The Universe's Mixer

Castiel had been pondering the object in the sky which he could not reach out to, could not move to. It was odd to be restricted from someplace he was looking at, a discontenting feeling that he got whenever he was barred from a place, but usually it was just a building or a room with a seal on it. Something he could at least identify from outside. The object in the sky was posing a real mystery to the angel, and he didn't care for it very much.

He'd meant to return to the lake where he'd talked to Piotr, a new favorite thinking spot of his, when he felt a tremendous force take hold of him and he appeared... elsewhere. The angel's first instinct was to try to teleport again, to go where he was intended. But then he stopped himself, because where he was now was utterly unlike anyplace he'd gone before.

First of all it was a city, and not one of the dilapidated, ruin cities of the dead world he'd been on for a while, but instead a modern looking, enormous city. Secondly it was full to capacity, there were people everywhere. And third... it was different. Alive. Quite possibly the whatever had taken him from his intended journey and landed him here. The people were different too, even more so than the people of the dead world. They were duller, somehow, lacking the inner life most humans had. Most of them walked or drove by, altering course slightly to avoid the man that had just appeared on the curb of a busy street. Nobody looked at him directly, though, instead going on with their days as determinedly as most did in the bigger cities back on Castiel's original Earth.

The angel looked around, then cautiously tried to teleport back to die Festung, to find Dean or Sam. It didn't work, however, and he frowned. Had he been brought someplace else? Where the Winchesters brought here as well? There was no way to check unless they called for him; the protective wards on their ribcages hid them from him. But if they were suddenly brought someplace new chances were they'd call for the angel to see if he was here as well. Not out of concern, but in order to see what he knew of where they were.

Either way, it would seem that once more a being greater than Castiel had decided he should be elsewhere. Castiel was used to his life being governed by others greater than him, but at least when it was his brothers had told him he why and where to wherever they sent him away. He was getting uneasy with all of the silent pushing around that seemed to be going on.

The City had spent time studying its foe. Worrying about the people that it had lost and trying to come up with a way to rescue them. The more time that went by, the more urgent the matter became. Some of them might have been replaceable, but it didn't want to do that to even those few. The place it was seeing, this planet, was not a place it was willing to lose to. It was broken down, not advanced, empty of true life. When the City let go of people, it always sent them back to where they had come from, and it refused to drop them into a place they would not be at home in.

Not finding a way to fight the planet without hurting its own people, The City devised another tactic. it spent a few days perfecting the idea, and doing some more studying. It didn't want to be rash and it didn't want to hurt anybody that it was bringing in. It did want to hurt the planet, though.

With the final decision made, the City acted. It reached out to the planet below and picked out those who it knew belonged to it. That's not where things stopped, though. The City also plucked out some of its own hostages. People who obviously belonged to the planet. The City would do them no harm, but it wanted some sense of security while it tried to figure out how to make sure this planet never did this to it again. The best way to do that was to have some people that it surely cared about. It wouldn't attack with hostages taken, would it?

Not taking care with its actions, the City ripped the people back to itself all at once.

"Yes. Yes, I have your information." She said to the person on the other end of the phone. "Yes, I will look into it, I promise. We're all looking into every one of these calls. We're doing what we can. Yes. I understand... I do.... I unders... please stop yelling. Crying isn't really better... I'm sure that there's somebody more equipped to handle your current sta... yes, like a psychiatrist."

When she was finally able to put the phone down, Jennifer got up from her chair behind her desk and leaned out into the hallway.

"STOP FUCKING FORWARDING THOSE CALLS TO ME." She yelled - loudly - down to the reception desk. The anger was present in her voice. She'd told them before that if they actually wanted somebody to start looking into these cases, they couldn't keep sending her the calls. She couldn't do both at once. It was impossible.

There was also the issue that she was worried her partner was one of the ones missing. She hadn't seen him in a day or so. Hadn't heard from him. There was too much going on for him to be gone, though. She needed him to be here. She needed his help, and his way of comforting without actually having to say anything. His brain, she needed that, too. The way he thought, he might see some kind of pattern here that she wasn't.

Jennifer stalked back to her desk and sat down, leaning back a moment, enjoying the peace of the phone not ringing. If she didn't need it for things, she would unplug it right now before another call could come through.

Jack had noticed the change.

Certain key people seemed to be missing from the City. Oh, there were still citizens here who knew what he was, who he was, and that he wasn't dead. But there were so many others who were gone. Why were they gone? He had no idea. But the pretty birdy was gone. The fishnet magician was gone. He wondered if the Battiest of all Batfucks was gone as well. There was no real way to check that. Wayne Manor had stood empty of a true Wayne, though the ever loyal butler was still pacing around on the inside, going about things as if it were all normal and Brucey was still running around in a cape.

He wanted to get into trouble. Real trouble. So far all he'd been doing was having fun and teasing. But they were bound to know that he'd been the one by now. If they didn't, they were all stupider than he'd previously thought. Which was saying something, considering it had taken until recently for any of them to try to kill him. If it were him over on that side - how laughable, but possible, he supposed, in some twisted Other Reality - he would have done for a Joker nemesis the first time he tried to do something like shoot Babsy Baby in the spine.

No, there was no use in hiding anymore. No use in being the faceless terror. He needed to strike now while the iron was hot and the cats were gone. Really show them that he meant business.

But what... what?

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.

The City needed more people. It needed fresh faces. The seeking through areas it had already been was churning up nothing that it wanted. It had made the decision that it was going to try new areas, new worlds.

It set it's new path.

It had hopes that it would be able to fill the emptiness it felt, find new sources of power, and new companions. It was at it's lowest residency in a very long time, and it didn't like that one bit. There was a chance of finding one of it's species, and it wasn't sure that if it did so, right now, that it would be able to win the fight. The risk was even greater because it was venturing into previously unseen territory, but it was a risk that had to be taken.

The City scanned the planets it passed, seeking.