1.
Triquetra Headquarters, Gotham City...A dark figure crept around the sides of the building, silhouetted against the full moon that shone through into the common room where the three members of the Triquetra were sprawled on separate sofas, casually watching television. Teleka sat bolt upright, her eyes wide with fear. "What was that? Mother of Gotham, what was that!" she cried out.
"The news, mate..." Blue Moon replied hesitantly, looking at her sideways. "You're getting skittish in your old age," she scoffed, trading glances with Venom, who hadn't seen fit to move, as of yet.
"No! Big, tall, lanky, shadow thing... outside!" she continued, fearfully pointing at the offending window.
"Or you could be going mad..." Blue faltered, giggling.
"No! I'm serious! There was something at the window!"
"Teleka, relax. It was just a cat or something," Venom sighed, unfazed as always.
The Dark Figure shot a rope to the rooftop and clambered up with a quiet wicked cackle. "Shhh!" he scolded himself madly. "Nasty children will hear you!" he chuckled to himself. "Shhh!" He launched into quiet song as he reached the roof and pulled three, baseball-sized spheres from a pouch attached to his belt. "Hush little baby, don't say a word, Mama's gonna buy you a mocking bird... These mockingbirds won't be singing for a while now..." he giggled, sounding silly even to himself, as he dropped the balls through into the air conditioning through the vent on the roof. "Time to have some fun!" he cried gleefully with a high-pitched cackle as they smashed at the bottom and the dense gas dropped through the vents into the building.
Teleka was the first to feel it. A wooziness that settled over her and a pressure inside her skull. "I told you it wasn't a cat, Venom," she drawled as she blacked out.
"Huh?" he asked even as he was affected too.
Blue Moon looked at her two fallen teammates. "At least Telly's not mad..." she reasoned as she too fainted...
The next morning, sunlight had replaced the beams of the moon, illuminating the three teenagers who were just beginning to regain consciousness. Venom was the first, but the second he opened his eyes, he jerked upright, his breath caught in his throat. He leapt over the back of the couch and ran out of the room in the direction of his triangular third of Headquarters. Teleka blinked slight, rubbing away the unconsciousness before she began to look around her, her eyes focusing on every obstacle like a cat, before she began to leap between the tables and chairs in her own direction. Blue Moon, as soon as she woke and saw the redhead bounding away like demented kangaroo, screamed loudly, coiling up on the couch for ten long minutes before she found the strength in her legs to bolt away.
So what were the reasons behind this strange behaviour? Only the Triquetra can explain...
Venom"Unreal... Unreal... This is so unreal, that wasn't the girls. There's no way that was the girls. This is insane. Just a nightmare probably. I couldn't have done that, I wouldn't have." I know I'm talking to myself, but I really don't care. Anything to get that image out of my head. That scene...
"Okay, okay, straighten things out. Just go back to the living room and check. Stay calm. You're the calm one, remember? You've always been the calm one. You can do this." I can barely hear the words coming out of my own mouth as I slowly tread back to the common room. They're still lying there when I look around the edge of the doorframe. I have to fight the urge to throw up on the spot and force myself to keep walking. Teleka's the closest to me so I stop there.
She's lying right in the beam of the sun, that shocked scream frozen on her face. She looks so scared... I lift her wrist to check, feeling for a pulse, even the faintest one, but there's nothing. Only the gaping mouth and the green veins that look as though they're about to pop out of her skin. My work. I've seen it, but I've never killed anyone. Suddenly it's unreal again. It's a strange fearful place and I could swear Teleka turned.
She glaring at me, those glazed, fearful eyes are boring right into me. And then I'm sure. She is moving. Her arm rises, pointing to the other couch. "You took Blue first!" she screams at me. "See what you've done to us!" she cries. I feel her moving me with her powers and try to close my eyes. I don't want to see what I've done to Blue Moon. "She was the first!" Teleka keeps screaming, forcing my eyes to open. "You were bored when you got to me! Why? Why!" Finally she forces me to look at Blue. The frozen scream across her features is possibly even worse, wrenching her pretty face into mad disarray. Teleka moves me, still screaming, forcing me to look further down, at the huge chunks missing from her torso, and the purplish stains the crimson of her blood has made across her blue veils. Her eyes have rolled back horrifically inside her head. But even as I look at her they come back, the same, glassy gaze Telly subjected me to.
