Though I still missed my very best friend Miguel, I was really enjoying my new life in the Southern Isles. I loved living in my new mansion. It was a grand, white-bricked mansion with many beautiful rooms, many large shiny windows and two large wooden doors at the front and at the back.

The bedroom for me and Chel was a grand one with its massive comfy and warm king-sized bed, grand wooden chest drawers and wardrobes and beautiful paintings on the cream-painted walls. Our son Benito had a great room all to himself. He had a big comfy king-sized bed to himself and had everything our room had with the exceptions of no paintings yet and his walls were painted light green.

And we loved all of our other rooms. We had a kitchen to cook our delicious meals, we had our own library with amazing books that educated and entertained us, a longue where we go for some quiet time and to relax, a dining room if we ever invited some of our friends (we were friends with everyone in the Southern Isles and we didn't care whether they were royalty or some of the wealthiest people or some of the poorest peasants) for dinner and we had a lovely bathroom. And because of these advising jobs Chel and I were working, we could afford a few servants to look after the whole mansion. They were all very polite, hard-working, talented and bright with their own jobs.

And our garden was so massive and beautiful. It was so huge that it could be mistaken for a jungle, even a jungle that was as massive as the one that hid El Dorado. It had tall, striking trees, bushes and flowers of all shapes and sizes and the grass was very green and smooth. We had a couple of very skilled and talented gardeners to come twice a week to attend it. Even our beloved Queen Nicla was so impressed with our garden when she came to visit us one day that she said it looked more like a royal garden than the one at the royal castle.

And I loved my job as the Southern Isles' Chief Treasurer. Not only was it my first proper one that I got paid for, but it was one I always wanted. I was surrounded by gold coins and I got paid for counting them and I didn't have the pressure of ruling a kingdom. Nicla had been Queen of the Southern Isles for at least five months now and she was doing a fantastic job. She was a very popular ruler and a much better one than I ever could be. Miguel and I could barely rule El Dorado when we had to pretend to be gods for those few days.

Even though we didn't realise it at first, Chel and I started to see Nicla as a daughter to us. And though she never said it, I believed that she viewed me and Chel as the closest things she had to having parents, as her real family was killed. I believed that because of the way she always looked at us and she always told us that we were the best advisors she ever had after our meetings and she always asked us for advice, whether it was for the kingdom or personal. She did the same to Benito, who she viewed him not only as her best friend, but also as a brother. He viewed her as a sister as well. And Nicla was a great classmate for my son Benito when he went to school. At first, I wasn't sure whether my son needed an education or not because I never had one and neither did Chel, but she was the one who wanted him to try because she wanted him to have the very best he could have in life. So did I, so we let him go and try school and surprisingly it paid off. Benito would come home smarter every day. Every day we would ask him what he learned and he would tell us, teaching us what he learned. One day, we bumped into his teacher and she said that our son was a very bright and hardworking student, which delighted us a lot.

Yes, so with the exception of my very best friend Miguel not being in the Southern Isles with me, life was perfect as it could be. And I was very happy that he was happy living his life in Arendelle with his friends. He wrote letters to me every month and I likewise to him and we shared news about our own adventures. And the letters he sent me never bored me; they always excited me, especially the ones where he and his friends discovered Cortez and his men were invading Arendelle and stopped them like the time we stopped them from destroying El Dorado. I hoped he never found my letters boring as well.


One day after a good day of work, which was counting money and reporting it to Queen Nicla who was very pleased with my news, I headed back home. When I got to home, I saw two people at the gate. There was an old man with long grey hair and a huge grey bear and an old woman with silver hair. They were both wearing clothes with a lot of holes. They were at the gates looking desperate to get in.

"Can I help you, sir, ma'am?" I asked them as I approached them.

They looked at me and gasped.

"It's you," the woman said softly.

"It's me, all right," I said. "I'm the Southern Isles' Chief Treasurer." I was very confused at what was happening.

"No, it's really you!" the man cried again but louder.

"Who am I?"

"Our son!" The man and woman said together.

I couldn't believe what I heard. It made me faint.


I woke up and discovered that I wasn't abandoned in the streets of Barcelona by my parents, but in my favourite chair in the lounge of my mansion. As I took a deep breath to calm myself down, I must have been dreaming after I fainted. No, not dreaming, but having a nightmare about my parents losing me in Barcelona or rather leaving me there on purpose and I was all alone trying to find out why, but never finding them and finding no one else but the man who raised me and later Miguel for a while called Benito, whom I named my son after.

"Are you all right, Tulio?"

I turned to see that Chel was beside me. She hugged me and I hugged her. I saw Benito was there as well and he gave me a hug as well.

"I feel better for seeing you guys," I said. "I thought I saw my parents."

"You did, Tulio," Chel said.

I was about to ask her what she meant but when she moved out of the way and I saw the same people I saw at the gate, I got my answer.

"Son, we are really your parents," the man said.

"Prove it," I said.

They got out a drawing and showed it to me. I saw on it a young man and a young woman with a boy about four years old. I guess the man and woman were my so-called parents when they were young and their boy was me. It had my face right and my eyes and my hair.

Then they first explained that they lost me when I was young when we were living in Spain. They were gamblers and thieves like me and my best friend Miguel. One day, they were found by guards and they ran, unintentionally leaving me in the progress. When they realised that they had left me and they couldn't come back for me, they immediately regretted what they did and they still regretted to this day. They had been travelling around the world looking for a new life and for nearly thirty years they had arrived and settled in the Southern Isles and since Nicla became Queen and rewarded me and my family for all the good services we did for her to return her home. That was when they recognised me as their son, by my face, eyes and hair. They said I had my father's black hair and my mother's blue eyes.

"If you are angry with us for what we did to you, you have every right to be," the man said.

"We won't ask for your forgiveness," the woman said. "All we want you to know is that we are so sorry for what we did to you and we just want to make it up to you."

Then they both started to leave.

I sighed before I said, "Wait."

They stopped and turned me around.

"How about you stay here for tonight at least? Dinner provided."

They smiled. "Okay," they said.

Though they proved to be my real parents and they were pleasant and we, along with Chel and Benito, exchanged stories of our lives as we ate and sat down, I still felt like I could didn't trust them and could help feeling that they were up to something.