Elsie Boxer - Witch in training, expert scrounger and can assemble stuff you just don't expect.

Maeve Evana - elf who just can't have it all, though she wants it. Watch your pets around her, they might just leave with her...

BOI - Godling, confused. Need I say more?

Tudie Baker - inheritor of a local baking company and cafe. Plans to revitalize it with new recipies as well as traditional tea gardens and alien flavor.

Midori Takahara - grand daughter of Shezumi, a dragon mage with strong ties to the draconic world. Fast paced, stylish, and demonic on the freeway.

Olivia Sanger - daughter of Istvan in the Buffyverse, shapeshifter and true blond. Lost in the multiverse and loving every minute of it.

"I can't believe you got a motorcycle for your birthday," Tudie whined. Maeve gave a grunt of agreement and Elsie was still busy picking the leaves from her shoulders from her last accidental tumble into the bushes nearby. "I mean, my uncle could give me a nice car or something but he has to go and say 'you'll be getting the company van! isn't it great!' and all that!" She sighed. "You've got the coolest parents ever."

"I've got the coolest family ever," Midori corrected her, "and yes, they are. I love it." Her almost-monotone voice still carried a hint of the pleasure that she'd gotten from zooming into the parking lot with her new red bike. Midori's grandmother had given it to her, much to the distress of her great-grandmother, who thought she ought to be sprouting wings and flying away any day now just like half her other children.

"You got the cool rich family side," grumbled Olivia. Her voice was high, scratchy, but full of truth. "Dad's not even going to be staying for long, even though he found me here."

"But that only makes sense, Olivia," Midori said, almost soothingly, "because now you've got your dorm on school grounds, and he can't live there."

Olivia rolled her head around, "maybe. But it was nice having him around for a while."

"You'd both just get lost chasing your tails," Elsie snickered. "We'd have to keep rounding you both up!"

"You love it," Olivia said, grinning. "I've been thinking about having Crazy Doc put a tracking device in both of us, that way someone'd be able to find us."

"Don't even say that," Maeve said with a kind of shocked expression on her munchkin-face. "How horrible!"

Everyone knew that she was imagining the old style "radio collar" with the big clunky battery pack and a long antenna.

"They make a little tiny data-chip for that now," Elsie said with a hint of disappointment, like she'd rather see her friend with one of those collars on. Probably so she could take it off and scavenge something out of it.

"Our cat has one," Tudie announced, "they work pretty well, and we even got a hand-held tracker for it!"

Olivia was actually getting into this conversation, but then the first tardy bell rang - they all had to split up.

"Anyone seen Boi today?" Asked Maeve, "it's my turn to keep an eye on him."

"Check the gift shop, you know how he forgets to leave there, looking at all that stuff..." Elsie said. She'd love to hang out there too but her language class was halfway across campus from where they were. The group split up mostly at T'angle Way, since half had humanities and the other half were in the sciences building. Maeve found Boi lingering outside the math building, and took him with her into the science department.

The group of girls shared the responsibility for Boi, since he'd arrived a few weeks before. Just as everyone was getting registered into classes, in fact, he'd just shown up out of the blue. That was nothing new for Carramba of course. But the problem became that Boi was hardly human and hardly 'male'. He was really some kind of powerful creature from another galaxy, and without a body on he was not going to be able to sign any paperwork. He took a shape - loosely male - but still had yet to really conquer the concept of being 'human'. The batch of new seniors were simply the people who took interest when Cybil Qeats shouted out 'who can take care of this?'

They'd known one another for a couple years in some cases, to all their lives in others. Olivia and Midori knew of one another for many years, being very distantly related, but they had only met four years before at the end of the school year. Olivia had tumbled from one dimension into this one, and since Midori's folks had a ranch nearby (yet another famous Takahara Ranch) she'd gotten involved there. Her father had followed two years later, haphazardly blundering through the multiverse, and been reunited briefly. While the Takaharas took him in this time, they were never really happy to see him - even though he was the progenitor of their whole family line... Neither girl talked about that situation with the others, and after once or twice being told flat out that they weren't going to talk about it, the rest stopped asking.

Tudie and Midori on the other hand had actually known one another since their early childhood, when Midori's family had comissioned Tudie's to create a banquet cake or something. They were always over at each other's places, and while Midori seemed a little standoffish toward Tudie's working-class family, the Takaharas enjoyed every moment that the strawberry-cake girl carried into their home.

