The Universe's Mixer

The invitations started raining on The City's citizens at half past 11 on the morning of March 31st. In standard City style, the things were addressed to each person specifically -- and nigh unavoidable. Dressed in black curlicues and elegant script, the parchment invitations heralded the black-tie Magical Springtime Masquerade, where wishes would be granted -- for that very night, 7:00 sharp. No R.S.V.P. necessary, it promised, and fine script at the bottom also advised that the City had taken the liberty of stocking the wardrobes of its citizens with masquerade-appropriate fineries, gratis. From all appearances, it looked like the City was ready to host a grand affair.

And grand indeed it was. Just a block north of the Clock Tower, the City Opera House threw open its doors at exactly 7 p.m. Red carpet rolled down the grand marble steps. Warm candlelight beckoned with gentle, clinging fingers to those in the chilly spring night air, and the merry tinkling of crystal glasses and laughter from the Grand Foyer welcomed with warmth in even greater degrees.

As guests arrived, tuxedoed gentlemen stationed at the doors accepted invitations with one hand and passed host gifts with the other. Each host gift, elegantly tucked away in a bag emblazoned with the guest's name, included two items: the first was either a masque, a ring, or a hat matching the attire of the guest, and the second was a small box without seams, hinges, locks or opening of any sort. Everyone seemed to have received this second gift, and everyone also received the same note attached to it: "For your enjoyment between 12:01 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. April 1st"

The night was full and bright, and there was plenty of time yet to ponder the mysteries of that small gift box. For now, the party began in full force, with plenty of wine, music, and merriment. And as the guests began to don their party favors, each discovered something else...

Yes, it was going to be an excellent party indeed!

Logan approached Veronica's apartment building with caution, halfway expecting it to jump out of the way on him. He still hadn't quite wrapped his head around how the City worked or the fact that he seemed to keep forgetting where things were. He would think a restaurant, say, was on one street and then be completely unable to find it until he would run into it halfway across town.

None of it fit, and adding to that confusion were the now-healing puncture wounds on his neck and the strange woman in the park. He'd thought about things more, and it didn't quite make sense that Veronica would set up a 'temptation scenario' when they'd just gotten back together. Then again, he knew that Veronica's trust issues ran deep and perhaps... Logan sighed as he felt his mind pulled into the circular reasoning yet again. Something about 'Red' was off, and more than just someone playing a part.

The best way to find out what had happened with Red and most likely even get some ideas about what might have caused puncture marks on his neck without his remembering anything was to just suck it up and ask Veronica.

So, he stood outside the door to her apartment, pondering over the buzzer system. His eyes found the button for 'V. Mars' almost instantaneously, but he couldn't quite bring himself to push it. Visiting her unannounced was intimidating in itself, but doing so when he was weighed down with questions that he wasn't sure he wanted the answers for was even worse.

Veronica sipped loudly at her frothy coffee drink. She had her laptop open, and was looking through job listings.

She had web sites open for the City's police department, and something about a place called Angel Investigations...

She sipped again thoughtfully.

Did she want to try to be a part of the FBI, here? She thought so. She could restart her dad's business, but if these Angel people were already doing that, would she end up looking for lost dogs?

The coffee shop was pretty quiet, so when the door opened, Veronica's head turned toward it to see who was coming in.

Every morning, Veronica read the paper. Some mornings it happened later than others, but it always happened. She simply had to be informed to do her job. And this morning... this morning, when she got to the personals (a favorite with her and her Dad, and always entertaining or heartbreaking), Veronica had dropped her newly-purchased coffee on the pavement:


Former playboy turned one-woman man seeking that woman. She's tiny, blonde, sometimes annoying, stubborn, headstrong, too smart for her own good. Smells of marshmallows and promises. If you're here, please call ♥221166


After responding to the personal ad that she knew was directed at her, Veronica went over to the newspaper office, her heart thudding in her throat.

Logan.
( Logan was here. )

Fangtasia aside, Veronica was adjusting to the City reasonably well.

She'd found a key in her pocket she didn't recognize, but it was attached to her other keys--including the key to her room in Quantico. With a little bit of work, and a few phone calls, she'd found the building it belonged to.

