-1
-2 weeks after Rose and Slade's encounter.-
Robin glared at the monitor as hard as he could, but even if he kicked it, that tiny red blip would stay on anyways. The dot on the digitized map beeped continuously, and his ears rang from listening to it do so for the last 3 hours. Cyborg appeared beside him and put a metallic hand on his shoulder. "Dude, relax. You don't have to watch for Slade 24/7."
"I just don't trust him-"
"Who does? Besides, relax a little. Look," Cyborg pointed a thick finger at the screen,
"He's barely moving around, let alone destroying stuff. You can start worrying when he does cause trouble."
"That's not the real reason I'm worried."
"Huh?"
Robin tapped something unto the curved keyboard. A view clips from days before popped up. "Look at all these," Now it was Robin's turn to point. There was a softly blue dot meeting with the red blip everyday, at the same time, often in a similar region. "I don't like the looks of this..."
Cyborg tiredly cracked his neck while a phrase spurted from his mouth: "Two words, man- Just. Relax."
Just then, an alarm blared throughout the T-tower. Starfire automatically barged in, "Trouble!"
The titans naturally made a flurry of movement to the site, but as Cyborg's tech-car skidded onto the street, there was... nothing there.
"Was there not a signal signifying trouble?" shrilled a surprised Starfire. The Tamaranian looked around the empty intersection- It was deserted, and somewhat quiet. Robin kneeled down and touched the dusty ground; Scuff marks showed through the dimness.
"... I'm sure that 'trouble's' still out here," he said blandly. And, sure enough, a sweet-like laugh cawed around the team.
Raven stirred. "What was that?" The laughter echoed in a spooked assemble, and a sudden tapping sound vibrated through the ground. Footsteps.
The spiked-hair leader of the group narrowed his eyes, "Stay together- We don't know if that was Slade or not." (At this, the rest of the crew rolled their eyes.)
Just then, a bolting form barricaded through the middle of the tightly grouped titans- It slipped on the ground and ricocheted off of an abandoned building, leaping with unbelievable bullet-like speed. And then, another form flitted from the fog- a well-known, rather petty criminal by the name of 'Doctor Light'. The swift form jumped into the air, and for a moment, it flashed into view: A... girl. Just an average-looking girl, about similar ages with the titan members, wearing a normal array of a shirt and jeans. But then, apparently she wasn't so normal as thought. The super-teen team watched blankly as she punched into Light, throwing him off of the rooftops and into the ground. The crash was deafening: sending roaring wind and collapsing sound all around them; Cyborg had to hold onto Beast Boy to keep him from flying off. "What was that?!" he yelled at Robin after the hurricane died down.
The boy didn't answer and instead ran straight into the area. He quickly stumbled into a huge crater with a gasp, and crawled through the wreckages of old relical buildings. What he saw breifly stunned him of breath. Even when his colleagues joined him with little time wasted, they too were silent. The girl- her dark hair tossed in the musted breeze- kicked an unconcious Doctor Light out of her way, his 'indestructible mega-suit' crumpled like a pennied tin can. He patheticly rolled from her path- and the girl laughed cheerfully.
"Dang- Haven't had that much fun since... years," and then she seemed to notice the utterly quiet titans staring at her, "Oh. Hi! Who're you guys?", she glanced at their colorful fits and added, "You're not circus performers,... are you?" Her eyes were brightly incredulous, a happy brown colour- like the day after a pleasant picnic. How stupidly shocking.
Robin finally managed to blurt something out, "Uh... We're the Teen Titans. ...Who are you?"
The girl stepped towards the team, and flipped her hair again. Her day-to-day sneakers heavily clashed with the metal-coated boots and shin guards Robin wore. "Uhm... no one you should know about... And, by the way- Sorry that I completely ruined this street,"
She looked back at the deep crater, and the crooked remains of Doctor Light, "Sometimes I can get a little out of hand."
"A little out of hand?" squeaked Cyborg. He looked over the mystery-girl, her clothing not even touched with scratches.
She laughed again, a smile shuffling onto her features, and walked back into the dirty mist,
"Well, maybe we'll see eachother sometime! I gotta go now..." Her voice trailed off as the titans numbly stared at eachother.
Back at the Tower, Robin mulled over the odd events while Starfire and Cyborg attempted cheering up a sullen Beast Boy. "We didn't even get to fight! I was ready for a good verses evil kind-of-battle!- Eh, I mean..." Beast Boy caught the dangerously glinting eye of Raven, and returned to keeping his mouth shut.
