Teen Titans in
Colors
Chapter 3: The Institute
"Bizzy!" greeted the lanky female enthusiastically as her best friend forever darted over to join her at the locker.
"Lorelei!" Bizzy greeted back. "Oh, my gosh! How was your break?"
"Really good. How about yours?"
"Oh, it was the best!"
The girls giggled and squeed, then grew serious. "How's your dad?" asked Bizzy.
"He's been recovering well, yeah. Well. The doctors say he'll be able to use his arm again by the end of the month."
"Oh, I didn't realize it was that bad." I'm sorry. Lore had been known always to have a compassionate heart—sometimes too much so for a student of the Institute.
"Oh, by the way," Bizzy said. "I got the Hola Gata!" She glanced around, making sure that there was no school administration in the area, and unbuttoned her dark gray school Uniform. There was a flash of blue, and a pink and white feline, and then she redid the buttons quickly...
Both girls envied the upperclassmen. They could wear whatever they wanted to school But the lower grades had to wear the drab uniforms until they were old enough. It didn't even have anything to do with age, really. They all had equal opportunities on the entranced exam—which made the fresh new arrivals of this year very suspicious...
Just then, the nearby physical education wing doors burst open, and out came The Headmistress. An ancient monster of a woman, Terpa Mandrag had resided over the Institute for nearly thirty semesters.
"Well," she said, as she passed the two girls, her single remaining eye scanning them, her flesh turning gray-green around it, hinting at the violence that left her so disfigured. That was largely why she had started teaching at—and eventually taken over—the Institute to begin with: she did not like violence. She wanted to control it, and subdue it before it got out of hand. What better way to do that, than to educate? "Elizabeth Fahngurl and Lorelei Suethor. My star freshmen." Her nose made some sort of writing noise and both girls thought they would puke. "I trust that you will be in class before the Tardy Chime, eh?"
"Yes, Headmistress Mandrag," the girls monotoned. It was said that the headmistress could smell fear and see in the ultraviolet—to know if your skin was cold. It was possibly just a school myth, though.
Hopefully.
The principal turned and walked away, leaving the girls alone, with a good fifteen standard time units till classes began.
"So," Lore said, "what do you make of the new students that showed up and became immediate Juniors?"
"They're good, that's for sure," Bizzy replied. "The one called Tim Drake has become the Institutes new quarterback!"
"I had heard. And then there's that Victor Stone, who beat out Smurgel for wide receiver."
"Yeah. Also, there's that quiet girl who calls her self Rachel. I have Advanced Physics with her, and she has all kinds of weird notions about magic and other planes of reality."
"I heard she scared some students out of their wits when they made fun of her." Lore made a face halfway between angry and disgusted. "Something about the color of her skin, I think. Ugh. I can't stand racists."
"What about that heartthrob. Garfield Logan? He's like the total dreamiest!" Bizzy spasmed thinking about him. "Have you heard him play that instrument of his? Thing is, he's best friends with that nerd Collin. I hate that guy. He talks about politics in Astronomy class! Idiot."
"Yeah. Gar rules! I heard he's going to start something called a "garage band" in the Durgenmyer dorms. I wonder if they'll be any good."
"Maybe. The REALLY weird thing is, that all these new students are from the same place."
"I had heard that. What was it called again?"
"K'halufor'nua, or something like that."
"Any idea where that is?"
"Not on any planet I've ever heard of," Bizzy shuddered, her aquamarine skin contracting slightly to allow more oxygen in.
"You think Camellia Anderson will be jealous?" Lore asked. "She enrolled five months ago and is already a Senior, and these new people might get there in half that..."
"Omigosh!" Bizzy blurted. "Speaking of Camellia," she said, pointing down the hall to a tall tan-skinned Junior, her red hair bouncing back and forth as she walked, her hazel eyes. She also had curves in all the right places, and wore purple clothing of a fabric the girls had never seen.
"That's not her," Lorelei corrected.
"I know. Her name is Kory Anders. But other than the different hair color, they could be twins!"
"Now that you mention it, you're right, Biz." Kory walked on by, barely noticing the freshmen.
"And she's one of them. Human beings, they're called. I hear there are about three or four of them in the Green Lantern Corps."
"Well. It is a rather plain-looking species."
oooo
Of course, the girls did not know the truth, that the humanity of Kory Anders was very much a ruse. For underneath the white and hazel contact lenses and prosthetic eyebrows, she was really the Tamaranian warrior Starfire, and of course, a Teen Titan.
What? Did you really think I was going to write a Highschool Fic?
"Kory" carried her books unused to so much walking. She really wanted to unleash the unbridled joy of flight, but that would most certainly, as Robin had put it, "blow cover"...
Thankfully, she eyed Garfield Logan, who had been portraying himself as a bad boy guitarist while here at the Galactic Police Training Institute, and she was eventually able to match his pace and walk beside him.
"Have you seen anything yet, Gar?" she asked.
