"Tabby this is amazing!" I exclaimed as I started dumping more cash out of the backpack and onto the coffee table, where it soon formed a sizeable pile. In fact there was so much some of it even spilled over onto the floor.

From what I could see there were some twenties but it was mostly hundreds, and there were an awful lot of them. I was always bad at guessing numbers like that, but I figured there had to be at least ten thousand dollars in front of us.

Meanwhile Tabby's ears had folded back and the tip of her tail was twitching around while she slowly shook her head. She looked and sounded worried as she responded, "It's not amazing Cheryl. Something's very wrong. This is way too much money!"

I frowned, "Huh? How do you mean?"

"I was expecting something between zero and a few hundred dollars," Tabs explained anxiously as she started gathering up some of the loose cash that was still on the sofa with us. "That would be pretty much untraceable. I figured that would be small enough that some rich guy wouldn't even notice it was gone? This is way too much! Nobody loses this amount of money and doesn't notice!"

Her face went pale as she added, "Oh no! If it does this every day for a month we're doomed!"

"How would we be doomed?" I asked. "Too much money doesn't sound like a problem, you know? Anyways we can just put it in the bank or something, can't we?"

"You can't just walk into your bank with a sack of cash like this Cheryl!" Tabby insisted. She looked and sounded like she was almost ready to start panicking.

After a couple deep breaths she went on to explain, "Banks have to report deposits over a certain amount, because it's obviously suspicious! And if people see us flashing wads of cash around they'll assume we held up a bank or we're dealing drugs or something! If we start going around buying cars or computers or other big purchases with cash people will notice and authorities will start checking up on us!"

"So what do we do?" I asked. "I don't think we can send it back, can we?"

Tabby shook her head, "I don't know yet? I need to figure out what went wrong..."

She fished her scrap of paper out from under the pile of money then started reviewing her notes, and it was only a couple seconds before she found her mistake.

"Oh no," Tabs grimaced. "I didn't want to say 'the money in his wallet' since I don't know for sure he uses one? I thought that was too specific, but instead I went too vague. I went with 'cash in his possession', but I really only meant to address cash he had with him? Like on his person. Instead my wording basically means any cash he personally owns, and he obviously has a lot of it someplace. And now ten percent of his hoard is going to magically appear here every day for a month!"

My best friend took another couple deep breaths to try and calm herself down. Then she looked at Jinx and asked, "Is there any way to cancel that curse early? Like as in right now?"

The half-demon thought about it for a few seconds before nodding, "Cheryl's backpack is part of the parameters of the curse, that's where the lost money goes. So if you destroy the backpack the curse will probably be broken. The best option is with fire? Set the backpack on fire, then bury the ashes."

"You want to burn my backpack?" I grimaced. "What'll I use on Monday when I need to carry stuff to class?"

Tabby rolled her eyes and gestured to the pile of cash on the coffee table, "I think we can afford to get you a new backpack with some of this money we just stole."

"Actually we should probably count this," she added with a frown. "Then we'll have to figure out what to do with it."

That ended up taking way longer than I expected, and when we were finally finished the number was a lot higher than I thought it would be. And I finally understood why Tabs was freaking out earlier. We had almost five hundred thousand dollars on the coffee table, piled up in neat stacks. Most of them were hundreds, but a few of the stacks were twenties. There were even a couple dozen smaller bills, but they were sort of irrelevant compared to the bigger denominations.

Tabby was still freaking out a little, but she'd had enough time to also kind of get used to the fact that we just stole a half million dollars in cash.

"So the good news is I'm pretty sure this is untraceable," she announced quietly as we all stared at the money. "Considering the money was all loose, and I didn't see any obviously consecutive serial numbers? That and the fact that it all showed up here by magic means there's no way for anyone to connect his loss to our gain."

She continued with a frown, "The problem is we have a half million dollars of stolen cash, that's going to raise questions if we try and spend or use a bunch of it all at once."

"So what do we do?" I asked. "I hope you're not going to suggest we burn this too."

Tabs shook her head, "Oh hell no! I'm just saying you can't go buy a new car with a stack of it, or try and deposit it in your bank account."

"For now we need to hide it," she added. "We can take some, like a few hundred? If we took two or three hundred apiece every week that wouldn't look too suspicious I think. If anyone asked, we could claim it was our pay from a job that paid cash."

I asked, "When you say we need to hide it, do you mean from Avery? Or just in general, so nobody finds it and steals it?"

Tabby sighed, "I don't think we can keep this from Avery. She's going to flip when she finds out, but she needs to know. I doubt we could keep it secret from her anyways."

"Plus she's taking that business management course right?" she added. "Avery can probably help us figure out what to do with it, or how to launder it."

I picked up my backpack and pulled out the last of my books and school things. Then I suggested, "We can try and stuff all the money back in here? Then I can hide my backpack in my closet for now."

Tabby shook her head, "We have to burn that remember? Otherwise it might just fill up with more money again tomorrow."

"Oh," I frowned. I looked at my empty backpack then asked, "Maybe we should let it? I'm not sure we can burn this around here anyways? We don't have a BBQ anymore, since I nearly burned down the house with it a couple years ago. And that time I tried to make a campfire in scouts I burned my hand and lost both eyebrows."

"Yeah you're definitely not allowed near matches or open flames Cheryl," Tabs replied as she rolled her eyes. "I think it's a bad idea to let the curse repeat tomorrow though. That's potentially another four hundred and fifty thousand dollars? We'd have almost a million in stolen money here, and it's going to be hard enough to deal with this as it is."

After a pause she decided, "Let's hide it in your closet, we'll leave the backpack for now. And when Avery gets home from work we should tell her what happened. She can decide what to do about the backpack, if she wants to burn it or not."