Tudie and Elsie had been friends in junior high, again bonding through the joys of food. It was Elsie and her strange relationship with Maeve that sometimes brought attention to the fact that neither was a normal girl in the slightest. Elsie had, one day when she was about 11, been playing magic in her yard. She accidentally opened a portal to a forested world, whereupon she met Maeve who was on the other side of that portal. They were so opposite, and so similar, that everyone always loved watching them together.

Midori and Maeve often argue about the best ways to get something done. Midori insists that directness and straightforwardness are important tools, where Maeve knows the benefits of gossip and trawling for secrets.

All of them love Boi with all their heart, and want to protect him from the big scary world that they share. None of them could expect what this school year would bring...

***

After lunch that day three weeks into the school year, the group settled together in their spot on the lawn near the center of campus. The Caffetorium loomed far above and gave off its faintly glowing steam, and they could hear the giggling laughter and shouting from within the java-mug-handle-slide.

"What are you going to present for your class next period?" Asked Maeve, prodding Boi to shake his unblinking stare at the sun and look at the girls.

"Oh, miss Penbardd has asked for a report about nutritive dispensing devices," he said.

"Kitchens," Elsie translated with a smile. Boi nodded.

"Yes, those! We have one of those in the dorm, but usually the councilors tell me to stay away from it." Boi affected a sad look and a slump, everything he did was slightly exaggerated but always faintly hesitant, as though he didn't quite know which emotion he was supposed to be playing.

"Well that's a good idea," Midori said poking at him with a carrot stick, "because you don't eat."

"I do not have to eat," he said with a smirk, "I do eat, you know."

"We know," Olivia groaned. When he first started 'acting human' for them they did try to make him eat like everyone else. But the problem was that until he started taking his Biology course with one of the Mason-Takahara instructors, he didn't even know what the inside of a human looked like or did! They were lucky he had realized they had to have something 'open' on the inside because they took in air and made noises by squeezing it through their throat.

Excretion had not yet been something anyone wanted to bring up with him... But with Penbardd's Environment Crafting class, he'd be sure to learn alllll about that.

"So?" Asked Tudie, "what's your kitchen like?"

Boi described it, and then produced the folded paper which he'd drawn a diagram of the Boi-2004 Biological Intake System.

Midori blinked, and put her carrot stick down to take a closer look at the page. Elsie gulped and almost choked on her cheese sandwich, while Tudie and Maeve both blanched (which was an accomplishment for the dark-skinned elf girl). Only Olivia looked at the dentists'-chair-torture-device looking thing and said, "cool! F'r real! Lookit, it can put liquids down the right pipe!"

Apparently the Sanger Cruelty gene was running strongly in her, as Midori seemed to be judging the paper... which was a switch. Everyone looked at Midori, and she shrugged.

"It's a little bulky," she said. "I'd also want to put a section on to expand the mouth a bit, to ... You know I'm kidding right?" She said, while Boi was busy making notes.

He interrupted himself by glancing up, and with those innocent not-human eyes blinking twice, he said, "yeah. Sure." But he continued to draw in 'improvements' while they ate.

"Well we're going to be working with non-wheat grains in my Veggies class," Tudie said, trying to segue the conversation away from where Olivia and Midori would have pushed it. "You know when I open my place, it'll have a full line of allergy-aware foods." She nodded, and they had to spend the rest of the lunch break explaining to Boi that yes, some humans and other people couldn't eat this or that, because it made them sick.

Their classes, varied and unique, went by as slowly or quickly as they had to to reach 7th period, last of the day. Maeve and Elsie shared their Dungeon Crawl class with professor Mehta, yet another of the Sangerist 'relatives' in their school experience. The dark-skinned Hindi man liked to play up the spooky aspects of his own experiences with the shapeshifters and mages, and everyone in the class who had a power to use, was meant to use them. This time, Maeve got to be on the 'bad guy's side' and put up an interesting 'animal maze', while Elsie took her 'good guys' through it with judicious application of 'fetch toys' and the like.

Boi had to go it alone again, with his Anthropology class, but he was still having a great time learning all about the evolution of life on Twoarth. Tudie's Psyche Procedure class was less fun than all that, and she made it through the pop quiz purely by 'thinking like her Uncle' and second guessing her own answers. Olivia's Multiplanar History class was gearing up for a field trip, which she for some reason was dreading.

"I'm just like, not sure I'll be able to make it back with everyone," she explained on their way to the nearby park. "I always get lost, it doesn't matter if I'm on the bus with everyone else."

