Jiper's Child: Children of Olympus #2

Chapter Two: I Meet my Grandpa in a Cafe

PIPER

So triplets. That was going to be interesting.

Piper had been ready for the care that she knew would come with having a child, but she wasn't sure she was ready for that times three...

But that was life. She and Jason would cope with it, especially with all of the friends they had; only two had children of their own, but she'd trust any of them with her own life or even her children's.

She was laying on her bed, just thinking, when she began to feel a strange tugging sensation in her stomach. She sat up quickly, hand on her stomach. Were the babies moving in there? Could they even move yet? There were hardly a week old.

Was something wrong? It sure felt like it. Before she could decide what was happening, the room around her began to fade. Or maybe she was losing conciousness, her vision slowly giving way to blackness. Or...

Suddenly, she was standing in the middle of a busy city street. For a second, she stood there. Then a car honked, and blinked, hurrying off the road.

She looked around in bewilderment and realized that the people passing were returning her the same expression.

Something was seriously wrong. Nothing looked right; all of the women passing were wearing vintage dresses, their hair short and curled or wavy. The vehicles all looked like something you'd see at an old car show, the music drifting out of a nearby restaurant slow jazzy with a deep-voiced guy crooning, nothing like what you'd hear today.

Without fully processing what was happening, she ran into the bathroom of a near cafe and willed her hair to curl itself into something like the same soft, wavy style she saw on most of the women walking by, and miraculously, it obeyed; maybe she had found one benefit of being the goddess she was. She then willed her jeans, t-shirt and old sneakers to change into a simple, vintage-y blue dress reaching just pass her knees and some modest black heels.

Satisfied with her look, she took a deep breath and went back out to face the strange world she had been suddenly set into. She did a double-take as a man walked in the cafe who looked strangely familiar. For a second, she couldn't place who he was or where she'd known him from; then it clicked. It was almost hard to tell at first, but if you added a few wrinkles, turned his thick black hair salt-and-pepper colored and thinned it out a bit, Piper knew he'd look much more familiar.

"Tom!" the man behind the cafe counter called, confirming her suspicions. "Great to see you again, buddy. I thought you'd never come back. The usual?"

"Yessir, my friend," Tom said, and if Piper had any doubts that her theory was correct, they were all removed when she heard his voice. Sure, she'd remembered it a bit more gravelly and wisened, but there was no denying it.

Somehow, she had gone back in time and staring right at a younger version of her Grandpa Tom.

***

After Grandpa Tom had ordered sat down with is coffee and a newspaper, the man at the counter had asked Piper if she need anything. She ordered the first thing she saw on the menu and sat down in an empty booth, still in a daze and trying to process everything that had just taken place.

It sounded crazy, but there was no way to deny it; she had traveled back in time, and she was now witnessing Grandpa Tom in his younger years. She supposed they were in the 1940s or 50s judging by the hair, the clothes, the cars, and the age of her grandfather.

But how? There hadn't even been a prophecy that she knew of. Why was she suddenly thrown back in time, and what were the odds that she'd end up right in the same cafe as her grandfather?