The Universe's Mixer

Jack wasn't the brightest bulb in the box. Ever. He tended to use words and phrases to make himself look smarter than he actually was, and unfortunately, managed to convince himself that he was rather intelligent. Trouble was, he was a bit on the dim side. Which is probably why he found himself leaning against a building, grinning like a fool that someone was obsessed enough with him to not go away.

( 'Ok, I get it, you like me. But haven't you heard of a shower?' )

Halloween.  Tony Stark's favorite time of the year.  The weather was perfect, not too hot or cold, trees around the city were changing colors.  And he had no reason in the world to complain here.  He and Pepper were together, and it'd been a blissful few weeks since their initial union.  For the first time in years, Tony could say he was happy and satisfied.

He'd sent out invitations city wide in hopes of drawing in the citizens to his home for him to have a chance to meet them.  He hadn't ventured out much since he'd been here, mostly because even if he was ever the social butterfly, Tony was too focused on fixing the once damaged relationship between him and Pepper.  Now that was all taken care of and here he stood in his bedroom putting on his costume.  He'd laid his choice of cstume out on Pepper's bed for her to put on, chosen since she'd lost to him in a little game they'd played to determine what they'd spend this night as.  It was custom tailored to fit her form perfectly, having taken the dress she'd worn for their first night together and used its measurements.

He stared at himself in the mirror, thinking that his goatee would make wearing the mask a little awkward at best, but he didn't care.  He thought since he should play the mysterious host of the night, that he should don the look of someone just as mysterious.  Taking a step back from the mirror, he attempted to twirl the cape, almost tangling himself up in it the first few times until he got the hang of it and smiled.  Affixing his mask to his face, he smirked as he gave his appearance one last once over.

The Phantom of the Opera was ready for his grand entrance.

[ooc: If you're character is showing up, feel free to start your own thread under this.  Tony will attempt to greet everyone but might not for getting sidetracked by others.  If you plan to crash the party, I will start a separate thread after a day or two to give people a chance to do regular party stuff.  Have fun, and don't be shy with your characters!  This is a very social log!]

It felt like forever since he'd been out here, like this.

Watching everything. Waiting. But it had felt fruitless before now. Bruce realized that he'd given up. Barbara gone. Maxine gone. Everybody gone. Gone back to where they'd come from, was all that he could assume. Everything had changed very quickly. Everybody had vanished on him. Clark had gotten himself turned to stone. He hadn't known what to do.

Never before had he given up as completely as he had the past few months.

But now?

Now a good chunk of the City had been murdered, brought back, but murdered. Now Tim was back. Now Jack Napier - The Joker - was back in his life, making his subtle threats with giant penises on the front of his buildings. Now there had been sightings of Harley Quinn and even Poison Ivy.

Now things were turning back to the way that they had been when he'd been really needed. Before everything had fallen down.

He felt like he needed to reconnect with this city. With this place that had become his home. It needed him again. He needed to stop feeling sorry for himself, stop missing the scores of friends and compatriots that he'd lost in the big shift, and do his job.

This was his job.

Sitting above the City, keeping a watch. Protecting. This was him. Bruce Wayne was the mask. Batman was his essence. He'd changed, sure. People had gotten close to him. He'd allowed that. He'd opened himself up. And he found he'd be willing to do it again. He was changed, and yet different. He knew in his heart that this man that he was now would never have been had he not been pulled here. He wasn't sure if that was good or bad. But it was what it was, and he had to live with it. Accept it.

He was Batman. And The City was his home.

Life was hard. Zoe knew that. Nothing was just given in life. Zoe knew that too. Life could flip in an instant, and the survivors picked themselves up and went on. Zoe knew as much as lived that. But, being lost, Zoe had never really been lost in her life. Yes, she'd lost her location; she'd even come close to dying. But, she'd never not known what to do before.

She had hoped that maybe finding Mal would have given her a direction. He wanted to fix Serenity, but the warrior woman doubted that Serenity would fly anytime soon; if she did fly, she wasn't going where Mal wanted her to go. Zoe didn't want to go back to the Black if it meant losing Serenity's true pilot. She didn't want to stay on this rock if it meant she could die or lose her husband and nothing would...could be done about it.

