The Universe's Mixer

Jennifer sat at her desk, staring at the mountain of paperwork that had overtaken it. There were two things that she was supposed to be working on and neither of them had anything to do with her actual job. Funny enough, none of her superiors seemed to care. They never told her to leave it at home, they never accused her of not doing her real work. They just let her do her own thing.

Which she didn't know if she should be disturbed about or not.

There didn't seem to be anything for her to be doing anyway.

Jesse Custer, whoever he was, was proving impossible to find. There was very little on record about him, which meant in her mind that he couldn't have been in The City for very long. Other residents seemed to have entire drawers to themselves. He didn't have a job. He didn't seem to have any kind of residence. There was a note about him living in a hotel room for a while, but then he apparently dropped off the face of that particular planet.

All the looking made her wonder why the guy had wanted Custer found. How could somebody that dangerous make no mark at all?

She was also supposed to be finding the guy who had killed everybody. That was also a dead end. And while it seemed like a logical conclusion that maybe they were one and the same, her gut told her otherwise. Her instincts told her that they were two different people, two separate problems.

Jennifer had been spending so much time with all of this that she had done nothing but work and go home for weeks. She'd never even gone to seek out Simon. Which was a real shame. She needed to do that.

She was going to do that, she decided suddenly.

Very soon.

Maybe if she stopped thinking about Custer and the murderer, something would happen. Some clue would pop out at her. Or maybe she'd just accidentally run into one of them. Hopefully it would be Custer and not the murderer.

Anger renewed toward her inability to function here fueled her toward her coffee pot. She would figure one of these problems out, damn it.

The park was becoming her favorite place to have lunch. It was right outside her building (she had no idea if it was always that, or just for her), and it was big and open. There were people to watch. Plus, well, it was outside. She'd found that in this place she really liked being outside. It was a lot different than where she'd come from. It was still a city, but not overcrowded, and not filled with ads.

Jennifer really really liked that there weren't many ads. That she could buy things without being slapped in the face with product endorsement. She also liked that she could buy things and they didn't cost her a lot of money. She'd taken to the novelty of buying a whole McDonald's meal for five dollars. And shoes for under fifty.

She was going to have a lot of shoes, if she stayed here for a long time.

Her sandwich wasn't particularly good today, but she was still eating it. She'd been brought up to not waste things, and couldn't bring herself to throw it out. It might have been good, really, but she wasn't particularly fond of tuna. She had no idea why she'd bought a tuna sandwich, and now that she thought about it, she was pretty certain she'd said turkey.

With a frown, Jen looked up. And spotted something she hadn't been expecting. A cat sauntering across her visual path. She wasn't sure she'd even seen a cat in the time she'd been here.

It gave her a bit of a thrill. A bit of childhood came back to her, in a way.

"Here kitty!" She called out, and thought enough to offer it her sandwich to lure it her way.

Hannibal sat over the monkey with his bottom lip sucked into his mouth. He was concentrating heavily on the project before him.

For a while, he'd forgotten about the monkey in the wake of all the deaths and trying to determine if he wanted to go after the killer himself, or let somebody else do it for him. He was sure that there were many out there just as upset by this as he'd been, with just enough ability to rectify the situation as he had.

In the end, he'd opted to leave it to others, and gone back to monkey experimentation.

He'd expected Simon to show up at first. Every day when the door opened, he'd listened to the footsteps and focused on the scent, thinking that it would be his cohort. After a few days, he'd given up.

Today, well, the unexpected happened, and the familiar walked through the door.

Hannibal pushed away from his current experiment to turn to Simon.

"Finally."