It was an apartment building.

She looked at the mailboxes and call buttons, searching for her name. And sure enough, it was there. V. MARS 423. A dark haired girl with huge eyes had smiled at her. She must be a neighbor, Veronica figured.

She'd gone up to the fourth floor, found 423, and keyed the lock.

And gasped.

The bedroom was half her room in Neptune, and half her room in Quantico. The bed was her bed at home. Her closet had her clothes she'd taken for the internship.

And the living room looked like the waiting room from her Dad's office. There was even a stained-glass window.

Veronica put her bag down and sat down hard on the couch, looking around. She half expected Backup to come running in, or her dad to ask her to file something. The filing cabinet that'd belonged to her during high school was there--next to what looked exactly like her desk.

She thought of something, and her hand covered her mouth.

Getting up, Veronica went back to the closet and opened the door again.

The gear that came with the internship was there. There was an FBI sweatshirt, all of her reports and books were on the floor in a box, and... the gun they'd given her was in the box, too.

Veronica closed the closet door and put her back on it, then slid down the wall and sat there. She felt like crying. It was nice to know what the City expected of her--and to know it was what she wanted for herself, too, to continue down the road to becoming Agent Mars, instead of just Veronica Mars, PI. She had to decide what to do-- to go to the City's law enforcement offices, open her own investigation business...

"I wish you were here," she said, to no one in particular.

Eric looked around the bar. Appearance wise, it was exactly how he wanted it. Everything was in it's place. The location, however, was still bothering him. He hadn't even really left to explore at all, so he had no idea what was out there. He'd decided that the best way to get to know the people was to draw them in. So he'd had the posters put up by one of the stupid girls who had come to work for him.

He'd thought the twit human he'd had before was bad. The ones, other than George, who had come to find work with him had proven to be no better than goldfish. They had wide, sparkly eyes and ridiculously puckered lips and seemed to drift in circles until he told them specifically what they should be doing. It was obnoxious. He hated all of them. But he couldn't open the bar until he had a staff, and unfortunately, they were the best he could find on short notice. He wasn't willing to put off opening for too long. He needed something to do. Something to keep his mind from stewing about the strange things he'd discovered. Such as - apparently they didn't need deliveries. Every day the bar was refreshed with product. The fact that things around his bar seemed to change on the outside. The store that was across the way one day was not the store that was across the way the next.

At this point, he just needed distraction. Distraction and a way to meet people. Both of which the bar was good at.

Right at ten sharp, he unlocked the front door and placed one of the girls outside as the greeter. He'd rather have had a vampire out there, but as he didn't know any here, he had to make due with what he had. It had caused him a brief amount of wonder, were there any other vampires in this place? He'd sensed nor smelled none since he'd been here, at least not close by. That was both disconcerting and rather interesting. Imagine, being the only vampire in a city. What he could do with that.

Eric returned to his throne at the back of the bar. The place he always sat when the doors opened. Through most of the night, as well. Ready for humans and vampires alike to present themselves to him. It was also the place with the best view of the entire club. There wasn't a corner he couldn't see into, save for the other rooms in back. Luckily he could hear well enough to know if there was anything undue going on back there.

The girls waited for their first customers. A couple danced lazily, joined by a handful of males, at various places scattered about the large open room. Some with poles, some just up on especially sturdy tables. Things he'd arranged for vampires to dance on, not normal humans. But what could he do?

There hadn’t been any warning that today was going to be any different form the days that had preceded it. He figured he’d wake up, do the sort of zombie, on some serious medication shuffle that he had spent the last however many days it was, doing. Then sleep. Wake up. Repeat. Except the doctor (or at least Eddie thought that it was a doctor, he had a white coat on, seemed like a doctor) after Eddie had greeted him with a “what’s up doc?” (however many days he’d been here -- that still hadn’t gotten old) had told Eddie he was free to go. Eddie (who was feeling more himself, more alert, more awake) had given the doctor a wary look and then took the doctor at his word.