Zoe Washburne did the one thing she knew she could do; she started moving. Sometimes, staying still was the best choice; perhaps, if she sat still long enough, the person she was looking for would actually come by. Zoe wasn't in the mood to stay still, and how she ended up where she ended up, she couldn't guess. Although, it had been the last time she'd actually laughed, and understood the world.

Wayne Industries. The penis was gone, but she smiled anyway. The tactics, Zoe could certainly understand.

Bruce sprang out of bed, breathing hard. The last thing he remembered was Tim going down. The sight of blood. And then nothing.

Nothing.

He very distinctly remembered the nothing that was there. The not living. Not being alive. It hadn't been a dream, as much as he wanted it to be, and the look on Alfred's face when he encountered his loyal friend at the door of the bedroom told him that he had, in fact, been dead.

Which meant that Tim had been dead too.

Bruce wondered if Tim had remained that way while he, Bruce, had somehow managed to pull a Lazarus and was breathing now as if nothing had gone wrong.

He found himself sprinting toward the boy's room, calling his name as he moved. Hoping that Tim would pop out of somewhere before he could get to the bedroom door.

"Tim!" One final time as he got his hand around the knob and burst in.

Now this was different. Not on the street or on a rooftop or in the park, but in a house. And one hellava house too. I looked for signs of security but it seems The City took care of that for me, at least for a little while.

What luck, finding them both, here together.

Resting the rifle on the wall, the target was easily spotted in the scope. The older one had been targeted first, but the younger moved in the way. That would just be his bad luck.

Take a breath. Hold it.

Fire.

Quickly I recovered, focused on the goal. And found the other. Didn't want to let too much time pass or give him too long to get away.

So I didn't.

Take a breath. Hold it.

Fire.


His fancy cars wouldn't help him now. Nor would his money or his technology or skills. It would help either of them at all.

"What do you mean by 'Jack Napier is dead', Alfred?" Bruce had come home after finishing his date with Aeon to all kinds of bizarre and interesting news, not to mention news of murders happening all over the city. But this took the cake.

"I mean, sir, that he's dead. He was the first victim in this rash of new murders." Alfred stood, watching Bruce, an eyebrow lifted. Curious to see what would happen next.

"So he draws a giant penis on my building and then gets killed." Bruce couldn't help but feel like it was some natural retribution for everything The Joker had done to him over the years, including his time here. The Joker here was, quite regrettably, much more violent. He had his moments back home, yes, but something about the City had brought out the worst in him.

"Well." Bruce wasn't sure what to say.

"There's something else, sir."

"Something like what?"

"On my routine today I discovered there are things in Master Tim's room again."

"What kind of things?"

"Stuff, sir. Like things belonging to him."

Bruce stopped thinking about everything else. He looked directly at Alfred. His old friend would never joke about anything like that. Even so, the look on his face solidified it.

"Is it..."

"The same Tim? I can't tell, sir. None of the things are age restrictive."

"Is he..."

"Actually here? Not that I've seen, sir. There's been no show of him on the property at all from what I've seen on the cameras. But he's here somewhere, sir."

He was flying low over the City's streets, catching the attention of the occasional dog walker or snowcone-eating child as he listened for problems on the evening air. Ever since he was released from his stone prison, he hadn't wanted to stop moving. Sleeping was so impossible that it didn't even cross his thoughts. There were several times already that he found himself tempted to fly straight at the sky despite the knowledge that he couldn't get out of the atmosphere to view the Earth. This wasn't Earth. But there was nothing Clark enjoyed more than ripping through the air with a cape on his back.

Superman's restlessness had resulted in a severe drop in the City's crime tonight. He was sure he'd been recorded on at least eighteen different cellphones, which was an odd thought for a reporter, not to mention the sightings by various police officers. If he kept it up, Superman knew he'd be on the frontpage for the next week or so. That didn't give him much time to see Bruce before the billionaire got offended.

The crude S signal in the sky was funny the first night it went up. He'd been ready to fly over there immediately, just to make some wisecrack about why Batman's signal was so much better looking than his own, but found he couldn't. The banter was appealing, if only because it would annoy Bruce. Clark didn't go because found there was a bitterness in him. Not over the signal, but over the fact that it'd taken a young witch whom he didn't know to bring him out of stone. He was going to be grateful to her for a long time. He had already set the idea in his mind to help her, somehow. From what Clark could tell, he had been in stone for a very long time. A whole network of superheroes had existed here, who insisted that he trust them, and yet none of them came to get him out of there. Not even the one he'd stood in front of to save.

