Mandrill Park

Mandrill Park, Part 2

The rain outside the window, seen dimly past the glass pane fogged on the inside from condensation from the collective breath of the six people in the room, beat against the glass like pebbles shot from a Derringer.

The people in the room were waiting. They were accustomed to waiting, and they hated it. They existed as if possessed of one mind, seeking, searching, watching, and recording. There were no fleeting flights of fancy in their perceptions, nothing was filtered through the screen of their emotions, and their point of view was as unbiased as could be imagined. They lived in a universe devoid of illusion. At times it threatened to drive them to madness. Time was an open book to them: the past, present, and future existing simultaneously, choices, events, contradictions and conclusions nakedly exposed. Frequently it was more than they wanted to see. But sometimes things happened that were so intense, so rife with catastrophe and with tragedy, that they were, in spite of themselves, drawn to watch and to record. So they waited. They had a dark sense of what was coming and they wanted to be proven they were wrong. They knew better.

Seventy years. Their city had been the center of a midnight whirlwind of unexplained and unexplainable, often times lethal, events for almost seventy years.

And for that same seventy years They, a group of concerned town fathers, merchants of influence, and sons of fortune, had been cursed with the responsibility to make sure that the Great Balance was never tilted too far one way or the other. It was a nightmarish, soul-numbing responsibility. They were all that stood between the fragile order of daily, waking existence and the onslaught of horrific chaos. All cities had their strange stories, all communities had their new urban mythologies, their superstition-fueled legends, but Rubicon was special in the worst of ways: its legends and myths lived and breathed...

Tell a tall tale in Rubicon and chances are the reality was far stranger and far deadlier.

In this city, the thin dimensional veil between the Realities was porous; sometimes things passed from one reality to another. The city was the bridge between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Within the city's depths, counted among its alleys and boulevards, there were places of power where the impossible was commonplace. Turn a corner and wander down some streets and you entered into a world beyond your imagining. Rubicon was a city of gates to the metaphysical Beyond. Time and history revealed to those who guarded the Balance that the greatest of the gateways was right in the heart of Mandrill Park.

And that was why the things that happened in Mandrill Park could never be ignored.

The parahuman minds of the men in shadows buzzed and their collective consciousness rerouted itself in a river of sensory perception past the windows, outside, onto the rainy streets of the city...

                                                                                * * *

A quarter-mile away:

Early winter. Fat charcoal clouds sitting in a twilight sky over the city skyline, crouching like junkyard dogs warring over a half-eaten bone. Cold winds carrying the scent of car exhaust and fluorocarbons from the biochemical plant two miles to the east. Chemical smog.

The rain couldn't clean the scent of corruption from the air.

Early winter, a katana-blade away from Ninjatown.

Vanna Diamante sipped her French Roast coffee and watched the dancers file into the nightclub, passing from night's gloom into neon glare, their eyes hungry and hopeful as they passed through the doors into the club. The place, a former meat warehouse and butcher's company, was now called The Last Bet. Sylvana Diamante, whom no one ever called 'Sylvana,' watched with a dispassionate cynicism. Wes Lusko, one of her partners in Spectrehouse Security, a parapsychological investigations firm, was working undercover as a bouncer at the club, patrolling the velvet rope outside the noisy and decadent interior.