The Universe's Mixer

Opening night for Verdi's La Traviata ran as smoothly as the City Opera House manager designed it. He allotted a certain number of complimentary tickets to be distributed by high-performing members of his production. Those lucky enough to receive these tickets were placed on a special guest list and personally escorted by the house staff to their box seats. The manager himself claimed a seat in Box 5, which was otherwise empty.

Tonight, the crowd glittered and shone brightly under the warm glow of the opera house. Attending the opera was as much about high art as it was about being seen. With every playbill this night came an invitation to the opening night celebration following after the performance. There, all would get their fill of the glamor brought out by opening night.

When the lights in the auditorium dimmed, so too did the chatter. Then began the orchestra, casting its spell with rich, full-bodied music. The pianist, one Hannibal Lecter, would be remembered by musical types for his mastery. But there was limelight enough for others, as well. The production's Violetta, Ms. Christine Daeé, sang soprano with a curious and heady combination of seduction and fresh youth, while the Flora of the opera, Ms. Enigma, carried the darker mezzo-soprano with an expert's touch. And when the lights came up, it was to the roar of an audience recognizing the triumph it just witnessed.

Once the curtain calls were done, the crowd began filtering down the staircase and into the Grand Foyer, where the night was just beginning. The wine flowed; the violins hummed -- a triumph indeed.

Oliver saw to it that anyone who had worked with the Justice League had been invited. He wasn't sure how many of them would actually show up, but he'd made sure to contact them all, one way or another. At the rate things had fallen apart, he was beginning to feel less averse to the idea of Dean coming along with Dinah. But that remained to be seen.

He'd set the meeting for a Monday, mid-morning, to allow everyone time to make it, or at least to check in, if there was something going on out in the real world to prevent attendance--and hopefully to start the week out right. The younger of the Winchester brothers was already present, working on some IT stuff at Oliver's behest. Now all they had to do was hurry up and wait.

Zee felt the swirl of energies around her and needlessly held her breath. It was just a stupid habit she couldn't help doing during a transport or teleportation. Where it was transporting her this time she couldn't be sure, but it had to be better than die Festung and that world. She had a moment of hoping whatever this was had nabbed John too, but that thought went out of her head when her vision cleared and she found herself standing in the living room of Shadowcrest. She was home! She was home!!

She let out with a happy squeal as she turned in place to take in the sight of her family home, so lost in the elation of being there that she didn't notice how still Shadowcrest had gone. If she were paying attention she would recognize the house's reaction as utter confusion and hesitancy. But she wasn't paying any attention to it as she darted up the stairs. She wanted out of these clothes and into clean ones. NOW! Oh sure she could magic up clean clothes, but it wasn't the same as the clothing she had bought specifically for herself.

Bursting into the bedroom she noticed that the bed was not empty. Zee pulled up short for a moment wondering who she'd need to blast out of her house, then caught sight of some rumbled blonde hair peeking out of the blankets, gracing one of her pillows. John! Whatever power brought her back brought him too! Yay!!

"sehtolC enog!" The incantation was almost breathless in anticipation of enjoying her homecoming with John in the time honored fashion, a flick of her wrist practically sweeping her clothes from her. With an eager, but gentle smile on her face she slid under the blankets with him. Her hand smoothed along his arm as she pressed a kiss to his neck. Hopefully he wasn't too hungover and it wouldn't take too much more to wake him up. "Hey, baby. We're home."

Dinah hadn't called Zatanna immediately after the article and picture about Zatanna and the mayor had hit the City Voice. She'd wanted to, but she figured that her friend might need some time before she dealt with the deluge of questions.

For Dinah's part, she was a little hurt that Zee hadn't confided in her that something was going on with the mayor but it wasn't like she'd found the time to tell Zatanna about Dean yet. So if anything, when she did finally get over to Shadowcrest, it wasn't to yell or even to pry, but more to commiserate.

Dinah hoped that the rest of the Justice League wasn't giving Zatanna grief about her choice of companions, but she also hoped that Jack wasn't simply leading the mystic on or that he wouldn't suddenly revert to his views of superpowered crimefighters. Really, she wouldn't trust that he had truly change duntil she saw some sort of new legislation.

