The Universe's Mixer

He felt ... kind of uncomfortable. He felt like he had fallen asleep in his van, and was just waking up after a night of sleeping in a vehicle that was meant for driving, and not meant for sleeping in. Cracking open an eye, Oz surveyed his van and frowned as he struggled up to a sitting position.

A quick check in the rear view mirror showed him -- himself. Dressed in what he considered his “Mexico” clothes, and not the asylum uniform that he had gone to sleep in. Or that he had thought he had gone to sleep in.

"Weird." Oz told the van. "Really weird." He turned around in his seat and checked behind him, his guitar was there, the clothes he had had with him on his Mexico adventure. Which begged the question -- was he back in Mexico? Had he had some sort of dream?

A glance out the window of the van showed an unfamiliar cityscape that was very not Mexico looking.

He didn’t feel .. panic. Not quite. But he did feel the wolf, just sort of nosing around the edges of his consciousness. The wolf was not a supper happy camper at the moment, and hey, Oz didn’t blame him, Oz himself was feeling a bit out of sorts himself. And deep, deep, deep down, he was almost glad to feel the wolf was back. He didn’t like the beast, but at least it meant whatever medicine he had been on was out of his system.

Spying the keys in the ignition of the van, he turned the vehicle on. Time to go exploring and see if he could find some answers.

He missed his guitar, he missed his guitar a lot. In fact at the moment Oz was sitting on a bench in the hallway and moving his fingers like he was playing chords. Yes, it was an imaginary guitar, that he was playing, but he wanted to do something, and acting like he was playing an imaginary guitar was doing something. And focusing on moving his fingers over those imaginary chords more or less kept him from thinking about last night.

Last night he had tried to get the wolf to come out and hadn't been able to. There was irony there, Oz could acknowledge that. Whatever they had him on here, it was keeping the wolf very much at bay. To think, he had traveled all the way to Tibet to learn the basics of being able to keep the beast inside him under wraps, and all it took was some sort of cocktail of drugs. Who knew. Or maybe he should have guessed, because the wolf could be tranquilized, so it wasn't like modern medicine didn't have an effect on it.

Sitting on the bench, Oz glanced up and looked around. He wasn't sure if he was supposed to be out here, or if this was some sort of loitering. But the bench had been in the hall, and what were benches for if not to be sat upon? So when he had wandered out of his room and down the hall and seen the bench, he had decided to sit. The scenery hadn't changed that much from what he saw in his room, but it was nice to get out of the room he had been spending his time in.

But right, time to focus on the imaginary chords on his imaginary guitar. The nice thing about playing an imaginary guitar was that he could nail that imaginary E flat, diminished ninth chord.

There was weird, Weird, and Sunnydale Weird -- and Oz tended to roll with all of the forms of weird that the universe threw at him in the same way. He'd think about what had just happened, re-arrange the way he looked at reality a bit if need be (often the explanation that something Sunnydale Weird was going on made things make a lot more sense) and then nod and sometimes say; "oh" or "I see." or "well that makes things make more sense." He rarely said this last one -- figuring in most cases that his "oh," or "I see" covered all that.

So when he woke up in a strange room, wearing strange clothes, his firs reaction had been ... "oh.".

He had been in Mexico. And now -- he wasn't sure.

So. When the going got tough, Oz tended to take off. But the door to the room he had found himself in was locked ... which was problematic. Memories of the Initiative were rather fresh in Oz's mind, and he had almost expected thinking that about that would make the wolf break out of the cage that Oz worked so hard at keeping it in -- so Oz did what he thought was best.

He sat down on the floor,and worked really hard at thinking calm thoughts, and on meditating. (He wasn't sure where he was. And he figured the wolf might be helpful in getting out of here -- but the thing with he wolf was, that once it was let out it was hard to rein it back in, until it was ready). So for now -- it was time to mediate.

Elizabeth didn't know why everything was pink and red, she didn't understand all the flower carts and balloons. She just knew that there was a lot of music playing, and all of it sounded a bit too happy for her. She stopped in a store to get something to drink and came out with a metal can of some sort. Painted in colors.. but it wasn't paint. She couldn't just scrape it off. She was playing with it, rolling it between her hands as she walked up to the street corner.

She could hear the liquid inside of the can. But how did you get it out? There was nothing just to press on to open it. She supposed she could smack it hard with her sword, but she didn't want to spill the liquid. Co-la. Cola. The man in the store had said it was good. Sweet even. She had no idea why she wanted sweet, maybe all that rum had been getting to her head lately. Still this metal can had the liquid, the cola, trapped inside. Elizabeth shook it a little. Nothing came out.

Fine.

Elizabeth set the can of cola on the ground and unsheathed her cutlass. "You are going to come out co-la, one way or another." She pulled her sword over her head and lined up with the can.

It was going to surrender it's liquid goodness to her. She wasn't King of the Pirates for nothing.

Xanadu missed Inara. The seer started to suspect that either the companion died in the plague or that The City cast her back into the unknown. When asking the runes the only reply Xanadu received was lost. Sometimes even the renown le Madame de Xanadu, adviser to the rich and unfortunate, lacked definitive answers.

