Author's Note: Okay, when material is quoted from Robin's guidelines or from a fan letter, it will be rendered in italics as the default condition. That will help you distinguish between what is written on pieces of paper in the hands of the Titans, and what is going through their own minds as they react to whatever they've been reading.

Chapter Three: Early Screening

1. If the writer is blatantly trying to establish a romance out of the blue—such as asking you on a date, or talking about how much he or she would love to kiss you, or proposing marriage, or anything similar, moral or otherwise—then feel free to toss the letter aside and move on to the next. (Quoted from Robin's guidelines.)

The Titans had each counted out their five hundred letters and then carried the correspondence back to their private rooms. The agreement was that around one o'clock they'd all take a break for lunch and compare notes.

Starfire scrupulously followed Robin's guidelines and threw away any letter which quickly made it obvious that the author was desperately seeking romance. That simple step reduced her pile of 500 to about one-third of its original size.

It occurred to her that Robin probably had a similar problem—wouldn't it be nice if they could find some way to introduce all the female fans who thought they loved Robin to all the male fans who thought they loved Starfire? At least those young people would have common interests to talk about, and perhaps some pairs would get interested in one another and stop pestering the Titans with their pleas for affection. (Most importantly, perhaps less of those shameless Earth girls would be trying to capture Robin's attention!)

She made a mental note to suggest it at lunch and see if anyone else was interested in her half-formed idea, then shrugged and went back to the short pile to start finding things she actually wanted to respond to, subject to Robin's other guidelines, of course.

As luck would have it, the second letter Robin opened began:

Dear Robbie Poo:

I hope you remember that blissful evening as well as I do! Howzabout an encore?

Oh, no!

Robin skipped down to the signature at the bottom and confirmed his worst fears. It read:

Your Own Cuddly Kitten!

Killer Moth's daughter must have broken up with her boyfriend Fang again. Robin had never quite understood what she saw in that guy in the first place—but then, he'd never quite understood what Fang saw in Kitten, either. Still, when Robin had watched those two hugging at the end of the worst date of his life (not that he'd had all that many), he'd taken considerable comfort from the realization that Kitten had completely forgotten about him for the time being!

(Should've known it was too good to last!)

Robin hastily skimmed through the rest of the letter to see if Kitten was actually threatening to kill anyone this time—found she wasn't—and decided all he could do was carefully not answer, and pray that she'd decide he just wasn't worthy of her after all.

Galvanized by this experience, Robin starting slicing more envelopes open, then using some speedreading tricks (which Batman had taught him years ago) to rapidly filter out anything else which appeared to be asking him out on a date, or suggesting other types of "romantic" activity, or even just strongly hinting that if he wanted to ask the girl, he wouldn't need to worry about being shot down in flames. All that went into a trash bag—Robin didn't need to waste any more time on those sociopathic types who regarded a costumed superhero as a fashionable toy to make the other girls in their cliques turn green with envy.

Okay, so he was probably being unfair to some of these correspondents. A few years of helping Batman face all the usual suspects in Gotham tended to leave a guy with a cynical view of human nature. Some of these letters might come from reasonably "nice and normal" girls who would never dream of threatening an entire city just to extort you into "asking" them to to the junior prom. Perhaps some of these writers were just desperately lonely. Or, in some cases, probably weren't even desperate, but were just letting off steam by writing fanciful letters to a teenage celebrity whom they knew perfectly well would never take their missives too seriously?

At any rate, Robin really couldn't afford to care about the exact motives of any given writer in the "romance-seeker" category. He had set the guideline about that sort of thing, and he was definitely going to set the example by following his own guidelines . . . even if it wouldn't surprise him to see some of his friends fudge on certain details. But he had also meant it when he said he wasn't planning to peer over their shoulders and study every word of their private correspondence.

Raven looked at the stack near her right elbow and blinked. She'd been tossing any "romantic" letters in that direction as she made a preliminary sweep through the entire pile. She'd previously estimated that Robin's "No Romance" guideline might help her winnow two or three letters out of a sample group of 500 items from her mail bin.

(She expected each of the other Titans to get considerably more in the way of romantic overtures, but that was their problem.)

Instead, her "romantic discard" pile now had . . . she did a quick riffle through them . . . forty-seven letters. (Well, technically it was forty-four letters and three postcards, but that wasn't the point.)

Forty-seven divided by five hundred was, um, 9.4 percent.

She hadn't seen any Gallup polls on the subject, but there were probably many tens of thousands of people out there who would proudly call themselves "Teen Titans fans." Presumably some thousands of those would even call themselves "Raven fans" (although she wasn't sure why they'd bother).

And now it appeared that as many as 9.4 percent of the "Raven fans" were masochistic enough to want to go on a date with her? Now there was a depressing discovery!

(It was almost enough to make a girl weep for her entire generation! Fortunately, Raven didn't cry that easily.)

Then she shivered as she realized the situation might be even worse than it appeared at first glance. The 9.4 percent of her fan mail which was angling for a date only represented those of her male fans who apparently were obtuse enough to think they had a chance of persuading Raven to reply and schedule a "blind date" with some weirdo she had never even heard of before. (Yeah, like that was going to happen.) Accordingly, whether from arrogance or cluelessness or sheer desperation, they had made their bids by letter. But surely not all of her male fans were that self-centered in how they normally tried to attract the attention of a girl after they began to feel a certain interest in her.

