The Universe's Mixer

Maxine was now staying with Wash. Jo had mixed feelings about this. There was the blind relief because she wasn't anywhere near ready to be responsible for a five year old, but there was also an unexpected sadness. She missed the kid. Maxine would be back for weekends sometimes, but there was that. All the same, Jo found herself without plans for the night. No work, no kid, no Ted. She'd been curious about one of the other bars in town that seemed to cater to... unusual clientele. She'd heard things about Caritas and figured that now was as good a time as any to check out the club.

She wasn't dressed up-it was standard jeans and a black tank top. She wasn't here to meet and greet or attract attention. Just the opposite, in fact. She wanted to just blend in with the rest of the club. She was curious about the proprietor who supposedly could see bits and pieces of the future for people who sang karaoke. She'd also heard even stranger things about some of the denizens of the club. Potentially demons.

It seemed like the City had everything. Vampire bars, possibly demon bars. All of these creatures in one small, confined area. It was a wonder that anyone survived.

After the first day of total darkness, Maxine started to fret. She used the internet to look up when the sun was supposed to rise and set. Then there was the alarms. Maxine set every single alarm in the house, all for different times. Without the sun, the animals wouldn't know when it was their bedtime. Maxine had to fix that.

As obnoxious as it was, the owls and crickets were only heard during the nighttime hours. The rodents and other creatures only ventured out during the safety of the dark days. With or without the sun, the animals continued the best they could under Maxine's ernest direction. To the untrained eye, however, Maxine was a nightmare of a house guest -- waking up at all hours and going out into the yard, concentrating with all her five year old might.

It was a strange sight in the least.

Getting up at all hours of the night meant sleeping at all hours, too. Maxine had curled up in the living room with a blanket. When sleeping deeply, she didn't hear Jo coming or going. She did, however, hear the knock on the door. Her hair was comically disheveled. Maxine rubbed the sleep from her eyes when she looked up at the older man at the door.

"...Are you Jo's dad?" she yawned.

Without being to explain precisely how, Maxine knew that this world was not her world. No one needed to tell her, The Red of this place was different than The Red back home. Back home, The Red was much more complex, built up like a fragile House of Cards made of thousands upon thousands of ecosystems. This world’s Red was very small, like Maxine. And like Maxine, it seemed to be contained in one single spot, webbed through a single city.

The six year old wasn’t afraid though. She may not have been smiling but there were no tears. After all, Maxine Baker was the daughter of a superhero. It didn't matter if the five year old had no comprehension that Animal Man was a second stringer at best who didn’t make a big enough dent in even the regular criminal underworld to require a secret identity. She still assumed he’d be in the Justice League someday, on par with titans like Superman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman.

Aquaman was her favorite superhero besides her father, of course.

Somewhere along the way, a well meaning adult made up of the simpler Red gave Maxine a brochure. She could read some of it, but didn’t bother trying to struggle through the more complicated words. Maxine just needed someone else willing to explain it to her. Someone that looked trustworthy. The first person she looked for was a uniformed police officer. After failing to find a patrol officer, Maxine settled for the first adult who wasn't obviously an evil mastermind of some sort. Walking toward the lucky individual with all the confidence of a five year old, she tugged on their hand.

“Excuse me. My name is Maxine Baker and my phone number is six one nine, three four four, three one two three. My dad is Animal Man, he isn’t here though. He’s in San Diego with my mom and my big brother Cliff. Do you know how to get there? My dad can come pick me up.”

Maxine handed them the brochure which read, New to The City?

Charlie kept talking about how Ted was seeing somebody. He didn't know much about her, just that her name was Jo and she ran a bar. It didn't sound like Ted was being evasive about answering questions, just that Charlie wasn't pressing for information too hard.

Jen, however, was curious.

Since Charlie was hers, and Ted was important to him, Jennifer wanted whomever Ted was dating to be on the up and up. Or at the very least, a good person. From what she knew of Ted, he needed good people in his life. He deserved good people in his life. Yes, he'd messed up and yes, he'd gone to prison. But so had Charlie. Where Charlie had been falsely accused, Ted had actually deserved his time. But that didn't mean he hadn't changed.

