I do not own Teen Titans, nor do I own Bizenghast. They belong to their respective owners, and all I can claim credit for are the concepts presented in this story. For future reference, all non DC Comics-verse scenarios depicted in the story are of my own invention.
CHAPTER WARNING: Some violence and creepy descriptive devices; mild language
The Sunken Mausoleum - Ch. 7
The two Titans had stared at the little green cat-like creature for about a minute before Beast Boy exploded.
"What do you mean, any questions? Of course we have questions! How the heck are you supposed to help us?"
"I'm like one of those thingies that sits on your shoulder and tells you what to do."
"You mean a conscience?" Beast Boy replied, grasping at Edaniel's meaning.
"I think he mean those angel versus devil things that sit on your shoulders and confuse your judgement" Raven quipped dryly, "but close enough."
"The lady's got it!" Edaniel said, performing a forward flip that landed him in Raven's lap. She shoved him off angrily, trying to get to her feet in the process.
"Rae, you're still hurt... Don't force yourself to..." Beast Boy was instantly by her side, concerned. Raven waved him off, her eyes still fixed on the little green thing that was now bouncing on the balls of his feet, tail twitching in anticipation of something.
"What happens if we miss out on something, say, don't show up? What's the penalty exactly?" she asked.
"Well, he" Edaniel said, pointing at Beast Boy "will die. He'll become one of Bali-Lali's cleaners."
"Cleaners?" Beast Boy piped up nervously, not really liking the sound of that.
"Yeah. CLEANERS!" Edaniel called out, and suddenly dozens upon dozens of hatches opened from the ceiling of the Mausoleum, and wires lowered down some of the most horrifying things that the two Titans had ever seen.
Mangled bodies of what looked to have once been human beings were attached to hooks and gears that connected them to the cables; skin drooped off of bones that protruded in all sorts of angles that were just plain wrong. Eyes hung out of their sockets, flesh blackened by decay and rot seemed to grasp at them feebly, looking to take back some of the vitality that no longer resided in their own forms.
"GROSS! Get them out of here, I get it! ICK!" Beast Boy shrieked, while Raven's normally pale complexion had only turned ashier. She didn't want to imagine Beast Boy as one of those things. The cleaners then retreated into their hatches, which closed with metallic thuds.
"So you can't physically interfere in the dreams, just offer us advice?" Raven established in a firm tone. Edaniel nodded his weird looking head.
"Yeah, my brother Edrear's the one who'll be able to help you out with the fighting and stuff... I'm the brains of this operation" he said, batting his eyes.
"Azar help us" Raven muttered, hand on her stomach which still pulsated faintly from the pain.
"Yeah, well, whoever he is, he's probably not as good looking as me" Edaniel said, his fixed toothy grin turned towards the sorceress in a flirtatious way.
"You? Good looking? You're nothing but a lime-green kitty cat wannabe with weird-ass pointy ears" Beast Boy said with a chuckle. Edaniel suddenly leaped into the air, so high and so quickly that the Titans' eyes didn't have a chance to catch up with him. What fell to the ground in his place was no longer the kitty-cat wannabe form that Beast Boy was laughing at, but something else completely.
Edaniel was a tall, leanly muscular man that looked to be about in his mid-twenties (although Raven was sure that he had stopped aging a long time ago, due to the magic of this place). He had shortish curly blonde hair that gave his face a cherubic quality, although the shit-eating grin from his cat form was still there (albeit minus the spiky teeth... they did seem sharper than normal human teeth, however). He wore a distinctly metrosexual cropped leather black jacket, that basically served as a means to cover his arms and not much else. His chest was in plain view, and on his left pectoral a large black tattoo of a cross was visible. He wore extremely low-cut white pants held up with miscellaneous belts, and knee-high riding boots.
"Now look at this sexy piece of ass, and tell me I'm not good looking" he said, strutting over to them and posing with a wink.
"You aren't good looking. And Beast Boy, pick your jaw up from the floor. You're only giving him more points" Raven deadpanned.
