The Universe's Mixer

Jack had gone to bed with Zatanna and woken up alone for the first time in months. It wasn't a good feeling. It was worse when he'd searched everywhere in the City and found no sign of her. He'd spent days looking for any sign of her and had finally been forced to conclude that she was gone. Alice had disappeared awhile back and that had hurt too, but not like this. Truly, not like this.

After burying himself in work all week, Jack found himself on a Saturday morning with nothing left to distract himself. Sure, there was always something to do but his secretary had all but shoved him out of the office and maybe he did need to clear his head.

A walk in the park seemed like a fine idea. It was a lovely sunshiney day, as most days in the City were. Somehow that seemed a little extra cruel lately, but it was what it was. When all was said and done, this had become his City and he would still continue to do what he could for the people here, no matter what or who he'd lost along the way.

Jack had gone underground.

Thankfully, he had the memories of what he'd done to the secondary Dinah to take with him when he went. He was already bored and irritated with his lack of social activity, but if he hadn't had that, well. He might have become destructive, as well. He had been very quiet for weeks. Trying to fit in with the glorious ruse that he was locked up in Arkham, being tended to and kept away from harming others. Funny enough, the ruse was actually keeping him from harming others for the time being.

But the time had come to implement the next stage of the plan. Which meant that he had to get to Arkham to talk to the doc to arrange what they were going to do. The last time Jack had seen Crane, there had been a wonderfully fun torture session with four very unfortunate men. He didn't know if any of them had survived the evening, but he knew at least one of them probably shouldn't have.

With a lot less dramatics to his arrival, Jack disguised himself and made for the asylum. He quietly appeared in a tow truck wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and a baseball hat pulled down as far as it would go. They were clothes that he would never wear in day to day life, and it was the first step of his disguise. The second was the handlebar mustache and the third was the mullet wig that resided under the hat. He'd even gone so far as to get motor oil on himself so that now he smelled like he'd been working on vehicles. There was a clipboard in his hands as well.

He'd stolen it all from a guy who actually did run a towing service. The guy would get it all back. Eventually. And be untied and let go. Eventually.

At reception, Jack made loud chewing sounds with the gum he'd stuffed in his face. There was too much of it, and he spoke a bit slower to be understood.

"Here to see a..." He looked at the clipboard "Jonathan Crane... about a car needs to be towed?"

Charlie stood in front of a store, staring into the destroyed glass. His head tilted slightly as if he weren't sure what he was looking at. Actually, he wasn't. Why had homicide been called in? Was he just homicide here? Was he more generalist here?

The jewelry store had been robbed, or at least broken into. He had been called in with his partner to investigate, and he wasn't convinced that this was the best way to spend their time. Of course, they could do the job, and possibly do it well. Yet, they had other cases to solve. He glanced around to see where his partner had gotten off to. He had told her about the strange young woman in the park, and he had placed the question to the agent on whether or not picking flowers was murder or not. Was it the same as picking fruit? He was possibly still waiting on an answer.

"I should call Annie. Annie could talk to the jewelry, see what it saw." It was an idea. He also needed to talk to Annie about the watch. There had been a report of a missing watch that had caught his eye. He needed to see the watch again. He also needed to check on the young woman who'd not had much experience with ice cream.

"We need to watch the security tapes." He finally spoke to a nearby uniformed cop. "Ask if anyone saw anything." Jennifer would probably have more answers.

The bar needed to reopen soon and Jo still didn't know what to do about it. She had no actual way of keeping her clientele safe, short of a guarantee from a vampire that she didn't trust as far as she could throw him. Even if the bar stayed closed, it wouldn't be long before some of her people came poking around and tried to retake the bar.

She needed some sort of solution. And as much as she wanted to just go with Toot's suggestion of killing Eric, she didn't know how many vampires there were or if another one would just step in to take his place. She needed more planning to pull off something like that. And from what information she had managed to gain on the vampires in the City, there were far more than she could handle on her own. This wasn't just one nest that she could roll in and take out. In fact, from what she could gather there were several types in the City and no one was an authority on all of them.

That was why she found herself wandering the City aimlessly. She had chosen to walk and maybe there was just a little bit of hopefulness that this would be one of the times when the City decided to be helpful. Sometimes it provided what she was looking for. Other times it provided things that she didn't even realize she needed until they were staring her in the face.

Of course, other times it simply kicked her while she was down, but she was going to hope for option A or B tonight.