The Universe's Mixer

River padded to the bedroom window on bare feet and pulled back a purple curtain with a motion far too graceful to be believed in any one else.

As she watched, the building across the street waivered, then sort of imploded and grew back slowly, out of the ground, like a plant on Miracle Grow. Her eyes went wide and dark and shiney, and there were not, by far, enough Mandarin curses for this.

She bounded down the stairs, past Alice Liddell's door and outside, not really sure where she was going.

Everything in the City was a silent scream. She clapped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes, standing in the middle of the street and almost getting hit by a taxi driven by a cabbie who stopped to gawk at the rearranging cityscape to his left.

Amidst the cries in her mind, and knowing for sure now, beyond anything reasonable, that there was no making sense of this, River heard one train of thought, loud and clear and steady, like a metronome.

And she made her way toward it, navigating around the buildings that waxed and waned and fluxed, calculating, as she went, the odds of one shooting her up into the sky like a star in reverse, should she step down in the wrong spot.

When she found the man she was looking for--not, she mused to herself with a smile, her brother or her sweetheart, not this time--she tapped him gingerly on the shoulder.

"Is it roaring in your head, too?" River asked, eyes looking up at the skyscraper across the street that suddenly ceased existing. She smiled, then, a big gentle smile for the man that had made things in her head less like a car crash and more like a working consciousness.

The Pearl had moved.

The Pearl was no longer in the Swamp. Or. Wait. Jack couldn't be sure. He'd sat cowered under the window in his captain's quarters, fingers on the window sill, and periodically pulled himself up to peek out of it.

When last he'd seen it, The Black Pearl had been happily moored in the bay. Which Jack could not explain. He'd yelled for Zoe when he started to notice the changes, and asked her if she had any idea 'why the world was goingk all manner of bendy-like.'

Zoe had not had any idea.

Running a hand through dark hair, Jack stood in the middle of the City, near where he knew there had been a fountain or a monument of some kind. It was notably, as it were, absent. He scratched his head.

He withdrew the compass from his pocket and set his jaw, sighing. Ah. Ah ha. The needle pointed to his right.

"Tha's interesting," Jack said, smirking. "Tha's very interesting."

Jack went right.