The Universe's Mixer

Scavenger Hunt. Pair off. Each pair has to find:
- The tooth of a four fingered homeless man
- A unicorn's eyelash
- Blowfish venom
- A pocket watch
- Mittens

continued from here

There were less people than he'd thought there would be. Which was good, he supposed, in the way that they didn't really have to worry about supplies. But it was bad, because it either meant that people hadn't seen his sign, or that they'd all been bitten and there wasn't anybody to come find shelter here.

It worried him.

It also worried him that he hadn't seen Buffy. She hadn't come back to check in, and she hadn't sent anybody in this direction. Nobody wandered in carrying her name on their lips to assure him that she was okay.

There were others he was worried about as well. He'd not seen hide nor hair of them, and he couldn't help but fear that they were monsters now too.

Aside from Zoe and the kids, a few of the City's regular residents had popped in for shelter. Those who didn't come from some place or time outside of this one. They had no special abilities. No extraordinary skills. It was easy to forget about them in day to day life, because they just tended to blend in with the background. These were the people who had no idea that their city was alive, because they'd always lived with it. These were the people who didn't think it was bizarre how the streets and buildings shifted. How people popped in and out of existence. They were the people that needed the most help in this.

Jesse sat, looking out one of the holes in the stained glass in the choral balcony. The streets seemed dead outside. In more ways than one.

His new neighbor had been kind enough to inform him that there were dead people walking around outside, eating other people. He wasn't sure if he would have noticed it before, as there hadn't seemed to be many of them when he'd first left the Manchester, but the longer he stayed out, the more they seemed to multiply. It seemed to him that every few minutes a dozen more of the things were shambling around in large groups looking for meat.

Jesse spent some time collecting what he could in the way of supplies, but he couldn't do very much he found. He got the very basics from about a dozen stores around the city. Everybody seemed to be collecting what they could, however they could. And he wasn't about to punch out a little old lady just to get his hands on one extra gallon of water.

It was all locked away in one of the only churches the City had. It was the biggest, and had actual pews instead of seats, which none of the others did. Big, heavy wooden doors, and no windows low down where they could be broken into easy. There was the added bonus of the choral balcony, where anybody could look out onto the rest of the city below. Perhaps a sniper could be set up there. The unfortunate thing would be the breaking of the stained glass. It wasn't the religious loss for Jesse, but the aesthetic one. As much as he might have disliked God and the church, he couldn't deny the beauty of the stained glass. But it would have to be done.

There was room enough for a lot of people there. Plus a basement they could hide in if it all came to that. There was a confessional for extra hiding, as well as the sacristy just in case. And a small hallway leading to the priest's quarters which had a kitchen, and an additional bathroom.

He could take care of people here. And hopefully they'd show up with additional supplies. There was just enough butcher's paper and paint in the supply closet for him to make a sign that he hung over the front doors.

It read, simply

"SAFETY"

Jesse lay in his bed, eyes closed, wrapped up in his sheets from sleeping fitfully. His pillow was somewhere on the floor next to him, and he'd gone and knocked his water glass over through his flailing.

He hadn't been able to rest properly since having the thought that maybe all of those who had been killed could remember being dead. Something about that really didn't sit right with him, and he hadn't been able to find anybody who had died in order to ask them if it was true. He would have stepped in and prevented that little bit had he had the idea before hand. Before everybody had been resurrected.

Of course, in his defense, he hadn't really thought any of those people would be coming back. Where he came from, the murdered stayed down.

Actually, that wasn't particularly true, was it? He'd seen plenty of people brought back from the dead some way or another.

He just hadn't expected it here, and not all the victims of a serial killer. There had been a dozen or more deaths that he'd heard of, and it was absurd that all of them should return to life.

Jesse just didn't know what to do.
Again, he felt powerless despite all of his power.

So it would be no surprise to him when he woke up and once again wrecked his bedroom.

His unsettled thinking while sleeping brought him around to both Buffy and Fray. The blond slayer whom he'd gone and done very ungentlemanly things to in the alley had caused him no amounts of worry due to her almost immediate disappearance from The City after said rendezvous. And Fray, well, Mel was just all kinds of a new thing for him. He felt protective over her. Didn't want to see her get hurt. She worshiped him in kind of a weird way, sure. But it was flattering.

And of course, thoughts of them brought along thoughts of them together. Nothing new for him. He'd been having these little fantasies for a few weeks now. Mel and Buffy and some pudding. The dream blossomed quickly and there they were. Buffy was in a little pink bikini, and Mel was wearing a black one. They stood facing each other over a blow up kiddie pool filled with chocolate pudding. Jesse looked down and noticed he was wearing a black and white stripped referee shirt, and even had a whistle.

He blew on the shiny silver sound maker, the dream got entirely too real, and then the girls were wrestling. Jesse sat on the edge of the bed, watching. Lucidity washed over the entire scene and all at once Jesse discovered that he could control what the girls did, and had the thought that if either of them found out, he'd be all kinds of bruised in no time flat.

Buffy couldn't hear the unusual rhythm of plucked harps. Or, she was not consciously aware of it, as chords and notes were created similarly to a guitar. Buffy walked down a neighborhood street with white picket fences, quiet homes with lights long turned off, housing pleasant people and their pleasant dreams. She continued to walk to the beat of music, confused. A day old headline of the serial killer fluttered past the slayer and she watched it go.