Her mouth doesn't move from its horrific pose when the scream starts. Not even a scream, but a banshee screech, a mournful blood-curdling wailing. I can feel tears in my eyes, but I still refuse to believe it. I blink, and suddenly there's no telekinesis holding me to the spot, no mangled Blue in front of me and no more of Teleka's enraged screams. They're gone. I run out of the room and stop with my back to the door. I close my eyes again and breathe deeply, calming myself. There are a hundred reasonable explanations for this. None of them involve Telly and Blue dying. Most of them involve me going mad, or being driven mad. I open my eyes again and start to walk off down the hallway. No real reason, I'm just trying to put some distance between myself and the common room. Just in case...
Teleka"Not here... Not now... This is impossible. I was sitting in front of the TV worrying about shadows a moment ago. Or... when was that?" I murmur to myself.
"Quiet child. Don't be caught unawares..." That voice... in my ear... when did I put an earpiece in? Is that... Oh Gotham! Catwoman! I knew I recognised the uniform I'm wearing, the way my sight is tinted green through my goggles. I'm Cat-Girl again... Impossible. How could that have happened? Jesus, I'm going nuts.
"This is all wrong," I say urgently, tears welling in my eyes in confusion.
"This is exactly as it was planned. Don't be silly girl! Focus! What on Earth is wrong with you?"
"No!" I shout frantically. I reach up to tear the earpiece away and watch it skitter across the floor. It does nothing to stop it. If anything her voice becomes louder, filling the entire room.
"Stupid child! Now look what you've done!" Guards... hundreds of them, coming at me from every direction. I run back the way I came, as there seem to be fewer that way. I barrel through them, pushing and shoving, Selina shouting after me all the way, her voice following me. I can tell this is still HQ. I can't have moved. Could I? I come the doorway I know should lead into the living room, but I watch as I totter on the edge of the floor, hanging out of a floor-to-ceiling window. I twist in the air as I fall and grab the edge. Do I pull myself up, and face hundreds of armed guards? Or do I let go and pray there's an old mattress in the dumpster below me? Decision, decisions, huh?
"May God give me wings," I mutter. My fingers snap out straight and I fall. I can time it. I should've hit the ground by now, but I haven't. Something lashes out from another window and pulls me up. It's her. Catwoman, her whip around my wrists with my hands holding on to it for dear life. "Wings... wings..." I murmur over and over again.
"Failure..." she hisses at me, the slashes open across my face before I even see her hand move. I squeeze my eyes shut as tightly as I can, feeling the blood run down my face. How could I fail someone I no longer work for? I keep telling myself that over and over again. This isn't real. I open my eyes, hoping I'll be facing the truth when I do. And it worked. I'm standing in the common room in the shaft of sunlight from the window.
I tilt my head back, looking up towards the ceiling. "Thank you! I knew you were up there today!"
"Wings!" A high-pitched screech. Just that one word, 'Wings.' Two huge bird's wings swing out of the shadows and wrap around me. Suddenly I can't breathe. It's pitch black. There's nothing... I gasp for air, but there is no oxygen to draw into my lungs. I feel myself black out momentarily and come to seconds later on the ground. I stand up and run down into my third. Just getting away from the common room.
Blue MoonAlright... when I fell asleep, Telly and Ven were here. They were, I remember it! I'm not nuts, I was not alone and I was not here! This place is scary, and I was in HQ. The only thing that should be scary now is what Teleka looks like in the mornings. Yeah. This is all wrong, and very different. I'm fully aware that I'm frozen in place where I woke on the couch. Couch? Tree trunk. No! It's a couch; something's making me think it's a tree trunk... Or maybe something's making me think that something's making me think that the couch is a tree trunk, and really it is a tree trunk. Or maybe I'm confused. Yeah, it's the last one.