Edaniel let out a bark of laughter and Beast Boy lost the shocked expression from his face, a little disgruntled. At least Raven didn't find him attractive... Or did she? He shut down his worries quickly, not wanting to alarm Raven as she could probably pick up on them with her empathic abilities.
"So what, tomorrow we meet back here and go into the vaults with you?" Beast Boy managed to get out. Edaniel nodded.
"Yep, so I'll see you here as soon as the moon is up!" and with a poof of sulfuric smoke, he had vanished, leaving the two Titans to ponder what had just happened to them.
x.x.x.x.x.x.x
"I'm so mad at myself for not asking him about the thing that attacked Starfire and I" Raven said the next day as she and 'Garfield' ate lunch on their respective breaks.
"You can always ask him tonight?" Beast Boy offered, taking a sip of his soda.
"The whole point of this mission is to figure things out as quickly as possible so I can report back to Cyborg or Robin in order to deal with it effectively. I was weak and my judgement was clouded last night, so it slipped my mind when normally it wouldn't have."
"Stop beating yourself up about it Rae, it's so not your fault you were healing yourself from a tough battle and you were... hey, what do you mean your judgement was clouded? Clouded by what?" Beast Boy had stopped halfway through his attempt to soothe her as what she had just said was fully processed. Was she distracted by Edaniel's surprisingly good looks? Beast Boy really hoped not.
"Gar, I was just... I mean, you'd helped to heal me, so I had a lot on my mind..." she trailed off, a faint blush dusting her cheeks as she had been so honest and upfront about what she was feeling with him. Where did that come from?
Beast Boy's nerves calmed and his gaze softened. "You know I'd never let anything bad happen to you, Rae... I mean, uh, we're supposed to look out for each other!" He mentally cursed himself for sounding so awkward and strictly 'friendly' in this statement... but that's what they were, right? Strictly friends?
Raven's blush hadn't gone anywhere, and she cursed her rampant emotions repeatedly and took a bite out of her sandwich to buy time in order to come up with a coherent response.
"Yeah, we're supposed to look out for each other. But I'd have done the same for you" she said coolly.
"Rae, I'd have done it even if we weren't teammates to begin with"Beast Boy replied seriously. Raven could sense the anxiety coming off of him as he admitted this, and so in response she reached over and grabbed his hand.
"Thanks, Gar."
x.x.x.x.x.x.x
That night they had managed to reach the Mausoleum just as the moon reached its height in the sky, as Edaniel had said. They deposited their gold toll in the Hooded Angel's plate, and were granted access to the subterranean Mausoleum. Edaniel in his cat form, green tail twirling, was waiting for them.
"There you are, slowpokes! I was beginning to wonder what the holdup was."
"Let's just pick a vault and get out of here before I get a headache"Raven muttered, walking over to the corridor that housed all of the riddles.
As she and her two companions browsed the poems, she suddenly made a double take as her eyes skimmed them over.
"Hey, Edaniel... this one's really familiar to a poem I've read in a book before. Is it common for ghosts to pull stuff like this into their own dreams?"she asked the green being.
"Ghosts were once alive, human beings with real human feelings. It's possible that the riddles might be based on something very real that they experienced while alive, something that impacted them. What poem are you thinking of?"
"It's been debated as to who's written it, which is why I ask. Shakespeare is among the supposed authors, but perhaps this is the original?" Raven mused, running her fingers along the plaque. Beast Boy came up behind her and began to read over her shoulder:
"If you see a fairy ring
In a field of grass,
Very lightly step around,
Tiptoe as you pass;
Last night fairies frolicked there,
And they're sleeping somewhere near.
If you see a tiny fay
Lying fast asleep,
Shut your eyes and run away,
Do not stay or peep;
And be sure you never tell,
Or you'll break a fairy spell."
"Well, it seems innocent enough as far as vaults go" Beast Boy said, shrugging. "Fairies are sweet, right?"
