The Universe's Mixer

Discontent paled in comparison to explain how Robin felt about suddenly being thrust from his home of merry old England and into the bowels of this nameless city. But it was not simply that he was displaced from all that was familiar. It was that this new range of land and dwellings were so completely alien to him that he did not know how to begin to make a mark for himself. So, after his untimely arrival and subsequent meeting of the Lost Boy, Robin kept to the woodland that seemed to border every edge of The City proper. True, it was not always bordering the same edges, as Robin had noted that the forest, itself, appeared to move (by some magic unknown to him.) But Robin soon learned how to remain within the tree coverings and avoid confrontation with those rock-solid roads and the blaring noises of fast-moving carriages (horseless and engulfing of the individuals on the inside.)

The technology was beyond him in knowledge and understanding. And though he was no fool when it came to books and learning, he knew when to yield to something beyond his own capacity. And figuring out The City was one of those things.
( So Robin did what he was best suited for. )

The late afternoon was balmy, even pleasant, but to Dick, who had been running, leaping, fighting and lifting the entire day, it was unbearably hot and sticky. The sun glared down on him as it started to sink, and he was actually missing his suit, which though dark, actually breathed well and used small, weightless chemical packs to regulate temperature. Dick hauled his single remaining crutch up off the ground and hooked it on the end of the fire escape, looking down as a clowder of cats streaked through the alley below, hissing to themselves as they bounded and twisted. "Always wanted to use 'clowder,' in a sentence," Dick commented to himself, tearing a piece of his shirt into a long stripe so he could bind the wound on his arm. This would probably only stop the bleeding at best; the bite was deep and ugly, courtesy of what he could have sworn was a raccoon.

His leg wasn't holding up all that well, and he was lucky that the dog he'd first come across that morning had decided to bite the crutch on his other side instead of his leg. He'd been helping people get to higher, safer ground all day, moving over the roofs as only he or one of his trained kind could; he'd managed to avoid getting bit right up until about ten minutes ago, and he was still cursing the mistake. He took in his breath in a long hiss as he tried to get the bleeding to stop, and looked around into the windows of the building behind him. He might have to break into one and find something to clean the wound with, or this was going to get ugly fast. "Wonder what a bunch of raccoons are called."

Nightwing knew what Shadowcrest looked like, and he didn't have as much trouble finding it as he thought. Zatanna's home was a large, looming mansion with as many windows as doors, once of those old Victorian looking things. When he'd first seen it years ago, it had suited Dick's idea of magicians with top hats and white gloves. He had since grown used to the house's magical quirks, like the way Zatanna would make a bathroom door redirect to an Italian cafe, or close one window since it was raining outside it when it was clear and sunny on the doorstep. He liked Zatanna, though they had never been best of friends; Dick wasn't a total idiot and every once and a while he got a vibe from Bruce that meant the two had a history. Not that he'd ever confirmed that. Prying information out of Bruce was an exercise better left to more important things than who his girlfriends were.

His little encounter with a length of alleyway (and a cute blonde, incidentally) meant his leg was throbbing, so he was careful when he dropped over the side of the roof and hung from an eve to peer through the plate glass. Dark. Hm. He swung to the next one, hooked a knee over a gargoyle, and tipped his chin. There it was, the study. "Just stay right there," he told the gargoyle. With an agile twist, he tapped on the glass. "Zatanna? Anyone home?"

Claire was glad that the whole snow ordeal was over. She didn't particularly like it, though without the experience she probably wouldn't have met Dexter, who seemed to be in a way just as fucked up as Claire herself was. She wondered if she'd see him around again. There was just something about him, Claire didn't know what, but he was different. He tried to hide it, but he was.

Just like Claire. Claire was different, and as much as she tried to hide it, she couldn't. But in this place, it seemed a lot of people were different, so maybe she would be okay here. She had just decided to take a walk, she didn't have much to worry about. What could harm an invincible girl? Maybe there were people here in this City that might need help. Claire wanted to help people, she suspected that she got that mostly from Peter. Nevertheless, people might need it and Claire was here to provide it if she could.

(For Bella, Veronica, Dick, Bruce B, Lee, Edward and Simon)


Making the snowman had been extremely fun, and Jeannie was very pleased to have met a new friend. She genuinely liked people, and the truth was, she was more than a little lonely. While she enjoyed meeting all the people that she had since coming to this place, not one of them had really stayed. There was no one that she saw regularly. While she liked her new master, it was not at all the same as having a human master who was always there. To talk to. To serve. To love.

But when the snow became too bad, it was no longer quite as fun. It became too difficult to hold a conversation. So reluctantly, Jeannie made her good-byes and watched as Liz disappeared into the growing storm.

For a bit, Jeannie wandered through the chilled and changed landscape. Here and there, she ran into people that needed a bit of help dealing with the ever-deepening snow. All of them received aid in some fashion or other. ( Except for the last man. )

Being a cat had to be an all-time low for Dick. (Alright, that wasn't true, there was the time when he was lying in a largish pool of his own blood and everybody thought he would be dead in minutes.) Being a cat that changed back to a man on the hour had to be even worse. For one thing, he couldn't go outside for very long. The snow was coming down in waves, and being a rather small, warm fuzzy animal one minute and then a rather large naked man the next meant snow was not the ideal environment for Dick.

Then there was the overwhelming urge to claw things. Literally, almost anything. Buffy walked across the room once and suddenly her ankles just had this... incredible appeal. He had to get them. So he sprang, sank his claws in... and she was rather upset with him for a while afterward. It was all very embarrassing.

