Piper slowly opened her eyes. The last thing she remembered was being in the middle of a fight with a demon, her two sisters battling alongside her. She could feel the cold of metal around her wrists – chains – and her feet were barely reaching the floor. The wall behind her was cold and rough, like stone.
The eldest Charmed One squinted through the darkness. The demon must have gained the upper hand during the fight and knocked her out, escorting her down to the Underworld. Did that mean that the demon had also captured her sisters?
'Hey! Stop that! Squinting is my thing!'
Piper jumped in surprise at the voice. It did not belong to Phoebe or to Paige. Suddenly the fire of a torch on a bracket to the left of her head lit up, revealing Prue chained to the wall next to her. Prue did not seem to have aged a day since the wall incident.
The apparently-not-yet-eldest Charmed One stared at her apparently-still-the-eldest-and-either-dead-or-not-dead sister like she had seen a ghost.
'Prue?' Piper breathed. 'Are you a ghost?'
Prue gave Piper a disbelieving look. 'Don't you think that – if I was a ghost – I would have phased out of these chains by now?'
'Fair point,' Piper agreed before her expression changed to one of outrage. 'Wait! That means you're alive! You've been alive all this time?'
Prue shrugged as best as one can when they're chained to the wall at their wrists and their feet are barely touching the ground.
'Like a wall can stop me,' Prue said. 'I decided to go down to the Underworld and thwart many demonic and evil plans from down there. It was easy without having two weaker siblings to slow me down.'
'We buried you though…' Piper muttered, her anger shifting into confusion.
Prue smirked. 'Astral Prue's a good actor, isn't she?'
'Why would you not tell us that you are alive?' Piper asked, unhappily.
'What do you mean she didn't tell us? I knew.'
Piper's head darted to her right as another torch lit up to reveal Paige chained to the wall. Piper frowned at Paige.
'You've met Prue?' Piper questioned. Her eyes widened in surprise.
'Yeah. We meet up on a weekly basis,' Paige answered nonchalantly.
'A weekly basis? What? Why? Where? How?' Piper blathered.
'Oh, it's just at our weekly club,' Prue explained. 'I set it up when Phoebe and Cole started dating; you know how I never trusted him, even before his secret came out.'
'And after meeting Cole, I happened to find out about the club and I couldn't wait to join,' Paige continued.
'Of course Paige tried to replace me as the chair woman of the club, but she didn't succeed at replacing that particular part of my life,' Prue concluded.
'What? Why did you never tell me?' Piper asked, distraught.
'You never seemed to dislike Phoebe dating Cole as much as the rest of us did,' Paige replied with an indifferent shrug, accompanied by a mug.
'No! Not that!' Piper complained. 'I meant: Why did you never tell me that you meet up with Prue every week?'
'Oh,' said Paige, blushing. 'My memory is not the best.'
Piper groaned. 'So Phoebe and I have been led to believe that Prue was dead all this time?'
'No. I knew she wasn't.'
A torch on the wall opposite suddenly lit up to reveal Phoebe chained to that wall. Considering how bright Phoebe's pink outfit was, Piper was surprised she had not spotted Phoebe earlier.
Piper looked gobsmacked. 'You knew too?'
'Yeah, seeing as I did join the anti-Phole club after Cole's…' Phoebe turned her head to look at her fingers so as she could count it out. After five minutes or so, Phoebe resumed. 'I joined the anti-Phole club after Cole's first vanquish.'
'Wait…' Piper said, dumbfounded. 'You mean that when you told me each week that you were off to the anti-Vole club, you weren't on about hating cute little rodent-like creatures?'
'Naturally, after Phoebe joined, we had to rename it,' Prue said, rolling her eyes. 'It can't exactly be called the anti-Phole club if Phoebe and Cole are no longer an item.'
'After much debate, we ended up calling it the SRC,' Paige finished.
Piper raised an eyebrow. She had two questions to ask, but with her sisters' joint attention spans, she was probably going to only get an answer to one of the queries. Therefore she had to get her priorities straight and ask the more important question: Why did Phoebe never tell Piper that she knew Prue was alive? or…
'What does SRC stand for?' Piper asked. Yep, she could see no flaw in her priorities.
'Shredded raw cabbage,' Prue said smugly as if it was obvious.
Piper raised her eyebrow even higher, waiting for the explanation to go into more detail.
'As in that side dish called coleslaw… It's a play on words, Piper,' Prue said, returning to her mode of thinking that she was the only one who knew anything useful. 'Coleslaw… Coles – law. Cooooles laaaaaaaaaaaaw. Cole's law. Get it?'
'I got it the first time. I just don't get why you would name it after him like that,' Piper pointed out. 'It makes it sound more like a fan club.'
Prue and Paige both looked disgusted by the insinuation. Meanwhile Phoebe seemed to be taking the suggestion quite well.
