The Universe's Mixer

Charlie was feeling pretty good as he woke up that morning. He had a free scoop of ice cream out there waiting for him; it might have been a silly thing to be happy about, but how often did one get a free scoop of ice cream from a young lady? Not that he thought about her in such terms that might get him arrested, but she was a nice young lady; too many young men and women these days had problems with authority. Charlie had problems with authority, but it was of a different nature.

The detective showered, smiling the whole while, got ready for the day (clothes and such - no shoes yet), and went down to have his usual breakfast - some sort of fruit. He was curious to see what the City would bring to him; as he opened the door to the refrigerator, he took a moment to realize that he was happy. Happiness wasn't a bad thing, but he was happy in a prison. His eyes narrowed as he stared at the cool whiteness with what looked to be a couple fruits that didn't come from Earth at all. He was happy in a prison?

"I could be happy anywhere, or content. A prison is only in the mind. The world is not a prison unless I make it so." His voice took on that singsongy nature that he'd heard on the tapes, but it held questions. Was this true? Could he make a prison a place of content?

"I should find someone and discuss this. Wish Reese were here. Perhaps Jennifer?"

It always seemed to rain on days when she was running late.

Bella had a growing suspicion that this City place had picked up on her distaste for rainy weather, and simply let the heavens pour down upon her whenever they had the chance. Well, they picked a perfect day to do so, and it wasn't like her day could get any worse...or could it?

She'd slept through her alarm clock, spilt orange juice on her jeans, slipped on the sidewalk (well, that was actually something normal for her, but it really wasn't helping!), and now the back half of her jeans were totally wet through. Smooth, real smooth, Isabella Swan.

At least she could rely on her truck. This baby may look like a fossil, but it was the most reliable machine she'd ever driven, thanks to her good friend Jacob Black. Yup, everything was was going to be fine now! and --

A slight bump distracted her from her thoughts, and the truck veered slightly.

"Oh man" Bella groaned, praying that it was nothing major. "Just let me get to Bio on time."

It didn't take long for her to admit defeat. Eventually she pulled over, reluctantly hopping out of her beloved truck and into the pouring rain, to investigate. A faint hissing sound, as well as a sinking tyre pretty much said it all.

Great, even her truck had abandoned her in her hour of need. What next!

As days went, these were beautiful ones. The sun was warm, but not hot enough that Firekeeper felt that shedding clothing was necessary, or Blind Seer like sleeping in the shade was an overwhelming need. Neither of them saw the use of being indoors or roaming the City, where the concrete and asphalt absorbed and amplified heat, so to the park they went.

They slept in their den under the bridge when the sun was too hot for Blind Seer's thick coat, chased rabbits and deer, and generally had a good time loosing themselves in being wolves. Blind Seer was glad to be someplace where he wasn't crushed by humanity; Firekeeper was relieved to not have to act like a human all the time.

This particular afternoon, they took out their good spirits on each other by wrestling, a time-honored pastime of wolves everywhere. "You're holding back," Firekeeper accused Blind Seer, wiping sweat from her eyes with a battered arm.

He panted, giving her an innocent look. "Of course not."

She snorted. "Liar. You have spent too long with the two-legs, to learn their habits."

He growled a challenge back. "Perhaps if Little Two-legs would give this her full effort--"

Firekeeper interrupted whatever Blind Seer was about to respond with by leaping at him with a growl of her own. Soon enough they were laughing as they wrestled, but to an outsider, all that could be discerned of their fun was a very large wolf and a bruised and slightly bloody girl attacking each other.

Xanadu fell asleep on Ted's bed and lay there for nearly a day. It felt safe and warm and she was loathe to leave it. She'd tried to feel her way toward a washroom but exhausted, tired and still hurt the blind seer refrained. The wounded slyph chose her steps carefully out of the bedroom and using the bannister as a guide, slowly took the steps down into the main entry way.

"Hello, Ted?"

Not unlike a hangover, Xanadu's head pounded from dehydration. She felt ill wanted to attempt drinking and perhaps eating something. The seer did not feel hungry, but she had stopped feeling the desire for food a week into her torture. She must have looked like a wreck. Her hair was matted in some places and she was still covered in green and purple bruises, slow to heal, dried blood and other cuts and marks decorating her body like a voodoo doll.

She couldn't wait to step into a shower, wear fresh clothes and feel normal again. The fate of the shop was far from the soothsayer's mind. For now she was safe. The doppelganger would be dealt with later and by someone else.

There was a girl somewhere in the house that Ted had saved.
Ted had saved.
The words still felt absurd and irregular in his mind. He didn't even dare say them out loud. He'd have to, he knew, once Charlie came home, because Charlie would want to know. But until then? Ted was just going to keep the phrase to himself.