"I'll try and put a leash on you," Midori said. Her motorcycle waited, she was being polite and playing with her friends, before heading home. "I asked Ms Valerian when we're going to actually get in our mech suits, today."

"... aaaand?" They all said as one.

"She's all, 'when everyone understands the principles behind their creation' and I'm all 'but we're not here to learn political psychobabble, we're here to learn how to pilot machines', so she's like, 'in order to become one with your machine you must become one with its history'." She made a pshaah noise, "I mean, it's not like I'm having sex with the damn thing, I just want to ride it!"

"The way you ride that bike, Midori," Elsie reminded her, "is like you want to screw it to high heaven..."

Laughing with the others, Midori had to admit that there was a certain... intimacy that she shared with her very fast and very sexy bike. Each of them had been given at least one ride on it, since she'd gotten it the prior Friday on her birthday. Only Elsie and Boi asked for seconds - they were braver than the others.

As the afternoon went by, having finished their homework in the park and turning to watching the clouds and talking occasionally about this or that, the group saw a shadow slip by the one big cloud that looked like a giant-skipping-rope-with-a-porcupine. Midori sensed it first, Maeve next.

"Oooh, dragons," Maeve said, perking up. She had a Dragon Care class, figuring that it'd come in handy if she ever had to help a vet heal one. Midori had the same class three periods later, but for other reasons. "Look! It's landing in the school!" Maeve suddenly stood and pointed excitedly. Her emotion quickly wore into Boi and Elsie who bolted to their feet and followed her across the street. Midori, Tudie and Olivia went more carefully. Tudie hadn't really seen anything but a large dark blur - her glasses were good, not that good.

Though the campus had certainly calmed down since the last class ended an hour and a half before, there were always people there milling around. Down by the field was where the dragon had spiraled, so Maeve led the group to the track. Olivia knew the area well, her favorite class was Track and Field where she excelled in hurdles and 100 meters. Right now, though, it would be kind of hard to get on the sprinting field.

There were two dragons on it already.

"There was only one," said Maeve in a bit of a daze.

"The other is a local," Midori pointed out, seeing the instructor who was standing by the big brown.

"Ms Talshoy?" Olivia asked, "wow, I didn't know you were a dragonrider!" That perked the professor up, and made Midori deflate. She'd been intending to watch at a distance and try listening in with some complicated air spells, but Olivia was always one to step boldly right into the middle of the action.

"Yes, I am," the mohawked and leather-clad woman said, nodding and indicating to the rider of the huge blue dragon that he ought to stay put. She approached the group, and the dragons gazed down at them all with multicolored eyes whirling. "And you should not be here right now."

"Is this a secret meeting?" Asked Elsie, with an eager wideness to her teal-colored eyes. "We promise not to tell anyone!"

Talshoy sighed. "It's not so much secret as private."

The tilt to Boi's head indicated that he wasn't quite clear on the difference. But he remained silent, instead choosing to gaze back at the dragons with their own swirly-colored eyes. He could do that, change his appearance at random, he was almost as entrancing as the dragons themselves.

When there was a strange pause, Talshoy's eyes closing as though a breeze were blowing at them, she adopted a series of odd expressions.

"She's talking to her dragon," Maeve said behind her hand at the others, "he must be telling her something important."

With that, Dominique Talshoy sighed and nodded again. "Yes, you're correct," she said. "It was kind of important. Ringeth just told me that you're all to be considered Searched. Now, if you don't mind I've got to tell-"

"Searched," Maeve said, looking at Midori, "doesn't that mean we are supposed to become dragon riders like you?"

"The elf has a point," Midori said, suddenly intrigued. "But we're interrupting you and your conversation. We can wait."

"But -" Maeve said, but Midori held her hand stiffly at the shorter girl's shoulder and she shut up.

As Talshoy walked away the rider of the blue - which was nearly the same size as the spangled-marked Ringeth - stepped into view. He was tall and blue, with pointy hair and spines on his arms.

"Hey, isn't that ... Wha's his name? He's a Junior," Tudie said.

"Aern," Olivia said, "he's really cute, but... I can't figure out - how's he got a dragon? He's in my Sushi Tech class."

"That is a different one," Boi said strangely. "Our Aern is a Junior." He glanced at the girls. "What? His girlfriend Rue is in my Journalism class! She's really clingy on him."

"Protective," Elsie suggested, "she's not clingy."

"She's that too," Boi said, "when he asked me out she was way angry..."