Oh God, this is weird. It's some kind of swamp type place. It's scary. I'm in it. That's all I know... "Who's there?" I hear my cry before I even realize I've seen something. Something human-sized, but hunched like a cat, bouncing among the roots and branches. No! The chairs and tables! No! Roots and Branches!
There are bubbles in the water of this swamp. No bubbles in carpet. I must be in the swamp... There are bubbles and there are ripples. Ripples spreading out to me, now waves, splashing all over me, brown mud, holding me down. Something breaking the surface. Black and hairy... a long, jointed leg pulls out of the mud... slowly... reaches over to me, pins me down, and another... pinning me back further. More and more legs, and now the body. The head, pincers where the mouth should be, and what look like hundreds of eyes.
A spider... a giant, black, hairy, muddy spider, leaning in towards me, those pincers clicking, legs twitching. Too much for me to take! I pull myself free of the legs, feeling my veils rip as I bolt out of the room. Now I recognise my surroundings. Triquetra HQ! The hall up towards my third! I'm saved!
I feel something stop. A scream... Have I really been screaming all this time? The barbed wire in my throat says 'Hell yeah, you stupid cow!', so I head for the kitchen. Water. A glass of water. Whenever I wake up from a nightmare, which is probably all that was, I have a glass of water and I feel better. It must've just been a nightmare. That's a reasonable explanation. Good God, I sound like V. Is that a sign of madness? Have I lived with those two nutters too long? Or is that the other way about...
"Stop thinking!" I tell myself out loud. "All you do is confuse yourself!"
I clear my mind completely, managing to clam myself a little as I reach the kitchen. I focus on it like some kind of prize, distracting me from everything. I almost manage to forget. I grab a glass and reach out to the tap, or the faucet or whatever you call it outside of East London, but as soon as I turn it I try to turn it off. Not water. More spiders, tiny ones, millions of them, streaming into the tumbler. But the flow doesn't stop when I twist the tap off. They keep coming, flooding the sink, out into the kitchen. I throw the glass away, barely acknowledging the crash as it blasts into the wall. I sprint from the room and pull the door behind me. I pull one of the veils off and use it to block the bottom of the door before I run off down the hall, away from the kitchen. Far, far away from that bloody kitchen!
SpeedyI wonder what's going on. Normally the Triquetra would have been out already today... Even weirder, their security's off. The door's slightly ajar, so I push it open and walk in. There's a thick gas hanging in the air, so I cover my mouth and nose, trying not to breath any of it in. "Telly? Ven? Blue? Are you guys here?" I walk into the common room and immediately know something's seriously up. Tables and chairs overturned and ripped. It looks like Teleka's claws have been at work. Were they attack. Ripped pieces of Blue Moon's veils are draped over one of the sofas like dead blue leaves and there are spatters of Venom's poison all over the place.
I start off following Teleka's trail, heading up towards her third. It seems to go half way up the hallway, then return to the common room and head back again. Whatever happened, she was running as fast as she can. Faster than I've ever seen her. If I didn't know better I'd say she fell at least ten times where her claws have dragged the floor.
"Who's there!?" The voice is more of a feral roar; something following me around the corridor, but it's moving too fast, always one step ahead of me.
"It's Speedy. Who's that?"
"Ssssspeedy..." hisses the voice, lowering to something I can recognise and trace to a shadow hanging in one of the alcoves in the ceiling.
"Teleka?" She sounds out of her mind, and when the shadow drops to the floor, that's how she looks. She has the look of a predator in her eyes. Eyes that track my every movement like I'm her prey. "Telly, talk to me, what happened?"
She imitated me perfectly, breathing heavily. She looked almost like she was about to be sick, wrenching back and forward. "What is it? What's the matter? Teleka, you're scaring me, just tell me what happened!" I grab her by both shoulders, forcing her to face me, trying to get her snap out of it. Again she mimicked my words flawlessly.