Regardless, inventory was painstakingly difficult. Everything had to be done slowly and by touch. Perhaps if she hadn't been so eager to send the grumpy one away, she might have had him work off the damage he'd done to the door. Already she was surprised to find a bill of an unknown denomination in place of a jar once containing troll teeth. She sighed.

A mundane looking Help Wanted sign made of bright orange block print on a black background remained taped to the front window by the door.

There's a room filled with 500 rare and expensive birds. They all need to be caged, individually, and carefully. No feather must be out of place. No bird harmed. Magic doesn't work on them. There are perches high in the room that the birds can get to easily, and the birds themselves have rather sharp beaks.

One problem with being a reaper was that darned metabolism. Getting drunk wasn't terribly difficult if she followed enough shots one after another, but staying drunk for more than thirty minutes was something else entirely. It required either spending lots of money or the kindness of strangers. Since George wasn't the sort of person to flirt, or attract the sort of attention she would have despised in the first place, she found herself out of money and alcohol very quickly.

Her head started to ache.

"Water please."

George slapped her hand on the bar twice before taking her clear plastic cup and finding a moldy couch to sit on. One eye squeezed shut as a band on stage began to warm up. The crowd (many of them covered with fresh marks and scars of the recent undead epidemic) started wail and shout. If any of them recognized George as the girl who cured them, no one acted on it. That suited the reaper just fine.

He hadn't done a whole lot since he'd been overcome by the zombies. They'd caught up to him, and he'd done everything he could to keep their attention on him, and away from Sweeney, for as long as he could manage. They'd overtaken him and started biting. Emotion might have been foreign to him, but physical pain was not. It was possibly the only time in his life that he wished he was less human.

Of course, it wasn't long before he got his wish.

The infection ran it's course in a matter of hours. He'd hidden himself in hopes that he could avoid further bites. He felt he'd given enough flesh to the zombies. There hadn't been a whole lot he could do to make himself comfortable. The idea of blowing his own head off crossed through his mind more than once. Of course, he didn't have a gun, and by that point, didn't have the energy to get up and find one.

So Dexter Morgan died.

When he rose, he wasn't all the way absent like he'd seen the other zombies be. Mindless flesh eaters massing on one victim at a time. Thousands of teeth gnashing and gnawing. He had more. Perhaps it was the Dark Passenger that made it possible, but he was still thinking on a very limited basis. He knew that he was fundamentally different. He couldn't reach the higher brain function that he'd had before - that he knew he'd been capable of (that memory was fading quickly anyway), but he could still think. He knew there was food out there. And he knew he could hunt it better than the others. He knew that a group wasn't the best way to go about it. Solitary feeding would produce more food for him.

He was wandering the street, still slow, still incapable of reflexive movement in any sort of timely manner - the bird flying into his face and his painfully slow reaction to it attested to that - the only thing he had was determination. A will to feed himself. To find his own way.

For all the purpose in his movements and choices, it was a little like running around as a chicken would with it's head cut off. He didn't stay still for long, and he was constantly going back and forth to check for people. There were key individuals that he felt he needed to look out for. Simon, because he needed to talk to the other doctor about this infestation. And River. Because he needed to be with her, and be sure that she was alright.

But no matter where he went, neither one was there.

Hannibal needed to rest, and he knew it. If he was going to do any good, he needed to sleep. He also needed to eat. He was running his body ragged.

He'd just left the hospital for the last time. He was going to hole himself up in River's apartment and stay there until she turned up. Simon hadn't been in the office. The monkey had looked fairly confused and slightly manic. There was nothing left for him to do but leave a note and hope that Simon found it.

Simon,

The last syringe is in the locked cabinet. Before it can be used, it has to be duplicated. I'm going to find your sister. I'll be back once I know that she's safe. Get started as soon as you can.

-H

The key was hidden, but in a fairly obvious place. If Simon put a moment's thought into it, he'd be able to find it easily. Probably he should have stayed put, and started work on this thing himself. The sooner the better. But he couldn't stop worrying and thinking of River. She could take care of herself, but she had yet to encounter things like this in her life. And he hadn't either. They were both facing the unknown. He had to find her.

When he got to her building, there were hundreds of those things milling about in front of the doors. They hadn't been there on his last stop by. Hannibal wondered if he could get around them. Through them would have been a bad idea. Even he knew that much. He'd seen it. He started looking for a way to get to the door.

Perhaps he spent too long standing still, but the ones in front of him didn't seem to notice he was there. They hadn't moved. One or two looked at him, but they seemed to be ignoring him. It caused a sense of untrue safety. He didn't notice the one behind him. The one that had noticed. They all smelled so horrible, that even his heightened senses couldn't pick up the difference from one rotting corpse from another.

It bit into his shoulder. Wrapping it's lanky dead arms around him in a pseudo bear hug. Hannibal managed to break free, leaving a shred of flesh behind. He looked at the thing that had tried to eat him. The others began to take notice. The scent of fresh blood filling the air.

Hannibal ran until he found a place to duck into.