(Well . . . she hoped they weren't always that bad, anyway. But it would be just her luck to attract all the worst elements of Teen Titans fandom. In fact, it would be only natural if all the lonely nice guys had recognized a kindred spirit in Starfire and were writing to her instead. Still, Raven would work with the optimistic assumption of "most of my fans have at least a smidgen of tact and humility" for the moment and see where the logic took her.)

How many more male "Raven fans" were out there who also wanted to ask her on a date, but were too realistic to think it would do the slightest good when she didn't know any of them from Adam? So they were bright enough not to make any blatant overtures in their first letters, at least; even if they were secretly toying with the idea of working up to it at some later time, if and when they had become cozy pen pals of hers?

Ah, well. Not much she could do about all this right now, beyond following Robin's wise advice by not sending any reply which could possibly "encourage" any stranger dumb enough to ask her for a date by mail. If any full-fledged stalkers later showed up outside the Tower and started annoying her—by trying to peep in through the windows, for instance—she'd be firm. She'd give them exactly what she had given Doctor Light the first time she met him. It wouldn't draw blood, but it certainly ought to discourage them!

The sender's name was Athena Norrell. The letter began:

Dear Cyborg:

You don't know me, but I'm a great admirer. I'm also majoring in electrical engineering. If you ever need any help with maintenance and repairs on stuff you can't easily reach by yourself, I'd love the chance to help out and see what makes you tick.

I could double-check your system diagnostics, clean off your solenoids, recalibrate your sensors, check your hyraulics for leaks, and even give you a full oil change if need be!

While I was checking your wiring for any loose connections, and so forth, I could also keep an eye out for any areas where you might want to upgrade key components. After all, the tech that was cutting-edge when you became a cyborg may be second-rate by today's standards—things move so fast in this field!

She went on and on like that. Cyborg wondered if he was blushing. He didn't hear—or read—such racy suggestions every day. Sure, later on in her letter this young lady claimed she was only interested in getting extra credit with her professors if she became intimately familiar with some of his unique hardware configurations, but he saw right through that cover story.

Dear Beast Boy:

I think you're the cutest Titan! Do you have a steady girlfriend?

Yours Truly,
Shawna McCormick (currently unattached)

Well, that was short and to the point . . . showed she had extremely good taste, too!

Beast Boy sat back to consider his options. Robin's guidelines indicated he should ignore this, but he didn't want to. Besides, "guidelines" weren't the same things as "Sacred Commandments," were they? It wasn't really a sin to bend them a little, was it?

(Beast Boy honestly thought he was being very clever in working out that rationalization. It did not occur to him that perhaps Robin had carefully chosen the word "guidelines" for his handout for exactly that reason; fully anticipating that any generalizations he offered about handling fan mail would not strike each of the other four as deserving slavish obedience in every possible situation; hence it was better to use a mild word which did not appear to be loudly demanding such absolute respect in the first place. Occasionally ignoring a mere "guideline" was trivial, but getting into the habit of ignoring "explicit orders from the team leader" could be fatal someday. Hence, Robin tried to be very careful about how many "explicit orders" he actually gave in peacetime, so as not to devalue the important ones!)

Beast Boy figured this was the sort of thing that was bound to come up again and again today. Earlier, he'd been thinking about cranking out a form letter for such things. But what to say in it? He certainly couldn't invite every girl who sounded interested in him to fill out an application and thereby get started on the road to possibly becoming his new girlfriend.

(He knew he couldn't do it that way . . . but now that this train of thought had been triggered, Beast Boy wasted the next nine minutes fantasizing about what the application-and-testing process might be like, if he actually had the nerve to take that approach, and if a substantial number of fangirls then turned out to be willing to participate in a lengthy competition for the honor of dating him for awhile. The kissing portion of the contest would generate the most important factor in each finalist's score, he decided; but should the essay test be weighted more heavily than the cooking test, or the other way around? Eventually, however, he came to his senses and tried to think of something more realistic.)

He supposed the most important thing was to make it clear that he didn't have a real girlfriend right now. No need to talk about Terra. The next most important thing was to not make it sound like he was in any hurry to find one. But he didn't want to seem too standoffish either . . . how did other celebrities handle this kind of problem, anyway? Hadn't Elasti-Girl once told him a story about some celebrity who eventually married a girl who had sent some fan mail? (He couldn't remember the name now.)

Not that Beast Boy was in any hurry to take things that far! He liked associating with pretty girls, and sooner or later he thought he'd really get the knack of flirting with them, but he was definitely too young for any serious romance. The last thing he wanted at this point in his young life was to get in over his head and then be dragged in front of a preacher and prodded to say "I do" and then feel obligated to settle down in a nice quiet house in the suburbs to start raising children and mowing the lawn every Saturday and actually sharing closet space with someone who would think being married to him gave her the right to criticize his taste in clothes and his favorite amusements and his other habits . . . no, such a miserably oppressed lifestyle just wasn't for him. Not now. He knew many grown-ups seemed to like it—or at least tolerate it—so maybe he'd find it more appealing in another ten or fifteen years (which, at his current age, seemed almost as far away as the heat death of the universe).

Maybe someone had already posted copies of something useful on the Internet. Not too friendly, not too formal, but encouraging the fan to write again, and it might even have all the words spelled correctly? Beast Boy brought up Google on his bedroom computer and started searching.

(Once Beast Boy's mind started wandering, it was hard to make it stop. As it turned out, he would spend the next hour on the Internet, mostly reading samples of other people's fan mail and replies thereto, before he remembered he really ought to be doing something about his own fan mail!)