Most of their research on the topic went nowhere. The watch couldn't have been older than a couple hundred years (considering when pocket watches were in vogue, likely later), but other than that, they had nothing. No idea where it was made, or why, or whether the spell on it had anything to do with the watch at all. Maybe some nut just picked it up and decided to practice making the owner a cat. Thought it was funny, or something.

Dick wished he could throw things. He put it on his list of things to do when he changed. He had a whole minute as a human, and he made a list of things to do once he got there. Throw something. Scratch the exact top of his head. Eat a piece of fruit.

One night, when Dick was at the point of suggesting they just smash the damn watch, the City must have decided this whole thing had run its course. The doorbell started ringing, and the City started dumping the magically inclined at Buffy's doorstep--probably so it wouldn't have to deal with Dick the Cat's irritated yowling.

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.

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.

Scavenger Hunt. Pair off. Each pair has to find:
- The tooth of a four fingered homeless man
- A unicorn's eyelash
- Blowfish venom
- A pocket watch
- Mittens

Zoe went home, but she didn't find him there. She thought of going to Serenity, but she didnt' want to see him. Or she did. She wanted to take back everything she did, but she knew she couldn't. There was no going back; there never was. She'd get over it; just like she'd gotten over everything in the past.

She got cleaned up, got dressed, and headed back out. Eventually she'd find Serenity, but for now, walking seemed like the best idea. One part of her wanted to be in the air, taking care of a ship. On the other hand, she was glad she was on the ground and could walk. Her body was sore; the bites on her arm..it could have been worse. She'd have to leave it bandaged for a while, but the doctor fixed it up well enough.

She looked at her arm again, remembering that she'd been bitten while shooting Jesse. It wasn't so much that she remembered shooting him, but that she was absent firepower. The City hadn't exactly returned it. How could she have forgotten it? What kind of idiot had she become to just leave weapons lying around? Well, she supposed she'd have to find it before some foolheaded kid found it and tried to use it.

After a whole huge messy brawl occurring between Tabs, Dick, and some ugly guys which messed up half of the pizza parlor (by the way, TOTES not their fault), the two of them were strolling innocently on their way out of the place and out on the sidewalk. Okay, Tabs was running out, Dick, hobbling. Same thing.

Unfortunately for them both, it was raining, and their victory inside is dampened by a lack of umbrella for either of them. "Aw man!" she whined, holding a hand up to shield her eyes from the rain as best she could. Across the street, some guy was slowly moving across the way, sluggish and...odd. At the same time, a car was driving way too fast especially when the roads where this slick.

Eyes bugging out at the soon to be horrific disaster, Tabitha began moving towards the guy, waving and yelling "WATCH OUT," trying to get his attention any way she could, not realizing how close she herself was to danger. From the car of course.

They'd been moving along down the sidewalk for a while now, at least an hour since they'd met, with Tabs doing most of the talking and Dick concentrating on their surroundings and the creation of a mental map which would soon prove completely useless. The girl had a voice best equated with a brook, and it poured on cheerfully until Dick interrupted (gently) with: "Hey, I gotta take a break. My arms are killing me." With a last swinging step on the crutches he came to a stop on the sidewalk, shuffling a little on one foot to get the damn things out from under his arms and rolling thick shoulders to get the kinks out of his muscles.

He looked around. "What are the chances we find something to eat around here?" The backpack he wore might have a pack of squashed M&Ms--if they were lucky. If they weren't lucky it would just have his costume and escrima, which weren't going to help the lunch problem unless someone came along that Dick could beat food out of.

Okay, something was up here. One second she could have sworn she was rushing off to her bio class (she has a test for pete's sake!) and the next...she was...here. Wherever this "here" actually is. So startled she was, BAM she tripped and landed right on her keister. Not a good position to be in while lost somewhere. Assuming she was actually anywhere. Maybe she hit her head on the door. Lord knows she's done that plenty of times.

Maybe trying milk three days after its expiration date was the crux of the problem here, and she was hallucinating up the wazoo. Or maybe she was dreaming. Though that didn't explain why her butt hurt a little from the fall. She pinched herself to be sure, as anyone can tell you dreams don't hurt. "Ow," she muttered.

Okay, she's not dreaming.

Her cell phone! Why didn't she think of that? Rummaging through her purse, she...remembered it was sitting on her nightstand charging. Drat. At that point, she had no choice but to start exploring the city/concussion/hallucination, determined to attempt to get to the root of the matter: what she was doing here.

Okay. Dick sat up, blinking into sunlight he hadn't expected to see. He was behind some kind of industrial warehouse; the place was deserted, except for him.

The good news was that he wasn't dead. In fact, that was more than good news, that was the best freaking news Dick had heard in a long time. When a building comes down on your head in the middle of a chemical warfare attack, standing up in good air is a miracle. So he was alive. "...YES!" Fist-pump into the air. Dick was glad to be alive.

Okay, next. He still had his backpack, which had a number of useful things in it along with his mask and uniform. He was still in jeans and a t-shirt, which were only a little dusty. Some minor cuts and abrasions, but no concussion symptoms. With difficulty, he could stand up with the one crutch that seemed to have survived the trip from Bludhaven to here. (Wherever 'here' was. He would figure that out later.)

Dick hobbled around the edge of the warehouse, looking around for anyone who might be able to tell him where he was. He stopped short and stared at a completely unfamiliar skyline--a skyline where he was somehow able to make out Gotham's Clocktower in the horizon. "What the hell?" Dick said, stunned.

After a moment, he kept hobbling, heading for the Clocktower, still mumbling to himself. "What the hell?"