It's The End Of The World As We Know It

Eden had seen destruction before. Been the cause of it before...

Nothing like this.

It must have been days already, and she hadn't seen another soul. Just the lights. Now having seen the glimmer in the distance the night before, she was carefully picking her way across the desolate city towards them, now with a little more hope in finding other survivors.

She shrugged the pack she'd grabbed from a deserted outdoors store (no one was coming back to claim it, she was sure) more comfortably on her shoulders as she walked, keeping an eye out for anyone, or anything.

Far beyond the point of being fussy, here.

Jake and Bella had finally reached Boston, only to discover few survivors and a whole lot of the same chaos they'd left behind them on the road. They'd claimed an apartment for themselves -- finding spare keys in a kitchen cabinet, the first bit of real luck they'd had lately -- and had settled in to wait it out.

Which for them meant Bella flailing and Jacob prowling around, both as wolf and as human.

Now, though, Bella was upstairs taking a nap and -- after having left a note so she wouldn't worry -- Jacob was going through one of the first floor apartments for supplies. He'd left the apartment door open, partly to let anybody else know that someone was in there and partly so it'd be even easier to smell if someone was coming in.

So far, he'd found a lot of canned goods, which meant that food was pretty much taken care of. For the next week or two, anyway. Which meant moving on to the bedroom and people's personal things. The thought made Jacob shiver.

The Doctor has his head in an empty SUV, his glasses were back on and he was shiny the blue light of his Sonic at the on board G.P.S. panel. The car had a rear view camera...and without a doubt in the world...the video was temporarily stored in some kind of solid state memory built into the car. The Doctor was trying desperately to gain access to that memory...to see what happened when this mystery rift opened.

"Come on," he said tapping the side of the screwdriver.

The small blue light flickered, a tiny pulsing sound came from the Doctor's prized possession. He held it to his ear, a quizzical look on his face. He turned the tip just a little, then took his hand away, the sound increasing in volume.

"That's a power signal," he looked around. "A rift like this...would've knocked out any power source."

He held the Sonic Screwdriver level and began turning around on the spot. The beeping increased when he was facing southward. He took of his specs and crammed them in his pocket, eyes wide as ever. He ran off towards the south.

Every so often the Doctor would glance at a street sign, none of them caught his eye...until about three minutes into his spring. M.I.T Campus; the sign read. He stopped and looked to the sign and then up the street.

On the horizon (where the Doctor assumed M.I.T was) there was a slight haze of light hovering in the sky. He smiled and took off.

"Other survivors," he shouted at the top of his lungs out of sheer joy.

It was time for them to go back home. To their home where they felt safe and could get a break from all of the intrigue and pageantry of the courts. Meredith wanted to go home and be with her men, her guards, and pretend that life was safe and normal.

At least normal until the next attack occured or something else from their history got released to wreack havok on them or someone else.

They were halfway to the airport when they all spotted the black funnels of magic that were making their path of destruction towards them.

"Galen!" Doyle roared. "Stop the car. We have to get out of the car."

Galen did as he was ordered and Meredith and her Ravens quickly exited the vehicle. They had all seen tornados before, but these were different. These were full of magic and power that was darker than they felt in a long time.

"Meredith, head to the trees," Rhys suggested. "We need to get you to safety."

"I'm not leaving you," she argued.

"Oh yes you are," Doyle and Frost said at the same time, staring her down. "We wil not take the chance with your safety, Merry," Doyle said smothly.

She steped close to hug them broth, feling their arms enveloping her like they could protect her from what was coming.

"Run," Frost whispered. "Run Merry and don't look back."

Merry nodded and back away, then turned to run.

Unfortunately when she did that, one of the funnels of power descended down upon her and pulled her in. They heard her scream, and then she screamed again.

Somehow, and please god, don't ask them how, Gwen and Owen had managed to get the Rift to trigger a power surge and the electricity in the school buildings came back on. The power kept flickering, but so far, it had stayed on -- much to their relief.

Unfortunately, this burst of electricity had done nothing to help phone lines or anything like that.

As darkness descended agin for another night in Boston, the lights at MIT remained on -- attracting the attention of any one in the area.

Inside the basement lab, Gwen was leaning against the wall, watching as the energy from the Rift fluctuated. Owen was sitting on the leather couch, and she thought he might have fallen asleep. This didn't surprise her as they had been trying to take shifts around the clock to keep an eye on the damn thing and see if they could harness the energy of it somehow.

It had been a very long couple of weeks and Gwen wasn't sure how long it would be before she and Owen collapsed from exhaustion. They didn't dare sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time because who knew what would happen. Leaving the Rift unattended was dangerous, they both knew this.



