It started out at a party - someone I tangentially knew through T. The place reminded me of an apartment I looked at in Ottawa years ago. The floors were visibly slanted, the walls were painted a rather hideous shade of hospital green, and the neighbourhood was one of those grim colourbled areas waiting for gentrification. The kitchen was nice and big though, and the general desolation of the area and lack of any neighbours meant that people could be as loud as they wanted and nobody was going to complain about it. Someone had brought a pretty kick-ass stereo system, which was blasting early 90s techno. I was in the kitchen, looking for a glass, and for some reason I started compulsively organizing the cupboards, because stuff was just thrown haphazardly into drawers and cabinets with no sort of underlying logic. As a result, I missed most of the lead up to whatever was going on out in the main room until someone started screaming.
It was all over by the time I came out. There were a couple of people on the floor - a guy in a leather jacket with patches all over it and a somewhat wilted mohawk and a tall, pale blonde woman in a bright blue minidress. Several candles had been knocked over and one of the sofas was on fire. There was a sigil painted rather sloppily on the wall in blood. I took off down the stairs and ran out into the street, but there was no one in sight and no sign of a car. Went back upstairs and stayed with the two people until EMS arrived (a lot of people left because they didn't want to talk to the cops), then copied the sigil onto a scrap of paper and went home to do some research.
The next bit was on a double-decker bus - I was sitting next to the blonde girl, who was looking nervously out the window. We were the last passengers on board, and we'd paid the driver a pretty hefty bribe to deviate from his route to take us straight to [the meetup location]. There was a van coming up fast behind us that looked straight out of The Road Warrior, including the horde of freaky neo-barbarians hanging all over it waving nasty spiky instruments of mayhem. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a handful of old-fashioned jacks, blew on them, and chucked them out the back window. Two of the van's tires blew out and it swerved off the road, knocking off most of the guys on the outside.
Next place was an abandoned building, possibly an old school made of cinderblocks with security bars over broken glass in the windows and peeling paint and crumbled ceiling tiles all over the floor. People squatted here on a regular basis, if the ratty mattresses and camp stoves were anything to go by, but there was something *wrong* about the place. The people I was with (nobody I know awake) were sniping at each other, pacing, looking out the windows. There was a sort of hum in the air just below the threshold of hearing that set my teeth on edge, and the smell of hot metal. The alley outside was... it looked like a reflection of something in a window. I realized that it didn't exist in the real world, or more accurately that the location was superimposed on another like two images on a photograph. The people looking for us couldn't find us, but the longer we stayed the more likely we were to be stuck in the superimposed state. Like being on the wrong side of a quantum waveform collapse, if that makes any sense.
