It was raining outside, which was not uncommon in San Francisco. Long gave a grunt of satisfaction and settled into his comfortable chair by the window, eying the pile of books on his coffee table and considering which to resume reading. A cup of tea first, perhaps. He stood back up to set the red kettle onto the hot plate ( Read more... )

Michael sat on his kitchen counter, tablet in his lap expanded to its biggest laptop form.  He was pretty sure he'd worked out most of the kinks in the gadget -- well, more or less -- except for the crucial matters of breaking it, sabotaging it or trying to get it to stay off for long periods of time.  How was it even powered?  Taxon (he was ( Read more... )

[ there's a little bit of rustling after angela turns the tablet on, and then a clearing of the throat before she speaks. ]Hello, Taxon citizens. My name is Angela Dodson, I've been here...a couple of months, at this point. I've got a couple of questions for the population at large ( Read more... )

To tell the truth, it was him who started doing all of the preparations for walking into a trap. Not going into this unarmed, Mike, he'd said, and Michael had agreed: they'd passed a petrol station two blocks down that had an open shed. If both of them were right they could've just ambled in and nobody would've cared what they'd taken out, but they ( Read more... )

Castiel’s gone, Bobby’s at home, and Dean’s on the road, the radio off and the windows down. The wind whipping through into the car is loud, drowns out any thinking that Dean might have wanted to be doing, and for that, at least, he’s thankful. He looks calm enough to the outside viewer, but the way his hands are positioned on the steering wheel, ( Read more... )

Spencer stood in the office that Brennan had allowed him at the Jeffersonian, staring at a white board covered in writing. On the right side were the names of the most recent newcomers: Paul Smecker, Michael Westen, Sam Axe, Sookie Stackhouse, Buffy Summers (with an asterisk next to both of those names), Katherine Pierce, Elisa Maza. On the left ( Read more... )

Of course Sam Axe had woken up before with no idea where he was or how the hell he got there. He’d gotten married once in Vegas. And there’d been this one Staatssicherheit guy who’d pistol-whipped him to every rendezvous no matter how much Sam said he’d love a blindfold -- but that’d been ‘89, and nowadays he tended to wake up wherever he’d put his ( Read more... )

It's been a rough six weeks. Not just for Tara, but for everyone. Two huge glitches, right in a row, and then another spate of people leaving. She hated that Piper had gone before she'd really recovered from being a Wendigo, and she missed Buffy a great deal. (Not to mention how much it clearly hurt both Dawn and Willow, having her gone.)  She hadn ( Read more... )

Paul Smecker was wandering around the city, not exactly lost but nowhere near found, either. That sort of blank, overloaded expression common to newcomers flitted across his face at times, although more often one saw frustration. He was mostly looking at his tablet as he walked and trying to figure out the map function, with some goal of orienting ( Read more... )

The phone was ringing ( Read more... )