"I don't know where I've been.
I can't remember what I've seen
since I left, or was between..."

"Should we go outside?
Should we go outside?"

"And Danger! Danger! Draws me near.
I think I've been here.
And Danger! Danger! Draws me near.

"Should we go outside?
Should we go outside?"

Buffy started to run. Up ahead she saw her house. She knew what The City was capable of, bringing in persons from different times. Her mother could be in there and still alive. Dawn could be there. Any of them. The harp music continued and Buffy was still wrapped in The City's song.



ooc: This is what happens when BB listens to too much Joanna Newsom. Her lyrics from "The Spout and the Bean" have been liberally abused here. But please feel free to take the song in a different direction or something. We can Moulin Rouge it. :B If you're confused as to why there's any weird singing at all, blame Doctor Horrible. >.>

Wilson sighed and pushed his way out the front door of the hospital. He was ready for a hot bath, a hotter dinner and a cold glass of white wine. Only he lacked the dinner and wine. The bathtub.....well, he hoped that was still in his apartment when he got back. hell, he hoped his apartment was still his apartment when he got back. He didn't take things for granted here, not since he learned about the way the City worked.

Crazy messed-up world, huh? The psychos in Times Square with the posters and dreadlocks had no idea. Or maybe they did.

He picked up some beef curry and vegetable samosas at an Indian take-out place, then sprung for a nice bottle of Pinot Grigio at the liquor store. Everything was together in a nice, nondescript brown paper bag that thankfully didn't leak through or lose a handle as he walked. The night was looking up.

Until he turned down a street that was supposed to be where his apartment was, and walked into a fight.

His first instinct was to turn around and wait around the corner until it was done, but it was too late. The dueling duo had spotted him, and apparently resolved their conflict by telepathically deciding to take their aggression out on him instead.

Wilson lifted his hands palm out and said, "If you need money, I have a few bucks in my wallet. If you need food, take my dinner. It's not worth fighting about."

The taller of the two smiled nastily, flashing fang in the process, and said, "Oh, we want dinner but not yours. Just you."

Fangs? Wilson found himself wondering as a sense of unreality took over. That's new. He looked over his shoulder at the street corner, trying to gauge the distance and if he could make it. Too late. They were coming closer, and he wasn't sure he could run fast enough.

Just because he had a soul, that didn't mean the need for blood stopped. It didn't mean Spike wasn't hungry. And though he seriously considered offing his neighbor, Spike instead went out, grabbed pints of blood from the butcher shop (oh, he thought, how the mighty have fallen), and came home.

It was quiet here, right now. And he wanted it to be quiet. Spike wanted to think. He'd downed a pint of the blood and stashed the rest in the fridge, where there was a leftover flowering onion (mmm)and a case of beer.

He sat in the window--the window he'd once hopped right out of under Buffy and Wes's noses--and looked out on the City. He hated how much he was changing, but he wondered if it were not for the good. The things he'd been doing in Sunnydale... had he not already been headed this way? He'd helped. Helped. Saved Dawn, he knew, from what Willow said before she got all terrifying.

But... Jesse said this was not the way it was supposed to be. Jesse who was... sort of like God. Spike didn't believe in God, but he thought Jesse was a good guy, and hell, if there had to be a God, why not him? At least with Jesse, he stood a chance at getting out of that fire and damnation and torment, right?

Things moved and shifted outside his window, and he did not expect there to be a knock at the front door.

But there was.

Spike looked at the door, half-hoping he'd gone insane again. Because if Dru was on the other side of it, or Darla, or ANY version of Angel, he was breaking a leg off the wooden chair in the corner and ending it all. He'd only been sitting at that window five sodding minutes.

Whatever. If he was going crazy, he was going all the way. "Yeah, come in, s'open," he said, standing and waiting to see what the hell else this place had in store for him.

The slayer was listless. The City had a habit of hiding people from her. The constant running was exhausting. What she needed was to recharge. While not exactly lonely there was something missing.

Seeing The Bronze was a sign.

She went in for a drink. There was a band on the stage that night. Not in the mood to dance, she didn't play much attention to who it might have been. The City lacked in any kind of music scene. Unfortunately it didn't see fit to kidnap some decent bands along with the other people it'd taken.

She ordered a beer. Buffy didn't drink much after being turned into a Neanderthal once. Sitting at the bar, she was willing to take that risk now.

All Harry had been trying to do was complete a summoning circle. He fumbled with the awkwardly small piece of chalk in his long fingers, stooped down and traced a circle around himself on the rough pavement. As the two ends met, he fed a little bit of his will into it to close the circle and stood up. The problem was that when he'd bent down to draw on the sidewalk he'd been in Chicago, the alley just behind his office building to be precise, and when he looked up again, he was somewhere...else.

The air around him should have been charged with energy, only it wasn't. He looked down to see that there wasn't even a smudge of chalk on the ground. No summoning circle. Nothing. He was standing somewhere completely different.

"Okay." He breathed, more to calm himself than anything. He shuffled forward, his hands gripping tight to his wizard's staff as he rounded the corner. "Okay." He said again, a little surprised. He glanced up at the unfamiliar skyline. "Definitely not in Chi-town anymore."