Summer in Houston. Motionless heat enveloping the day. Hazes of humidity visible in the streets. Cicadas chirring their conversations. White clouds gliding lazily across the painfully bright sky.
Everything was still, and had been for the past four years.
Monica, Michelle, and Alison Connors had not returned to the Pirates world.
After seeing At World's End, how could they? James had died. Will could not be reached. Jack was on a journey to god knew where.
Frankly, the sisters didn't know where exactly they would end up if they ventured through the dryer again…and they weren't sure they wanted to.
Alison, the oldest of the three, was now twenty-five years old, out of college, and in graduate school. In other words, doing pretty well for a girl whose possibly fictional boyfriend may or may not have been killed. Not that she would know, considering she'd spent four years without any contact with him.
Michelle, the middle child, was now twenty-two, freshly out of college with the world at her feet. Not too shabby for a chick who killed herself, came back through mysterious magic (or convenient writing), and watched the man she had feelings for—and who she knew had feelings for her back—choose someone else. Twice.
And Monica, the young'un, now nineteen, had just completed her first year of college, and wasn't doing too badly for someone who hadn't seen her best friend in four years. A best friend who was much older than her, constantly in some form of danger, and was coveted by practically every woman in the world.
So yeah, the sisters were tormented. But, understandably, they had to hide it. Because who the hell would believe them if they mentioned any of the above three paragraphs to anyone other than themselves?
Perhaps now you're wondering why exactly they remained abstinent from their somehow-magical dryer for four years, considering that the time they spent there was kind of awesome. Wait no longer, dear reader—thank you for being here, by the way, I appreciate it—they were scared.
Alison was scared to go back to find James dead. Michelle was scared to go back because, let's face it, seeing Will again would be awkward as hell. They kissed, remember? Yeah. Mondo awkward. And Monica…well, Monica was scared that if she returned to the Pirates world, she wouldn't ever want to leave.
The question that was primarily on their minds concerning the dryer was this: did the events of At World's End affect the world they had visited? Meaning: who was dead and who was alive? What plot points had occurred, if any? If not, would they continue their own story, four years later? And if this last was true, how would they adapt?
Such paranoid thinking had kept the sisters away from the temptation of the dryer.
But all that thinking went flying out the window when Alison approached Michelle and Monica with a proposition on a blazing summer day in Houston.