Well, if anything could take my mind off of Tish, it was the phone call I got from Vincent one afternoon.
     “Cyber Shop.”
     “Brian?  It’s Vincent.”
     “Oh, hi, Vincent.  What can I do for you?”
     “It’s kind of a tall order, actually.  We’ve got a big show coming up, and our stage manager is bedridden with the flu.  You’re the only other person we know who’s both technically adept and SORM-registered.  Can you help us out?”
     “Now, wait a minute.  I have exactly zero experience with theater stuff.  Are you sure you want me?”
     “You’re missing the point, Brian.  In our business, keeping secrets is the first priority, and you are already in on this particular secret.  You’re an engineer, so you’d be able to learn quickly how the props work and how to handle them.  The only remaining thing for you to need to do is manage the stuff backstage and make sure that we have what we need when we need it.  It’s really not complicated.  We can run you through the show dry a few times to make sure you’ve got it down.  Don’t worry.  We don’t want you to suck any more than you do, and by show time, you will be a professional theater practitioner.  So, what do you say?”
     Which is how I found myself standing in the dark in one of the wings of a very nice theater in town.  I had all sorts of large props around me, and I had been told what they were for and how they worked.  At my little table, I had a digital music player that was wired into the theater’s sound system to play the music for the show, and I had a toolbox in case something happened with a prop.  I had asked Leah why she didn’t just conjure up props on her own, and she told me that sometimes, it’s just easier to do things the old-fashioned way.  An appreciable attitude to have every now and then, isn’t it?
     The main curtain was down in preparation for the beginning of the show.  The stage was set for the opening routine, with a sort of Japanese temple motif surrounded by tall bamboo shoots.  The backdrop was painted with crane birds and the like.  Vincent and Leah were in costume as a ninja armed with sword and a geisha armed with fan, respectively.  I hadn’t actually seen their act yet, but they had roughly run me through it so I would know when to cue the music for the next part of the routine.
     As time ticked towards the beginning of the show, I busied myself backstage making sure that everything was set up so I could grab it and send it onstage quickly.  The large props were actually on little tracks in the stage, so all I had to do was pull the right rope at the right time to roll the prop into position.  Everything else was just the blades and such.  A few minutes before show time, I took a quick peek through a little gauze patch in the curtain to see how full the house was.  It was packed; apparently Vincent and Leah were pretty big show biz names locally.  I was delighted to see Marcus, Minerva, and Felicity in the audience.  I think I might have mentioned to them that I would be busy here today, and they put two and two together.  Hopefully, they weren’t thinking I would be on stage, and fortunately, the Ms had made some attempt to make their larger modifications somewhat discreet.  After what Vincent and Leah had told me about secrecy, I had gotten a little paranoid that these SORM people were going to come knocking down my door for spreading my little toys too far.  Besides, they would only have detracted from the show.
     All of a sudden, I looked at who was sitting next to Felicity, and I froze.  Tish was sitting right there, looking as lovely as ever.  I backed away from the curtain and headed back to my table.  The others from Freaks and Geeks would probably seek me out after the show, and Tish would be with them.  I tried to figure out how I was going to avoid her without being a complete dick to the others when Vincent and Leah came up behind me.
     “Brian, you okay?” asked Vincent.
     “You’ve got nothing to be nervous about,” said Leah.  “Hey, we’re the ones who have to go out there after all.”
     “No, it’s not that.  It’s just that there’s someone in the audience that I’ve been trying to stay away from.”
     “Can you describe him?” said Vincent.  “We can alert security if it’s that much of a problem.”
     “No, there’s no danger or anything, it’s just kind of an awkward situation between us.  And it’s a her, not a him.”
     “Ex-girlfriend?” asked Vincent.
     “Let’s just say that I did something to her that I shouldn’t have and leave it at that, okay?”
     They gave me a bit of a funny look.  Damn it, I couldn’t have this on my mind now, not with a show to run.
     “Look, I’ll handle it, okay?  Just get to your positions.  Curtain’s about to go up.”  I put on my headset and got ready to hit Play.
