“We have so much to talk about,” Cassara told Trevor as they walked to his car, briefcases in hand. Trevor hadn’t looked in the cases yet, but he was still stunned at what Jesse had said. Almost $2.5 million!? It wasn’t lost on him that they were trusting Jesse that there was even any money and not a bunch of bricks in the things. But the way the conversation had gone, it didn’t seem like he was willing to mess with this Metallah character.

“And I have so many questions I barely even know where to start,” Trevor replied.

“I bet,” said Benny, and he squeezed into the front seat of Trevor’s Infiniti sedan. Or tried to anyway. He got one leg in and comically sucked in his breath, and then slammed the seat back as far as it would go. Tiny framed Marie had been the last one to sit in the passenger seat.

“Quit complaining,” Trevor said, as he let Cassara into the back seat. “Had I remembered I had such big friends, I might have purchased a bigger car. But you always have the teleport option…”

“Nice ride though,” Cass told Trevor from the back seat.

“Thanks. I had a junker, but when I started working for Jesse, he told me he’d get me a new one for a ‘steal of a deal’. After getting to know him, now I know what he meant. But I love this car far too much to put too much thought into it. It was a few years old when I got it, so not new, but new to me. It puts my last car to shame. And he really did offer a great deal.”

Benny started playing with things on the dash. Pushing buttons and turning knobs. When he got to the seat warmer, he rolled his eyes and shook his head. He looked at Trevor.

“This is nice and all, but I didn’t think you’d be inclined to take things from a guy like Jesse. A great deal means you paid him thousands for something he likely paid nothing for. Except maybe what he paid someone to steal it for him.”

“I was in a bad place at the time. I had a job I hated, could barely afford the meager existence I had. Pretty much hated my life. And I didn’t know Jesse at the time.”

“He offered you an illegal job, making illegal money, and was selling you a super nice car for what, far less than what it was worth? Stretching the morality end a bit thin, eh?”

“Alright there Benny boy,” said Cassara. “Don’t we think this could wait a bit on the judgy? Turn on your seat warmer and slow roast a bit, eh? Let him at least regain the rest of his memories!”

“Oh I’m not judging so much as just driving home fodder I’ll use to hold over his head later. And absolutely not on the seat warmer. I get too hot and we all suffer in this little thing.”

Trevor laughed and pretended like he was looking for something on the dash of his car.

“Where is the eject button when you need it?” he wondered out loud.

“Don’t bother,” Benny told him. “It wouldn’t work on me anyway. Too heavy. At least this thing isn’t electric. I’m not even sure it would roll.”

Trevor looked at Cassara in the rear view and she raised an eyebrow at him and smirked. Those eyes. Trevor still couldn’t believe he could ever forget them. But he had. Completely. He badly wanted to know why.

“Can I ask a question before we get started catching up?” Trevor asked.

“Of course.”

“Who’s Metallah? Is that the old guy I had a mental vision of?”

“You haven’t remembered him yet, besides that?” Benny asked rhetorically.

“Probably because he’s the one who placed the spell. Makes sense that he’d be one of the hardest things to recall. Don’t you think?” Cassara suggested.

“Spell?” asked Trevor.

Benny sighed. “Yeah man, things are a mess and we’re still trying to figure it out ourselves. Metallah is who we call Popy. Popy raised the three of us. Created the three of us. And he’s a Wizard of sorts. Well, a Plasma Mage actually. Long story. There’s a hierarchy, and he’s up at the top. And he decided we needed to forget things for a time. Who knows why. So he placed a spell on all of us and put us in lives back in the places he found us initially. You here, me in LA, and Cass back in North Dakota.”

Trevor looked a Benny with a blank face, not saying a word. Benny put his hands up in surrender. “I know, it’s confusing. If it wasn’t for her, we all might still be living in a fog.”

“So you broke through?” Trevor asked Cassara.

“Yeah, I guess you could say that, though I’m starting to believe our ‘waking up’ was more or less scheduled for about this time. Especially after hearing Jesse talk about your one year contract. But I started to have flash backs of our training days while I jogged every day. Kinda when I would be zoned out. And then one day, I was so zoned out I damn near got hit by a car and when I ran to get out of the way, I ran so fast I completely lost my feet and fell into a ditch. It wasn’t pretty. But that helped the memories start flooding back for me.”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

That earned another blank stare from Trevor. Benny laughed, and was still laughing when he continued to explain.

“And Popy expected Cass to be the first of us to recover, because when she went back to our place on Page Island, if you remember that at all, there was a note for her. It had yours and my general location so that she could use our connection to shake us awake too.”

“And instructions said specifically to get money from Jesse. That’s the only way I knew there was something going on between the two of them. And sure enough, we walked right into your mess,” Cassara told them.

“Oh wow, so you played that off pretty well, and your timing couldn’t have been any better,” Trevor told her.

“I know, right? Pretty cool, right? I’m awesome, right? Right?” she remarked with a smug smile.

“Oh great. Don’t wanna get carried away. Right? Right?” Benny asked her.

“Right? Wrong!”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Trevor chided. “So I know we have a connection, I felt that right away. But that was enough to find me? Us? And where is Popy?” he asked. A familiarity was returning, just saying the name helped, but no actual knowledge of time in Popy’s presence was back yet.