Jennifer decided to take it upon herself to look in on this Jo. Get to know her a bit. Find out if there was anything that she wasn't telling Ted. It was easy enough, since the woman worked in a bar. She could go and sit in a bar for hours and not get hounded about it. If there had been a convenience store involved, she would have had to spread it out over many, many days.

The bar itself was weird. She'd had some idea that it would be from the name, Purgatory. But when she got inside, it was all kinds of fucked up. She had to stand in the entrance for a minute just to get her bearings. Half of it looked like a place that she'd be comfortable in. The other half looked like a goth kid threw up all over it. There were very few people in the bar at this hour, nobody in the goth half. Jen wondered if that half got busier when the sun went down.

Eventually she eased herself in and went to the normal-looking half of the bar and sidled up.

The news report about Fred was extremely unwelcome. Jo instantly tried to call Dean and Sam and left messages for both. Then she tried again.

And again after she'd gotten into her truck and driven down to see what had become of Angel Investigations.

She also tried Fred's phone, trying not to panic when she got no answer. The news reporters had said that she was presumed to be dead. Not that they'd found a body. Not that they knew for sure.

The thought of losing someone that she'd worked with, that she'd considered a friend... it hurt. Jo didn't have many people that she trusted in this City and she couldn't stand to lose any of them.

She didn't realize right away that the sun didn't go down when it was supposed to. In fact, a few hours passed before she realized that it was 9pm and still as bright as if it was noon. She'd been running all over town trying to find what she could on what had happened to Fred's place and to Fred. Now she pulled her truck over and got out. She looked from the sky to her phone, as if doubting that the time on her phone was wrong somehow.

Jesse was nothing if not a man of his word. It might take him time, occasionally, to follow through with it, but he always did. He didn't like to be called a liar, and the best way to avoid that was to do what he said he was going to do. So once he decided that Zoe was well enough to last more than a few hours without him at her side, he went in search of Jo.

He had promised Jo that he would show her what he looked like on the inside.

Very few people had been witness to it, but Jo seemed like the sort who could truly appreciate it. He didn't need to look that way, he knew, but it was a piece of Genesis, so it was a piece of him now. And truth be told, it seemed like it might be a fun thing to show off occasionally. Just to see the reaction.

He made sure to find Jo when she was alone, and in an area where the public couldn't just wander upon them randomly. It turned out to be a little house with a white picket fence. Not exactly the sort of place that he'd imagined she would occupy. But the feeling he got from it was that it was her house. She lived there.

Jesse appeared in the living room and looked around. The inside seemed more Jo-ish, but still not completely. He wondered if she'd just moved in. He was glad that he'd put out his cigarette before appearing. He doubted she wanted smoke-stink all over her... was that a couch doily?

They had discussed further steps that could be taken to assure the safety of all the patrons. Hunters, vampires, and humans alike. What Jo had come up with, and what Eric grudgingly agreed to, was spells. Protection spells. She apparently knew of a wizard who could put such things into place and he told her to go ahead and do it. That he was going to trust her and not hover over her, and reminded her very gently - but firmly - that he had his own source that could check and make sure that nothing was put there that would harm himself or any of his staff or custom.

The spells would assure that no fights broke out and that nobody did harm to anybody else while on the bar's property. It extended out into the parking lot for good measure. Eric knew that many a bar fight was taken outside, and he didn't want to have to deal with dead anything on any part of land he owned. If they wanted to fight so badly that they all wandered to the park, then so be it. It was on them, then.

He knew that Jo was unhappy at the prospect of vampires taking humans home, but he told her that there was nothing to be done about that. There was no accounting for taste, for one, and there was no law saying that a citizen of legal age couldn't have sex with or supply blood for another consenting adult.

Safety measures in place, rule board duplicated (in the rustic style of Jo's half - Eric had had it made as a joke, but it didn't seem to be coming off as one) and in place on the less-than-vampire side, it came down to renaming and reopening.