Raven turned around and gave him a look that said otherwise. "Fairies are not sweet. All the folklore I've read about them and from what I can tell you from experience says that they are destructive and mischievous creatures at the very least. They love tormenting humans."
Beast Boy looked a little crestfallen, but he trusted Raven's judgement. "Well, hopefully we don't run into any mean ones in the dream..."
"I fear that we will"Raven said with dread in her heart.
"Well now that you've picked out a vault, let's get going! It's sure to be pretty fantastic" Edaniel said in his usual chipper fashion, causing Raven to glare at him as they proceeded to leave the Mausoleum's underground.
"Well, might as well find the headstone... Come on, it's really easy!"Edaniel said, bouncing around on top of other headstones, occasionally landing on Beast Boy's head as they progressed around the graveyard.
"I'm guessing it's that one?" Raven said sarcastically, pointing towards the headstone in question. In it danced a beautiful young girl, her hair flowing behind her back; she held hands with two small winged creatures, fairies, who seemed to be guiding her around the circle of mushrooms that she was dancing in.
"Looks nice enough" Beast Boy commented, again wondering what all the fuss was about. Fairies were sweet, innocent little nature spirits, weren't they?
"That's just what they want you to think" Raven replied.
"Well sheesh, who needs me when you've got Mrs. Know-It-All over there!" Edaniel quipped, earning another glare from Raven. He ignored it as usual and jumped into the ring with the statue of the girl, pretending to dance in a circle as she was.
"That's exactly what you're not supposed to do!" Raven said, exasperated, and she grabbed the little green cat thing by his scruff and pulled him out of the ring.
"Well then what ARE you going to do?" Edaniel said, wiggling his kitty brow in anticipation.
"Uh, the poem said something about them being asleep, right? And to tiptoe around them?" Beast Boy said. "So I guess we just..." he grabbed the two fairy statues and laid them down on one side of the ring, outside of it of course. He then morphed into a gorilla and lifted the statue of the girl out of it, placing her on the opposite side of the ring; it now looked like she was tiptoeing away from it.
Suddenly, the ground inside the ring gave way to the trapdoor which would lead into the dream. Beast Boy morphed back.
"Piece of cake!" he said with a grin.
x.x.x.x.x.x.x
Once again they were in a forest. Raven looked around much more cautiously this time, however, as she knew how tricky anything with fairies could be. Edaniel on the other hand was gallivanting through the trees as if nothing was wrong at all, and in fact he seemed rather used to this sort of thing.
"Come on kiddos, let's get cracking! It's gonna be tough finding a fairy ring in the dark, and ghost dream like this one usually stay se in the nighttime"
"How do you know so much about ghost dreams anyway?" Beast Boy asked curiously, catching up to the little green cat-thing.
"It's part of my job to know! The Mausoleum exists for one thing: to find restless spirits and store them until they can be processed and moved on to the next life. Ghosts are like static on a radio, they interfere with the living. They're nightmares and confused versions of their former selves, and without us to pick them up and figure out what's keeping them that way, life on the planet would grind to a halt."
Raven winced at his terminology, and Edaniel gave her a pointed look as if he knew much more than his silly exterior showed.
"The Mausoleum has sixty vaults available for storage, and you've cleared ten of them, which leaves us with forty more that are still occupied... Well, thirty-nine after we get this one all sorted" he said, his weird grin expanding on his face.
"Why are all the ghost dreams like this though? Why is everything so... real?" Beast Boy then asked as he held aside a tree branch for Raven to pass through.
"The living rarely dream of reality, while the dead think of nothing else. Cold, hard, reality. They're fixated on what may have happened to them in life and it replays in their minds over and over again until we can process them... Life isn't always pretty, and people die all the time full of sorrow and pain. Some of that pain can stay with someone even in death."
"You know" Raven spoke up for the first time since they had entered the dream, "this might be the first time you've ever said anything really useful and serious about what we're doing" she said. Perhaps they'd have a chance to get some useful information out of him for their own Titans-related mission.
