What happened

City General was a busy little medical hub, something like what one would expect to see on those TV dramas about hospitals. Green scrubs and cold sterile white walls, the smell of alcohol and bleach, the faint buzz of florescent lighting and the low rumble of hundreds of voices made up the soul of C.G.

Tucked off in one quiet corner a dark haired woman lay in a clean clinically white bed, under clean clinically white sheets, in a clean clinically white gown. Inara Serra had been down graded to stable condition and awaited only a few blood tests before her release. The incident which had brought her in had raised more then one eyebrow in the C.G.E.R. She wasn't the first to come in, she had however been the first to be brought in alive.

A dozen or so like her were in the morgue, disturbingly three of those had decided to go missing a number of days after their arrival..and more disturbingly, their autopsies. Inara offered a chance the hospital had not yet seen and they jumped on it. While she was slumbering away her blood was being tested in every batch of blood work that they could think of. City General was about to discover the truth of the existence of vampires.

For her part in the matter Inara only wanted to be warm and safe and among friends. Perhaps that was what drew her in her dreams to the dining hall of Serenity. Warm friendly faces smiled to her and food..real food not just protein shaped like food, filled the table. Kaylee was smiling brightly, Simon seemed to catch her eye with a blush of his own. Zoe and Wash were doing some not-so-subtle flirting under the table, even Mal seemed in rare form. They were all there, regardless of Books death or Jayne's desire to leave or Rivers..being River.. all of the crew that had been was together. As joy full as she felt, something nagged in her dream mind that this was not quite entirely right.

(OOC: Ok, great for any Firefly'ers to jump into the dream. Even Dream himself. Feel free to take surreal turns with it. Feel free for others of the waking world to step in as well. Have fun!)

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As hospitals went, this one was much more the speed Mal was used to. No big, shiny monolith of glass and plastic.. But still a whole lot cleaner than the sort of folding table chop shops he'd seen in years past. It helped keep his mind off the unpleasant possabilities to mutter imprecautions about how that damned Simopn was never around when he was needed.

Damned doctors had kept trying to shoo him out, but apparently bullheaded and stubborn idiots like him were relatively common things around hospitals, and eventually they'd just ignored him.

She'd lost a lot of blood. Needed a tranbsfusion.
And human (or whatever that was) bites tended to infect at the drop of a hat, so antibiotics had been involved.

But in the end, it came down to what Mal hated most: waiting.
Inara needed to sleep, for however long it took, and so Malcolm Reynolds had pulled up a chair, set it's back against the nearby wall, crossed his arms, set his head back, and lightly dozed off.

Muttering some to himself about bats, and cramped cars.

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It was the right decision.

When the couple were safely inside the car, Batman took the precious second and a half to find the kit in the back seat. There were bandages in there, tape, gauze.... Enough to get by with for now, for the brief minutes it would take to get them to the hospital. He tossed it at Mal, then slid into his seat and sent the Batmobile careening onto its path.

"Who did this?" Batman asked, his voice gritty and dark.

The City was shifting again, surprisingly. The road to the hospital felt much shorter, which was an unrequested blessing that the Dark Knight was grateful for. Sometimes this City had its good sides. Then again, if the City had kidnapped the beauty in his back seat as well, it probably had a reason for bringing her here, too. Dying in the street did not seem to be one of them.

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Mal had quit asking questions a long time back.

How a city this big managed to get by without a single wide wave comm unit, was anyone's guess- but everyone's guess would be about the same: not very well. People came, and people went. Every one of them looking for someone, and Mal was just one more long coat in the crowd.

All things considered, Mal had managed to land on his feet; no matter what time or place a body was in, folk still needed work done... and it was'nt always legal. He still wandered about every now and again: keeping an eye out for the ones he'd lost, but more and more of every day was taken up with the dirty details of getting by.

Taking a few boxes from one fella in a funny suit to another fella in a bad hat (without drawing the attention of the local lawmen) had landed him the bare basic welding gear, to start repairs on what was left of Serenity.

Getting that message out for Lucy had'nt gotten him a proper comm unit, but the pretty boy had been good to his word, and set Mal up with what passed for one in this place: a little short range unit to unit device.. It beeped from time to time when work turned up.

