Chapter 2

Year: Summer 2032

Location: Piper's House; Tampa Bay, Florida.

"Mom, come on. I'm 22 years old. Don't you think it's about time that you just freakin let go? I'm going to be a whole forty minutes away, not counting the fact that I could orb to you any freakin' time I want. Besides, you'll still have Chris. Heaven knows he'll never leave unless you give him explicit directions to do so," Wyatt said with a roll of his eyes. Suddenly the cereal in the bowl he'd just poured flew up into his face.

"Jeez Wy! Don't be such a klutz," Chris taunted his brother as he entered the kitchen.

He then smiled innocently at his mother as he passed her on his way to the fridge.

Piper, choosing to ignore her younger son's interruption, turned to Wyatt. "Look sweety, I know that you really want to go, I'm just not sure it's the best idea. I mean dorm life is hard enough for any person, it's going to be really hard to keep your magick a secret there."

Wyatt and Piper had been fighting for months on this particular subject, without much headway. The topic of argument: whether or not it was safe for Wyatt to live on the campus of the college he had begun to attend last year. Wyatt felt that he'd already been held back enough considering he'd wasted two years at a Community College studying business, only to decide that the ocean was where his heart truly lay. He'd always been mystified by the ocean, the one place on the planet that he felt was still potentially dangerous to him. He could face countless numbers of demons and other magickal beings, but he still hadn't managed a way to breathe underwater.

He began attending Eckerd College as a freshman the previous year, driving to the campus each day for classes. The routine however soon got old for Wyatt. Forty minutes was a long drive from home, and it was annoying to him when he had huge breaks between classes that left him with nowhere to go but the library or the beach. Luckily he made friends fast, and could usually find somewhere to spend the time in between classes.

Of course, this created a new problem. His friends always wanted him to come hang out with them, but the drive got old really fast. And of course, if he'd spend all day and night on campus his mom would always find something to say about it, not to mention the demon problems that would eventually call him away mysteriously.

"Look Mom, I know that you're worried, but I'll be fine. All I want is to try and hold some semblance of a normal life. I'm not going to live in this house for a better portion of my life like you lived in the manor."

" I know, son. I'm just worried."

Chris chose this point to speak up again. "You know, he's got a point. Neither of us are going to be here much longer. You'll probably be lucky if you can get Patty to stick around for a few more years. None of us will go far, but we're all gonna go. Besides, how is Wyatt going to get over his God complex if he doesn't get around people he can't use his magick on."

This of course provoked retaliation from Wyatt. As Chris went to dip his spoon into his own bowl of cereal, he felt it hit something hard. He looked down to see that Wyatt had frozen his breakfast.

"You asshole!" Chris yelled, flinging a tiny cornflake that hadn't gotten frozen to the rest at his brother. He waved his hand over the cereal, carefully using is Pyrokinesis to thaw the milk back out without overheating it, or burning the cornflakes.

"Christopher. I don't care how old you are. Don't call your brother an asshole!" Piper yelled, waving her hand at him.

As she waved, an athame appeared in her hand, causing her to stop abruptly and stare at her hand in disbelief. Both boys stared too, equally confused.

"Jeez Mom. I know you hate for us to swear, but I think stabbing Chris is a little extreme." Wyatt laughed, trying to break the tension.

Piper glared at her eldest. "Thank you for the update. Now, will someone please tell me how in THE HELL this athame appeared in my hand!"

"Well, I would have to guess that you conjured it," Chris said nonchalantly as he pulled the athame from his mom's hand and set it on the counter. "I think it's safer if we set this down now."

Piper switched her glare to her youngest son, as he smiled sweetly at her. "You know, I always thought it was crap that my children got to have all these awesome powers at such a young age, but that didn't mean that I wanted to be fifty and have athames randomly appear in my hand!" Piper's frustrations seemed to fail her though, as another athame appeared in her waving hand.

Chris and Wyatt both looked at each other and tried their best to control their laughter at their mom's newly found power.

Chris took a deep breath and tried to calm his mom down. "Look, Mom. If you can conjure it, you should be able to unconjure it. Just focus on making the athame disappear."

Piper stared intently at the athame for a few seconds before giving up, throwing her hands in the air in frustration, causing the athame to accidentally fly from her hand and towards Wyatt. Wyatt quickly Tk'd the athame into the wall, and then looked at his mom in shock. Piper had her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide in disbelief.

Chris carefully grabbed his mom's wrists and pulled her hands away from her face. "I think that until you learn to control this new power you should maybe watch where you put your hands."

Piper looked down, took a deep breath, and then looked up again. "I suppose that I should go check with Leo on this, just to make sure it was supposed to happen. But first, Wyatt, I suppose that I will help you pay to go and live on campus, but you have to promise me that if it starts to go badly, or there are too many close calls either here or there, because you know they're going to start attacking you there now, that you'll come back home."