"I appreciate the compliment, sister!" Edaniel said with a wink, which caused Raven to roll her eyes.
"Yeah, yeah, but wait, so what exactly ARE you to know so much about all of this? Were you just drafted like me?" Beast Boy interjected again as they kept walking through the forest. The trees seemed to be getting larger and denser as they progressed, something that Raven noticed but kept to herself for now.
"The Mausoleum is made up of a manager, the staff, and the cleaning crew. The Hooded Angel is the manager, the Tower Guards (like yours truly) are the staff, and Bali-Lali and her cleaners are the caretakers. We're all spirits, made up of pieces of other people's souls... But it's because of this that we can't directly interfere in the ghost dreams without the help of living agents under our employment. That's where you come in, boy-o" Edaniel explained, flicking his curly tail at Beast Boy.
"And once we've finished?" Raven said dryly.
"Well, if you succeed you get a big fat reward. If not... You are assimilated into the Mausoleum, or become cleaners."
Beast Boy gulped. Sure, a reward was a nice idea, but the opposing one that involved becoming a decaying rotting THING only good for doing the Mausoleum's bidding was not at all pleasant. Before he could voice these thoughts aloud, however, he reached out and grabbed Raven's arm and stuck his leg out in front of Edaniel in order to stop them both from walking.
"Guys... I think we're here."
They were teetering on the edge of a clearing, one much lower than the treeline. In the middle of said clearing, there was a perfect ring of mushrooms of various shapes and sizes. Sleeping on the outside of the ring were a dozen or two little beings, fairies. Beast Boy used his superior animal vision in order to scrutinize them more clearly. They looked fragile and delicate, their slit-like eyes closed. They had wispy thin hair that flowed around their small heads; they were all naked it seemed, their long thin limbs curled delicately around themselves. Their wings looked paper thin, and in the light of the moon he could make out tiny veins that spiderwebbed through them, making them look almost like leaves.
They radiated a soft light that warmed Beast Boy's heart, and he took a step in order to descend into the clearing. Raven's firm grip on his shoulder broke the spell.
"Beast Boy, look" she said quietly. He shifted his eyes from the sleeping fairies and they fell upon a young girl with auburn hair in a simple white dress who had descended into the clearing, her eyes alight with curiosity. She sidestepped around the fairy ring, and instead made her way towards the sleeping figures lying in the grass. She knelt down next to one, and gently her hand reached out to touch the fluttering wings.
Beast Boy's eyes widened, for as if they were all awakened by the same touch, the group of fairies rose all together and surrounded the young girl. All seemed innocent enough, as she giggled and laughed as they fluttered about her, threading flowers and braiding her hair. They began tugging at her dress, and some of them had already started dancing within the circle of mushrooms. The remaining ones pulled at her more harshly, and she then jumped into the ring and was dragged along with them as they danced and danced, going around the circle in a mesmerizing rhythm.
"What now?" Beast Boy whispered, his eyes still fixated on the dancers.
"Just wait" Raven and Edaniel said at the same time, although Raven's tone was grim whilst Edaniel seemed cheery as usual.
As if on cue, the girl suddenly began to shriek and try to pull herself out of the fairies' grasp, yanking and tugging as her feet became bloody with the effort of dancing. The fairies ignored her and continued, going even faster it seemed. The girl's arms began to bleed as their long fingers dug into them harder every time she would try to pull them away. Some fairies clambered onto her back and bent her forward, and she began to wheeze under the effort they were putting her through.
"It's going to kill her!" Beast Boy hissed. Raven bit her lip and looked over at Edaniel.
"Well? How do we 'break the spell'?" she asked him, in reference to the poem.
"My guess is you'd better find a way to distract them and get her out of there so she can talk about it to someone... Before they, y'know, rip her to pieces" Edaniel mused. Raven nodded, and she turned to devise a plan with Beast Boy... who was not there.
