Universe of Soulmates

"The Man With the White Briefcase"

A careful businessman with a clean white and black suit carries himself with dignity and pride, as if his job is the most important job in the world. As a CPA, he makes sure the government gets the money they're owed and the people the money they overpaid. In his white briefcase—a rare occurrence in the city because the pollution tends to wash anything white in a layer of grey—lies a stack of papers and a thin computer with the power to do all the calculations he tells it to.

Ignoring the flashing red hand on the crosswalk—or, maybe, just thinking he can get across in time—the man with the white briefcase heads across the street with not a care in the world. And, in a split second, a car travelling in parallel to him swerves to avoid another car driving the wrong direction. He sees a flash of blue before he's on the ground, blood spilling onto the pavement. The driver, a thirty-two year old hairstylist, would be freaking out about hitting a man hard enough to crack his skull open if she wasn't unconscious herself due to the impact of the car going in the wrong direction. Of the three people involved in the crash, none of them are conscious, with the driver going the wrong direction passed out due to being highly drunk.

Someone, call 911!

Multiple screams pierce the air, both in shock and to get paramedics to the scene as quickly as possible. What they didn't know was that, of the three victims, only one would survive.

Can you guess who?

Twenty minutes seems too long for paramedics to show up, but that's how long it takes them in big city traffic and one-way streets. They are called one-way streets for a reason, and even ambulances don't attempt to break that rule.

Clear the way.

Ruby, get tape up to keep the public out.

Leo, you and I will start on this man right here.

Kinsley, you and I will be working on the driver of this car.

Two teams of paramedics and a couple police officers work in tandem to get the victims of the crash to a hospital—or morgue, if they wind up DOA. One set of paramedics, the ones working on the man with the white briefcase, declare the victim they chose first Dead On Arrival (hence the term DOA). The blood pooling from his head combined with several internal injuries caused him to pass before anyone even called 911, much less in the twenty minutes awaiting the paramedic's arrival.

The second set, working on the drunk driver, finds a faint pulse in the woman's neck, quickly figuring out her blood pressure is tanking and about to fade into nothingness like the man with the white briefcase. The alcohol working through her system did absolutely nothing to help her case, although that's why everyone got in that mess to begin with.

Let's get her out of the car. Be prepared to start CPR.

As the second set of paramedics get to work to get the drunk woman out of the car and her heart beating in a steady rhythm, the other set of paramedics move to the other driver, who has blood dripping from her temple, although it seems to have mostly coagulated now. Pulling open the passenger door with the help of a tool named the "Jaws of Life", the smaller of the two paramedics climbs in, finding a weak pulse on the third and final victim of the crash. Her blue and brown hair almost strikes the paramedic as surprising, but with only a week's experience with color, there's all sorts of new combinations he's unfamiliar with.

He, along with one of the three other paramedics, are the only two on the scene with color vision. The drunk driver, a forty year old woman who was attempting to drink away the pain of not finding her soulmate yet, was stuck in the black and white world most people grow out of by the time they're thirty. The CPA, unlike the drunk, was perfectly satisfied with his soulmate-less life. Then again, he's also an accountant, so it must not take much to please the man. Although the hairstylist couldn't see outside of shades of black and white, she was more than good at her job, able to take colors and match shades perfectly without ever knowing what she was looking at. Not many people possess that kind of talent, if I have to admit. The two paramedics and the two officers live happy lives with people they know aren't their soulmates, and children who don't care that their parents can't see what the color of their eyes are or how their caramel colored hair shines when the sun hits it just right.