[[OOC:

1) Yay power! Yes, the power is currently on at MIT. However, this is, alas, a temporary thing. The power will remain on for three days and then the power will go off again.

2) This post also doubles as a meet-up as requested for Jack to meet up with his team.

3) This post can also be for Stargate people and/or the Doctor to make contact with Torchwood

4) Did I forget anything?]]

A small white light appeared approximately seven feet off the ground. The metallic whir of the TARDIS's engines became louder and louder, the large blue box materializing from nothingness on the desolate Boston street. The engine thunked once more and the small box went quiet.

Inside the Control Room the Doctor was walking around the large circular panel, flicking a switch and pushing a button there. He was dressed in a full blue suit with small red pinstripes and red trainers. Just as he went to hit the final button, the monitor jutting out from the center column of the TARDIS flashed red and beep several times. It was an alert of some kind.

The Doctor sprung into action, taking out his glasses and spinning the screen to face him.

"A rift," he quirked his eyebrow. "A rift being contained by..."

His eyes went wide and punched a few buttons on the panel in front of him.

"A rift this size could take out the planet," he looked up, expecting too see Donna Noble, his previous companion. She wasn't there, then the Doctor realized he was talking to himself.

He took his specs off and ran to the doors of the TARDIS, grabbed his coat and stepped outside, on to an Earth unknown to him. He was surrounded by rubble,of a building he had never seen before. He looked around and realized that there was no more Boston, and that something had seriously gone wrong if the rift destroyed an entire city.

The Doctor closed the blue wooden door of his spaceship and looked back to the ruins of the city.

"If there is a rift...Torchwood is bound to be here," he said to himself, then took off towards what was left of downtown Boston.

Buffy realized what she had to do. She turned and looked at her sister, her expression serene.

"Buffy ... no!" Dawn realized her sister's intentions.

"Dawnie, I have to."

"No!"

"Listen to me. Please, there's not a lot of time, listen."

Buffy grabbed Dawn by the upper arms and talked to her, ignoring the tears that started to fall. Lightning crackled behind them.

She stroked the side of Dawn's face, then kissed her on the cheek. Dawn continued to cry.

Buffy turned and ran down the platform as Dawn stood there crying. Buffy dove off the end of the platform and into the portal.

... and found herself standing in front of a half-destroyed brick building.

"I shouldn't be surprised that there is a library in hell."

Jo had set up housing for herself in one of the dorm rooms on the M.I.T. campus and was currently out patroling the grounds near there -- and near the basement lab wih that weird glowing thing that the two science people were working with. They had had a few cases of people trying to loot or mess with them and therefore they decided that the should take turns keeping watch to make sure they weren't caught off guard. She had no issues believing that there were good guys and bad guys - human and not human.

It seems that whatever apocalypse had happened didn't change things when it came to good and evil. The good guys were still trying to survive -- and the bad guys were still doing their damnedest to make it even more difficult for them.

Shifting her gun at her side, Jo started to make another circle of the dorms.

At least this gave her something to do besides freaking out that she couldn't get any news about her mom or Bobby.

Jason had been in Boston for a few days now. Something in the city was making his skin crawl, and the feeling got worse the closer he got to the MIT campus. He figured that was where the problem was, so he settled in a apartment building close enough to see if anything big happened, but far enough away that he driven out of his mind by whatever it was.

He'd spent the time he was there securing the first two floors of the building, to keep out looters and strays. Then he'd wandered through the other apartments and stocked up on dry goods and dumped out anything that was spoiling or would spoil. He had at least managed to save some of the meat, setting it up to dry out for storing and later use.

Currently though, he was camped out on one of the second floor balconies facing MIT and what used to be a main street and a cooler full of Corona. No ice, but beer was beer.

She gutted the building, destroying the false iconography and producing true images with the aid of spray paint. She overturned desks like Jesus dealing with the moneylenders, until her righteous fury was sated.

She needed to attract a congregation.

It had taken time, but she had come up with a way to do so.

With hammer and nails, she had set upon her task. That night, she lit her work with the one thing she could: fire.

On the roof of the building, in six feet high letters of burning wood, one word shone in the darkness.

REPENT

Tadashi knew something was wrong even before Liric second guessed anything. That's when they left. She wasn't sure where they were going but Tadashi told her it was for the best. She trusted him more then the others, so when he said they needed to go? She went. She didn't question it. She just followed him wherever he took her.She was too strung out to really notice anything.

She rubbed her arms as she walked down a street, she didn't feel good, but that was obviously from the lack of drugs going into her system. Tadashi had gone out to do something and she didn't want to be by herself. He argued she had to eat and she argued that she wasn't hungry. Obviously he always won yes? Maybe, just maybe she could find a dealer somewhere around here? It was possible. Though it was looking pretty useless at the moment. She just needed that fix, anything was better then the sick feeling to her stomach and the shaking she was having. She wasn't thinking straight.