All in all, it was like things used to be, way back when.
Every time the sun went down, Mal got a little bit closer to how he once was.. he got a bit colder, and he got a bit meaner.

That's the way a body gets when it gets lonesome.

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It always happened like this. The pain. The loss. How the world outside his body dulled, while the world inside was expanding to a multiverse of pain.

And then, silence. Stillness. An absence of everything that was so much worse than the pain.

As he did each and every time, Jake Chambers of New York opened his mouth and screamed as life slammed back into his body. It was only a matter of seconds before his body remembered how it was supposed to behave. The painful overstimulation was gone, and the boy looked around curiously.

"Roland?" The first word to leave his lips, the name of his father. The man who was truly his father.

Roland. He'd been with Roland. In the Keystone world. He'd pushed Sai King out of the path of the truck, and took the lethal force on himself.

It didn't horrify Jake as much as it would have horrified others to remember the details of his death. It was the third he could recall. But this one was different. Death was final in the Keystone world. So why was he here now?

"Roland?" he called again, a note of uncertainty making him sound like the eleven-year-old boy he was. Not the cold and natural-born killer that he also was.

The satchel of Oriza plates was heavy against his hip. Jake wondered briefly if he'd had hem when he jumped from the car. Then he just hope that the dishes had given Sai King one hell of a fucking bruise.

Jake looked up at the skyline, through the misting rain. There was the line of the Empire State Building. And over there, that looked like Central Park. Right? Was he back in New York again?

Familiar ground. That was all he was looking for. He was heading towards the park when he heard footsteps. Jake spun, each hand dipping with blurring speed into the satchel at his side, and lifting a plate in each hand, ready to throw.

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It had taken a helluva long time to find his way back to the part of Serenity he'd landed with his ship. Chalking it up to his sour mood, and the bizarre collection of characters he'd come across, he finally found the one wing, and half a cargo bay that he was looking for. It was dark by then, and Mal was frowning. Not a single comm office in the whole damn place. Of all the rotten luck.

Scarf drawn around his neck against the cold (nothing too bad, he'd slept through snow before so this would be easy), he drew his long, battered, and proudly brown coat more tightly around himself, and sat down on the grating, setting his back against the slightly curving section of hull. A long breath drawn and released, misting before his face. Settling in for what he meant to be a few hours, there was'nt much more Mal could do wandering around a strange city in the dark.. except get his fool self lost.. he had to wait until morning.

"You know," he commented wrly to no one in particular, "One of these days my lucky streak is gonna peter out, and someone else is gonna run into these kinda problems..."

But he and his always got the bad breaks. S'what makes them special.
Brown eyes closed, and arms crossed for warmth against his chest, hands tucked under the arms, Mal did his damndest to doze off.

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It was a grey sort of day in the City.
The sort of day when a storm starts brewing early, and does'nt seem too keen on the notion of moving along.

Storms can be mighty inconsiderate that way.

Just when this one had finally started to let up; when the rain and wind had started to lighten, and the lightning had finally quit, there was a crashing boom that was unlike any thunderclap before it. Metallic, with a hollow clattering that did'nt echo. This was because it was no thunderclap, but some outlandish amalgamation of metal, wiring, and fuse welds.

Well, half of one anyway.

Blinking hard as he planted a hand to the greasy grating he'd found himself facedown upon, Captain Malcolm Reynolds pushed himself up and regained his feet with a muffled groan. Punching a button he complained into the speaker, "Wash, there's easier ways to kill me than bad landings-" nothing, not even static. "Wash?"

A fresh gust of wind got his attention. Turning around, with even parts dread and regret, he saw half his cargo hold, and a view of the weather and some sort of cityscape where the other half ought to be. Stepping down, and hopping the couple feet onto ground level, it was half in a daze that Mal took stock of what had happened. He had half the hold.. and a wing. The rest was gone. Not wrecked, and strewn along the ground with him, oh no.. just gone.

"Huh."

He backed up a few steps before turning around, and facing- well he did'nt rightly know which one it was, but whatever backwater port he'd landed on the edge of, it had to have a comm unit someplace he could use to try and raise the rest of Serenity.. right?

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