It wasn't like him to be angry. So he kept flying, hoping the emotion would go away.

Superman had turned toward the docks when he saw the signal break through the clouds again. This was the fourth night. He tried to imagine Batman waiting up on a rooftop, perhaps in a lawn chair, next to a big spotlight. He smiled.

Alright, so it was still funny.

He made a sharp turn and shot off toward the rooftop of Wayne Tech, where the light was coming from.

How had he agreed to this?

How had this seemed like it would ever be a good idea? Somebody after a meeting had told him they had a perfect match for him, and he'd said -rather offhandedly- Yeah, sure, set it up, and then he'd completely forgotten about it. He'd put it out of his mind.

Then, two weeks later, he'd gotten a phone call which he'd promptly forgotten about. But then this morning, his secretary had reminded him of the date. That he was to meet the young lady out front of some Italian place. That he needed to wear a blue tie and bring exactly three orange poppies so that he would be easily spotable.

This was rediculous.

The only reason that he was here now was because he didn't want the poor young lady, whomever she was, to feel badly. He didn't want her to think that it was something to do with her, rather than the fact that Bruce just didn't date.

He really needed to find a way to let her down easily. Whoever she was.

He got word that Superman had been seen in the city again. Active. Which meant that the little witch had gotten her hands on that mirror thing and it had actually worked. He'd have to send her a thank you soon.

For now, what he needed to do, was find Clark and make sure that he was doing alright.

The best that Bruce could think up, due to the adrenalin rushing through him at the mention of Superman that he'd heard from somebody passing by, was to go up on the roof of Wayne Tech and somehow signal.

Bruce retrofitted a high powered police car spot light with a piece of plastic and carved a crude S into it with a knife. On the roof, he set it up so it would show over most of the city, and sat in a lawn chair to wait.

It wasn't a spectacular party that he was going to be attending. Just some thing. Nothing special at all. He hadn't even bothered to wear a tux. Just a suit. Not even one of his best ones. Just a nice one. He really didn't care. There were other things on his mind. Like the witch, and if she'd managed to do anything to help Clark. Getting the city back in order, getting back into doing things that he should have been doing all along. Being alive again instead of in the half dead state of loss like some high school kid.

He was late, of course, so he had to park his car around the corner and walk past a very dark alley to get to the hotel where the party was going to be held. Something that didn't even concern him these days. Hadn't for a long time. Not since the dark alley he'd been in when he was a child. He knew there was danger in there, and knew that they were just ripe with criminals. And cliches.

So it was really no surprise to Bruce when he hears screaming coming from the back of the alley. He didn't even roll his eyes in response, because he'd kind of expected something like that to happen.

Bruce pivoted on his heel and went into the darkness, ready to encounter thugs robbing a poor woman. He was almost to the end when he encountered the sight. What was really going on. And that was nothing like what he'd been expecting.

There were two of them, alright. And a lady, too. But they certainly weren't robbing her. They weren't doing anything expected to her. Not even trying to rape her. Which would have been disturbing in it's own right, but Bruce would have been able to deal with that.

What he could not deal with was the fact that the two men appeared to be eating the poor woman. Alive. One gnawing on her shoulder, the other chewing on her lower leg. There was blood everywhere. The suspects themselves didn't look particularly normal either. Not that chewing on a human being was normal. But their skin was mottled. Cold looking. What corpses should look like, he thought.

For the first time in what seemed like forever, Bruce had no idea what to do.

The statue was much heavier than she imagined. If she allowed herself to use magic, simply whisking it into the shop with telekinesis would have been easy. Where was a slayer to do the heavy lifting when you needed one. Willow thought about calling some kind of moving service for help but the idea of some underpaid hireling breaking the statue was too ugly a thought.

Somehow she managed.

Willow removed the bowler hat and the shower curtain. She tried to wash away the marker-made facial hair but that didn't work as well. The witch decided against harsh chemicals in fear of damaging it. But now what? She heard the rumors about an auction selling Superman. The paper wrote numerous articles about his disappearance.

If this was Superman, turned to stone, Willow finally had an opportunity to do something good. But if she used magic to undo what had been done, she also risked going back to what she tried so hard to avoid. She decided to distract herself with research and preform a few simple tests.

( What better research tool was there than google? )