The Universe's Mixer

By chance, it arrived at the Stealing Planet while most of its people were deep in sleep. It remembered the time when its people had walked on the skin of this broken world, and it recalled the stories they brought back. It remembered stealing citizens of the Stealing Planet as part of an offensive, before it realized that the Stealing Planet was not alive like it was. It still could name each gift it sent back with the inhabitants it returned back to that place.

And now, it wanted to check on those inhabitants. The world had not been well when it left orbit. But, as it looked down now, it could see how the planet was split by so many fissures in time, space, and dimension that it was impossible for the specks of life left here to continue. It decided to save these people - both the ones that held on to life even now, and the ones who had already been destroyed.

Reaching backward in time, it found a place before the worst of the reality fissures. Right at that place, interestingly enough, it saw that a large portion of the people had been pulled into a separate reality. It looked into this secondary reality, and decided to save those people as well. This would take some power.

First, the City put its own people into stasis, allowing them to power this maneuver, as it had done with a handful of other powerful citizens within its walls for the corrections it'd needed to complete in its systems. Then, it retrieved the people on the Stealing Planet, running the sub-routine that would assign them homes, place them correctly, sift the monsters and creatures out of the population and into their right place in the City, and finally set the criminals in Blackgate or Arkham if appropriate. And finally, it reached through the large crack in reality where the others had gone - a series of islands, it seemed.

The set of islands had some form of barrier around it that made removal more difficult. The barrier, however, was only effective in the reality where the island currently resided. The City solved that issue by sweeping the entire set of islands and dragged it whole into its own reality. Because the islands needed a place to be, it attached them to its own land mass and extended the wall around it.

That done, it considered waking up its people again. And this time, it would wake everyone up. But there was the matter of time. Some of them had been powering its corrections for a good amount of time, and the City didn't want them to feel like they'd lost anything by helping the City. And so, it also reversed the time in the City to the night when it first borrowed a few of its powerful citizens to help it. Because it didn't want anyone else feeling they'd lost anything, either, it ensured that the memories of the rest of the citizens remained intact past the moment in time that now kicked into play in the City.

Satisfied with itself, the City rested.

Storm clouds notwithstanding, it had been a perfectly lovely morning on the tropical island Giselle was fast learning to call her home. The afternoon was shaping up rather nicely, too, she thought, as she pushed deeper into the thickness of the leafy jungle before her, a basket looped over one arm.

"Oh, thank you," she said sincerely, when her guide swept back a low-hanging branch for her to step under. But just as she did, the ground began to rumble. Giselle caught her balance on the nearest tree, but only briefly, only just before the rumbling turned into an all-out violent churning. She shrieked and tried to keep her feet under her, but it was of no use.

She found herself on her knees, arms over her head, trying to protect herself from anything that might fall. Terror consumed her breath and kept her silent, even if the ground itself seemed to want to shake her screaming loose.

The shaking stopped abruptly. When she opened her eyes, she was kneeling in the center of a smoothly-paved street, surrounded with great castles of glass and flat, seamless stone. Astonishment painted her face.

A spot of weather never bothered Rose much. Ignoring the rain clouds, Rose still met with Matt on the beach to train. She'd worked up quite a sweat as they finished their forms together, and so it was that Rose was rubbing a hand towel over her face when the sea started sucking back away from the shore.

"What the..."

Then the rumbling started. She ran back to Matt, immediately latching onto his arm. "There's sumthin' wrong with the sea," she shouted over the increasing growling of the earth. Vaguely remembering something about earthquakes and tsunamis and the tide, she thought it would be a lot better if they got into the TARDIS -- and hurried.

But the rocking of the earth made it difficult - and then, as she saw exactly what was happening, saw how the entire island was lifting out of the sea and rising into the sky, she stopped altogether.

"Are you seeing this?" she asked.

When the world began shaking, there was a sudden onslaught of panic, fear, and confusion. It had been some time since Peter had been in a large enough population to need to shield himself regularly, and his level of comfort had left him a bit exposed. When the cacophony struck his mind, Peter flinched, mentally and physically, withdrawing into himself completely, curling up defensively, blanking his mind against the assault.

When he came back to himself, he was standing in a hallway. And he was lying in his bed, in his room on the TARDIS. There was an utterly confusing sensation of being two places at once, and he could clearly recall the caravan that had just left die Festung, where he had been standing a moment ago. But there was a set of keys in his hand, and the feel of Leeloo's hand wrapped in that same hand. There was a shudder of movement, and Peter tried to fight away from the conflicting information, trying to find where he was between the two sets of input. Then pain split his head, and memories flooded in - the savage world, the dinosaurs... the TARDIS, the inky woman.... He reached for something steady, something constant, like the solid feel of Evey's strength in his mind, but even that was split in two! Two versions of Evey Hammond, one from that first body's experiences in the broken world, and the other as he had last seen her, teetering on the edge of despair, feeling lost and alone.