As a peace offering and a show that she wasn't upset, she brought Chinese food and a bottle of wine. She knocked on the door, hoping that her former teammate was home.

Jack was in his office as per usual when the City started moving again. He didn't notice until one of the people in the office shouted. When he looked out the window that was being pointed at, he saw the buildings start to move. Slowly usually, in the fashion that was normal to the City.

The calls quickly started coming in after that. Mostly locals who were elated about their fridges repopulating the food, but some from others who were disgruntled about the streets and buildings starting to move again.

Jack was... well, he was always sorry for those who weren't used to the moving streets. He himself wasn't always used to them, but he could deal with it. All things said and done, he was mostly relieved. The bank account for the City's budget started to refill itself and suddenly his office had a fully stocked liquor cabinet again-the liquor had been slowly edged away as Jack had entertained various CEOs and others who might have needed reassurances.

In short, things were back to their normal working order. Normal for the City, which wasn't normal as far as those who hadn't been born here were concerned. But to Jack, normal was all relative.

With the panic in the streets mostly quelled, he decided that it was time to do something that he hadn't done for almost as long as he could remember.

He took a day off.

Just like that, he asked his secretary to reschedule all of his appointments and he ignored the ever growing inbox and he left the office. He didn't head home however. No, home meant the confusion with Alice and home wasn't really where he wanted to be right now.

Instead he left a message and then headed to the enchanted home of one particular mystic who had a fondness for fishnets. He stopped to pick up a box of chocolates and a single red rose on the way. Once there, he knocked and waited for the house (and presumably the woman inside the house) to decide whether or not to let him in.

Jack was extremely busy these days. This business with Thomas/the City had taken up just about all of his time. He'd been organizing the press conference and quietly searching for the witch responsible for trapping the City.

While he had left a voicemail for Zatanna the day after their date to let her know that he'd had a good time, he really needed to do something more. He'd spent the night, after all. And what a lovely night it had been.

He would have happily made another date with her sooner, but there were things that needed his attention now.

Which was why he sent over a dozen white roses along with a small strawberry cheesecake and a note.

Zatanna,
Thank you for the lovely evening. I would like to see you again soon. Are you available for dinner next week Saturday?

Yours,
Jack

She had a dinner date tonight with the mayor she had been pissed at. It was part of the whole making it up to her for making her pissed at him to begin with. It had been her suggestion but Jack seemed amiable enough with it. Surprisingly, Zee found herself agreeable to the idea as well. More than a little, too. Weird! Gods, she needed a better social life, apparently!

She wasn't nervous. Nope. Not one bit. That was so not the reason why she was running late. Nor was it because she couldn't decide what to wear. And her makeup wasn't giving her fits and looking bad so that she had to magically etch a sketch the whole thing and start over. Twice. Shadowcrest was becoming amused at her and was tempted to show her what she wanted to see in the mirror, but the last time it had done that to her and she found out she put mothballs everywhere. It hated mothballs!

Needless to say she wasn't ready when Jack showed up to pick her up. She had insisted on that instead of just meeting somewhere. The front door opened on its own when he got to the porch, inviting him to wait inside where a steaming cup of tea was waiting for him in the foyer.

She was feeling a little better after talking with Ollie. She still wasn't sure what was going to happen. They needed to talk to the League, have a vote. She was just glad her name would be off the table because yikes! Pressure!

She had to follow up with Jack, however. He was willing to talk with the League about working together with the City, but there was a delay. She didn't want him to think they'd changed their mind. She'd teleported his phone back to his office, but she wasn't entirely sure it made it there. Only one way to be sure! Good thing she remembered his number.

Zee had kept the rest of the visit with Dinah as light as possible, not wanting her friend to worry more than she already was. The reality was that after Dinah left she'd called Ollie almost in a panic. They needed to talk. Now. Immediately!

She wanted to call Jack, see how he was doing and make sure she didn't screw anything up with trying to help while he was sleeping, but until this matter was settled she wanted to hold off. She was going to have to tell him that the lineup had changed...and hopefully she'd be able to give him a name of the new League leader. Gods, that might actually be a while since they'd have to take a vote with the others.