Wyatt grinned widely at his mom, knowing how hard this was for her. "You're awesome, Mom. The best in the world!" He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

"Yeah, Yeah. Now, I have a question for you before you go to work. Who are you going to live with? Didn't they do room assignments before the Spring Semester let out for the summer?"

Wyatt looked down and pressed his lips together for a moment. "Well, you see, Mom. I kinda already decided that I was going to do this last semester, so I went ahead and reserved a room with one of my friends."

"Really," Piper said, giving her son one of her patented 'excuse me' looks. "Well, who is he? Is he nice? Are you good friends with him?"

"Actually, it's 'she'. Her name's Rain, and yes, she's very nice. Probably too nice, and, yes, we are very good friends. We might as well have been roommates this past semester. Her roommate didn't come back over Christmas break, so eventually Rain ended up just giving me a key to her room so that I could go there in between my classes. She doesn't ask a lot of questions either. In fact, she usually helps to cover me with our other friends when I have to leave suddenly."

"You didn't…"

"No, Mom. I didn't tell her that I'm a witch. I told you, she doesn't ask a lot of questions. After the first three or four times of hearing 'I can't tell you why I'm randomly leaving in the middle of the movie etc.' she just stopped asking. Now I just get the occasional 'if you ever need to talk about it' offer from her. Other than that, she takes it very well. She has to leave suddenly a lot as well. I'm not sure why though. It's a thing we share."

"A girl, huh?" Wyatt's mom looked at him suspiciously. "I didn't know they let boys and girls room together."

"Well it is 2023, but no, usually they don't. We petitioned the school for special consideration. I forget what Rain told them exactly, but it worked."

"Now, Wyatt. You're not living with her because there's something going on there, are you? I mean, they say that living with your best friend can be a bad idea. I'm sure living with your girlfriend is an even worse one."

Wyatt rolled his eyes exasperatedly. "No, Mom. We did actually try the whole dating thing once, but it didn't really work. I love the girl to death, but she's just really not in my dating type. Besides, I have a girlfriend. You know that. Kali and I are getting along great."

"I know. I was just checking. All right, you go to work. Chris, I need you to go to the club restaurant and start in the inventory for the food, please. I'm going to go ask Leo about these athames."

After graduation, Chris had been unsure on what he had wanted to do, so he began helping his mom out at her club in Tampa, P3-2. They had always talked about doing something different with the club, and had decided to turn the two upstairs floors, which had been used as storage, into a restaurant. Piper hired contractors to come in and fix the floor directly above the club up so that it matched the club, and had a hole cut into the center so that restaurant patrons could look down and see the action happening on the dance floor. The third floor she had designed into more of a family restaurant. While the restaurants were being constructed, Chris attended a local culinary school (he had always shared his mom's passion in cooking) and would begin managing the 2nd floor restaurant when it opened at the end of the summer.

"So, Mom." Chris stopped her exit. "Would now be a bad time to mention that I'm moving out as well?"

"Excuse me?" Piper said without even turning around.

"Yeah, I sign the lease on the apartment tomorrow. See, Wy and I kinda sorta planned this together. We thought you'd still be fighting him about moving, so I was going to gracefully step in with the fact that I found an apartment about 3 minutes away from Wy's campus. So this way your 'precious babies' aren't going off on there own. Of course, you had to go and just stop fighting Wyatt, which just makes me look like an asshole."

"I knew I should have sent you boys to regular high school instead of Magick School. Maybe then you'd think better."

"Thanks Mom," Wyatt replied, chuckling.

"Fine, fine! Runaway and leave me here all alone."

"Mom, seriously. You don't get to complain like other parents do. You still have Patty for one thing, and we're only an orb away. Besides, Chris works for you, so you know your not getting rid of him."

Chris walked over to Piper and hugged her tightly. "Don't worry, Mom. We'll still be here for you. Besides, this way I can keep an eye on Wyatt for you. Ya know, make sure he stays out of trouble and all."

"Momma's Boy," Wyatt smirked at his younger brother. However, after watching their embrace for a few moments, he too went and wrapped his mom in a hug. They stayed that way for a while, until both boys felt their mom stop crying and start to breath normally again.

"You're way too emotional." Chris informed his mom.

"Seriously," Wyatt agreed, as both boys put their bowls in the sink and left the kitchen, leaving Piper to call Leo to help her deal with all the new information.

Author's Note: So I promise that next time there will be some actually battles happening. I was just trying to get through the background info. The rest of the story should be a little better. Also, just a little disclaimer: Eckerd College is a real school. It's a private college located on Boca Ciega Bay, which is actually about 30-40 minutes south of Tampa. It's a beautiful school, and while the physical descriptions and other information will be mostly true about it, it is important to note that I do not own the school, and have no actual affiliation with them. Enjoy, and please let me know what you think, especially for improvements. I've discovered I'm not very good at this writing thing, but I enjoy it...so I'll keep trying.