When Mike met them at his front door, he had a…

Okay, the last time Dara had seen a grin like that, it had been the proctor’s busting an attempt to summon a sex-spirit.

“Right, I now have my magical App of finding strange shit,” Mike said. “C’mon in.” They followed him into his room, where he shooed his white cat off of the chair. “Go somewhere else to shed, Snowball, that’s a good girl.”

Snowball looked up at Mike, then narrowed her eyes and rubbed up against his pants, leaving a frosting of white fur, before she turned and strolled down the hallway.

“You’ll remember you love me at dinner!” Mike called. The cat merely flicked its tail.

I guess some things are truly universal.

But then Mike was handing Dara a… right, a phone. There was a strange man in a pointed hat on its screen.

“What is that?”

“A wizard. Don’t you have them on your world?”

“Not like that!”

“No respect for the classics,” Mike said. “Okay, put your thumb here.” Dara frowned and did as he said, and then the phone beeped and the… “wizard” went away, to be replaced by a screen full of tiny symbols.

“What are those?”

“Icons, you press them to activate them. Like this one.” He pointed, and Dara touched it, frowning.

Then the phone started screaming like a tormented soul. Dara shrieked and dropped it, Mike barely saving it from landing on the floor.

“What, you don’t have hard rock where you come from?”

“Why is it screaming?” Dara said.

“It’s not screaming, that’s music!” Millie said, evidently taking Mike’s side.

Then Mike touched the screen, and the caterwauling went away. “Kids, these days. Okay, here’s the thing. You have a code you can type, but that takes forever, so all you need to do is press your thumb on the phone, and it’ll unlock.”

“Like an aura lock?”

“Sure… let’s go with that.” Mike held the phone up to her. “Now, joking aside, I put a lot of apps on it because people might get a little curious if you only have one app. So you’ve got a link to TVTropes, a few games, try ‘Warrior Gods’. It’s great and doesn’t have much pay to win crap.”

“Uh… okay,” Dara nodded, feeling somewhat run over.

“Now, here’s your news apps, and your browser, and Millie can show you how to watch TV on this.”

“Why would I want to watch shows here? It’s tiny!”

“For when you’re in bed?” Millie asked.

“If I’m in bed, I’d either reading or slee—” Dara shook her head. “Fine, but what about the thing you said would help us. That’s an app as well, right?”

“So it is,” Mike said. “Touch the icon that looks like a cat’s head.”

Dara rolled her eyes and did as he said. Moments later, there was a map on the screen, covered by green dots. Dara stared at it. “What’s this?”

“An app that not only surfs the web for events, it prioritizes them. Right now, SoCal, just has green, those are the lowest probability by my algorithm.”

“Alg0—what?”

“The rules the computer uses. The program isn’t intelligence, so it goes by rules. Then you take a look at what it found, and you can see if it’s important enough to check. Go on, touch one of the green dots.”

Dara rolled her eyes and touched one. Moments later, a small square of text appeared.

Claim of haunting. Many previous calls. Individual diagnosed with mental illness.

“Okay, see, this was someone talking about spooky stuff, but the program also sees that he’s been doing this for a long time. Before you got here, and he’s also been diagnosed with issues. So it’s a low probability that there’s something actually happening. Thus, green.” Mike touched the screen and all the green dots vanished. “This filter lets you screen out stuff so the map isn’t covered.”

“Okay, what else does it have?”

“The app stores information, so don’t worry about missing anything. Yellow dots are dots with information that we can’t screen out. Someone say, calling for the first time about something supernatural, or several people calling about the same thing.”

“Red?”

“Emergency calls that the cops are responding to, actual visuals, or multiple visuals. If it’s a red, something is going down.” Mike looked down at the phone. “The problem is that I can’t screen out too many false positives, or it might ignore something real.”

“Does this leave any kind of trail?” Millie asked.

