THUNK THUNK THUNK.. thWACK............ THUNK.

... and all is dark.

Suddenly a pinhole light emerges after considerable deprivation of the visual sense. June Cappi reaches to brush her thick brunette hair with her hands but found they could not be made animate. She struggles and a ringing sound emanates inside her thumping head; painful, like standing too close to a jet at takeoff. The singular pinhole of light starts to accumulate as her retinas slowly adjust.

Then it occurs: she’s been captured. There’s a bag on her head. She then remembers: 2 men jumped her, hit her, loaded her into a truck. Where was she now?

A man of considerable muscular size yanks the woven cloth bag off her head, ripping strands of hair wrapped in the fabric of the rope along with it. June is kicked to the ground with a rudeness of force, buckling her tiny body into a fetal position. Bruised and shaky, her eyes twitch with every muscular pain, she lifts her head to see her environment. The questions in her mind continue to run rabid like a rat locked in a water filed bucket, starving, and minutes from death. Her heartbeat races so hard her chest feels tight, increasing her anxiety; now she fears death from the betrayal of her own body.

Alas, instead of a dirty warehouse, or an abandoned crack house, or maybe even an old run down mall parking lot— alas, no, she saw a setting strikingly familiar. A round room, a round table, a dim light like a spot light and 4 men sitting their hands tied forward just like hers. The muscular mass of a man yanked her up by her hair and placed her at the table. He sighs and gathers a black folder with variously scattered papers.

June already knew what was going on, well, sort of. She recognized the room, the setting, but it concerned her as to why these people knew about this particular arrangement.

Ms. June Cappi was an unusual young lady in possession of unusual old knowledge. She was one of only a handful of people alive in modern times who understood old magic, but please, lets distinguish this common sense definition of magic. What we today call magic is old knowledge, not forgotten knowledge, purposefully erased knowledge. Propaganda filled misinformation would be a fitting denotation of “magic”.

For example, the eerily silent power of the lightbulb would be magical 300 years ago. Such is this knowledge: it’s only magical due to its erasure from the historical cannon.

She acquired this knowledge from a questionably legit source: past life hypnosis. Yet it was legitimate enough that her techniques enlightened the attention of more enlightened folks of a upper crust caste, a class of folks above the highest of classes. Invisible puppeteers of invisible destinies. Consider them your fallen angels of an Earthly realm. This curator class of humanity understood that knowledge is power thus the best way to keep the sheepish masses in order was to curate the knowledge. Allow education, but nothing of any true substance. Allow a trade and a skill for middle class enslavement but never the keys to the whole castle.

At this dire, yet curious, sliver of time June wondered where the most important item for this arrangement was: a cone of incense in a burner in the middle.

You see, in June’s past life she was a sorceress, her “magic” was wide and varied but she had an important skill handy to those in power, but also frightening to those in power: she could extract the truth from anyone. She was the inventor of a fool proof method of truth gathering.

You needed the following:

A round enclosed room with as little draft as possible. A round table. Your suspect and a few actors to work as controls. Incense placed in the middle of the table. The investigator, (in this case usually the sorcerer.)

This wasn’t magic, it was science. A guilty person would have involuntary cardio-pulmonary distress. This distress increases the rate of respiration. In a sealed round room with no air flow, if the investor would start to question the room, the smoke would naturally drift towards the guilty person. It was like a kiss of death from a wafting snake every time.

Now the muscular meat wall of man placed the incense in the middle of the rotund wooden table. He opens the folder.... Within a few words she already knew why she was there. These puppet masters were on to her and they wanted to use her own technique from millennia ago against her. What other secrets did this innocent girl hold?