The cute little hellspawn blinks rapidly then inspects its paw.

Raven sets her hands on her hips, looking altogether displeased. "I have to say I was expecting something bigger after all that suspense." It certainly didn't look to be worth the sixty dollars she had to dole out for the bucket of goat's blood.

Catfire sniffs the air and glares at Raven. "Raven! What have you done to me?" The fail familiar asks telepathically, possessing an even shriller, distorted version of Starfire's voice. It bends its head forward and falls over pathetically. "Oh, these horns are so difficult to maneuver correctly."

"To fight a demon, you need to enlist the power of one." Raven explains as she picks up one of the books that had been dispersed by the explosion. Its cover features a poorly drawn werewolf embracing a nude, unnatractive adolescent girl but she wedges it into a bookcase before I can catch the title. Damn. "And since it would be unsafe for me to summon one..." She glances down at the Catfire still rolling around on its back attempting to right itself. "I had no choice but to create one."

"How do you know for sure it is in the grasp of these pesky demons that the once fun-loving and annoying Beast Boy suffers?"

Since we haven't seen a flashback for a while, Raven closes her eyes as her own memory of that fateful Saturday comes flooding back to her.

Is your horned demon cat not getting the excitement she deserves? Well here's something that'll turn lazy kitty into CRAZY kitty:

Comedic Relief, Part Twenty-Two

She was laying awake in bed that night watching Celebrity Ghost Stories on DVD when at some point in the middle of the Ernie Hudson episode she hears a knock at her bedroom door.

"Go away." Raven yells automatically. She, like any ordinary teenage girl, was determined to preserve the sanctity of her room. She resumes her viewing of the shifty-eyed Ghostbuster's account, confident that the fledgling dilemma had been sufficiently dealt with.

A second knock startles her out of her bed. She goes over to the door and flings it open. "I said go away-" Poking her head out of the doorway and looking both ways, she sees nobody along the bleak stretch of hallway. The hooded hotty bites her lip, at first thinking it was one of the other Titans pulling a prank on her. She immediately suspects Beast Boy knowing that Cyborg usually powered down early and Robin and Starfire were busy moaning on top of each other down the hall. She eyes a gnat on the wall warily, then proceeds to squash the unlucky insect. Without seeing any Beast Boy guts splattered across the wall, she determines that the troublesome prankster was still on the loose.

"Are you looking for me?" The unmistakable voice of Beast Boy bounces off the walls in the narrow hallway.

"Where are you, you little pest?"

"Right here." He steps out of the shadows and touches her on the shoulder. His fingers feel warm and they leave behind an odd sticky residue. Eww. "Did I scare you?"

Raven brushes his hand away and sneers at him. "No. But I'd say knocking on my door in the middle of the night with something sticky on your hands is a bit on the creepy side."

"But I'm so booooored, Ray-Ray. I'm sorry." He says, ringing his hands like some contrived cartoon villain.

'Ray-Ray' holds up her hand to silence him. "Call me that ever again and it'll be your last breath." She threatens. This wasn't the first nickname he'd come up with for her and neither was this his first time knocking on her door between the hours of ten and twelve 'o' clock at night - Beast Boy's shenanigans really did require some getting used to when you were a part of the team. But Raven was fed up with being the obvious main target of his desperate, childish pleas for attention. "If you're so bored, why don't you go annoy Starfire and Robin? Why does it always have to be me?"

"Well I could annoy them instead, but they're having sex again, so..." He replies simply, scratching his chin.

...

Raven is pulled out of her flashback by a Catfire digging its claws into her leg. "So you are both familiar with the late evening romps which Robin and I-"

"Yes." She answers in a tone that implied such information would be considered obvious by everyone on planet Earth. And as a sidenote, the pillow talk between Starfire and Robin is about as grinding and ridiculous as you'd expect, with the former's excessively wordy, over-complicated speech patterns and the latter's flagrant narcissistic tendencies. Truly there were a lot of things you just had to get used to as a Titan.

"Now at what point does Beast Boy's strange behavior make an appearance in your story?" Catfire curls up in a ball at Raven's feet and asks, looking up at her inquisitively.

"He was hunched and acting strangely; glancing over his shoulder as if were being hounded by someone or something, avoiding eye contact with me constantly." She gets up and runs her hands along the spines of books lining one of her shelves. They featured such titles in the faint glimmering candlelight as 'Suck me Dry', 'The Zombie that Devoured my Heart' and 'My Eternal Flesh: The Diary of a Real Teenage Witch'. Her voice is reduced to a dead whisper as she continues what could well have been her own reenactment of a scene pulled from one of those very selections, "What stood out to me the most was the way he ringing his hands as if he were formulating a scheme and the empty, dazed look in his eyes."

"I fail to understand how this Beast Boy at all differs from the one we are accustomed to." Catfire repeats her previous assessment, then tugs on Raven's cloak until she pulls it away sharply.

"Well, then he wanted to show me something..."

...

She follows Beast Boy up the last flight of stairs leading to the rooftop of the Titan's tower. Reluctantly, to be sure, but primarily for the sake of gaining some new insights into Beast Boy's worsening condition. At worst she expected it all to be the build up to an elaborate prank, but what she sees when she takes her first steps out on the rooftop immediately cofirms her darkest fears.

"It's a pentagram." She says aloud.

"Bingo." Beast Boy slips behind her and locks the only door to get back into the tower with a pronounced click.

As if the pentagram weren't a cause for worry enough - situated atop each prong of the pentagram is a coal-black cauldron large enough to fit a person.

"Beast Boy do you have any idea what you're doing here? This is a summoning circle and it looks like a high level one at that." She pauses, suddenly realizing the meaning behind the five cauldrons. Pfft, isn't it obvious?

"Isn't it obvious?" The artist formerly known as Beast Boy shamelessly mimics my snarky addition. "Human sacrifice is necessary to summon the most powerful demons."

Raven backs away from him, holding a glowing black palm at the ready in case he made any sudden movements. "You're not really Beast Boy, are you?"