“If you’re asking if I’m sneaking into places I shouldn’t be sneaking? No. It’s all open data. If someone decides to start tracking the phone, you’ve actually got bigger problems.”

“Right.” Millie nodded. “So we’re gonna be driving out to every costume party that went bad.”

“Yep.” Mike nodded. “I mean, it’s not that bad, but it’s the best I could do.”

Dara frowned at the little phone, using her fingers to manipulate it like she’d seen others doing. I can see everything from here. She touched a little screen, and suddenly the screen showed a birds-eye view of the land, so detailed that Dara could actually pick out people walking on the street.

This is incredible. But will it help? Dara understood what Mike had said, even if he wasn’t using magic. The app seemed like a fairly stupid spirit, handed a bunch of detailed rules. But it wouldn’t… think for itself. If something fell outside of the rules, it’d ignore them.

With millions of people, Dara could see why you would have to do that, but… She shook her head. Hopefully, anything serious would show.

“And I’ve also emailed a link to the desktop app for your home.” Mike said. “So you two can have your very own Batcave.”

Dara just stared at him.

Millie shook her head. “Poor kid, doesn’t even know what she’s missing. Okay, Dara, why don’t you go and fiddle with that. I’ve got a quick couple of questions for Mike.”

Dara nodded, touching another green dot as she turned and walked out of the room.

That dot called up a police report of… “I’m being assaulted by a band of singing badgers?” Dara shook her head. Okay, maybe there won’t be as much trouble as I thought.

Millie waited until Dara was heading out to the car, frowning at the phone.

“Mike,” she said. “Dear Mike. Friend M—“

“Millie, I already helped you with hunting down ghoulies and ghosts and probably some long-legged beasties.”

“And you had fun doing it! I know your look. You were doing some programming that didn’t include helping someone unscrew their shipping manifests over at the Port of LA.”

“And it sounds like you don’t think I’m going to have fun doing this.” Mike frowned. “What?”

“I want Dara to go to college.”

“Um, okay, not seeing the point—”

“She has no ID. No papertrail. You know as well as I do, just how bad an idea it would be to try to get a fake ID for anything important.”

“Given you two managed to blow up two places?” Mike shook his head. “Yeah. Some of my ah, friends in the hacker community want you both dead, by the way, because there’s a lot of shaking of trees to see what falls out.”

“Yeah. I got people who owe me favors, and you were the golden computer prince, and still stay in touch with your professors. Fullerton is already pretty easy with undocumented students, so if you added your letter to my favor…”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why, Millie? She’s here to deal with magic and then go home.”

Millie took a deep breath. “I don’t know if she’s going home, Mike.”

Mike paused. “What?”

“Dara has no idea how to put the gem back together, and that assumes she can find all the pieces. The only thing I know is that until she ended up here, she didn’t think something like this could even happen. Dara is a kid, and I don’t think she’s letting herself consider the question of what to do if, well…”

“At the end of the day, she can’t go back.” Mike glanced in the direction Dara had gone. “You like her.”

“Well, she’s not as dumb as I was as a teen.” Millie paused. “But if the worst case happens, she’ll be a lot better off if she has people she can talk to who aren’t old enough to be her mom.”

“Have you talked to her about this?”

Millie shook her head. “Not yet. We don’t know, and I don’t want to borrow trouble.”

“I’ll talk to ‘em. No guarantees.”

“Thanks Mike, you’re a prince.” Millie turned and headed for the door.

“Does that mean that I’m going to be a paid prince?”

“After the adventure you’re participating in? You should pay me!”

“Really?”

“Not really. Look, after we get the rent issue fixed, I’ll pay you for the last favor.”

“Fine Millie,” Mike said. “In return for one thing.”

“What?”

“Don’t tell Dara I used the screaming goat clip for her app’s alert noise.”

Millie paused. “Fine. I won’t. She’ll probably turn me into a frog, but I won’t ruin your prank.”

“Thanks.”