Which was what the meeting today was for.

Eric stood in his half of the bar, looking at the other half, still wishing that she would agree to just burning all of it to the ground. He'd tried placing table cloths over the un-stylish wood tables, only to find them neatly folded on top of his half of the bar as soon as he turned around. The City, it seemed, was determined to keep this fiasco in tact.

Eric was pleased.

Not just because there was going to be a party, to which they'd invited every single person in the City, but because it was for him and Baba. But to top that off? It was in their new home, Castle Dracula.

He would retain his sleeping place, and she would - of course - retain her cabin. Both would be used for various things, but their main residence was going to be the castle. Eric was in love with the building. The rich history, the fact that it belonged to living relic, every aspect of the castle was glorious to him. Baba had warmed to the place.

It was decorated with the red and black that they had decided on for colors. Tastefully done, but very gothic. The front door was wide open, welcoming all visitors. From the front gates to that open door was a pathway of red roses, to guide people inside.

The castle held many rooms, but only the ones on the ground floor were open to wandering. The stairs leading to the levels below and above were cut off by large men and velvet ropes. Strict instructions were given that only himself or his wife were allowed to pass. Even with these restrictions, there was more than enough room to fit every citizen, should they choose to show. Plenty of room to poke around.

In the great dining hall stood large tables laden with many kinds of food and smaller tables with chairs for people to sit at. Tables had been placed in other rooms, too, for people to take their food, drink, or company. Catering staff roamed with hors d'oeuvres and took drink orders. There was a large room filled with art and two fondue stations - chocolate and cheese. A room with a nice, even floor and a grand ceiling which also held the orchestral quintet he had found. Once the sun set, the grounds around the castle would be lit up with tiny fairy lights.

There was to be only one truly scheduled event, and that was when he and Baba would make their appearance and introduce themselves to the rest of the City as Eric and Red Northman. This would happen closer to sunset so that the other vampires could attend. The rest of the time, the people would be allowed to do as they wished when they wished to do it. Eric had spared no expense to get this rolling along. He wanted his new wife to have a party that nobody would soon forget.

Jo hadn't seen all that much of Ted over the past few weeks. Mostly, she'd been busy trying to figure out what the hell she was going to do about the bar situation. She also wasn't quite ready to tell him that she was staying in a motel or explain the reasons behind it. But she thought she might have some ideas as to how to make sure that the situation didn't turn into a bloodbath, maybe.

So now that she thought that she might be able to get things under control, she'd left Ted a message inviting him to meet her for coffee. They never had gotten around to that second date, after all. Coffee wasn't exactly the most original date, but it would be nice to do something normal for a change. Spending two weeks together in an alternate reality that was even more bizarre than the City didn't exactly count as normal.

Unfortunately, while she was waiting at the coffee shop, she got a call. The voice on the other end of the line was a little hesitant and vague about how they'd gotten her number, but seemed to really need the help. Something about a rental property that kept scaring off and sometimes even killing off its tenants.

Jo had promised that she'd look into it, but she wasn't going to simply leave and stand Ted up. She waited to see if he'd get there soon. Maybe she could still squeeze in time for a coffee before she went ghost hunting.

The bar needed to reopen soon and Jo still didn't know what to do about it. She had no actual way of keeping her clientele safe, short of a guarantee from a vampire that she didn't trust as far as she could throw him. Even if the bar stayed closed, it wouldn't be long before some of her people came poking around and tried to retake the bar.

She needed some sort of solution. And as much as she wanted to just go with Toot's suggestion of killing Eric, she didn't know how many vampires there were or if another one would just step in to take his place. She needed more planning to pull off something like that. And from what information she had managed to gain on the vampires in the City, there were far more than she could handle on her own. This wasn't just one nest that she could roll in and take out. In fact, from what she could gather there were several types in the City and no one was an authority on all of them.

That was why she found herself wandering the City aimlessly. She had chosen to walk and maybe there was just a little bit of hopefulness that this would be one of the times when the City decided to be helpful. Sometimes it provided what she was looking for. Other times it provided things that she didn't even realize she needed until they were staring her in the face.

