Pennie C. asked, “Sister Marian, has a Sister ever gone really bad, like evil?”

“It has happened a few times, usually because we were not able to bring the girl into the fold in time and she went mad or used her power for revenge or to gain temporal power.” Sister Marion replied. “Of course, that was much more common in the olden times when communication and transportation were more difficult. One of my own name triad sisters was one such, and the reason that the other one and I changed our name out of shame and grief. She was born a slave in an ancient empire and had been used in the most wicked ways as a child and young woman. Still, the Sisterhood thought she had been found in time, before her powers developed, and rescued her. She went through all the training managing to conceal the trauma rage in her mind. Secretly, she took to murdering men who reminded her of her abusers. She seduced them and then tortured them to death quite horribly without using her powers except to conceal it from us and worldly authorities. Over several years there were more than one hundred of them before we were able to intervene. Some of them certainly needed to be stopped from doing the kinds of harm done to her, but others, perhaps not.

“What happened to her?” asked Pennie R.

“We tied to heal her, but to no avail. She was too far gone and had come to enjoy causing pain. I think that in today’s terms she was addicted to it. At that time it was described as her having become a demon or a Fury with no discrimination of justice. She had to be destroyed as mercifully as possible.”

“How?” said Pennie H.

“She was put under a very deep sleeping spell and cremated.”

Bob Wertzler is retired from almost twenty years in the mental health field in California and Arizona. There are times the title, “Recovering Therapist”, seems to fit. In 2006 he retired to move to Western North Carolina to help and become primary care giver for his father who had developed Dementia. Before all that, there was work at various times as a soldier (US Army 1967-70), community organizer, cab driver, welfare case worker, wooden toy maker, carpenter, warehouse worker, and other things. He relates to a line in a Grateful Dead song, “What a long, strange trip its been.”