At the end of the day, much to Starfire's pines of him looking tired, Robin retired early into his room to think about the strange encounter. It was all too familiar, like a planned wreak. His thoughts turned to Terra for the rest of the night.
':,.':,.':,.
"You didn't tell them your name?"
"Nope."
"Or of your reasons?"
"Nuh-uh."
"And they didn't act... suspicious?" His one eye narrowed.
"Not at all- Stop worrying so much, Slade."
Slade exhaled and stood against a metal-work rails, his straight back towards the girl, who was determinedly tying her fraying shoelaces. Below the platform where the twosome was lounging, clanking steel wheels revolved together, meshed together into a marsh of burning mithril and melting pools of iron rigging. The second heart of his cavernous mansion; the bleak Engine Room. The railing he was standing before let in slits of flaring light to help brighten up his malicious tone. "Worrying... doesn't quite cover it." He turned his head to the side, the black half exposed to Rose. "And I suppose you made a commotion of yourself?"
"Well..." She made a frown in a way most parents would immediately recognize as the face of not-exactly.
Perhaps a quarter of an hour quietly ticked off between the two, and only after Slade turned his entire body around did he speak. "Now, let us get back to that topic about your powers."
Rose avoided his lidded stare and forcefully continued to retie, and unravel her shoes. "I don't want to talk about it."
"You can't always avoid it, Rose."
"I can try," She glared at Slade. "I hid my lightning from the Titans when I was beating up that retard Light, and I can hide the other powers-I-don't-even-know-I-have, too."
Slade overcame her spitting stare and replied nonchalantly, "Your naivete is touching. But you need to understand that you are not one to simply run away from your powers."
He clacked forward, a few paces closer to the now-still Rose. "You are not like Terra, nor are you even close to comparable to the Titans. You were made as a weapon of war by the military. You were trained, created, and made to be a host for your powers." Another step. "Your hands control lightning. Your mind can control others. Your body can increase in density to uphold immense amounts of super-human strength." He paused, slightly inclining his mask to look down at the seated girl, her frown deepening into a slashing line. "You were created to be a force of destruction. Do you think you can simply walk away? Dear child, believe me, I have tried to act rashly. Doing so resulted in my death, and only by sheer chance did I get my life back." Slade clenched a gloved hand, and then loosened it before returning his hard gaze unto her. He lowered his upper torso to stare at her level, into her eyes. Armoured arms still folded behind his army back, he dabbled on the final touch, interrupting her chance to pipe up and stop his demonic speech. "You see, Rose, it is undoubtedly true that you can change your destiny. However, it is absolutely impossible to change your reason for living." Malice fumed through the grill lines in his mask, clouding the frightened brow before him.
"Reason for liv-..."
"Your reason for living, child, is the same as mine- the military both did this to us, and we hold apart similar experiences in recieving these powers. Your reason for living is to destroy. To eradicate. To cause hatred and pain where ever you are and whenever you can." His breath came in spiteful puffs of air. Just a hair-breathe of a distance from the younger's quivering face.
Rose stared at him, and then slipped off of her dark chair, breaking eye contact as she fled away into the shadows of the cavern.
"Think of your powers as a 'gift', Rose," he calmly finished after her terrified departure.
How he enjoyed cruelty.
Whenever he got the chance, Robin would shove himself into piles of computerized information, grappling any information he could pull out about the girl.
Many false starts. Too many.
It had been a while since he had fallen asleep peacefully, now that he thought about it. No matter. He hacked at the mountainous databases locked around the city's mainstream, poring at little, useless flickers of information he would go through anyways. He could tell that the other team-mates were becoming restless and worried over this new obsession.
'We don't know if she's an enemy or not.'
'Dude, I know you're thinking about Terra- relax, man. She didn't look like a bad guy to
me,' replied Cyborg.
Robin thrust an accusing finger at the screen. 'But according to the map, she's the one that's been meeting with Slade for the past few days.'
'I'm gonna tell this to you again, man. You gotta slow down a little. And besides, even if she is working for Slade,... who knows? Maybe he's turned over a new leaf or somethin. I mean, come on!- She stopped Doctor Light for us- I doubt that's a bad act.'
Robin narrowed his eyes.
And now, finally, he recieved a rather large shock as he found a small, barely uncovered snip of an uncovered profile, lost in the darker regions of an private militia's networking systems. He read it aloud, "Subject #22. Experiment to create the ultimate superhuman 'weapon'," The title would've sounded corny if not for that it was actual. Then the persona's picture bought his attention. The black-haired girl, a soldier picture- facial profile showing a rather normal looking girl. Robin scanned on. "Orphan; biological family and name unknown and lost; brought for military standards of physique training and artifici-" At this, the profile stopped mid-word. Apparently someone had attempted to erase the further notices. Robin nearly crumpled the desk-pad in his grip.