After almost two hours of just walking she finally gave in and leaned against a wall slinking against it with her eyes half closed. This was too much, the whole thing taking it's toll on her. This was supposed to be safe for her. He wanted to bring her there because it was safer. Idly, she ran her fingers over the track marks in her arms before letting her head fall back to rest against the wall. Eventually, Tadpole would either find her or she's manage to get home. She was guessing he found her first. Always sneaking up and appearing out of no where on her. He was good at that.

The SGC was actually a cheerful place to be these days. The Ori and Adria were gone. Teams were working on hunting down the last of the Ba'al clones. For the first time that he could remember, Daniel was able to just explore whatever world they ended up on.

As they made a final check of their gear in the gate room, Daniel joked with Cameron about taking a vacation somewhere warm and sandy. Of course, he meant someplace where he could work at some actual ruins, Cameron was probably thinking Daniel meant some tropical island type planet. Vala started talking about several marketplaces she knew that were on worlds that fit that description. Teal'c just smiled at them and started up the gate.

Perhaps if he had been paying more attention to the wormhole as he walked through with Vala, instead of good-naturedly bickering with her, he might have noticed the slight ripple and flash on the event horizon.

Jaenelle had felt the storm approaching long before she had seen it. The storm hadn't felt normal to her and the only thing that she could think of was that it was a witch storm sent to do Darkness knows what. She wasn't frightened, she had dealt with many witch storms in her young life.

She heard the winds and things crashing around them. She reached out a hand to grab Rose, and then her other hand wrapped around Daemon's wrist.

*Hold onto me* Witch commanded as she pushed her shields around them to protect them from the storm that seemed to even now be picking them up off the ground. The crashing of the storm and the lightning kept her from seeing what was happening, but she continued holding onto the ones that were trusting her to keep them safe.

She wasn't sure how long they were caught up in the storm, but the next thing she felt was that they were falling through the air. It was only when her back hit the ground that she managed to let go of Daemon and Rose's hands.

They'd gotten dumped on their asses in the middle of nowhere by a shiny portal and all Jacob wanted to do was blame that damn bloodsucker Edward. He'd caused enough pain and trouble for Bella, so why not this, too? But a few moments of semi-logical thought -- and making sure that Bella hadn't managed to trip over something and break her face -- brought him to the realization that this wasn't any vampire trick, this was something else entirely and something dangerous.

Which was why he and Bella were going down a street, trying car doors and hoping to find one with a spare key tucked in a visor or under a floor mat. They needed to raid a few stores and get some supplies, but transportation had to come first. There was no way they'd get anywhere without it.

They'd found the word "Boston" scribbled on a sidewalk, over and over again. Having no idea what was going on, Jacob had decided that they might as well head to Boson, check it out, and keep trying to reach anybody in Forks by phone.

If only they could find a damn car.

As a Starfleet officer Janeway had to be prepared for anything.

Of course in her line of work there would be challenges thrown at her that she simply could not have foreseen, being stranded several hundred thousand lightyears away from home in the Delta Quadrant was just one of these challenges.

Winding up on Earth in what appeared to be the past, while it wasn't as if she hadn't experienced that before, when some sort of apocalyptic catastrophe had occured was another.

The day had started out so normally, Janeway had been commanding the bridge and for once there wasn't some alien attack going on. It was just a quiet normal shift, as normal as it could be given the circumstances.

That probably should have been her first clue that something was going to happen, however normally there was an aforementioned alien attack that usually occurred.

Then out of nowhere a portal appeared on the bridge, Janeway had called a red alert as she yelled at Ops to find out what was going on while she struggled to keep herself from being sucked in. She vaguely heard Harry's answer being that he couldn't tell what it was and it was within a matter of minutes following that that she lost her grip and was pulled in.

After she picked herself up from the ground where the portal had thrown her out, Janeway looked around her surroundings as she tried to piece together what had happened.

"Janeway to transporter room," she said as she tapped her comm badge, maybe she could still be teleported back, when there was no response she tried another way, "Janeway to bridge," still nothing, "Janeway to sickbay," nothing again, "Janeway to Chakotay," she was starting to get the feeling that she wasn't going to be able to reach Voyager but she was determined to keep trying, "Janeway to Tuvok," after she went through trying to contact the entire Senior staff before trying a ship wide call to see if anyone could hear her she gave up.

Janeway sighed as she pulled out her tricorder, hoping that it would shed some light as to what the hell happened, she started walking in a direction but the readings were all over the place. She obviously wasn't going to get an answer that way.