"Not that I can see," Beast Boy answered, "But, dude, are these alien babes worth the trip."
Kori rolled her disguised eyes. "We are not here to 'babe watch,' Beast Boy, we are here to find out why my sister is here, and how she is not dead."
"I know. Hey, look, there's Collin," he dodged, pointing towards the newest Titan, Ragnarök, sitting at a far off bench talking to a magenta-skinned Lanthian about the finer points of politics. Of course, he was trying to explain his liberal views to a member of a species that believed their deity made people spontaneously combust if they were ever to eat a cucumber, so much of what he was saying about 'tolerance' did not make any sense to the poor guy.
Collin must have seen the two, because he quickly ended the conversation and jogged over to join them, wearing a gray long-sleeve shirt and full length khaki pants. "Hola, mis amigos de la Tierra,"
"Dude, knock of the Spanish already. We don't need a code language."
"Indeed, in retrospect it is amazingly convenient that the Guardians of the Universe decided that the official language of the galaxy would be English, but now I do not question their decision." Starfire yawned. The artificial light of the Institute didn't replenish her the same way full solar light from Earth's sun did.. "Have you found anything?"
"Oh, have I!" Collin said, pulling out a holographic yearbook. "This place is great. Yearbooks come out at the beginning of the year, are updated daily through the wireless data network, and have full body holographic images of every student!"
"And you have found my sister in here?" Kori asked hopefully, taking the book from his hand. The only thing they had to go on was a brief commercial for the Institute, in which a face that had looked remarkably like Komand'r's was seen for a split second in a background shot.
"Unfortunately, no," Collin sighed. This place has nearly 50,000 students, and trying to look for anything alphabetically is impossible—I don't read this place's alphabet!"
Starfire sighed dejectedly. "Perhaps Tim and Victor are having better luck than ourselves."
oooo
"BOO-YAH!" Shouted Victor Stone as he scored yet another touchdown in the Blur-Ball scrimmage.
"Congratulations, Vic," Tim Drake shouted.
Smurgel, a towering seven-foot tall Gonradian, didn't like either of them. The humans, as tiny as they were, had somehow entered this institute just this year, and were suddenly the talk of the town. Smurgel never claimed to be the hottest ion in the isotope, but something seemed wrong about that.
Then, this little dark skinned man had broken a tackle—a tackle from a Gonradian! There was no way that should be possible! He and this 'Tim Drake' had supposedly just met, and yet they worked together in the field with utmost precision. It was either unnatural, or something was amiss.
Smurgel was going to find out.
oooo
Smurgel waited for the bell to ring and left the huge Blur-Ball stadium, eventually making his way to the computer lab. They had three-fuer long break for lunch, so he would have plenty of time to make his request.
"Hey, Smurgel!" called the nerdy looking biped at the most powerful of the rooms 300 computers. "What's going on?"
Smurgel waved back. Newton Kaprei was a pretty good friend. Smurgel found his rough exterior tended to drive people away, but he was a good ball player, and a decent student. The school said he would make a fine Galaxy patrol officer. And Smurgel was just smart enough to wonder if they only said that to keep him around for Blur-Ball.
Newton, on the other hand, was most certainly a star pupil in the academic sense. His species, the Targanfi, were never built for strenuous physical activity, but their mental capacity was often off the charts. Thing was, most of them were so smart, they avoided the Institute altogether and became highly paid scientists and philosophers. Newton, was, by his species' standards, considered rather dull.
"I assume you want me to help you look up information on this Victor Stone who you, in your typical Gonradian pride, perceive to have stolen the spot on the team that actually belongs to you."
Targanfi had very high standards.
"Yep. That's about the size of it."
"Figured." Newton smiled. "We have two fuers and 20 time parts before next period. Let us see what we can do."
oooo
It took them the whole lunch break and several fuers longer—after school had ended for the day. Newton and Smurgel sat in Newton's dorm room, bringing up every database they could find, and searching for the place the new Juniors called home. Newton skimmed through page after page of data, barely reading it any more as he went. They had been working all day and had barely gotten anywhere...
But then, something caught Smurgel's eye. "There, stop." The article they were on now was some old archived news stories about Green Lantern happenings.
Newton ceased his text scrolling, and took a breath to recalibrate his optical lobes. "Yeah, what?" he asked.
"This. Coast City... California." When Newt didn't say anything, but rather gave him a puzzled look, Smurgel continued. "A few years back, a Green Lantern went psycho and destroyed a place on a backwater planet, remember?"
Newton nodded. "Yeah. Hal Jordan, I believe was his name."
"California. That's where I heard Stone is from."
"Hm." Newton manipulated the data stream and eventually, a brief blip of a file was brought up about Coast City, in a province called California. Planet's name was Earth, which Smurgel thought was weird, since to him the word simply meant dirt.
Who would name their planet 'dirt?'
