Putting Jean-Paul in an empty city was a recipe for disaster. Unlike a lot of people who seemed confused or worried, he was having the time of his fucking life; he'd pretty much blown through every bar he'd come across, drinking non-stop, and then he'd raided a couple drug stores for some nice, pure pharmaceuticals. He would have killed for this quality shit on the street. He was flying, literally and figuratively, when he stumbled into a Best Buy. It took him about half an hour to figure out how to get the little security plastic bits off the CDs because he was too wasted to think logically and he ended up triggering half the store's alarms when he stole a stereo. Why? Cuz life wasn't worth living without music.

Stealing wasn't a problem for him--he'd been doing it for months, years, in one form or another, just grabbing shit and hopping dimensions before anyone noticed he was even there. That was the beauty of the Nexus: with just the tiniest sliver of creativity one could get stinking fucking rich with little effort at all, and he'd made a small fortune stealing high-end cars from one dimension and selling them in another. It was how he'd funded most of his less than legal antics. Up until Department H, it was how he'd made his living. Well, that and hooking and porn, but that was getting less and less lucrative the older he got. You had to be either really fucking buff or really fucking twink to make a killing in the sex industry with fags, and while Jean-Paul had once been the latter, he wasn't any longer. Too rough around the edges, and his porn career was basically doomed since he lost that eye, unless he was willing to get fucked in it--and he'd decided that, kinky as he was, and as much as he joked about it, that was pretty much a hard limit. Gross. He'd have to be really hard up for cash.

Of course, it was fucking boring being all by one's self, and he'd spent the last few weeks doing all that soul-searching, self-examination shit; he'd been tattooed by the mutant colony in Panama, seen God in the desert in Mecca, gotten lost in the rain forests of Peru, had his clumsy Chinese mocked by the local punks in Hong Kong, and blown up a mutant concentration camp in Poland, freeing seven thousand innocent people who had the misfortune of being born with an extra quirk in their genes. The name Johnny Vega was fucking legend in more than one universe at this point, but he was tired of doing it on his own, of being the observer--what he really wanted, which he wouldn't admit to anyone, let alone himself, was for Warren and/or Peter to be at his side the whole time. This was the side of him that he'd been reluctant to show them--Warren, because he knew that he'd love it and want to join him and then he'd have to worry about being murdered in his sleep by the Sherman-Townsend family for "ruining" their boy, and Peter, because Jean-Paul wasn't sure that he'd approve. And since when did anyone's approval matter to him?

Bored, so bored, he really just wanted someone's attention, which was why he'd spent so much time rigging up this stereo system, cranking it up to eleven (dig me now and fuck me later, and sing it to the tune of FAGGOT FAGGOT FAGGOT!, screamed into the night sky) and was currently tossing half-assed gasoline-and-chlorine bombs into the street. They were easy to make: a glass bottle (courtesy of all the freaking booze he'd had tonight) filled halfway with gasoline, cram a piece of cloth into the neck and then stuff a chlorine tablet in there. You toss it, the impact smashes the bottle and mixes the gasoline and chlorine, causing an epic explosion. There wasn't anything to blow up, but they were loud and fucking awesome, and he was bored.

"INCOMING!" He pitched that thing in a way that would make a professional ball player green with envy. Boom!

The boy who wandered into Distopia today walked in like he belonged there. There wasn't a trace of hesitation or "wait, this totally doesn't look like the place I just stepped out of..." This is because, while it certainly did not look like the alley outside of a particularly rowdy goth club in Moscow, it was also not a surprise to him that it did not. He'd not really been aiming to go anywhere in particular, he'd been wandering around for quite a while now. Aimless. Directionless. The way he liked it.

Most eighteen-year-old boys would not willingly choose to forego their upper-middle-class upbringings and trust funds and Ivy League colleges in favour of eating out of dumpsters and sleeping in public libraries. But Jean-Paul thrived when he had the opportunity to be at his most independent--there was nothing and no one he leaned on for support, not family, not friends, not even the government. Thrust into any new world, he could make a living as easily as anywhere else. Find his own food. Shower out of broken water mains. He wasn't your typical sad, hopeless street rat. No, he fucking loved this, and while he missed Warren, Peter, even Andrew, he needed this time to go back to his roots and remind himself that life was so much more than a government job and a dingy apartment.