Of course, other times it simply kicked her while she was down, but she was going to hope for option A or B tonight.

Jo had a few days to think things over and hopefully figure out a way to keep the re-opening of the newly combined bar from resulting in bloodshed. Whatever Eric said about his rules, she wasn't sure how much she could trust the vampire or the rest of his clientele to keep from seeing her clientele as juice boxes with legs.

The first step right now was keeping her customers away. Jo had put the word out to some of her regulars already. Now it was just a matter of tracking down Dean and Sam. She really didn't want to tell Dean because she had a feeling that the hunter's first instinct would be to try to step in and for better or for worse, this was her problem to solve.

Jo dropped by the apartment over the flower shop and knocked on the door. She wasn't sure she would ever get used to the idea of Dean living over a flower shop. It did seem rather... ill-fitting and just a little bit amusing at that.

Her bar had been taken over by a vampire bar. Or rather, it had been smashed into a vampire bar. There were no words for how upset Jo was about this. She wanted to hit something, shoot something, and possibly set something on fire.

Unfortunately, she'd checked around and there was nothing to hunt at the moment. She considered calling Ted, but she really didn't want to become that girl that went running to a guy whom she'd only been on one actual date with.

So instead she found a bar. Not her bar, but some dive bar that was devoid of vampires and had the most delicious aroma of pizza wafting out the door.

Pizza and beer wouldn't make things all better, but it was a start. Jo ordered a large pizza in spite of being on her own and she told the bartender to keep her glass filled. She didn't really know where she'd sleep tonight, but it wouldn't be the first night she'd made her bed in a motel. She could deal until she could find some way to fix the bar situation.

Eric thought to check on Fangtasia after a little while spent in the arms of his witch. Pam knew enough to run it on her own, and he didn't doubt her ability or commitment to the club, but every once in a while he liked to drop in and let the employees know that they still had to answer to him.

When he approached, the building looked different to him. Bigger, was the most noticeable part. Still the rich blood red that it had been painted. But the neon sign was missing. Nowhere on the outside was it designated Fangtasia. Nor were their posters in their nice movie-style frames. And the door was now situated directly in the center, instead of off to one side.

Confused, and a bit irked, Eric wandered in. What he saw stopped him in his tracks just on the other side of the threshold. The interior of the bar was changed more than the exterior had been. It seemed to be divided in half. One side, the dark red on the walls, the pitch black tile on the floors. On the other, wood. Wood floors. Wood on the walls. Even his lovely black laquor bar changed halfway, into something of old, worn wood. Beautiful hand picked red and black furniture butted up against used up stools and tables.

It pissed him off.

Being well before the time when Fangtasia would normally open, there was nobody there for him to yell at. Eric considered just setting fire to the whole thing. It was during this brooding fantasy that he noticed somebody else.

Pam was hungry. When Pam was hungry, she fed. Now that she was in a place that she didn't have to worry about certain ridiculous rules that kept her pent up, Pam could feed how ever the bloody hell she wished. How ever, when ever, and where ever.

It just so happened, that this particular night had the how, when, and where right behind a particular bar, that was not exactly vampire friendly. She'd lured the man in with a smile and a very good bit of eye contact. Sure, glamouring might be cheating, but she wasn't there to play fair.

She knew there were humans to watch for...maybe. Small women who had the idea that they could actually do damage to vampires. She knew nothing of hunters. There had been those Fellowship types, and they did know a thing or two about killing vampires; yet, they didn't seem to have a foothold in the City. As far as she knew, other than this Bill human, who wasn't completely in the know, she could do as she wished. She was cautious, of course, which was why she would keep the human under her "spell" until she'd fed, and she wouldn't take too much. In fact, she'd make the whole thing fun for the idiot.

That had been the plan anyway. When she found stakes on said idiot, she strongly considered killing him. Or...

Jo wasn't usually the type to wear a dress, except for when she was going undercover for something or other. In fact, she very rarely wore anything other than jeans. Which was why she was a little frustrated with the City (or whomever might have broken into her apartment and left clothes in her closet) for filling her closet with dresses and dressy pants and shirts.