He didn't know where the woman was. The blind woman. He'd left her in his bedroom, pointed her in the vague direction of the attached bath, not wanting to think about the implications of that at the moment, and left her to her own devices. She could still be trying to get clean. Blindly (no pun intended) trying to find where he kept things. But he would have been no help there, really, because it was all still new to him, too. He'd be going through cabinets just as much as she was, and he'd be in the way on top of it. Or, she might have decided to lay down in his bed. That was okay, he supposed. Anybody who has gone through what she did deserved to sleep some.

He supposed it was their fault, his and Charlie's, that there wasn't a spare room with a spare bed where she could go instead of his room. On his bed. With his sheets. Ted sighed.

What he was going to do, he was going to just go into the kitchen and try to put together a meal for her. She'd probably be really hungry whenever she was done with whatever she was doing, and he wanted to have some good assortment for her. But nothing hot, not too hot, or too cold. He knew what the shock of a first meal after a large shock - IE going to prison - would feel like if it were just a sandwich. Nobody needed soup or ice cream to double that. But juice would be good, he was sure. She needed juice. Or maybe Gatorade. Maybe that would be better. Electrolytes and whatever.

Ted took one step into the kitchen and stopped. Staring. Not sure what to say. Or how to say it.

The day was crisp and clear. Only a slight warm breeze made the leaves of the trees move, making the dappled light on the ground below shimmer and dance. Playing shadows over the faces of the playing children and the walking couples in the area.

The Valentine's day spirit had taken up residence in many, and was showing thusly in the store windows. Nobody had yet taken down their decorations. The sales for jewelry and candy went on, with the hope that more would be bought and lavished upon those who were loved and loving.

There was a man carrying balloons for sale. A woman carrying a basket of assorted flowers that never seemed to empty, no matter how many of her beautiful wares were bought. Another man pushing an ice cream cart, and a lady in a colorful outfit giving out free cotton candy and selling roasted nuts. There were performers of every sort. People on stilts, people juggling. A fire breather, yes, right in the middle of it all, carefully showing what she could do. A belly dancer dancing around in a circle, a sword swallower doing his thing in the middle of that circle. It was almost like a circus, this show for the lovers.

It seemed as if everything was greener. The sky bluer. The flowers more radiant and filled with scent. The water of the lake clearer, with paddle boats and row boats gliding over it's surface easily. The birds sang sweeter. All was perfect.

( ooc )

(For Dexter, Ace, Dean, Claire, Venkman, Firekeeper, Logan E.)

It'd been fun for a little while. Traipsing through the snow. It became a little more difficult as the snow kept coming; it simply wasn't physically possible for this much snow to drop like that. And, when she noticed the dog fighting to get free of what had to have been a little old lady now turned lump of ice and snow, Fred decided it was time to get inside. Well, only after trying to free the little dog from its frozen mistress, which didn't work out so well, seeing as the damn dog tried to bite her rather than let her help.

Fred didn't want to leave the little yapper out in the snow, now falling in clumps, but she couldn't stay out in it either. No, she started looking for some place that was still open and could take her. Unfortunately, the only place she found that still had its doors open, figuratively speaking, was an old movie house. Actually, Fred didn't mind it; she remembered her mom and dad talking about places like this, and she supposed it could have been a lot worse. She even giggled at the posters hanging up; yeah, it could have been a lot worse.

She didn't seem anyone around quite yet, and supposing that concessions weren't open, she settled down on one of the velvet like couches in the theatre's lobby - sure, it'd seen much better days, dust rising as she sat, but there was something reassuring about a place this old still standing. Plus, the place was a lot warmer than it was outside. She just hoped she wasn't about to be all alone, or maybe that wouldn't have been a bad thing. She'd done alone in bad times before...

The den under the bridge in the park had been temporarily abandoned. It wasn't that Firekeeper couldn't stand cold weather--she was quite used to it, in fact, and had survived much more frigid winters than this one--but she was near somewhere that was warm with plentiful food and she decided to take the opportunity to be comfortable.

Was trying to take it, in any case. There weren't many places that allowed wolves as big as small ponies.

She gathered up her injured dignity after the third deli owner saw the pair out (both for Blind Seer's presence and for Firekeeper's shoeless state) and stopped looking in the brightly lit restaurants. Blind Seer advised her against threatening the people who told her in no uncertain terms that they didn't allow vagrants with dogs inside their stores, and she had to reluctantly agree. There was no Derian here to translate the bigger picture for her, no Elise to diplomatically smooth raised hackles.