Shields slammed into place, and Peter found himself on the ground again, curled upon himself at the door of an apartment, The keys in his hand were digging painfully into his palm, but he embraced that pain as it was the only sensation. A singular sensation, not that horrid duality that had threatened to rend him apart.

With a shaking breath, he forced his limbs to relax, moving into a sitting position. He was a single entity again. His memories were intact, though slightly altered - he could remember arriving here shortly after leaving die Festung... but at the same time, re remembered the later attack of snow dinosaurs in that world, the sudden arrival on the savage world and the experiences and adventures there, and then, once more, arriving at this location.

How? What? And strangest of all, an overwhelming sense of awareness, of life, of sentience all around him. He sensed the awareness focus on him for a fleeting instant, but before Peter could pinpoint just what it might have been, it retreated beyond his reach.

He shook his head, hard. The TARDIS had sometimes felt like that, but this had not been the TARDIS.

Slowly, cautiously, Peter eased the strength down on his mental shields. He reached for one mind, but the thought instead went to two: Evey?

When the world started to shift strangely, her first thought was Logan -- and then Jono -- but it rapidly settled instead on the only friend she had who could actually be harmed badly: Selina.

Laura lurched down the TARDIS hallways toward the room Selina used, but even as the shaking began to even out, she knew that Selina wasn't there. All the same, Laura took a second or two to break into the room and look through Selina's things to try to figure out where her friend might've gone.

Out. That was the only guess Laura could make. And so Laura started for the TARDIS door --

-- but the TARDIS melted away from around her and was instead replaced with a long stretch of darkened city street. Laura advanced without hesitation, though her claws sniked as she walked. Sniffing at the air, she narrowed her eyes and looked deep into the darkness, trying to find her friend.

It was a shot - literally - in the dark, but until she was certain that Selina was unharmed, Laura intended on looking wherever she could.

All she could remember from before was that everything was broken. Broken walls, collapsing buildings, people living in some strange state of poverty. An apartment building. She remembered the way the apartment looked, a threadbare carpet on the cold floor, a sagging couch with mismatched pillows. An empty shelf...they hadn't been allowed books of any kind, no literature.

Mag could recall the weeping angel, the scarred statue in the graveyard. Her mind drifted back to Maurice and the story of his lost love. So many faces and names and things entered her mind and yet the only emotion she felt at present was one of pure confusion.

The soprano looked up at the buildings, beheld the tidy, empty streets and tilted her head. What had happened here? Had someone fixed the world while they had been sleeping? Where was everyone? It was almost as if this city were something else entirely.

Breaking from the shadows, the singer took small steps down the sidewalk. Despite everything she had been through there was still an exponential amount of grace in her motion, every step elegant and easy. The air seemed cleaner here, wherever here was...she wasn't fooled into thinking that some how she had the misfortune of ending up back home. That would have been her undoing. The GeneCo tower that painted the skyline was not here. Other buildings had taken its place. So that earned the night a breath of relief.

But this was curious indeed.

Another few steps brought her to the corner of the street, the lamplight kind to her pale skin, dark hair and strangely bright eyes. She recorded everything she saw for future reference. In case she got lost. A glance down each pathway and Mag stepped into the street. In a few well-placed steps she found herself across and moving easily into a park of some kind. The flowers greeted her. The grass waved....and some where, perhaps in a faint remnant of a daydream she was sure she heard the caw of a crow. Not that a black bird was a strange occurrence, there was one in the place before this one, but that one had never brought her comfort. This new sound had. Strange and mysterious as it was.

Oh, she was rather used to the City and it's games, and had even joined in a few a time or two, but there was something wrong at the moment. It wasn't a little thing that she could brush off easily, like a file being out of order or a few hours missing...but there were two very large holes in her life that screamed at "Not Right".

Her father and Bruce were gone.

Just...gone. No signs, no nothing. She had checked the Tower. She had checked the Warehouse...she had even gone to Arkham (and found her step-father moping about which ended her search for her father right there. If Edward was there...Jonathan would know it. Jonathan would never willingly be without Edward.

She sighed, locking the door to her and Logan's cabin, pocketing the key and heading for the Warehouse again to search for clues...for something, anything to explain what the hell was going on. She had missed Logan and Giselle by an hour, not realizing she had a problem waiting for her (such as two strangers now sharing the same space she had thought she shared with her lover), her mind focused, narrowed down to a single point.

Find out what happened.

"This is not funny, by the way," she muttered, kicking at the earth as if she could kick The City itself. Honestly, she would understand if she could just have an answer...

Ariel squinted as she beheld the strange sight that was erected before her. There was a small crowd of people standing one behind the other, almost seeming eager to get something...whatever it was they were waiting for. She read the sign over and over as it loomed over her, child-like as she stood there. There was dirt on her face, her red hair was a tangled mess from the fall she had taken when the Earth had shaken. And then she had ended up in this strange jungle of rocks.

And ice cream ?

What was.....ice cream?