Waiting was the hardest part so she puttered around Shadowcrest cleaning things even though she really didn't need to. Shadowcrest cleaned itself, but sometimes it was good to be able to do things herself. At this rate she'd have the whole downstairs of the manor dustless by her own physical actions.

Dinah hadn't meant to put off talking to Zatanna about resigning from the League. She really hadn't. However, it was a conversation that she wasn't looking forward to. She was a little bit worried that Zatanna would try to talk her out of it, and perhaps a bit worried that she wouldn't.

She knew it was the right decision, but it still hurt to make it all the same.

She had brought a peace offering of Chinese food and wine and was hoping for a bit of time with her friend on top of the unhappy conversation that they would have to have.

She'd told her friend that she was coming and now she knocked on the door to Shadowcrest and tried to ignore the feeling that the house was watching her with interest.

The League meeting had been a bit of a disaster. She felt guilty for arguing with Dean, but only a little bit. The guy was a serious dick. Zee was beginning to think all guys were dicks since that seemed like all she had met lately. Except for one, but...technical difficulties there. Bother! She'd need to make time to talk to Dinah about what happened. See what could be done for the hunt against Eric.

Meanwhile, she was placing surveillance cameras for Jensen. He'd given her a map, a bag of small cameras and thorough instructions on how to activate them that had been written in words with no more than two syllables. She had a feeling he'd tried for monosyllabic words but it was hard to replace "button". Of course he hadn't told her that some of the locations were five stories up on the side of a building! Apparently he had been counting on her teleportation working right because she'd found herself in free fall more than once, tagging a camera and turning it on before teleporting out of danger rapidly. She was SO going to punch Jensen in the face when she got back to the Clocktower!

The final camera was fortunately to be placed in a tree, and not that far up. It was just awkward since she had to put her weight on a low hanging branch and reach up to put the camera right where Jensen wanted it. "...c'mon you little bugger get on..there...ha!" She got the camera attached and activated the transmit switch then leaned back onto her feet. "Final-EE!" The branch gave a crack, then a snap as it broke away from under her. The next thing she knew she was back in free fall.

Once Dinah had had the chance to talk to Zee about everything, she called the Justice League together for a meeting. They needed the chance to pull together as a team now because they had all been going in opposite directions since that first fight with King Kong, and that was her fault more than anyone's as well. A good leader brought people together and didn't get bogged down in her own personal issues, letting the team possibly fall apart as she did.

She didn't know if the rest of them would still want her as a leader, but she knew that they would want to discuss what could be done about the vampire that could walk in the daylight. They could also take the meeting to discuss whether or not Dinah should remain as leader.

Fred was specifically left out of the meeting because of her sympathies for Eric. It was safer that way. Jen was left out as well, but that was simply because Dinah knew that she needed to talk to Jen privately about whether or not the CBI agent wanted to continue to risk her career by associating with the League. She had told everyone that she'd been able to talk to about the meeting that Dean would be there. It was a courtesy, since he wasn't officially a part of the team. But he had information that could help them and he had as much a right as anyone to help take down the vampire.

Not to mention that Dinah trusted him as much as she did any of her teammates.

She waited outside the Clocktower for Dean. She would let him in rather than give him his own code. Because while she trusted him, it wasn't fair to everyone else to give him access without the team clearing it. She was also waiting because she wanted to have the chance to make sure that he would be able to work with Zatanna. She thought that he was capable of it, but she didn't want there to be any personality clashes once they got into the meeting.

She was in her full costume with fishnets, leotard, jacket and all. She paced outside the tower in an attempt to keep warm because the weather was still a little bit too chilly to be comfortable.

It was time to get back to work. Dinah didn't think she'd ever really be ready to get back to life as usual without Jake, but she had to do it anyway. In fact, she was overdue. If Eric had hurt anyone else while she'd been taking time to herself, that was on her head. And Dean feeling like he had to camp outside the Manor to protect her from something that she damn well needed to be protecting herself from was also a problem.