Cole had been visiting Halliwell Manor when the portal opened. He was trying subtly to pull Phoebe upstairs for a "conjugal visit" as he paused from dodging bounty hunters, but she was embroiled in planning wedding details with Piper and Prue, both of whom made it clear they wanted nothing more than for him to leave. Phoebe tried to play peacemaker, telling him to wait and her sisters to stop glaring. Yes, her boyfriend was a demon, but he'd proven that he loved her and wouldn't harm her, right?

The portal opened in the middle of the living room. Cole knew what it was; he'd used similar things before, like when he went to the past to destroy the Halliwell line. But he had no idea what this particular one was for, so he immediately grabbed Phoebe, trying to stop her from getting pulled in. He could hear Prue and Piper shouting and calling for Leo as the portal drew both of them in.

He hit the ground hard when they emerged at the portal's other end, twisting just in time to take the brunt of the impact and cushion Phoebe with his body. Piper landed beside them, but he didn't see Prue anywhere.

Cole pushed himself up and helped Phoebe to her feet. After making sure Phoebe was OK, he immediately looked at Piper. "I didn't do it," he said.

Jason had never been one to put stock in fortune tellers. Seers, psychics, he'd met a few and they had been legit. But fortune tellers, like the ones that Jean-Claude hired to work at the Circus of the Damned, they were just glitz, glamour, maybe some intuitive skill, but fakes. He liked to play along with Giselle, even though he was pretty sure her license said 'Mary', because she had been fun in bed. So when she had pulled out the tarot cards the other day, he'd just smiled and waved at her, and let her comments go in one ear and out the other.

Right now though, he was wishing he had payed more attention to her. 'When it happens, you will go to Boston.'

'It' had been the bright flash of light that had knocked him on his ass while in the Apple store picking up a new iPhone. 'It' had done something, because he was in a nearly deserted city, where none of the clubs or the Circus seemed to exist. 'It' left him with a very bad feeling, because if he was the only shifter around, things were going to end up very bad.

( It never hurts to be prepared. )

It was nearly dawn by the time he had his pack together and was ready to head out. He was on his way out the door when he saw the bikes. He could get there a lot faster on a mountain bike than he would on foot. Besides, it wasn't like anyone was actually going to see him on the damn thing.

Sarah looked down at her stockpile. Too much, or too little? Shrugging, she began packing it into the backpack she'd brought with her into the store.

She had been running, almost on autopilot, since arriving in Boston. All those drills with John had paid off, and finding clothing and shelter had been relatively easy. (It helped that she wasn't worried about radiation or machines attacking.) The next day she'd set off to gather supplies, and begin to search out other survivors.

It was eerie walking through abandoned streets, around empty cars and past rubble. It was like every post-apocalyptic movie she and John had ever joked about, only worse. John was missing. She was marking store locations on a map she'd grabbed from the first gas station she'd come across, and this took her mind off her worries.

Now she hefted the backpack and slid it on. The spare clothing lay against her back, protecting it from the cans of food. She had yet to find a sports store to arm herself with weaponry, but that could come later. Right now she had to find any other people who were left. According to the Boston-area map, the museum was a few blocks away. Hopefully, any survivors would think to gather there.

Hopefully there would be other survivors.

She'd traveled, taking what vehicles she'd needed. She was no longer be a creature of divinity, but she still would do the divine will of God.

God's hand is what guided her to Boston, and what guided her to this building. She laughed when she read the sign. Standing on top of an abandoned car, she hurled small rocks at the windows.

"Where is your power now, you heathens and worshipers of false idols? God's wrath has shown itself to you, and you have fled your sinking ship like rats! Behold, in my hands I hold the punishment of old. If you wish the mercy of God, come here and cry out to him for forgiveness, and we shall see what his will demands. And when the vermin have fled, I shall consecrate this building, so it may become a proper temple of the Lord thy God. For he shall not forsake thee, not even in this time!"

Yes, she was yelling and preaching at the top of her lungs, regardless of anything was actually there to hear.

Gabriel did that. A lot.

Tamsin had been through a lot in her life -- powers activating at the age of twelve, going to Xavier's, dating John, leaving to become part of the Brotherhood, losing John to someone else -- but this? Took the effin' cake.

The portal or whatever it was that'd sucked her in had deposited her on a college campus. It'd taken her maybe five minutes to realize that it was MIT. But it was like a bizarro version of MIT. There was nobody there. Nobody. And she knew enough about MIT to know that there should've been people over all the place, especially in the middle of the afternoon.

She drew her gun, keeping it at her side as she moved through the campus. Maybe she was being overly cautious, but better that than dead.