     In a few minutes, I hit Play and the act began.  Backed by koto and shakuhachi music, Leah walked towards the temple and knelt at the shrine.  After a brief prayer, she lit an incense stick.  As she got up to walk away, a small object flew onto the stage.  When it hit the floor, it exploded in a cloud of smoke, and Vincent appeared, his sword drawn at the ready.  The music jumped into something more up-tempo.  Leah quickly jumped back and drew a fan from her obi, but she wasn’t fast enough to keep Vincent from flipping towards her and swinging away with his katana.  The two of them jumped around each other, Leah dodging Vincent’s attempts to run her through, and a few seconds later, Vincent had succeeded in slicing up her kimono into something a little more stage-magic-y.  The sleeves were now missing, and there was a long slit up one leg.
     Leah brought some strange powder from a pocket in her outfit and sprinkled it on the smoking incense.  The smoke began to billow out in huge clouds.  Leah stepped over the incense, and the smoke began to lift her up until she was sitting on top of a fifteen-foot high pillar of incense.  She then took out her fan and beckoned to Vincent, daring him to come up and fight her.  Immediately, he lept up onto the top of the shrine, back-flipped onto a bamboo leaf, and leapt towards Leah, coming to rest standing sideways halfway up the backdrop.  He started swinging at Leah, but she parried with her fan.  She began to kick at him, but he dodged her blows.  After a minute or so of Crouching Tiger fighting, he rolled a few feet down the drop and swung at the column of smoke supporting Leah.  The smoke began to disperse, and she floated down to the stage like Princess Peach from Super Mario 2.  The fan-sword fight continued, and then Vincent quickly gained the upper hand.  He caught Leah off her guard for a second, and he put his sword through her fan and knocked it out of her hand.  With one final mighty swing, he swung through her body, and like Obi-Wan giving in to Darth Vader, she vanished and her clothes collapsed.  
     Vincent sheathed his sword in triumph, but the smoke behind him began to billow again and encircle him in incense.  He called out in protest and struggled, but the smoke quickly surrounded him, and when it cleared, he was gone.  As the audience began to react to the dual vanish, the shrine structure collapsed, and Vincent and Leah walked out and posed for the audience.  The applause was vigorous.  As the applause began to die out a little, Leah pulled a large cloth from her robe and held it in front of her and Vincent.  That was my cue to switch the music to the next track and switch the sets.
     When the cloth fell, Vincent and Leah were dressed like Japanese schoolchildren, with Vincent wearing slacks and a tie and Leah wearing a skirt, a blouse with tie that left her midriff bare, and over-the-calf socks.  The music had switched from Japanese fight music to “ABC” by the Jackson Five.  I pulled the collapsed shrine set offstage along the track and brought on the Stretcher box.  Vincent and Leah changed their demeanor from being all mystical and combative to being more like bouncy school kids.  I think Leah might have even been skipping a little.
The Stretcher box was about eight feet tall, ten feet wide, and deep enough for a person to stand inside it.  There were four pieces in front with holes for Leah’s head, arms, and legs, and each had a groove that it could move along.  The arm pieces were long and thin, with the arm hole at one end and a pivot at the other end, located at the extreme ends of the box.  The legs holes were both in the same piece, and this one extended around the head piece to a pivot point above Leah’s head.  The whole thing opened up in the front to show that there was nothing but a stool and some motors and wires inside, and Leah stepped in and sat on the stool.  As the Jackson Five continued to serenade the audience, Vincent closed the doors and Leah stuck her head, arms, and legs through the appropriate holes.  Vincent then picked up a small control box that hung from the side of the Stretcher by a cable.  He pressed a button, and Leah’s head descended along its groove until it was about where her lap would be.  He pressed another button, and her head rotated 180 degrees.  Her hands played with her hair in her lap for a while until Vincent pressed two more buttons, and then her arms swung down on their pivots and ended up at the two lower corners of the box, ten feet away from each other and laying almost flat on the floor.  He pressed one more button, and the piece holding her legs swung up and around until they were at the top of the box sticking up into the air.  They then swung down in the holes so they hung normally, except that the little toes were now next to each other.  Vincent took his bow for spreading his wife’s (I think; I seem to remember seeing wedding rings when I first met them) parts around, and then he dropped the control box into her hand on the floor and walked to the other end of the stage, gesturing to her that she should finish the trick herself.  She felt around the controls, being unable to see them.  The first button she pressed raised her head back up to the right height, which was now where her feet were.  She smiled out at the audience with her feet flanking her inverted face, and then pressed another button.  This one made her legs pivot back down where they belonged, where they swung back down into the proper position.  She next pressed the button that brought her other arm into place, followed by the arm that held the box.  Unfortunately, but according to the act, the controller was now out of her reach, so to complete the trick, she reached up and twisted her head back around, opened the front doors and stepped out of the Stretcher to great applause.  Meanwhile, Vincent was waiting for her to join him across the stage, where the next piece of apparatus was already waiting for them.  
