A/N: Great reception, thanks a lot to everyone who read and/or reviewed the first chapter. I've been trying to find a good way to seperate sections, so please bare with me.

Disclaimer: I do not own the Teen Titans.

"What!" Robin shook his head, attempting to regain his composure. He disengaged from Raven and leap to his feet, then helped her stand, he could hear Cyborg's sonic cannon a few feet behind him open and start to slowly charge.

"There's a crater in the ground…" He coughed again as the Titans advanced on him, Beast Boy up from his spot against the tree, his eyes red. "Nothing else I shot on the ground left a crater, which could mean—" He was cut off as Robin picked him up by the neck of his under-armor body suit. His thick, horn-rimmed glasses were askew and cracked in the left lens. His nose was broken and bleeding profusely and his mouth and teeth were coated in blood.

"Which could mean what, exactly?" He did nothing to mask the cold fury of his voice.

"When you destroyed my weapon, I was firing it at her…I'm sorry I don't know why I was, I didn't want to hurt anyone, really. It was just a knee-jerk reaction!"

"Get back to the point!" Robin demanded; the other Titans were now sporting deadly looks, regarding their foe with complete hatred burning in their eyes.

"Well, it was originally a project to create a stable wormhole between parallel worlds…but I over charged the Hinesburg Compensator…so instead of transporting matter through wormholes…it disintegrated it." He scrunched himself up, closing his eyes, expecting the fury to be released at him, when it didn't come, he gingerly opened them and continued, answering the question Robin was about to ask "I'm James Dixon, you've never heard of me, right? I have a doctorate in quantum physics from MIT. No one cares about my work and I don't get any funding. I needed to make people listen to me. I wasn't going to hurt anyone, really." He began sobbing, Robin dropped him back to the ground, he landed with a thud and moaned from the pain of the fall. "When your weapon destroyed mine, it may have caused a short-circuit in the Compensator, and transported her to another dimension."

"How do we get her back?" Raven asked.

"You don't!" He looked around; the four Titans were standing over him, looking down at him with a mix of hatred and disgust.

"There has to be a way to get her back!" Beast Boy spoke up for the first time.

"You don't understand. There are an infinite number of parallel universes; she could have ended up in any of them. The machine was designed only for short-range trips—worlds close to our own in their histories—but even that could be hundreds of thousands, millions. You're chances of finding her are literally one in infinity!"

"We're going to look, regardless of what you say."

"You won't find her."

"Looks like the police have arrived." Robin said, looking over his shoulder at hearing the sirens. "I think we'll be paying your research lab a little visit. Good like trying to get grants from inside a prison cell, doctor." He put a great deal of anger and contempt onto the last word before turning and walking away, the other Titans following close behind.

---

They rode to Tower in silence, and it continued as they made their way into living room, where Robin stood with his back to them, looking out the window at the city, the still new sun breaking through the clouds and beating down on him.

"What are we gonna do, Robin?" Cyborg asked, his voice unwavering, despite the redness of his one human eye.

"We're going to find her." He stated simply, turning towards the other teens "No matter what."

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Starfire was unsure how to take in everything she had learned in the last few hours. Something about her whole position just didn't feel right; aside from the obvious of course. But everything seemed the same: the cars, the buildings, the trees—no funny colors or strange activities—the date, even the time of day; and the people, especially her friends, all seemed the same, except for the fact that, by their account, she had been dead for nearly three months.

Her head was spinning and her body felt more taxed than she'd ever felt before. She could only compare it to the first time she'd gone into battle, and been utterly trounced in combat. Luckily that had only been verse her father's best guards, only a training session. She laughed internally, only, she thought, they'd beaten her badly and made sure she felt the "sting of defeat" as her father had called it, for a few weeks afterwards.

She made no attempt to resist, or even barely comply as the other Titans helped her into the T-Car. She was almost totally lost in thought, at first they'd gotten worried about her state, but Raven had quickly assuaged their fears.

"After all," she said later, after they had gotten back to the tower and allowed Starfire back into her bedroom, "it's not every day someone learns they've been dead for ten weeks."