There was a little comedic pause, while the girls thought that over, and Maeve tucked it away for future use. If Aern was asking Boi out, thinking he was a 'real' he, then.... An impish little smile went all over her face.

But it was true, this Aern was also known as Shard, and was the leader of a vast network of dragon riders, one of whom appeared to be Dominique Talshoy. As their conversation came and went on the slight afternoon breeze, the group noticed that the dragons were in fact far more interested in watching the girls and Boi, than listening in to their own riders.

Do you want to come closer? I do not mind, said the blue. Ringeth and I do not get enough attention from younglings any more.

I like it when a bunch of them help me bathe, the brown announced happily. He spread his star-marked wings and gave a deep rumble. So the six came closer. The poor elf girl Maeve was torn between trying to spy on the adults' conversation and just diving in to touching and petting the dragons.

Elsie was happy with looking them over and comparing their anatomy, and wondering when the dungeon crawl class would be using them? Tudie tried to keep reminding herself that these dragons weren't the same ones who would be affected by that last potion that her Alchemy teacher had them studying, which would render an earth-dragon unconscious when it breathed the stuff. Boi was perfectly happy reaching first one itch and then the next on the dragons, just entranced by their mere existence.

Olivia felt her cheetah-senses tingling, and on a whim shifted into a four-footer. Her clothing dissolved and her bags would return when she regained her human shape again. She lounged in the shade below Ringeth's wings. Midori plotted.

"If you're done chatting, Ms Talshoy," she said finally when Aern and she seemed to be done, "I'd like to know more about this Search thing."

"Oh, they were searched?" Aern said, the tall blue man happily jumping into this conversation too. He was like that. "Jeremoth usually searches someone when we're out, he didn't tell me about them."

"Ringeth did it," Talshoy said, "the big lump. They've been on campus with you for three weeks," she reminded the brown. "You could have said something earlier."

They were not nearby me, then, the dragon asserted. You would not have let me into the speaker's square while everyone else was there, would you?

"Nope," Dominique said with a smile. "Now, I suppose you're right, you should be given a bit more information."

"She's in the dragon care class after mine," Maeve said, "they've said we're going to meet dragons during the class, but it's all theory right now."

"I'll have to get on Hollis about that," Aern said, "it isn't like there aren't enough dragons to go around for these classes." He strode back up to Jeremoth his blue, and swung up onto his neck. "Well kids, I'm guessing we'll be seeing each other again. But for now the Protectorate awaits. Dom, you keep that white-haired idiot in line for me."

"Will do, boss," Talshoy said with a big grin. None of the group had any classes with the infamous chalk-white Hollis Blackstone, but they knew one of his dad's clones who had classes with a couple of them... Dominique cracked her knuckles and looked over the five girls and one 'boy' and nodded to herself. She seemed to do that purely to make the foot-tall mohawk on her head dance.

As the afternoon stretched into evening, Talshoy explained the basics. Since a dragon had determined they would be worthy to stand, eventually it would be important for them to show up at a dragon nest or clutch site, for a hatching. Perhaps a dragon would choose them as a partner. Their lives would be changed irrevocably to that of a dragon rider.

"That doesn't mean that you can't do most of the things you've been planning on doing," Talshoy said as they walked toward the parking lot across campus to get Midori's bike and split up for the evening. "I mean, I'm a teacher and a revolutionary and a dragon rider. You can be many things."

"My uncle is going to drop a load," Tudie said. "I was supposed to be taking over the family bakery and restaurant."

"And you will do that," Talshoy promised her. "Only you'll do it with a dragon partner. They're not all big like Jere and Ringeth, you know, some of them are quite small."

"Ah, who wants a small dragon!?" Elsie said laughing, "bigger is better!"

"I'll settle for 'managable' thanks," Maeve said, "I'm smaller than you guys remember?"

"It's quality that counts," Midori remarked, as she mounted her bike and pressed the ignition. A sound like a small jet engine came up and startled Olivia back into her human form once again.

The cheetah-shifter turned to Boi and said, "well it's closing time at the kiosks, we've gotta get to the dorms. I'll make sure you get there in one piece, it's my turn tomorrow."

"I guess I'll go with you," Maeve said and glanced with great regret at the big brown dragon who had accompanied them all there.

They walked off, and Talshoy tilted her head. "What did she mean, her turn?"

