Everything and Nothing

Everything was different and yet the same as it had always been.

Hunter sat in the backseat of the Rolls-Royce as Jeeves drove them through town. Towering skyscrapers still shot into the sky in the downtown core, streets still carried motor vehicle traffic, airplanes and helicopters flew overhead, shops and boutiques lined the streets. People walked on sidewalks, destitute still stood on street corners asking for money from stopped cars, and angry pedestrians flipped off reckless drivers.

But it was noticeably different too. He wasn't sure how to describe it other than to say it all looked more... mystical. Buildings stood on foundations so flimsy he feared a light breeze could knock them over. One in particular looked to be an inverted pyramid, standing only upon its pointed tip; yet Hunter knew it to be more structurally sound than even the Great Pyramids at Giza, such was the power of the enchantments in its stonework. He looked down at himself and marveled at his overcoat, the fabric was stationary and yet moved in place cascading down simulating an endless waterfall. It was 'trippy', but quite commonplace.

Jeeves turned them onto the freeway taking them towards the outskirts of town where the private jet was waiting for them at a private airfield.

A fucking private jet on a fucking private airfield. And he was being driven in a FUCKING ROLLS-ROYCE!!!

What the actual fuck!?

He had to shake his head again to clear it. He remembered when his parents had tried to organize their family trip. They'd been putting it together for months: renting the cottage, coordinating schedules, booking tickets. It was just going to be the six of them, his parents, siblings and himself, all together over Thanksgiving and that in-and-of-itself was something of a logistical miracle.

But now those memories were all wrong.

He wasn't going to some cottage they'd rented. No he was going to his maternal grandmother's mansion on the mountainside. It was a huge forty-four room palace where you could ski down a small hill in the backyard straight onto the ski lift. And it wouldn't be just the six of them it would be the entirety of his mother's side of the family. His grandmother, his mother, her three siblings and their families.

The same as it had always been.