The Universe's Mixer

The hammering of his blood inside his veins woke him. With one hand, he shielded his eyes from the streaming light on his face; with the other, he reached for the bottle that was always present at his side. After a few painshot moments of aimlessly floundering for said bottle, he cracked an eye open.

Then he dropped his hand.

The next move was a mistake, though; standing up so quickly with a raging hangover he'd been building for months meant that he immediately sat back down again. Where was he? Too much absinthe? But he'd never actually hallucinated on the stuff before...

It was morning. He was in a city. But it wasn't Montmartre, and it wasn't even Paris. The buildings were wrong -- the streets were wrong. He sat up straighter on what appeared to be a bench plastered with advertisements that didn't need glue....

Back in 1894, there had been a race with the newest, most modern invention; the streetcar. He'd even seen one before. But the streetcars here were wrong. Christian, bleary-eyed and suffering, straightened his rumpled suit jacket and ran a shaking hand through unkempt hair. How long had it been since he'd shaved? He stood - far more carefully now - and tried to decide what to do.

Much searching had yielded very little of the City's liking. It had crossed the space it had known, unable to find anybody to it's liking. Was it just getting pickier, or were things really this slim? Surely no other could have picked up on what it had been able to do. All those it had confronted, those who had learned of the power it gained from the people it took, were dead now. Had not lived long enough to communicate the discovery to others. But there was no reason that it could think of that there would be so few.

When, finally, it had made the decision to cross into unknown space, it had not been a choice made lightly. There were risks, big risks, into entering the unknown. Not the least of which being that it could get itself, and every one of it's residents, killed by doing so. There was a chance - however small the City felt that chance was - that there was a greater being on the other side.

Pleasure came along with terror when it discovered the planet.

From the outside, everything appeared to be normal. Nothing strange about the way it looked. But it felt wrong. When the City scanned the people living on it, it knew why. The people there were as diverse as anything the City had ever found. In the very beginning, the first few seconds of the encounter, the City had decided that it was going to steal these residents. Take them for it's own. Everything had changed very quickly then, gone very wrong very fast.

Before the City could act, the planet did. Ripping away pieces of the collection.