For a second, something changed and she softened. "Scarecrow!" she screamed wildly, before the mad look returned to her. "You never loved me!" she exclaimed, her voice becoming that insane roar again. "You said you loved me!"
"What? Telly, I do." She pounces like a wildcat, pinning me down with her claws and powers combined.
"No! That's what you say, but you don't, do you? I'm right, aren't I? How could you? How could anyone? Noone ever has! I don't care!" I'm convinced now that she's gone totally crazy. I don't mean to sound harsh, but truth is truth. It's like it's not even Teleka. It's some Arkham outpatient in her body.
"Teleka, I don't want to hurt you..."
"You lied to me! You already have! That HURT!" she screams. That's when I know I have to get out of there. If anything she's getting more violent. If I stay here, I'll probably end up dead. I throw her off, watching as she crashes into the wall and sprint for the door. I can hear her screaming after me, but as soon as that hard door's at my back, she stops screaming.
It takes me a second to relax. I've only ever heard rumours about when Teleka went crazy, but nothing like that. This is something entirely new. And what was it she'd said, in that second when it faded and it was just Teleka? Scarecrow. Suddenly I know what she meant by that, and I know who I have to call. I'll tell Robin, and the Titans can help me sort this out. If Blue Moon and Venom are as crazy as that, I'm not going in there alone again.
A full hour later, and I'm standing outside Titans Tower. Goddamn communicators... The range is crap, and there was no point walking to the outskirts of Jump City just to put a call in. I just hope they're in. God knows what's happening at HQ. If Teleka's anything to go by, Venom and Blue Moon are probably the same. Actually, Blue Moon's probably the worst of all of them. She was already nuts.
I know what they say about superheroes never answering the doorbell, but this is getting ridiculous. I pull out the communicator anyway and see that, yes, they are in, all in the living room on the top floor. "Hey! I've been at your door for ten minutes! This is important!"
"Like, ultra-important? 'Cause it's the weekend dude," Beast Boy informs me. As if I need reminded. This isn't exactly my idea of fun either.
"I'm fully aware of what day it is. Our friends are in serious trouble!" As soon as I say that, the doors swing open by some kind of mechanism and I march upstairs to them.
"Is there something up with the Triquetra?" Robin asks sincerely.
"No, I'm talking about the Hive! Of course the Triquetra! I just stopped by HQ and... well it was... weird, to say the least." So I have to explain all about the security and the gas and the strange behaviour, but as soon as I finish, they all start talking over my head, trying to figure it out. "You're not listening to me! Teleka knew! She said it was the Scarecrow!"
"Ah..." they say in unison, slowly. All I can manage is to roll my eyes. "So will you help me or not?"
"Of course, man. Let's go," Cyborg says willingly, but Robin stops him cautiously.
"That gas is probably centralized to affect only the Triquetra, but I think we should still be careful."
"What do you suggest, Robin?" Starfire says, ever-so-cheerful as always. No offence to her, but the girl sickens me. She's been on Earth for years now; you'd think she'd have picked up something about the language.
"The breathers we use for underwater missions should be able to filter it out," Raven supplies more helpfully than usual.
"Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go," Terra says, already half way out the door.
Thanks to the T-car, it's only half an hour this time until we're standing in front of Triquetra HQ. Of course, Robin takes command as always. I don't bother arguing with him for once. Truth is, I'm still worried about Teleka. Beast Boy is sent into the air vents to investigate the source of the gas. The rest of us are to split up and find Venom, Blue and Telly and hit them with tranquillisers Cyborg's supplied. I feel kind of bad about knocking Telly out like some kind of animal, but it has to be done. Robin, who has experience with the Scarecrow, says sometimes there's no other cure than time and sleep. And as we suspect the Triquetra were knocked out all night, they've inhaled enough to be fully in the thrall of the gas.
Raven and I are sent after Teleka, Cyborg and Terra are on Venom and Robin and Starfire are searching out Blue Moon. Promises to be an interesting day, if nothing else.