Not that she would have shown up for dinner in jeans and a ratty flannel shirt, but she resented that the choice was being taken out of her hands. She finally grudgingly settled on a flowered sundress that was cute but not overly formal.

She didn't really know what to make of her dinner plans for the night. Ted was sweet, if not her normal type in many ways. All the same, there was something sort of refreshing about that. He wasn't a hunter, which was extremely appealing actually. Most hunters seemed to be loners who didn't do all that well with relationships. Or they just went off and... well, she wasn't going to think about what had happened to her first boyfriend.

While it was all she knew, and there was a part of her that was definitely drawn to those types, the idea of getting out of her wheelhouse sounded kind of nice.

She was more nervous than she'd expected so by the time she pulled her truck into the parking lot of the building that housed the mayor's office, Jo's mind was a bit blank. She had kept the shotgun as well as a few other hunting supplies in a lockbox in the back of her truck. It never did hurt to be prepared and Ted had seemed more than willing to have that extra protection around. There was also a small vial of holy water, a knife, and some salt in her purse.

Once a hunter, always a hunter. She might look like a normal twenty-something woman, but she never really left the hunter side of her personality at home.

Ted had gotten Jo's message about the ghost, and had been about to run over to the house and buy it up when the streets and everything else had begun to move again. Which was also about the time when the coffers had filled themselves back up, and his efforts of looking for investments to tide the City over were nullified.

Partly glad for it, and partly annoyed because of the amount of work, Ted hadn't known quite what to do. He sat at his desk for a while, staring at the top of it. Jo's number was scribbled on the front of his planner, right under his nose. When his eyes floated over it, he made a decision.

He dialed her number before he could talk himself out of it. Listened to it ring, making sure he didn't overthink things as he waited. There was a click that told him either she'd picked up, or her voicemail had, and he just started talking.

"Jo. This is Ted, from the haunted house. Haunted house. That sounds really stupid said out loud. Do you call it something different? Probably. Anyway. I was thinking I'd like to take you to dinner as a thanks, if you'd want to do that. Maybe drinks after? There's this Italian place that everyone in the office keeps talking about. We could go there. Or anywhere you'd like."

Realizing that he'd just spit out a whole lot of words and hadn't any idea if there was somebody actually on the other end of the line, he paused, waiting to see if there would be an answer, or the telltale beep of a message run too long.

Jo had dispatched with the bones of the ghost in that house. She'd left Ted a message that it was all clear, though she was a little bit disappointed that she'd only gotten his voicemail. She'd also left him her number if he wanted to call back, though she wouldn't have blamed him if he didn't.

It seemed that she had a whole laundry list of things to look into in the City because her next stop was the park. She'd heard a lot of odd stories about a house on chicken legs, and that sounded like something that might need looking into.

She didn't exactly know where to start, so she just picked a path through the park and began to walk. A giant chicken house couldn't be that hard to spot, right?

The City Hall was chosen because it held a room within it that was big enough to accommodate the droves of people that were sure to come. Plus, being inside space, there were no worries over weather that couldn't be controlled. The people could sit and listen and not have to try to hear past traffic or wind.

Even with the late notice, everything was done well before the scheduled start time, which Thomas was proud of. He was glad that the ones who were born here weren't entirely useless without him around. They were keeping their heads together, doing what needed to be done. Of course, it also could have been the fact that they believed Thomas was who he claimed to be, and with his presence there with them, they felt better about the situation they were currently in.

Thomas looked at the stage. That's where he would be standing, talking to the people he had brought here. He had no doubts that they would be the ones with the questions, the ones who demanded answers. He was ready. He could do this.

He sat in a seat hidden by a curtain, where he could still see the stage and the rows of chairs beyond, and waited.

Ted was checking out houses and condos for investment purposes. He'd had an idea shortly after Lois Lane had left his office for keeping the City in money and helping it's residents at the same time. City housing. The City would buy the houses and keep them maintained, while the rent would be cheaper so that the poorer and disabled residents of the City could afford to be in nicer areas with better resources around them.

