Anne watched the dragon fly over the river, and descend into the trees. She didn't rub her eyes disbelievingly like the old woman across the street, she just closed her eyes and watched the water that no one else could see for a moment. Nerve damage she'd been told, back when she'd been able to afford to have someone examine her eyes.

But she had never seen random things before. The vision behind her eyes always showed a tracery of branches and sky reflecting in clear rippling water. It wasn't always the same pattern of branches, and sometimes she could make out leaves, but the rest was the same. So… now she was hallucinating dragons.

Her eyes popped open. The old woman had seen it too. "Hey, did you see the dragon?" Anne called out questioningly.

The old woman looked her over once, with an incredulous expression, and then gripped her handbag tighter and hurried away.

Anne bit her lip. She had probably sounded crazy. The woman's reaction was so typical that she couldn't even bother to be irritated by it, but it didn't answer the question. Still, it had probably been a plane or an interesting bird or something, and her eyes were just playing tricks on her.

The world sucked. But logic corrected quickly, the world itself was beautiful, it was just people that sucked. Truth reminded her sadly that most of the people she'd met were actually good sorts, it was just that those few who weren't always seemed to do so much damage. Bitterness narrowed the level of suckage down to just her own life.

It was almost like the meditation path for reducing pain, where they told you to narrow your focus of the pain down to the single point that actually hurt, and then to move your focus to all of the parts that didn't hurt. Anne felt great sympathy with old Jose at the moment. He always claimed that the technique never worked for him, because he didn't have any part of his old body left that didn't hurt.

It was really difficult to think of any part of her life at the moment that didn't suck. And now she was hallucinating dragons. She closed her eyes and watched the water again while she thought about that for a moment. The dragon had been pretty. Colorful. Like some hybrid between a Chinese festival dragon and a European dragon with wings.

If she had to start hallucinating things, pretty dragons were much better than the kinds of things you could hear junkies or drunks exchanging horror stories about. Thousands of times better than the things that drank blood that her great grammy used to go on about when her mind wandered.

Anne decided, after due consideration, that maybe hallucinating dragons didn't actually suck. If she saw more, she would just treat them like the water that she was watching behind her own eyelids. A secret, but not a bad one. If you couldn't help seeing things that nobody else could, you might as well enjoy it.

--

The vampire had a bit of a problem. A problem that millions shared, but a problem nonetheless. He had no money, and his identification and license were expired. It wasn't at all a surprise, because well, Gregory Vincent was dead, but it was still a problem.

He had everything set up so that Gregory's nephew, Norris Price would inherit his trust fund when he turned twenty-one… in another sixteen years, when he would normally wake up. Convincing an exhausted midwife that she'd delivered an extra baby, when he started feeling tired, was easy. School records and the like, if required, weren't nearly as difficult to fake as government ID. Lots of people faked them just because they didn't like their real records, and it was hardly ever a problem unless you were trying to become a politician, or an astronaut.

He had been severely tempted to apply for one of the astronaut training programs during the last half century. He hadn't because he was certain that the physical monitoring and examinations would reveal that he wasn't actually human.

Normally he would just take some under the counter work, for some slob who didn't want to pay taxes. But apparently some new plague had appeared, and everyone was holing up and practicing the same social isolation that had been considered a mental disease just a few years ago, and no one was hiring. The streets were so empty that it was scary. And unfortunately empty of easy pickpocket targets as well.

The only real advantage he had over the millions who shared his difficulties, was that he could survive very well without needing a shelter to sleep in, and without buying food every day. But he really wanted to browse the internet and get a better picture of what was going on in the world, and look for clues that might tell him why he was awake after just a "nap".

--

She hadn't meant to knock the little boat over. She really should have compressed her form before surfacing. People who caught sight of a small unidentified form in the water could quite easily pass it off as some weird fish or floating weeds. Disguising herself as a mermaid was fun too. She had just been too distracted to think properly.

She carefully righted the tiny craft, and was slightly reassured, and incredibly curious when pumps coughed to life and the water trapped inside of it started pouring out of little spouts along the edges. The craft seemed… more than a bit strange. Mankind was always making new discoveries, even if they were mostly limited to the purely physical, and this was definitely a sailboat. The general shape was quite familiar, it was just all of the details were… strange. Especially the twinned body.

She brushed aside her distracted thoughts and hunted for the person who'd fallen overboard. It was both a relief and a bit of an embarrassment when she found the woman, in no particular distress, swimming strongly toward her boat, with her fishing pole gripped between her teeth like some pirate with his sabre.

Instead of scooping the determined little woman up and depositing her on top of her boat, she compressed her shape into a pretty mermaid and swam up beside her before suggesting hopefully, "It'll be best if ye were to forget that ye saw any of that?"

She could have forced the poor thing to forget, but she had always suspected that doing so caused them some mental damage, and besides, it was against the rules of the game. The game probably only existed in her own mind, but it made exploring their society so much more entertaining.

The woman was quite admirably strong willed. She rolled her eyes and growled through the mouthful of her pole, but she didn't stop swimming toward her sailboat.

She couldn't resist hanging around until the little woman had herself aboard, to see what she had to say. And to ask about the design of her craft.