The next day finds each alone in circumstances not at all in keeping with having been at a raucous mid-November party the night before.  Each is certain they have fallen prey to the twisted humor of a brother cabbie.  But after finding each other, events unfold proving to them that they are in fact on another world entirely, where magical abilities, shape shifters, and the menacing Yellow Wiqq are commonplace.

In the quest to find each other and then get home, the three cabbies run afoul of the Yellow Wiqq in increasingly violent confrontations.  At last, the cabbies reach their ultimate destination, Cycla'a'ahtso, a school for the magically gifted, where they are assured they can be returned to their own reality, or "When" of their birth.  But on the night the three cabbies are to be sent home, they are forced into one last fire fight with the megalomaniac Yellow Wiqq in a Duel Arcane that decides not only the fate of the three cab drivers and their children, but the fate of an entire world.