But before she called a meeting with the League, she needed to talk to Zee. She hadn't been purpopsely dodging the mystic's calls, but she really hadn't gone out of her way to talk anyone. She just hadn't been ready.

She still wasn't ready, but she missed her friend.

And more than that, she would need to talk to Zee before she brought Dean in on the war council. There was a history of dislike and misunderstandings between the two and she needed to at least try to convince Zee to call a temporary truce. She would deal with Dean too if he threw around any hostilities while acting as a guest at a meeting with her team.

Even if they might not want her as leader after she'd gone AWOL on them and had dropped the ball on things, they were still her team after all.

She had left Zee a message to know she was coming and now she stood outside of Shadowcrest and knocked. The house always put her a little bit on edge, since she didn't ever know what to expect from the sentient house. Much like the sentient City, it made her a little bit nervous.

The streets were still behaving themselves. She still had to go food shopping, but she was lucky in that Shadowcrest cleaned itself. She did have to do laundry though. Her house drew the line there. And she could still teleport, but she wasn't doing that today. Today she was going for a walk.

She was worried about Dinah. Her friend and collegue in fishnets was really hurting. Zee wanted her help her as much as possible, but when you're that hurt sometimes the best help was to be left alone. She didn't want to pressure Dinah at all so she stuck to calling her to check in and dropping by if she didn't answer.

Having a leader for the League was another thought occupying her mind. And Lindsey. He was usually in the back of her mind somewhere, and thoughts of him never failed to make her smile, but not today. Unfortunately, he would have to take a back seat to the other things that demanded her attention. She'd call him, but she didn't want to take her problems there.

Needless to say she was a bit distracted on her stroll.

Dinah had given him a job to do. Regardless of what Jensen thought about the blood crap with the Nordic Vampire God this was way more important. He'd see it through. So he sat down with his laptop and sent out a generic message to everyone, then one more private.

To: Batdude(batman@jlc.com); DrHank(hmccoy@jlc.com); Fred (fredcutie@jlc.com); RobinHood(oliverqueen@jlc.com); MagicLegs(zatanna@jlc.com)

Hey guys,

FYI. Dinah's going on hiatus for a bit. Jake is missing. I'm running as many searches as I can and I'm coming up with nothing. No record. At all. As if he never existed. Consider her backup for now. Nothing less than Priority Apocalypse to draw her out for JL related stuff.

Any questions, let me know.

Jensen

He sighed after he hit Send then started composing an email to Fred.

To: Fred(fredcutie@jlc.com)

Hey

Regardless of what's going on personally, I wanted you to know she's hurting. Like bad. She called me by my first name. I'm going to check in on her once in a while under the guise of giving her updates on the search, but I'm not that kind of friend to her.

Thought you should know.

J

This time there was a heavier sigh as he hit Send. He ran a hand over his face then put the laptop to the side to return his attention to the searches.

There was only one thing Hatter was completely sure of. He wasn't in Wonderland.

He knew that place better than most anyone, perhaps even better than its royalty. The royals couldn't possibly know the underground the way he did, the back alleys and the traps and the outer forests. As a kid on the run, he'd learned the slums of the cities in and out, and as he grew into the smooth talking conman, he'd learned the city proper. And finally, as a member of the Resistance, he'd learned the secret hideouts, the places for people to go who wanted out from under the Queen's eye. This? Was definitely not Wonderland.

But it certainly wasn't what he'd been expecting when he'd gone through the Looking Glass, either. If this was Alice's New York, he wasn't sure he liked it. He'd read about it in the books in the Great Library, and he didn't recognize anything. Either it had changed drastically since the book had been published (as getting Oyster books to their world wasn't really on the agenda of the Queen), or he'd somehow ended up somewhere else. Occasionally he'd ask questions of passing people, but he was admittedly loathe to trust most people and had reverted to his old ways of hiding in alleys and stealing scraps of food where they could be found.

He was, possibly, one of the only people in the City who had no idea that it wasn't how it was supposed to be. It looked normal to him, and so he ran with it. After all, he'd dealt with some ridiculous and strange things in a city that shouldn't even have existed to the Oysters. Why would this place be any different?