"But, Raven, it just doesn't make any sense." Cyborg was seated around the kitchen table with the other three Titans, a large, steaming mug of dark coffee in front of him. "I scanned the area for almost the whole hour we were there after we found her. There wasn't a damn thing unusual except a higher than normal level of neutrinos for a five block radius."

"Could the Doritos bring her back to life?" Beast Boy asked, still clutching his mug of undrunk coffee in both hands.

"Neutrinos. And no, neutrinos are everywhere, they're smaller than electrons and they go through anything—there's probably a few billion passing through you right now. Anyhow, they have no effect on anything around us, and as far as we know, can't raise people from the dead."

Beast Boy looked down at his own chest, his expression clearly a little disturbed by the though of billions of little things he could see or feel going through every inch of his body all the time.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, the only sounds above their slow, measured breathing the light thud of ceramic mugs and the occasional sip.

"Was it something on you end, Raven?" Robin spoke for the first time in two hours, his half empty coffee cup clutched in one hand as he continued to stare pointedly out the window to the view of the ocean.

"I don't…" she paused, looking up at Robin then back down at the table "I can't be sure."

"I want to know—" he started, he chocked for a moment, lagging just enough for the other Titans to notice, but they made no outward signs they had "I want to know if it's really her. I—We, need to know, if it really Starfire, or some magical imitation." He drained the last of his coffee and placed the mug back on the table a little harder than was necessary.

"I checked when we first found her, and again a little while after. I found no outward signs of any magic at all, dark or otherwise. I can perform more complicated and through searches…but I doubt I'll get anything new, magic powerful enough to," she seemed to be lost in thought for a moment "powerful enough to, well, any magic that powerful leaves a trace, there's no way to avoid that, and if it's there, I'd have found it already."

"It looks like the ball is in your court then, Cyborg." Robin observed, his voice as emotionless as the masked eyes that were appraising the metal teen.

---

Starfire sat down on the edge of her bed. Her bed? Was it really? She was dead, or supposed to be anyway. Something about it just didn't feel right, like she was in the room of a very close friend for the first time, comfortable, but not at ease. Something about that last battle, it had to be the cause of all of this, it was the only starting point that made any sense to her.

She was on the ground, knocked down by a powerful punch, then a point of white light, then a flash of red, more light, different colors, like an explosion, then the white light grew, and it enveloped her, and she woke up under the rubble, unable to move. The relief that had come with being discovered by her friends was quickly stripped away as she learned their version the truth.

Perhaps the evil man's gun had somehow changed the past…no, that would mean she never would have been their in the first place, or, maybe because she was there when it happened it didn't affect her future self. She shook her head and pinched the bridge of her nose while running a hand through her long pink hair, this was making her head hurt even worse, and the more she thought about it, the more it sounded like the plot to a bad science fiction book.

She sighed heavily and let herself fall backwards onto the bed. It may not be hers, but it was just as comfortable as the one she was used to. All at once the light pain that had pervaded her senses was washed away by a torrent of exhaustion and she quickly fell into a deep, fitful sleep.

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"This is it. His research laboratory." Robin's voice had returned to normal hours ago, but the Titans still had the powerfully raw emotion their leader rarely displayed on the back of their minds. They entered the after him as he threw his shoulder against the flimsy wooden door and the lock snapped out of the frame.

"Wow, look at this set up…" Cyborg said with unabashed wonder as he surveyed the scene before him. There were dozens of unique looking gadgets scattered about the spacious workshop, which was itself a strange mix of spotlessly clean, and hopelessly messy, which tools and parts strewn about nearly everywhere. Some of them spun with little arms around a stationary center beam, an electrical filed between them, others were glass balls of different sizes, various objects floating inside of them—a pencil, a watch, a frog.

The other Titans too took a moment to absorb the spectacle of the large, open room, before Robin had to snap them out their daze.

"Alright, lets get searching. Look for anything about wormholes, or anything like the weapon he had." But before the other Titans could even start carrying out his orders, Beast Boy spoke up.

