Jones grew up learning there were some things one simply didn’t ask in the Midnight Cabaret, such as how a trick really worked, a performer’s home town, and what Uncle Ernie did on his nights off that sometimes brought him home with bloody knuckles…

What few outside the Midnight Cabaret realize is that nearly everyone in the show is a war refugee from some faraway magical realm, worlds overrun by evil. Despite leaving their conquered homes and taking human form, the enemies of these survivors sometimes send minions after them; perhaps to thwart future reprisals; perhaps to finish the job. The performers always look for signs of incursions by their old enemies as they travel around the troupe’s new home.

“When I recovered from nearly drowning in water, unchained otherworldly evil, and magical energy, there was a ghost at my side: Uncle Beau. As I huddled with everyone else in the reeking SuperDome, he slowly told me about how the storm took out more than just the levees, but the magical wards that had kept all kinds of evil locked up in this town. Now that evil was running wild all over the South, and as his heir, it was my job to find those old monsters wherever they hid, bring them back to their cages in New Orleans, and lock them up again.”

She also learned about their program for creating mentally enhanced soldiers, for building machines to augment and control psychics, for spinning off from any government program, and for forming an organization to hunt down and train “special” children under the guise of a world-wide charity. It was a lot for a five-year-old to take…