"My poor backpack," I pouted. Then a second later I shrugged, "Anyways, I guess let's hide the loot? Then we can figure out what we're doing next."

It turned out the easiest way to get all the money up to my bedroom was to stuff it into the backpack first, so that's what we did. Then instead of just dumping it in the floor of my closet we ended up loading it into the bottom drawer of my dresser. Me and Tabs each grabbed a handful to keep with us, the rest was carefully hidden under a layer of thigh-high socks.

When that was done we went back down to the living-room again, pausing in the kitchen to help ourselves to some more drinks.

"So what do you want to do now?" I asked Tabby as we both got comfortable on the sofa again, alongside Jinx.

My best friend shrugged as she had a gulp of her cola, and that's when I found myself staring at her collar again. We never did finish discussing that topic the other day, and now seemed as good a time as any to get back to it.

"So with this being the start of the weekend and all, I was thinking maybe I should finally scan that code on your collar?" I suggested.

Then before she could protest I quickly added, "If nothing else, assuming it works like the collar in your story, then I should be able to unlock it so you can finally take it off. Right?"

"I don't know Cheryl," she sighed. Then she reached up and sort of self-consciously fidgeted with the little tag while a thoughtful frown settled on her expression.

After a minute or so she added, "If it works like that then yeah, you could unlock it. But you could also mess with it..."

I was about to protest that I'd never do that to her, but something in her tone made me hesitate. It almost sounded like she was trying to suggest I do just that. Like maybe despite all her protests and how embarrassed she acted about it, she actually wanted me to mess with it.

Which reminded me of the stuff I'd been wondering about after reading her story. Like she said space-Tabby was her self-insert, and was an ideal version of her. Which confused me since the character in the story was a lot more passive and submissive than my best friend ever seemed to.

And that's when it finally struck me, maybe that's something else Tabby wanted. Like maybe she wanted to be more like her character, in terms of how she acted and stuff. And maybe that's why she was so embarrassed about the whole thing, like she didn't want to admit that's what she actually wanted. On the other hand I doubted I could ever be like space-Cheryl, but maybe I could pretend now and then. Especially if that'd make my friend happy.

I was also kind of curious about getting one of those collars for myself, assuming it really did work like the one in the story. On the other hand I knew it would take one of Jinx's final three curses, so I'd have to talk to her about it first and make sure it was ok and everything.

"All right fine," Tabby suddenly announced. She let her hand drop away from her collar and added, "Go ahead and scan it then. I guess I'm curious to see how this actually works, like if it'll actually install something on your phone or not."

"Ok Tabs," I grinned as I got my phone out.

Me and Jinx ended up trading places so I was sitting in the middle, then with one hand I held the tag on Tabby's collar steady while I used my other hand to position my phone. The camera app detected the square barcode thingy, then the phone gave me a pop-up asking if I wanted to access the data in the code.

I tapped 'ok', and sure enough it installed a new app. The icon was a six pointed star, like the one that was on the front of Jinx's book. At the same time I was surprised to see that square barcode fade away from the tag on Tabby's collar. Like once it had been scanned it wasn't needed anymore so it disappeared.

"Did anything happen?" my friend asked after a couple seconds.

I nodded, "Yeah. It installed an app, and the barcode disappeared from your tag so the back of it's just blank now. The front still has the same text as before."

She looked down at my phone, and we ended up opening the app together. Tabby's eyes widened and she grimaced, "It's pretty much exactly like I imagined when I was writing my story. Except for those two sections at the bottom."

The screen was divided into four separate areas. The part at the top had a slider and two buttons. It was pretty clear that's what controlled the collar's main function, and from the look of it you could use the buttons to adjust the power step by step, or just grab the slider and pull it in one direction or the other. Right now it was sitting a the bottom, indicating that it was at zero or off.

The second part was just a single line of text that read 'collar locked' with an on-off toggle next to it. The toggle was set to 'on' which made sense, since she said she couldn't take it off.

Then the third section was a text area, that currently showed the same text that appeared on the front of the tag. It looked like the app was set up to let me change that text, but that feature wasn't in her story. And the final bit was a red button labeled 'uninstall' which made me feel like it did more than just delete the app from my phone.

"Should I just unlock it?" I offered. "Then you can take it off and not worry about it anymore. Or we can find out what the uninstall button does?"

Jinx spoke up with the answer to that question, "Uninstall will remove the magic from the collar completely, so it just becomes a normal collar that doesn't do anything."

"Don't do that," Tabby stated quickly. She immediately blushed and added, "I mean, it'd be a shame to destroy it before we had a chance to actually try it out."

That made me grin as I asked, "Does that mean you don't want me to unlock it? Should I try playing with the slider?"

Tabs hesitated and bit her lower lip as her cheeks got brighter. I was pretty sure that meant she wanted me to mess with the slider, but I didn't want to actually do it without her definitely saying it was ok. So I held off and waited for her to say yes or no, while she was sort of waiting to see if I'd just go ahead and do it.

It almost seemed like the two of us were going to be stuck like that, until Jinx suddenly spoke up. The small demon looked and sounded impatient as she stated, "Will you two just have sex already? We all know you're both into each other, and the only reason you didn't do it last week is you got distracted with pets and ear-scritches. So stop messing around and have at it!"

That made me blush just as bright as Tabby, but also kind of broke the stalemate we had going on. She suddenly took hold of my hand and stood up, pulling me to my feet as well.

In a soft but intense voice my best friend said, "Let's go up to your room Cheryl. Bring your phone. And yes, you can mess with the slider. I want to find out what this collar can do, and I want you to be the one who helps me experience it."

"Ok," was about the best response I could manage.

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