of spell overload," Dairine objected.
Nita's eyes went wide and she shot up from her seat. Kit, caught by surprise, lost control of his balancing act and his chair went over backwards with an almighty crash. "Aggh! Nita!"
"Oh no- sorry! You okay?" Nita said, trying to help him up but obviously distracted by whatever lightbulb had come on in her head. She looked at Dairine and said urgently, "I think I know what happened to Roshaun."
Dairine's eyes widened and Kit's head popped up over the table to stare at his girlfriend. "Spill!" Dairine urged.
"Okay, okay, I'm trying to figure out how to say this- Well, you know Bobo?" Nita began.
Dairine gagged. "Neets, seriously, can you stop reverting to childhood? I can't believe you're talking about your invisible friend right now."
Nita refused to be annoyed. "Don't be a smartass, Dairine, you know I'm talking about the peridexis. Anyway, when I was trying to save Ronan when he stabbed himself with the Spear, I asked the peridexis for extra power and it warned me what could happen if a wizard tried to channel too much." She passed both Dairine and Kit mental pictures of that moment: desperation, rainbows in the dark blood, silent Yaldiv looking on- Your mental conduits could be scarred- you would be too sensitive, afterwards, and every use of power would be agony- Just do it, I'll worry about the consequences later.
Dairine blinked and shivered a little at the raw taste of the memory. "Ouch. But what-?"
"Come on, I'm supposed to be the slow one here, not you!" Nita said.
"Wait, you think Roshaun burned himself out? I thought of that already and tried it in the locator-"
"Not just burned out. I think he burned out and lost wizardry."
Dairine and Kit got it at the same moment, an expression of mingled horror and enlightment mirrored on their faces. "That would explain everything! His name would change-" Kit said.
"-And he'd lose the memory of the Art, which since he's an alien on Earth would mean he'd basically lose the memory of his whole life on Wellakhit-" Nita went on.
"Right, because there's no explanation other that magic for ending up on a different world! So that's why he hasn't contacted us." Dairine finished, then scowled as another thought occured to her. "Great. He's wandering around in New York with amnesia, looking like some kind of anime freak. That complete idiot!"
"Hey. Dair'," Nita said, correctly reading her aggression as worry and coming around the table to give her a companionable one-armed hug. "Roshaun strikes me as the kind of guy to always land on his feet. And we'll find him. We'll just do it the old-fashioned way."
"He does stick out like a sore thumb, so he won't be too hard to find," Kit agreed. Dairine lifted her chin, suddenly filled with joyful desisiveness. Spot sensed her mood and scrambled into Dairine's backpack.
"So what are we waiting for then?" Dairine picked up the backpack, got up, and held open the porch door for her sister. "Come on, we've got a prince to find...!"
Annoying Authorial Annotation:
I know, I know, filler, I apologize. Plus I've sunk low enough to commit the cardinal sin of posting without even a read through edit. orz I just needed to update and it's one A.M. I guess I could stay up another couple hours and churn out the bit where they actually, you know, go out and do stuff, it's just that with the way sleep deprevation hits me they might be doing stuff like fighting giant scissors and riding candy unicorns desu. I'm pushing it as it is because that actually sounds workable to me right now. . So, give me a bit. I had to rewrite this whole chapter anyway because originally Roshaun was going to be in a school and be Sean Kendall because he said "Roshuan ke Nelaid" and someone misheard but I've scrapped it because that's stupid. D:
Actually, amnesia is stupid too but hey, it's 1 AM so I laugh in the face of logic! And brain injury! Hopefully this doesn't burn your eyes too much and Kit falling over is enough action for now. Sorry about the lack of paragraph indents, FFN is awful when it comes to formatting. Finally, I love Kit and Nita. *been rooting for them to make out since SYWTBAW*
REVIEW and you too can have giant scissors and candy unicorns! :DDD Thanks so much, "Hello", yours is on the house! ;)