She knew ice....ice was hard, frozen water. When the winter came often things in the sea grew of ice and they became frozen. But she didn't know ice cream. And trying to imagine it was confusing. Her mind swirled over a few things she was familiar with, but nothing was clicking together the right way.

She canted her head to the side as her gaze lowered, watching a small child skip out of line holding something strange in his fingers. It was a dripping, pile of....pink? And green? And what was that thing it was sitting on as he held it?

Frustrated, lost and frightened, Ariel moved to sit down on the ground. She watched the crowd lessen, and then attract more. Her fingers rubbed absently over her eyes as she settled, sighing hard through her nose. Her frame was perched in the grass near the line, and try as she might she couldn't stop watching the strangers. All of them were strangers to her, all of them dressed in clothes she knew. She knew pants, shorts, shoes, shirts...dresses...the TARDIS had a large array of choices when it came to clothes.

Slumping her shoulders, Ariel finally moved to stand up and brushed off her clothes, which were also covered with dirt, and stayed out of the way of any of the others that might want to walk around with the strange....ice cream.

Erik had been working on his rearrangement of La Mer, which would be opening a week from today. He must have fallen asleep over his sheets, because when he lifted his head from his desk at the City Opera, his sheet music was still laid out in front of him and his ink pen had rolled to the edge of a picture frame of his wife. He retrieved the pen, capped it, set it aside, and stored his work for the evening.

The Opera House was quiet; it must have been far later than he knew. Frowning, Erik pulled on his gloves and started for the door. It was then that he noticed by the posters for the ongoing show: The City Opera was still in its run of Don Juan.

That show had complete its run some months ago, while he was still incarcerated. It was surely some sort of error, and Erik detested errors in his opera house. He would get to the bottom of it in the morning; tonight, he wanted to return home to his wife.

And so it came to be that he hurried down the steps in the dark, the street lamps casting shadows as often as they dispersed them. His car should have been been waiting for him. Irritated again, he pulled out the contraption that would page his driver and placed the call while standing on the sidewalk.

It used to be he could count on less than two hands how many dimensions he'd been too. John didn't think he could still claim that after landing head first in the land of zombies...oh excuse him, Netvores...and now suddenly standing in the middle of the streets of a city. This one wasn't a crumbling city without all the fun toys like running water and electricity so it was a step in the right direction.

For a minute he frowned feeling...something. No idea what it was only for a minute he was dead sure he'd landed in Bette Noir again. But it wasn't that. This wasn't that annoying city he'd ended up in with Tefe and Gemma. It wasn't any place he'd ever been.

And there was no sign of Zee.

Bollocks.

"Right. Shit's gone pear shaped again inn't?" At least if there was no sign of Zee there was also no sign of baby Batman. Now baby Supes he could stand to have but it didn't look like that was going to happen either. John pulled one of the precious packs of Silk Cuts Zee had magicked up for him out of his pocket and lit it. Looked like you could get more here and this wasn't the sort of thing he wanted to face without a smoke.

"Okay universe. What d'you want this time?"

The night was still.

But most of them were.

The tip of the sword he held was pressed ever-so-gently against the moist Earth. He was thinking, and watching. Tasks that came easy because they were second nature now. Eyes closed, Eric watched the sky as Bran did. He could see the broken world for what it was. Also, he noticed the glimmer of something capturing the reflection of the moonlight against it.

It was bright enough, that glimmer, to earn the attention of the too large bird. A caw, and Bran tilted his wings in efforts to discover what lay tucked just beneath the fresh blanket of snow. The crow landed, hopped some and then began to excavate the moist Earth with it's sharp beak, determined to unearth its prize.

Eric wasn't sure exactly what Bran had found and the curiosity showed on his face. He opened his eyes slowly and looked up at the sky for a moment or two. Bran wouldn't be long now.

But something didn't feel right. It felt off. Unstable. Eric lowered his eyes and looked around, finding himself on top of a building. A building? A moment ago he had been standing outside in a world too broken to sustain life, and yet there was a city looking back at him that felt too full. Almost as if it would burst at the seams.

The black bird fluttered forward, settling on Eric's shoulder. It lowered its head and dropped the shining object into Eric's free hand. Eric lifted his hand up, opened his palm and noticed it was a set of keys. But not just any set of keys. It was a set that haunted his very core instantly. "What...?"

He looked at the bird in question, eyeing the corvid with suspicion.

This is not my doing. This is now your path.

Eric frowned at the response, looking once more at the keys. These went to the apartment in Detroit. The apartment he had once shared with Shelly, the one he had left in efforts to hunt down every last one of them..... These went to the beginning.

He moved forward instantly and peered over the top of the building, finding himself glancing down into a large, broken circular window. Some of the panels near the top were stained with old, dried blood. His heart dropped. "Is this Detroit?"

It cannot be. It was not alive.

"Alive?"

Indeed. This is out of my control. Here lies your path.

If it wasn't Detroit, what city was this? Where were they? And how did they get here?

With those unanswered questions in mind, Eric leapt down into the loft below, sword in hand, ready to challenge the night.