Star Harbor Nights

Perfect stood by the door shell-shocked for a long time after Charade left. When she recovered a bit, she went straight downstairs to give Mr. Buttons a long, floppy earful.
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“There are eight million stories in the naked city,” according to conventional wisdom and popular cinema. The number of stories in the Sands are as uncountable as the sands of the Sahara, but some of them are just there to drink. Still, as the events which concern us most are for the moment beyond our prying, let us briefly dip among them.
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The easiest and most obvious way into the Club was through the front door. The black door, so called because it is a door that is black, leads one to a darkly elegant antechamber bathed dimly in candlelight and draped in red velvet. Not much ever happens in the entryway. If there’s any particular magic in the place, it is the kind of magic which ensures nothing happens. It is a buffer zone, between the world within the Club and the worlds without.
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Ray spent about an hour in the park, juggling and doing small tricks with his flame for the crowd. Hascomb Park wasn’t the best place in town for busking, but it was close to home and he was in a bit of a hurry. As it was close to lunch time, he was able to make a decent amount of money in a short span before he had to head back to Twistville.
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At one o’clock exactly, as Perfect was taking a break from inventing to dust the living room, there came a single, soft knock on the door. If she hadn’t been told to expect a guest at exactly that time, she would have missed it.
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Ray woke up with no idea where he was or how he’d got there. Then he remembered his night of passion with Perfect Jones the night before, which had begun on a rooftop high above the city and ended much later back at her place, an old-fashioned four story brownstone townhouse. Everything had kind of blurred together after that, as the flames within him had stoked his excitement to greater and greater heights until finally, emotionally spent, he’d let the flames expire and collapsed into a rare state of physical exhaustion.
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If the agent of Destruction was stunned by the actions of the agent of Creation in crafting a Rule which stated that neither of them could perform their functions, Creation’s agent was even more shocked. He could not imagine why he would have done something that seemed so counter to his own interests.
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Standard protocol called for any police officer who had contact with the villainess Rhyme in the field to be put on paid leave pending an indefinite period of psychological evaluation. Karen knew that. She knew better than to get her hopes up even as she insisted on going in for her first session the day after.
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It was the day of the state track meet. The sky overhead had grown darker all day, but so far the weather had held. Buford LeChamp hoped it held a little bit longer. He knew how important this meet was to his brother, Beauregard, the school’s track star.
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