The Universe's Mixer

Barbara loosened the scarf around her neck slightly as she left the library. It wasn't as cold outside as it had been when she had come into work, and between the sweater, the jacket and the pea-coat, she was more than warm enough. The walk to her father's place (yes, Barbara still lived at home at almost-twenty-one) was less than ten minutes long, so she didn't bother taking a layer off. Barbara wondered idly whether her father, deeming it unlikely as it was only six o'clock, and he had three underworld cases to supervise. She felt a little guilty being happy about the Commissioner being at work late, but it was the perfect time for her to go help Bruce Wayne as Batgirl.

She was too preoccupied with imagining possibilities for what she'd be doing tonight to notice the slight shift in the air around her. A gust caught her from behind, blowing her long ponytail forward and around her face. A light in one of the windows of the apartments next to her caught her eye. She had walked this street twice a day everyday for the last three years, but she had never noticed that odd orange light, or the arches around those windows, or the molding between floors.

Wait a minute. Where was she? This wasn't the way she usually went home. Barbara wasn't the type to get lost no matter how distracted she got, so being in unfamiliar territory, no matter how subtle, was starting to weird her out. She decided to walk to the street corner and read the sign, just so she could get a better grip on where she was. Impatient to find her bearings, Barbara half-jogged to the street corner, only to find that there were no street signs. To make things worse, none of the other buildings around her looked familiar either.

ooc: takes place before dick's encounter with babs

With the scavenger hunt finally over, not all loose ends were tied. There was still the matter of a certain cat. Backpack over her shoulder, the crutches were looped behind her back and between the pack's straps to free her arms for holding Dick in one and the box of his effects with the cursed watch in the other. The weight wasn't a problem but from afar she looked like a pack horse.

Buffy walked until they came across a City rarity: suburbia. The houses were all painted with non-offensive pastel and beige colors, and nearly every three lots one could see the same layout repeated, sometimes mirrored. Buffy walked into a home with a pleasant white picket fence on 1630 Revello Drive. It was nice that The City had seen to keeping everything the same, right down to her street address. The blonde entered through a front door that had been replaced on multiple occasions.

"Okay, I'll put your stuff in one of the bedrooms and then we can go research mode?"

For a vampire slayer, her home was shockingly normal. There were no obvious weapons or relics in the house. The Watcher's Journals and magical texts that she did have were so plain that they resembled the sort of mundane, decorative encyclopedias people kept on shelves in their living rooms and hallways. There were pictures in frames of Buffy with her mother and younger sister, and of Buffy with her high school friends. From the foyer Buffy walked up a short flight of carpeted stairs.

All three bedrooms were located on the second level. Buffy carried Dick just a little further and brought him and his things into the master bedroom. Since her mother's death Buffy hadn't been able to let herself move into the larger space with the larger bed, but she also hated to see it empty. She gently dropped Dick onto the queen sized mattress and placed the mysterious backpack on the floor between the nightstand and bed frame.

The newspaper ad red like this: WANTED. Receptionist for private investigation firm. If interested please submit resume in person to the offices of Angel Investigations. In a city where the roads constantly shifted, no address was necessary. Unfortunately the pool of applicants were reduced entirely to whomever The City decided to present.