"Where's Jana", I asked Mike.
"She's gone out to meet an old school friend." he answered.
"I can't believe you got her to perform those illusions. Well, I can believe that, I can't believe you got her to do them nude!"
"It was her idea. She thought it'd add some life to the show."
"It certainly will, although you'll probably get an all-male audience."
"Well, that would be better than no audience, which is what I've got at the moment. But I don't think so - I'm not going to let the T&A (as Jana calls it) overwhelm the magic." Mike looked very serious for a moment.
"Did you do that slicer one the way I suggested?" I had some ideas about illusion design.
"What, like a spiker? No."
"How then?"
Mike grinned. "Magic!"
I decided to examine the prop later to see how he'd done it, and changed the subject.
"How do you plan to perform a show with nudity? Won't the council close you down?"
Mike laughed. "Jana looked into it before you flew over. It turns out that unless you server alcohol, and you don't actually have sex on stage, you can have nudity. It's from when the local council thought they could become the new Las Vegas, or something."
I laughed. "So Jana was planning this all along."
"Yep."
We sat in silence for a few minutes, and then changed to topic to sports.
---
Jana walked into the Italian restaurant and saw Heather waving and grinning from a table.
"Heather!", Jana hugged her, "How are you?"
"I'm pretty good."
The two women spent the next 40 minutes catching up on the last year since they had last met.
"What brings you to town?", Heather asked.
"It's a long story."
"We've got time, at the rate those entrees took to arrive, we won't be finished here for hours."
Jana laughed, "Well, you remember Mike, the guy who left college to become a magician?". Heather nodded. "Well, I'm in town helping him spice up his act."
"Wow! I've seen his show a couple of times, and it's always been OK - not especially great, but the magic was good."
"Yeah, he's great at the magic, but sucks at the presentation. I'm trying to convince him to stage it better, and show more flesh."
"More flesh?"
"Mine, at the moment. We're going to start looking around for other assistants. Well, we have started, only we haven't done any looking!"
"How much are you paying?"
Startled, Jana looked at Heather suddenly. "I thought you had a great job?"
"Yeah, it's OK, but they cut it back to 3 days a week, so I could do with some extra money."
Jana looked at the brunette. "Well, you can try it out if you like - why not come over to the warehouse tomorrow after work"
"No work tomorrow!", Heather interjected.
"OK, come over at lunch time then. I'll show you around and you can try a few illusions and see what you think."
"So, tell me about this Dave guy." Heather asked with a smile.
"Dave?"
---
"Dave?" Mike was shaking me awake. "You just fell asleep on the table again! You're not going to guess how I did the trick, so just go to bed."
"I'm fine", I protested.
Mike shook his head. "Tell you what, we can run it again some time, and you can examine all the props and Jana after, and tell me how it's done."
I felt a familiar tightening in my pants, and grinned. "You're on. Now I will go to bed. See you in the morning."
To be continued