“Our connection,” Cassarra started, in a lecturing tone, “is more than I think you remember right now. I think we should wait to explain that later as that memory starts to return. You’ll know it when it does. As for Popy, I don’t know yet. No word from him besides the note,” she finished, a bit morose.

Trevor had more questions, but the others seemed to be contemplating within, so he drove in silence for a few minutes. He took the time to try and soak things in, see what he could actually remember. Nothing new was coming to him at the moment. Maybe it was because he was distracted with driving. Should he even BE driving?

“OK, look, we should just wait to get into too much,” Benny said, breaking the silence. “It only took a day for our memories to return in full, so it’s not too bad. But I wonder, what lesson from Popy could have been behind the purpose of all this? We remember, and you will later Trevor, he was trying to teach us some minor spells of our own at the time he separated us. Cass was the only one to really pick anything up from that training. So I wonder if we were brought here by Popy for a little mental balancing or something. Perhaps he wanted us to learn about ourselves. How to accept and love ourselves. I know it sounds corny, but I can specifically remember him saying that was going to be the hardest lesson we’d have to learn, and it was something we’d have to eventually get on our own. And that once we learn that, the spell training would become easier.”

“I do remember that,” Cassara agreed.

Trevor nodded. “Great. So my earning illegal money fighting for a living and buying a probably stolen car will have earned me high marks?”

“Not so much,” said Cassara. “But you were coming around. Look at what was happening when we finally got through to you. You were taking a stand for yourself. And though we haven’t figured much out, it seems pretty obvious Popy wanted you to find Jesse.”

“Or Jesse to find me. Jesse approached me about fighting while I was out for a jog one day. I was so sick of my other job I couldn’t wait for the chance of starting something new. I made it easy for him,” Trevor told them.

“So you had a year contract with Jesse. Do you remember how long you worked at your other job?” Benny asked him.

“Yes, I remember exactly. Three months. I was at my three month review when my boss told me I acted as though my heart wasn’t really in the job. Actually that was after he tried to promote me to a Supervisor position over a couple other women who had been there at least four or five times as long as me. He was a chauvinistic prick. And when I hymned and hawed at the opportunity, he told me my heart wasn’t in it. So he said it might be best that I go. The job was a borefest, but I wasn’t ready to leave that day until that conversation. It was then I realized I’d rather be poor than work for that guy. I came across Jesse soon thereafter.”

“OK, so fifteen months, give or take. That’s something we hadn’t quite pinpointed yet,” Benny told him.

“So you two lived happy, pristine lives in those fifteen months?” Trevor asked.

Benny snickered. “Hardly. We talked about this earlier. Neither one of us felt like we had a place where we were. Popy dropped us into jobs too.”

“Even though you loved your job!” Cassara interjected.

Benny laughed. “I did. I did. Mostly. Working with little kids. There’s nothing I enjoy more, aside from our training. But I had zero connection with the adults there, who were more worried about the drama of their lives than the dozens of wee ones running about around them. It was a chore pretending like I cared about any of it.”

“I didn’t stay at my job either. Security at a nature preserve. I love nature and all, but that job was slowly sucking my life force away,” Cassara told Trevor.

“So it appears he tried to put us in places we’d appreciate. Even if perhaps it took a bit for Trevor. And as we remembered, we did have bank accounts with a bit of money in them. Maybe not $2.5 mil or anything, but some. And places to stay.”

“How did he do that? I mean, how can he just plop us in lives like that, and convince us somehow that everything is normal? Crazy,” said Trevor.

“No kidding,” remarked Cassara. “Of course we know Popy has skills, but who’d have known he was this good?”

“Doesn’t it irritate you though?” Trevor asked. “I mean, he just uprooted the three of us, plunked us down where he wanted and said…well, he didn’t even say, ‘Good luck’. He said nothing. I’m not so sure I appreciate that.”

Cassara sat back, letting what he asked sink in. Benny stared out the window, obviously contemplating himself. Trevor turned off the highway they were on, as they were getting close to his place.

“We haven’t had time to really think that much into it, I guess,” Benny said, after Trevor told them they were almost done with their drive. “Cass found me and brought me back to Page Island when I could manage, and then we worked together to find you. We discussed things a little in that time. But not that. And you’re right, that does kind of suck.”

“I’m sure Popy had good reason,” Cassara insisted. “I mean, he is our teacher, and sure he’s been strong handed in the past, but he’s always been fair. When has he ever steered us wrong?”

“He hasn’t, that I can think of,” Benny replied.

“That we know of,” retorted Trevor.

“True,” Cassara told him. “But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. For now at least. I think he deserves that much. Besides, we haven’t even gotten to the scariest part yet.”

As soon as Cassara made that remark, Trevor pulled into the lot of his condo and parked the car.

“May as well get inside and get settled, before we start up that conversation,” Cassara told them. “We know that Popy has pushed us to our limits time and again, but we’ve always come out better for it. I don’t think this is any different. Even if we can’t see it yet.”

“So, in other words, I’m not going to like what you have to tell me once we get inside, right?” Trevor asked her as she got out of the car.

“You said it,” Benny told him, pushing him a bit in the back as he walked past. “Nice place. What made you choose this location?”