Food was less of a problem than shelter, though at first both she and Blind Seer were reluctant to scavenge like vultures. Eventually Blind Seer's stomach got the best of him and with a silent shrug and a wolf proverb about not overlooking what was right in front of them he made himself a meal of still-warm hamburgers from behind a fast-food place. "Not entirely meat," he told her, sniffing delicately at it, "but enough for a full belly tonight." Firekeeper had held out for only a little longer before joining suit. That was the first night that somebody had handed Firekeeper a dollar on the street. She started to ask why, but whoever handed her the scrap of greenish, smelly paper didn't seem too inclined to interact with her and hurried on their way. So she shrugged and pocketed it and accepted it as just another new, strange custom that these new, strange two-legs kept.

So today, a week later, she sat on the stoop of an apartment building just down the street from a cafe, enjoying the sounds of somebody's guitar as Blind Seer slept, her feet tucked under his belly fur to keep warm. It wasn't a castle, but neither was it starving in the middle of a mountain forest. Life was good.

You're all handcuffed together in a circle, facing outward. Handcuffs can't be broken, but there's a key taped to the ceiling. The floor below is metal grating that leads to a bottomless pit. Every two hours the grating retracts half an inch away from the wall.

Note: Hours are not real time hours

Boyd found his way through the throngs of screaming people to a quiet space. Some place away from all the blood and death and pain. Away from the zombies and all the things that he wasn't used to.

Not that he was really thinking about any of that when he did it. He just felt drawn to the place in the park that he now stood. Felt like he needed to be there. Or should be there. Or whatever the equivalent emotion a brain fried walking corpse might have, if it might be called that.

He was only alone in the park for a few minutes. Or it might have been hours. Then they started to join him. One by one. Two by two. A dozen. All like him. If he'd cared about the smell, that alone might have driven him back into the streets looking for more squirming food.

But he didn't care. And neither did any of the others, apparently. They stood, staring blankly, just as he stared blankly. Moaning occasionally. Grouping together. Huddling, almost. Being in the park as one, together.

One might say, supporting one another.

( ooc info )

( Two days ago. )

( Today. )

Firekeeper and Blind Seer had finally begun to settle down in this strange new place. They were still seized by the occasional moment of homesickness and longing for friends, but they accepted it with wolf-like pragmatism. They contented themselves with filling their bellies with any number of prey (as well as fruits and vegetables, in Firekeeper's case) and exploring the length and breadth of the park that they were now calling home. They rarely set so much as a few steps outside of the boundaries, though; there was still too much overwhelming strangeness that lay beyond.

But slowly, curiosity began to overtake the fear, particularly for Firekeeper. Slowly, their explorations began to lead ever so slightly further outside into the paved and unnatural world beyond the park. There were still any number of awful smells and sounds (to say nothing of the sheer alienness of it all), but the two were becoming accustomed to no longer sprinting for the nearest cover at the first sign of anything new. "Tomorrow," Firekeeper told Blind Seer one evening as they crouched behind a tree and watched the strange moving things on the road. "Tomorrow I think I will try to stay among the chaos of these two-legs for longer than a handful of steps."

Blind Seer chewed thoughtfully on his foot. "If that is your wish, then I shall accompany you as ever, dear heart. Far be it from me to leave a strange hairless wolf like yourself alone and defenseless in this strange city."

She thumped him soundly on a flank and he mouthed her arm gently in return, affectionate as siblings, and they rose as one and ran past some surprised passerby out for an evening walk. When they returned to the bridge that had been acting as their den, they were surprised to find a small bundle waiting for them, though they neither saw nor smelled anybody around. It was a set of clothes, of the type that they had seen the residents of the city wearing: trousers of a sturdy blue cloth that cut off slightly below the knee and a cloth shirt of a lighter material. Firekeeper frowned thoughtfully; they were nowhere near sturdy enough to wear for any long stretch in this forest, as active as she was, but it might be enough to blend in better out there...

She glanced over at Blind Seer, whose hackles were still up despite (or more precisely because of) the lack of any trace of an intruder. Perhaps blending is a lost cause, but if it helps...

The next afternoon, rested and fed, the two cautiously made their way out of the park. They couldn't help wincing at some of the new sounds and sights, but they didn't run. Yet.

((Just FYI, the dialogue in italics is these two speaking in Beast, which is (as far as I can figure) a mix of mostly body language and limited telepathy-ish, with some occasional vocal bits thrown in.))

Two days had passed. Two days of confusion where neither Firekeeper nor Blind Seer had any clue where they were or how they had arrived. There had been drowsing in the heat of the day, when it was too warm to travel to Hawk Haven from the Iron Mountains, and then there had been this new place, with its new smells and sounds and sights.

( Once the initial anger and confusion had passed, Firekeeper had to admit that it could have been much worse. )

As evening fell, the glow of the small fire illuminated the underside of the bridge, and the smell of roasting squirrel spitted on a stick began to waft out. Blind Seer snored next to her, a mound of thick gray fur who made sure to keep her between him and the fire, for fear of catching himself alight. She kept a careful watch on her dinner, huddled in on herself, dark eyes catching the firelight.