"Do you mean like that right there?" He pointed lazily at a chalkboard at the other end of the room, a large diagram of the gun from earlier in the day drawn on it, surrounded by other numbers and symbols that were to hard to read properly from where they stood. The Titans made their way over to the board and gathered a few feet in front of it, while Cyborg leaned in for a closer look. It was an old way to store data, but effeftive.

"This is some heavy stuff…" Cyborg said, more to himself than his teammates.

Robin bit his tongue, allowing his technophile friend assess the work more fully before asking him questions.

After a few more minutes of silence, punctuated by Cyborg's occasionally mutters of things like "oh, wow" and "how did he!?" the metal Titan straightened up and turned to face his teammates.

"He wasn't lying." Cyborg started.

"About what?" Robin responded before Cyborg could continue with his explanation.

"He wasn't lying about his weapon, he was originally making a device to open stable wormholes, which in and of itself is theoretically impossible." Cyborg picked up the top sheet from a stack of hand-scribbled notes, considered it carefully for a moment, then threw it away and continued.

"And he wasn't lying about the Hinesburg Compensator either, he made it too powerful and instead of figuring out where every single atom in an object was, it made them all go the same place then dissipate just as quickly, essentially disintegrating it."

"But wait! He said Star wasn't disintegrated!" Beast Boy cried out.

"She wasn't. Near as I can figure from these schematics, and the parts of this math I can actually comprehend, Robin's birdarang managed to re-wire the thing as it fired, making it's last shot perform what it was originally designed for, or well, near enough to that. Like I said, he wasn't lying. Starfire is in another dimension, the problem now, is which one."

Robin listened intently, he easily understood everything Cyborg had said, but he didn't like what it meant. The more he learned about this, the more it sounded like some bad science fiction story.

"Can you reverse engineer this?" He gestured to the board.

"I have no idea. This guy has discovered things that they'll have to rewrite physics textbooks for; it's amazing he wasn't working for the government, or some big corporation. This stuff is more complex than anything I've ever scene, even just the circuitry is as complex as my own, some of it more so. I can try, but I can't guarantee anything, man."

"That's fine, just take whatever you need here back to your workshop and get cracking." Cyborg turned to gather up items as Robin turned to Raven. Do you think you could track Starfire somehow?"

"It's possible…but the way Dixon described it…I mean, I've always know there were other dimensions, we've dealt with a number of them over the last few years, but an infinite number of parallel universes, millions of worlds, millions of Starfires? Who knows?" She looked disappointed in her own answer, she didn't really want to admit the truth to even herself, Dixon had been right, their chances of finding Starfire within the realm of infinity, were decidedly not good.

"Go back to the city, right where it happened, the police have it tapped off so I'm sure it will be undisturbed. See what you can pick up there and meet us back at the tower whenever you think you're done."

"Right." She stated simply, and with a flash of dark light she was gone. Cyborg had disappeared, but returned a few moments later, his massive arms laden with a veritable mountain of papers and gadgets, he passed the huge pile to Beast Boy unceremoniously and the small green Titan nearly buckled under the weight while his knees visibly shook.

"Alright, let's get back home." Robin said, he and Cyborg turned and walked out of lab, Beast Boy unsteadily shuffling slowly along behind them.

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Robin stood silent watch over the darkened form lying on the bed in the middle of a room he had once frequented, a room he still visited, to make sure he never forgot. He watched as the shadowed figure's side rose and fell lightly as it slept. He contemplated his actions from before, he'd been overcome with emotion, he couldn't let that happen again, too much was at stake.

He fought back an urge to call out "Starfire" To wake her and tell her he was here, to tell her he was sorry, to tell her everything he'd lost the chance to say, and thought he never would regain. It was a hard impulse to fight, but his years of training with Bruce had given him the discipline necessary to do it. She turned in her bed, her back now towards him, he had been a little worried the light from the open sliding door he leaned against would wake her, but when it didn't he understood the fatigue she must have felt, especially given the story she'd told about being in a tough fight before just appearing among them.

But he didn't want to think about the circumstance of her return just now. All that mattered to him was the fact of it. The real sense of it. Her look…her voice…her touch…her smell, all the same as before. She was back, and this time he wouldn't let it happen. This time, he wouldn't let her die.

A/N: Hope you liked it. More to come.