     This one was a modified Mismade, but instead of boxes with doors in the front, this one had four open frames with metal hoops to hold the body parts in place.  There was also a table nearby whose top was level with the top of the hip box.  The bars of the framework were thick enough that a cynical audience member might assume that they concealed some sort of trickery, and there was also an external frame holding everything together to add a little more possibility for misdirection.  Leah stepped into the trick from the back, bending over and squeezing through one of the gaps in the framework, and positioned herself so that Vincent could fasten her in place, which he did.  He then took a small case from me, which contained several metal oval discs, and set the case on the table.  He proceeded to insert the discs into the metal hoops and into the gaps where Leah had purportedly already separated the seams in her body.  After the last disc was inserted, Vincent stepped in front of Leah, probably to get people thinking that he had something to hide at this point, and began to remove and reorganize boxes from the stack.  When he was done, he stepped away from the table to reveal Leah’s feet, chest, and arms in their proper places, but her head and hips were switched.  Her hands weren’t fastened in place, so she felt free at this point to reach down and play with her hair a little to impress the audience.  When everyone was sufficiently enthralled, Vincent reached over to her chest box and pushed it sideways onto the table.  The framework held her hips in place.  He then pulled her head to the other side and pushed her hips down to where they belonged.  He slid her chest back over and lifted her head back up into position.  Then, he took out the blades, removed the hoops, and removed the framework from around Leah.
     As he took his bow, Leah tapped him on the shoulder and then pointed to her waist.  He shrugged to her like he didn’t know what she meant, and to illustrate her point, she slid her own upper half onto the table.  Oops, looks like he forgot one of the blades.  Well, of course it was part of the act, but the audience really thought it was cool to see a woman in half without any boxes.  While Vincent pretended to wonder what to do, Leah got an idea.  She stepped her lower half under the table and used the underside of the table to rub the disk off.  Vincent picked it up from where it fell and put it into the case with the others, and Leah’s lower half stepped forward from under the table as her upper half moved to join with it.  The trick finally over, they both took their bows.
     That was my cue to change the music again, which switched from “ABC” to “Tank!”, the theme from Cowboy Bebop.  Vincent and Leah pulled their schoolchildren costumes off in one dramatic motion to reveal the next costume, the male and female main characters from Cowboy Bebop, and I pulled the Stretcher and Mismade off the stage and replaced them with the final prop, a variation on the Disembodied Princess.  It consisted of a large box extending from Leah’s neck to above her knees, and it had holes in the sides for her arms.  There was also a small box on top for her head.  The props for this trick also included a small table like an end table.  
     Leah stepped into the box, and Vincent closed the doors.  He fastened cuffs around the holes where her limbs came out of the box to hold them in place.  He pressed a button, and Leah went limp.  Dry ice fog poured out of the holes where Leah’s legs were.  When he opened the doors, her torso was gone.  He then reached up to the box containing her head, turned it around backwards, and removed it, setting it on the small table and turning it around so Leah faced the audience.  Her eyes were still closed.  Vincent went back to the box and pressed the button again.  Instead of more fog, there was a crackling of electricity, and the whole box fell apart and collapsed into a pile of boards, as well as Leah’s arms and legs.  With a start, Leah opened her eyes and looked around as best she could.  Now looking a bit worried for Leah’s well-being, Vincent hastily reassembled the part of the apparatus that had contained Leah’s torso.  He pressed the button, there was a little bit of smoke, and Leah’s torso reappeared as the box promptly fell apart again.  Now relieved, Vincent looked around for a place to set Leah’s torso, and his eyes fell on the table.  He spun the small box around to face backwards and set the box behind the table, setting her torso in place of her head.  He then dug through the pile of boards until he found Leah’s limbs and clumsily reattached them.  Finally, he picked the small box back up, still facing backwards, and set it on top of Leah’s headless body.  He turned it back around, and Leah was once again whole.  The two of them got up to face the audience, who were going wild, and took a bow.  As the applause swelled, Vincent threw down another smoke bomb, and when the smoke cleared, they were back in the costumes they started out in, except Leah’s costume was already slit and sliced up.  They took another bow, and Vincent threw one last smoke bomb.  This time, when the smoke cleared, they were gone.  They received a standing ovation.