Experiment?
He eventually decided to alert the others during lunchtime, after Beast Boy had 'unknowingly' ordered a few tons of food from the Pizzaeria. Through a mouthful of cheese, Cyborg submitted to the news with a hacking cough of a choke. "She's a
WHAT?!"
"I searched through the part of her profile that wasn't erased. It said that she was 'an Experiment.' Some other military or something gave her... powers."
Starfire was silent for a moment, and then sadly whispered, "Like Red Star." The team thought back to the snowy ranges of a past memory, remembering the lone ranger that had been the host of an unstable power, given to him by a dying army. In the end, he had sacrificed himself in the darkness of space, to relieve the earth and his friends, of his imploding strength.
Raven retaliated after flipping a page of her black-bound book. "Well, that would explain how she totally trashed Doctor Light, along with half of an intersection."
"But what's she doing here, then? I mean, did she run away like..." Beast Boy faltered off, and Robin finished for him.
"Like Terra? Maybe, maybe not. We can't know for sure. That's why we need to make up our own experiment. A trap to find her again." Everyone stared at him, and then traded glances.
Uh oh, they all thought.
Beast Boy rubbed the tight dreams from his face, blinking at the echoing words in his head. Coincidentally, 'sleep' happened to be one of them. "Aw man- Robin, I know how important this plan means to you, but did you haftadrag the rest of us in?" His squeal sounded blandly around the gorge, a rather high and unstable-looking jutt grumbling high above the group. The beachside shied against scuttled rocks, which continued to clatter noiselessly while the team made their sullen way. Except for, of course, Robin, who actually seemed bright and alert. Well, perhaps not bright; but certainly alert.
"You know Robin, BB might be right- It's 3 in the mornin and we all should really be in bed," Cyborg groggily motioned to a far speck behind the team, a single, softly lit dazzle of dawnlight flouncing upon the surface. Titan Tower.
Robin turned his head. "This is important, Cyborg. A few hours of lost slee-" But alas for Cyborg, the center of Robin's stony sigh was vaguely interrupted by a rather large rumbling sound.
Rumble... went the mentioned rumble. And then it came again, a wind-waped shallow of a cliff not too far from the titans giving an ubrupt string of shivering. Pebbles tickled off the terran surface, the foaming tide below nonchalantly brewing about as clumps of grass and earth toppled into the blue.
Rumble...
The band was awaiting the moment in twitchy afterthought- Afterall, Robin had the whole thing planned out down to the direction of the lapping waves, even though the rest of the titans didn't really have the blurriest thought of Robin's executive plot. They had just been woken up and told to follow along. If you didn't know Robin very well, you'd call the boy a paranoid obsessor. If you did know him well, you'd call him a paranoid nut-case. The said leader glared intently at the hillside, fervently making hushing notions with his hands at Beast Boy. The quaking went on. And then, quite justly, it screeched to a halt. Full silence. There was a faint scuffing as Raven whipped back her hood...-
The cliff exploded.
Crude deafens lashed around the area, and Starfire floated up in a stun: rivullettes of greenery and fertilm smashed into the waters. But though the chaos continued unceasing, the eyes weren't on the massive bombing. Rather, all ten lines of sight focused on what was standing in the midst of the shredded vinery. A small shadow, equipped with nothing but a slackly dark pair of jeans with a belt wrapped about in a slim affair. Spastically enough, she was wearing a shirt labeled 'Gotham City Corps.' in red at the front. Robin glared some more, ignoring the presence of a nervous Tamaranian fidgeting behind him.
The girl based atop the demolished cliff was holding out a hand, a hand laced with red currents of what looked like electricity. The colours of blood shone happily on the whips of lightning before retracting into the child's palm. Smiles and all, with another respondant flicker of her fingers, the remainder of the gorge disappated in a hurricane of dust and irritated ocean waves, tumbling into the abyss of destruction below. Black hair stretched around her cranium as whistles of hollows wound about her.
And; to finish the flourish off, Robin hurriedly stood up and nodded to head back to the tower. Starfire seemed more worried than ever, and Raven had a hollow look to her. Cyborg was stoic as he slung a slumbering BB on his metal intrigate.
…But Robin didn't mind, or seem to notice, for that matter.
He had something he needed to look into.