Property generally only rose in value. Even when the market failed, the property itself didn't really lose it's spot, just what one could charge for it did. But it always rose again eventually.

He'd decided to scout some locations and draw up a proposal before going to the Mayor with it. A vague idea wasn't any good, you had to have numbers to back it up. Evidence that it was a good idea. Ted knew this. He also knew that the mayor was a busy guy and that bothering him with the very beginnings of a plan would probably only cause more work for him. He liked the mayor, he didn't want to add pressure to a job that was already difficult with the things going on.

There were already spots that Ted liked, his list was growing, but it was all condos and co-ops so far. No actual houses. He felt that having a house, some place that could have more than one person in them at a time possibly, would be a good idea too. There was a bigger side to this plan, of course, in the name of buying a whole apartment building, but that had to be worked up to.

Seeing an address without a door number attached to it attracted Ted and he skipped down several spots to visit that one next. He'd get to the others, he was sure. But houses went quickly. He wanted to see this one before anybody else had a chance to put a bid on it.

And it was a big house. He could see that from the outside when he arrived. But it looked so empty. Like nobody had lived there in a really long time. It wasn't so much neglect. Somebody was coming around to cut the grass and trim the hedges. But there was dust in the corners of the windows. The door knob looked shiny and untouched. The lock, when he got close enough to see, seemed freshly oiled.

But the door opened smoothly enough. He stepped inside and began to take notes on the things that he saw. Sure, every listing provided square footage and number of rooms. But seeing stuff for yourself always provided a much different view. A room with large footage might actually not fit a bed because it was an odd shape. Or a kitchen that seemed spacious might be so stuffed with cabinetry that you couldn't move.

Ted saw none of these issues. It made him all the more curious as to why nobody was living here, and why it seemed nobody had for a very long time.

He thought he heard something fall in another room and went to investigate, but found nothing. Then there was a scraping noise that he could feel into his bones, followed by a very disturbing giggling.

In a place where nothing could be ruled out anymore, Ted felt immediately suspicious and afraid. He went to the front door to leave, but discovered it wouldn't open. As he turned to try to find the back door, something flashed by him. Something unpleasant. He got a vague sense of blood and maybe a missing half of a face.

Ted became very still.

Dinah was doing the avoiding thing for the most part. Zee had tried to call and she'd sent a text telling her friend that she just needed some time and would call when she was ready. She didn't want to talk to her friends right now, but she did want to keep busy. Which meant that she'd been spending a lot of time working on getting the shop fixed up. She was currently sweeping up the glass and soon she would be installing the new windows that had just been delivered. Unlike the last time the shop had gotten trashed when the materials to fix it up had just magically appeared, Dinah had had to wait for everything to be delivered.

But it was here now, and working with her hands was exactly what she needed.

Working with her hands and... answers, really. She needed answers. She wanted to know what had happened to Jake. She needed to know if he had made it back home-even if she dreaded the confirmation of that news.

She knew how his story turned out. She knew that if he'd made it back home, he didn't have long before his death.

She knew all that.

But she still needed to know. Not knowing was driving her crazy.

Somewhere in the middle of sweeping up the last of the glass, it hit her. There might be someone in the City who could answer her questions. Someone who had shown up when they'd needed him most. She still didn't know if he was a god-or God, capital G, or just a guy with god-like abilities. She really didn't know what to believe in that.

She also didn't know how to get ahold of him, and she wasn't usually much for praying.

All the same, she did say a little prayer. She wasn't sure if she should say it silently or out loud. And she wasn't really sure if she was wasting her time or not.

"Um, Jesse. If you're out there, I could really use someone to talk to right now. I suppose if you are around, you're probably busy with more important things. Assuming you can hear me at all. But if you can hear me and you're not too busy... I could really use your help."

A tear slipped down her cheek as she admitted out loud that she needed help, but she just swiped at it and went back to sweeping. She didn't expect an answer, but she'd tried anyway.