Still. He'd come such a long way from the boy he'd been, always hiding, always on the run, never using a 'real' name. He had to suck it up and deal with this. If he was in the wrong place, he'd have to work on finding a way back. And he wouldn't know if he didn't get out there. When he found himself in front of the library, he felt a little better. Books were easy to get answers from, right? They'd never let him down before. He'd just head in there. Easier than putting his trust in a person, Oyster or otherwise.

Zee liked to read the personals and want ads over her morning coffee and cereal. What she saw almost made her choke. She recalled them telling her that the Joker had been around, but for some reason that hadn't sunken in as a reality until now. Oh, sure. The ad could be from any number of imposters, but she rather doubted it. There was just a certain...something...that carried through from that crazy bastard that no one could duplicate. She was pretty certain that Batman had seen this, but she had to be positive.

She called the tower and got Jensen to send a message to Batman. Their communications specialist was weird but he didn't goof around when it came to business. She appreciated that, and his discretion. She wanted to meet with Batman. Privately. She'd been avoiding him, but maybe with this gesture from the Joker it was time she faced her ghosts.

She told Jensen to give the address to a certain well known building with the instructions that she would be there. Waiting. Then went to change into her costume and head out. Without her teleportation to rely on this could get interesting getting there.

As it turned out, The City had a few tattoo parlors. Lindsey looked into all of them.

One had a reputation for doing shoddy work. Another had a reputation for tattooing people who came in drunk. There was a tattooist at one shop that had a huge portfolio of tribal work, and it could be seen at the shop's web site. A lot of the lines looked like the stuff Lindsey'd be getting redone. The man had himself a new client.

After a phone call describing what he wanted, and after a ten-minute consultation in person about price and amount of time the work would take, Lindsey had an appointment. By the end of the next day, he'd have himself a new set of protective tattoos. He'd be invisible to anything looking for him again, except for the naked eye. The Partners wouldn't see him. Neither would surveillance, though that was more of a funny perk than an outright objective.

He cancelled his afternoon appointments (there were only two, and they were for some easy stuff--small claims grade, easy crap) and headed out to City Ink. When he arrived, a girl with orange and blue hair and a nose piercing that reminded him of a bull smiled at him and took his coat. She took out the drawings Lindsey'd given over the day before, nodded at them, and said she'd go get Ben.

Ben, the tribal tattooist, was a skinny kid of about 25, who weighed maybe a buck twenty if he was lucky. He had stretched-out ear lobes and a hole in his chin Lindsey didn't understand, and a shaved head, as well as sleeve tattoos and a tattoo that stretched from the back of his neck to the top of his skull. He was wearing a wife-beater undershirt and pants that kept falling down slightly because he was so skinny.

"Okay. I'm gonna go set up my workstation. You want a water, or anything? We got some cookies Shauna made, too."

The orange-and-blue-headed bull girl grinned.

Dinah still hadn't quite forgiven herself for the issues caused with the mayor and the Justice League. She should have talked to him first. Come to that, she should have handled her first outing as leader better. They'd been floundering until Batman's subtle but firm reminder that she had to take control of the situation.

She was taking advantage of the gym facilities that were set up in the basement of the Clock Tower. She was doing a number on the punching bag, taking out her frustrations on it. Though she wasn't a large woman, she could hit awfully hard so the bag was creaking on its hinges as she unleashed a barrage of punches.

There might have been other, more personal, frustrations in there but for now she was just focused on the reassurance of being able to hit something.

After leaving Jack's office Zatanna was really not in the mood to go home. What she was really in the mood for was to pick a fight and beat the snot out of something, but her good sense told her that she should settle for a strong drink. So instead of having the taxi drive her home to Shadowcrest or the Clocktower she directed him to take her to Caritas.

She reminded herself to tip the cab driver well regardless of her temper so that she'd stay on the punctual side of the City's transportation then huffed her way into Lorne's bar. It was a tad early in the day to be drinking, early afternoon to be precise, but there she was grabbing a shadowed corner at the bar for her very own and ordering a shot of vodka with a Long Island Ice Tea chaser.