"Earth doesn't have any interstellar commerce, and our data on it is limited. Other than the last two Kryptonians and a couple of botched alien invasions, we know nothing. If I could actually get within range, I could probably hack or tap into their local databases, if they have them. That seems iffy itself, though. Their tech rating is a class 45."
"That's pretty low. And makes this even more gradking weird. According to this, they don't even have super-luminous travel yet. How could they enroll here if they don't...?"
"There is an unusually high concentration of off-worlders on this planet, for a class below 40. Perhaps they do have light-speed travel, but with only selective availability."
Smurgel sighed, his massive shoulders relaxing. He shrugged, and contracted his body, shrinking down from his imposing gigantic from to a smaller form that consumed less energy, and stood up, his chair squeaking in relief.
He needed to get to bed soon anyway. "We'll go there, then. Something is very wrong here, and I'm going to find out what."
"I agree, but we cant just skip school and go off on what could be chasing comet trails."
"It's not," Smurgel insisted
Newton scratched his head with a handbook stylus. "I suppose I could get us a ship. Not legally, of course."
Smurgel nodded, and left. He headed off to his own dormitory as the pneumatic door slid shut behind him with a light hiss.
oooo
"Well, search again," Tim insisted, glaring across the small dorm at Collin. "We aren't leaving until we find her."
"There are fifty thousand students at this place!" Collin blurted. "Looking through them all without so much as a name to go on..."
"He's right," Tim, Victor said, "it will take forever, even with a digital yearbook."
The Boy Wonder sank back on the bed and sighed. "Kori," he said to the Tamaranian, who was pouring over her own copy. "You can read this language, right?"
"I know it," she said, "but unlike verbal language, I cannot just become fluent by kissing someone. And I am, how would you say... corroded?"
"Rusty," corrected Beast Boy.
"Right."
"This would be so much easier if we only had a NAME to go on. Komand'r and Blackfire turned up nothing. She'd have been stupid to enroll under those names anyway." Collin sighed, and lay back on the bed.
Suddenly, darkness converted his vision, and he sat up quickly. The shadows of the room came together and assumed human shape, and faded away to reveal Raven, who was using her alias Rachel Roth. She was dressed in relatively normal clothes, though they were her typical blacks and blues.
"I have a name," she announced.
"What?" Robin blurted.
Kori looked up, clearly tired. Her body still hadn't adjusted to the artificial light yet. "Tell us, then?"
"Camellia Anderson," Raven said. "She enrolled eight months ago—just after you dethroned her on Tamaran. She became a Senior only three months ago, which explains why we haven't encountered her."
Collin perked up. "That still doesn't answer the question, 'who was it that attacked us with those wyorms. If Blackfire isn't dead..."
"She was dead," Cyborg said. "I gave the body to S.T.A.R. Labs myself. So either that wasn't Komand'r, or this isn't."
"Dude, this is getting..." Beast Boy trailed off, not knowing what to say.
"Curiouser and curiouser," Raven finished. Beast Boy nodded and said she summed up his thoughts nicely.
"By the way," Robin said warningly. "I heard that you were involved in some sort of falling out today."
"Someone insisted I was a witch and somehow inferior because I'm a human. I showed them the folly of racism. Nothing more."
"Raven, you know I don't approve of you using your powers like that. Messing with people's minds is serious business. First Dr. Light, now this. If you don't be careful, you could go overboard."
"I have myself under control, Robin," Raven said, not quite unable to hide her annoyance. The mark of Skath ominously flashed on her forehead.
"Sure you do," Collin smirked. Raven and Robin both glared at him.
"Here!" Starfire blurted, her fatigue now at the back of her mind. She sat the holographic annual down on the floor and adjusted the filter to the maximum size, which made the image about four feet tall.
There was no doubt. Her skin was a bit lighter, her eyes no longer purple—the purple wasn't natural anyway for Tamaranians. She was listed, oddly, as Kryptonian in the profile. But there was no mistaking the face.
Komand'r was alive and well, and a star-pupil of the Institute.
oooo
That night, Blackfire sat back in her dorm, papers and books scattered about. She should have been doing her Interstellar Navigations Homework. But she could not focus. Some way, some how, despite her best intentions and best laid plans, her little sister had found her.
She sat and stared at the hologram of the new quarterback, the 'creepy' junior with 'mystical powers,' and the hot babe and desire of all the junior males.
They were unmistakably Robin, Raven, and Starfire. "I don't know why you're here, Koriand'r," she said, "but if you so much as come near me, I will never forgive you!"
oooo
The following day and halfway across the enormous school, which drifted through space on a vacant asteroid like a giant floating science fiction version of Hogwarts, Newton and Smurgel made a mad dash for the airlock, ditching their student I.D.s at the very last minute to prevent school homing sensors for realizing they had left, and diving into the leaving ship just as the gas-tight doors were sealed shut with the his of air being pushed out of the seams.
"We're in," Newton said.
"Then let's go 'jack this bad boy!" Smurgel said. Their destination: Earth.