He had no real plan except getting the hell out of here. He figured once he got out of this place, he’d figure out where exactly he was, and what exactly was going on. But first he had to get away from all these medication happy Doctors, and then once that was done he’d figure out exactly where he was, and how he was going to get to where he needed to go.

When his personal possessions had been returned to him, Eddie had taken back possession of Roland’s revolver, and quipped that maybe it wasn’t a great idea giving a person who had just been in a asylum a weapon. Even as he “joked” about that, he had tightened his grip on the revolver, well aware that if they had tried to take it back there was going to be an issue. The person who was handing over his personal effects just gave Eddie a blank look, and told him that he was free to go.

So go he did. Right out the door, and standing there on an unfamiliar street Eddie glanced around.

“Now what?”

He was wearing a scarf.

It was a scarf that he'd been wearing the whole time he'd been here. It seemed wrong. He was pretty sure that he wasn't a scarf kind of guy. But he couldn't really recall much. His world was hazy in his memory. There were some really big things that kept popping into his brain, but he wasn't sure about them.

He kept thinking that he was God. But he had no abilities. No powers. But he was so sure that there had been something like that in his life. That he'd been able to do things and help people. He had this very watery memory of some hideously shaped thing, that he was the hideously shaped thing as well as it being an entity in and of itself. When he mumbled these thoughts at the nurses and doctors, they only smiled at him. The kind of smile that made him feel like a child. Like they were humoring him. It made him angry, but he couldn't really get angry enough to do or say anything about it. It was a strange, passing sort of anger.

And the goddamned scarf. Most of the time, he just sort of ignored it. It was plain black. It was soft. It hung around his neck in a single loop, both tails over his chest. It wasn't a particularly significant scarf, he didn't think. But when he tried to take it off, he couldn't. It just wouldn't come off. Sometimes as he was doing it, he forgot what he was doing. Other times, he would tug and tug and tug and nothing would get it to loosen. The only time this was really annoying was when he went to shower. The orderlies never said anything about it, that he seemed to want to never take this scarf off, but he had a feeling it wasn't normal to do that. To shower in a scarf.

He'd heard them once, actually, when they thought he wasn't near, they'd said "The guy thinks he's God and won't take that scarf off even when he showers. Why do you think he's in here?"

Jesse was allowed to wander around with the others now. Before he hadn't been. He couldn't be sure what changed, but he was glad to be out of the room, glad to be out of the restraints. He remembered those. He remembered how aggravating it was and how helpless he'd felt. They were gone now. Nobody put them on him anymore, even when he was in his room.

Right now he was on his way to the commons. They had a television in there. It was more often than not on a channel that played a lot of cartoons. He liked that. He liked when the lady came around with the snack cart, too, and he got to have crackers and juice. Or sometimes, every once in a while, cookies and milk. Those were really good days.

Simon had gone home happy, or content. He'd had a few good days at work; he'd spent a nice evening at Jennifer's, and it looked as if he might be doing something right for a change. Hell, the watch dog nurse assigned to him even seemed to be on the upswing when it came to moods. So, after saving a few lives, helping deliver a baby or two, even reassuring some poor kid that, no, he was not going to go blind after enjoying...personal time - very awkward discussion that one, and Simon did have to wonder if that rule applied in the City - the good Doctor Tam went home in a very decent mood. He didn't even mind the rather ridiculous people around him; there were couples galore, and they were certainly affectionate. He even thought he saw someone who looked a lot like Jennifer making out with some other woman, but then it couldn't be Jennifer.

It looked like even the doorman was having a happy, loving day because the man was busy getting cozy with Mrs. Applebottom, the poodle-happy octogenarian on the 3rd floor. Strange, but Simon wasn't going to comment; he wasn't going to think to hard about it. He was going to get in the elevator and ride to his apartment; then he was going to call Jennifer to see if she wanted to have dinner. They were going to have an actual dinner. That had been the plan anyway.

Instead, the City in the form of one majorly ugly Cupid decided to step in. Or fly in as the case may be. Dr. Tam was certainly hit by the arrow, but the elevator doors closed before Simon could see who hit him. When he tried finding whatever it was, nothing presented itself. He shrugged and waited for the elevator to start moving. He had pushed the right floor button, right?

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.