"We take turns, every day one of us makes sure that Boi isn't getting into trouble or wandering away doing something he shouldn't be." Elsie said, adjusting her backpack. Wires and bits of someone else's thrown-away project poked from it.

"That's nice, I guess," the teacher said.

"It's purely functional," Midori said before she put her helmet on. "He's a visitor from some really advanced godlike civilization. He doesn't know anything at all about human behavior or society so he's likely to get hurt."

"He can't really get hurt, Midori," Tudie said. "He's a god."

"He's a very naive and curious god," the half-japanese part-dragon said. They then split up for the night, heading their separate ways.

***

It took more than a week to get more information from anyone about these dragons they should be looking for, and when they did it was in the form of Hollis himself, the Dragonriding instructor, asking to see them all.

"I've been informed that you are Searched?" He said, and they nodded in unison. Well, mostly, Boi was looking out the window at the huge pale bronze colored dragon there. "And I am going to assume by the speed that you all made it to my office, that you're interested in bonding?" Again they nodded, and this time Boi joined them eagerly. If he didn't slow down his head bobbing it was likely his head would come right off.

Olivia gently put her hand on the back of his head, and said shhhh. He focused again, and Hollis' pale small lips drew into a smile.

"Then there is something of decent importance you've got to do first, before I can decide where to send you." He said, and he looked at a piece of paperwork resembling a spreadsheet. "If you can prove to me that you operate as a unit, the lot of you can go to one particular hatching... It's a special one."

The way that he got a strange misty look in his grey eyes, not like how one would if they were telepathically speaking - just a sweet mist and haunting softness, they got the impression that he had something more important to say.

"Well?" Midori asked, "what kind of tasks would you need us to perform, to 'prove' this to you?"

"We're already a team," Tudie said, glancing from one friend to the next, "we've always been a team. Even when Boi joined us, it was like he was always one of us."

Olivia smiled faintly, "we do pretty well this way, huh?"

Elsie and Maeve both raised their hands to high-five at the same time, and the group seemed to solidify. Boi was their focus, but he'd never be a bump in their road, always questioning but never forgetting their anwers. Olivia was great for comedy relief as well as sobering influence. Midori of course was the brains of the outfit, at least that's how Hollis saw her, she was the moxie. Elsie provided a catalyst and spur of the moment feel, while Maeve gave them a natural background. Tudie made sure everyone was tucked in and safe.

But could they do the job? Could they be the physical team mates they would need to be, in order to.... "How about this as a test," Hollis said and stirred them out of their own little reveries. "The break's coming up and I can arrange a little ... journey."

Olivia moaned, "oh gods, I'll just get lost again..."

"It wasn't that lost, this time," Midori commented. "Your class got you back in one piece."

The cheetah-girl sighed, and looked back at Hollis. "As long as you keep me on a leash, I won't wander from the yard."

"That... sounds.... You're a Sanger, aren't you?" He asked and flitted through some paperwork, grunting, and then smiling brightly again to pretend that the girl's heritage didn't scare the crap out of him.

"A journey to where?" Maeve had the good sense to ask.

"To a dragonry," Hollis said, "but one that's going to test your abilities. Will you want to do that?"

"Will we get extra credit?" Elsie asked, and Hollis nodded.

"Of course you will. Everything in this office is always extra credit - you've got half a dozen instructors on your side for it already." Hollis indicated Talshoy's image in a big picture hanging on the wall. But then they noticed several others. Ihrinnah, of course the Dragon Care instructor and her dragon, but then also it looked like Vax, the Speculative Engineering instructor, Crazy Doc Sanger and an electric-colored blue, and even Lethe the Combat Magic professor!

"Does everyone here have a dragon, behind our back?" Midori asked.

"Not exactly, but we're looking at increasing the number of resident dragon pairs," Hollis said. "I want you to go and think about a week together in these kinds of conditions," he passed Midori what looked like a pamphlet. "You'll be working under several ranking riders and non-riders. If you pass, then they'll send you back to me for the bonding."

"It sounds really fun," Boi said, "but what if we get hurt?"

"You can't get hurt," Olivia said, but he turned to her. His brown eyes looked actually like they were about to cry.

"But you can, and I don't want that to happen. I'll make sure that you don't." He said.

Hollis was about to say something, concern creasing his forehead. But Boi interrupted him.

"No, it's supposed to be this way. We're a team and we look out for each other. The least I can do is make sure that my friends stay safe. Right?"

They huddled and gave congratulations to one another. Then they filed out of Hollis' office, and passed around that pamphlet.