     As I stood in the wing getting props squared away, Vincent and Leah appeared next to me, dressed in normal clothes.  “Hey, not bad for your first time,” said Vincent.
     “Thanks, Vin.”
     “Yeah, I think we might have found ourselves a Technical Director,” said Leah.
     “Whoa, hang on.  Let’s not be doing anything crazy.  I still don’t know much about theater, remember?”
     “The Technical Director is basically the head engineer of a show who designs the technological side of the scenery and props.  And you’ve already done a little of that for us,” Leah said as she took off her hand to remind me.  
     She quickly put it back on as a middle-aged gentleman in a golf shirt walked up to us.
     “Hey, great show as usual, guys,” he said.  “You can play here anytime.”
     “Thanks, Bernie,” said Vincent.
     “Hey, who’s the new recruit?” asked Bernie.
     “Oh, this is Brian, our new technical director.  He’s standing in for our SM tonight.  Brian, this is Bernie.  He manages the theater.”
     “Hi, Brian.”  We shook hands.  “You got a last name, Brian?”
     Vin and Leah looked at each other a little sheepishly, probably embarrassed that they hadn’t thought to ask me themselves.
     “It’s Fontaine, Bernie.  Brian Fontaine.”
     “Bernie Halverson, Brian.”  He walked off.  I turned back to what I had been doing, and Vin and Leah were looking at me as if they’d seen a ghost.
     “What?”
     “Your last name is Fontaine?”
     “Yeah.  Why?”
     “Who are your parents?” asked Leah.
     “My parents are dead.”
     “Oh.  I’m…I’m sorry, I didn’t…”
     “Hey, it’s okay, you didn’t even know my last name.  It happened a long time ago.”
     “Do you have any other family?” asked Vin.
     “Not that I know of.  I may have some cousins or whatever somewhere, but –” All of a sudden, I remembered the note that had come with the book that I learned magic from.  It had come from someone who called me “cousin.”  “Why the interest in my family all of a sudden?  Do you know any other Fontaines?”
     “There used to be a married couple who were performing magicians.”
     “Oh, you mean like you guys?”
     “But a lot better,” said Leah.  “In the way that Copperfield is better than the uncle that pulls quarters out of your ear.  Their names were Wade and Rose Fontaine.  They really cleaned up on the magic circuit, and then they just stopped.  No one we know of has any idea what happened to them.”
     “So you think I’m related to these Fontaines?”
     “Well, if you are, it would explain how you’re able to do what you do.  You see, Wade and Rose were hereditary magicians like Vin and I.  They got it from their parents.”
     “But I didn’t get it from my parents,” I said.  “I got this old book in the mail when I got back from the hospital, and –”
     “Hospital?” said Vin.
     “Oh, yeah, I got nailed by a drunk driver when I was in college.  The settlement gave me the capital to start up my little shop, and this book that I got while I was convalescing gave me the ability.”
     “Do you know who sent you the book?”
     “Well, I remember that there was a note with it, and the person in the note called me ‘cousin.’  Do you think it might have been from this Wade or Rose?”
     Just then, Bernie came back.  “Hey, Vin!  Leah!  There’s someone out here who wants to meet you guys.  He might want to use you for his show.  Hey, if you end up heading out to Vegas, don’t forget us little folks, huh?”  He ushered them out into the lobby to shake hands with the masses, and I took the opportunity to head back to my place.  This was an intriguing new development that I had just learned, and it warranted further investigation.  
     On my way outside, I caught a glimpse of Marcus peeking above the crowd.  I know he saw me, and I know he saw me see him.  He tried to get my attention, but I tried my best to ignore him as I headed out the door.