Department H would be less than happy to discover that he'd just disappeared off the face of the earth, quite literally. That was very much prohibited by the contract he'd signed--saying that in exchange for them dropping all charges against him, he wouldn't go to jail, but he'd work under them and be supervised by them 24/7. They basically owned him. He wasn't even allowed to sneeze without their consent and he had to get permission and be escorted by their fucking lackies if he wanted to travel between provinces, let alone dimensions. They'd be looking for him, certainly; he was a wanted criminal and a dangerous one at that.

But he didn't care. When he returned, he'd grab his niece and fuck off. This would mean they'd add a Kidnapping charge to his long list of crimes, but he was already wanted for shit like murder and terrorism anyway. What was one more crime?

Whistling under his breath (Playing ethnicky jazz to parade your snaz on your five-grand stereo...) He turned a corner and headed to the nearest liquor-dispensing establishment he could find, a small building with a sign that labeled it, very aptly, "BAR".

Bars just look really sad with all the lights on and no one around. No voices to cover up the silence, no body odour to mask the smell of spilled beer, sadness and failure left by many decades of people long before. Empty, uninhabited, unused bars weren't that unusual for him, though--that was how they'd found the Basement, with its automatically regenerating booze supply, semen stains already applied on the dingy old couches. He looked not quite as out of place with no one else to compare him to, though--he stood out like a sore thumb in most bars, his 120-pound, 5' 11" body--emaciated, he looked like a walking skeleton--covered in studs and spikes, clad in the skinniest jeans humanly possible, the mohawk Yulia had lovingly sculpted at his previous residence truly epic. Not to mention the fact that he was missing his left eye and right hand, which looked incredibly odd on someone so young.

"Tabarnak! This is a fucking ghost town. Please let it be cylons or death monkeys or something awesomesauce." None of that Twilight Zone shit for him, thxuvrymuch. He peered around, not seeing any security, any bartenders... no patrons... but the door was wide open and unlocked. "Say something if you don't want me to clean you bitches out." Pause. No one said anything. He hopped over the bar counter and swiped a bottle of Absolut citron. "Score."

It was surprising how pain could block your perception of just about anything else.

For instance, upon waking up, he didn't even realize that the eye was gone. It just didn't register. His attention was focused entirely on the throbbing, searing pain in his left eye--worse than the worst hangover he'd ever had, and boy, had he had some doozies. The next thing that got his attention was more pain--but a sharp, stinging, tugging pain and he yelped, swatting at whatever was on top of his face. A crow had made its way here--likely the same way he had--and was pleased that it immediately discovered what it assumed to be a carcass to pick at. When the 'carcass' moved, it squawked and fluttered away, then disappeared. There was a temporary wave of relief before it was followed by more pain--a continuous ebb and flow, and he found that if he waited to move until the ebb, he could actually do something other than lie there, dazed in pain.

He wasn't a day older than fifteen, short, at an average weight, dressed in clothes that were being worn long after they were intended to, and he smelled like someone who took their showers out of a sink. Not exactly roses. His hair, half-black, half-lime green, fell over his good eye, obscuring his vision and also obscuring his bright green... eye. His nose had stopped bleeding, but there was dried blood all along his upper lip and his jaw. He'd been worked over good... and by a bunch of girls, no less.

Dragging himself to his feet, he wasn't aware of the fact that he was somewhere else--clearly this wasn't Coney Island, nor was it even New York--none of that mattered. All that mattered was the gaping, empty eye socket that was bleeding profusely and likely leaking brains or something all over himself. He still didn't even realize it was gone. He just knew that it hurt. Oh god. Oh god. It was like his head was on fire. He stumbled forward a few times, pain flaring up in new places now--his ribs, where he'd been kicked, punched and beaten with lead pipes--his arms, his legs, his jaw; he would feel, later, that one of his molars had been knocked loose. Right now, though? Right now all that mattered was that he had to put out the fire in his head.

"Ungh." Barely a grunt. Any other kid his age would be shrieking and sobbing. Maybe it was shock, but all he did was grunt, stumble, and fall face-first on the ground, out cold again. No screaming. No crying. Just breathing. He was still breathing.
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