"Beast Boy?!" she let out a gasp as she saw him bounding down into the clearing in the form of a mountain lion, and when he reached the ring he transformed back into a human. The fairies had stopped their dancing and stared at him in awe, suddenly shoving the bloodied girl out of the ring and pulling the changeling into their dance. Raven swooped down on the girl and caught her before she hit the ground.
"What's your name?" Raven asked her, frantically watching the now green-tinged blur of dancing within the ring.
"L...Lucy" the girl gasped.
"Okay, Lucy, what happened to you?" she asked, her tone becoming more nervous as the dance increased its pace.
Within the circle, Beast Boy was struggling to keep up with them. A fairy had grabbed each of his hands and was pulling him forward, giddy expressions on their faces. Others flitted feverishly around him, a few taking out pipes and flutes and beginning to play a haunting music.
"You're like us, changeling, you belong to us" one of them hissed through teeth that Beast Boy had not realized until now were spiky and frightening. The fairies in fact had become much more unlike anything Beast Boy had ever seen as they danced and danced; their limbs had elongated to become spindly and twiglike, their faces were oval shaped and their eyes slitted and completely black, and Beast Boy could see their bones protruding through their sides.
"I'm... Let me go! I can dance on my own!" Beast Boy growled. The fairies began to laugh and only increased their pace. Beast Boy was beginning to tire, and he tried looking outside of the ring only to be met with the sight of the clearing expanding towards the heavens, the treeline moving so far above him that he could almost no longer see it.
"You will come Underground with us!" one of the fairies cackled, and the whole world then began to spin.
"HURRY!" Edaniel said, looking alarmed as the ground suddenly began to bend and lose its shape around the ring.
"Speak up, girl!" Raven yelled at Lucy, her voice hinting dangerously at the demonic.
"They... It was a fairy ring! I thought they were all legends" she wheezed, "but I was captured by one, and they almost killed me! Almost..." she suddenly began to convulse, and then a smile appeared on her face as the fairy magic left her. Raven sighed in relief, and the girl suddenly changed forms and her angelic state rose into the heavens.
"Good, you solved the dream. Now you've got to get the green bean and get outta here!" Edaniel yelped, digging his claws into the terrain as it became almost a vortex at the bottom, pulling them in.
"Right." Raven steadied herself, trying to push aside all emotions in order to cast a spell that would save Beast Boy... yet her nerves at the thought of the fairies taking him was overwhelming her, and she couldn't concentrate.
"RAVEN!"
The sound of his voice, so desperate and hopeless, jolted her out of her state and she raised her arms which were now crackling with black magic. Edaniel jumped up as the ground began to give way, pulling on her cape and climbing into her hood, freeing Raven's eyes from shadow in the process.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos!" she chanted, and floated up into the air; she was now hovering above the fairy ring, and she looked down through her magic shrouded eyes. The fairies were hissing and spitting at her, throwing all sorts of insults and names at her which she ignored, focusing her power onto Beast Boy.
The black light hummed with power, and suddenly her magic morphed into a clawed black hand which pushed through the fairy spells and wrapped itself around Beast Boy, pulling him out of the vortex. With her other hand, she closed the portal pulling the fairies into the Underground, the ring vanishing and the clearing returning to normal. Her eyes then returned to normal, and with a groan she fell back down onto the grass, clutching her head. Beast Boy fell out of the magical grip, pulling himself to his feet instantly in order to make his way over to her.
"Raven! Raven, are you okay?" he gasped, kneeling next to her and helping her sit up. Edaniel was still in her hood.
"Yeah, my head's just swimming with fairy magic. It'll pass shortly" she moaned, rubbing her temples. Without further ado, however, Beast Boy grabbed her and hugged her so tightly that Edaniel yelped as he was jolted and squished by the changeling's arms.
"Thanks for saving me" he whispered in her ear. Raven's arms, still positioned at either side of her head, reached over in order to hug him back in some fashion. He pulled away slightly, smiling at her widely. She was turning a little pink, and he though that was the most adorable thing he'd seen in a while.
"Rae, you're blushing!" he teased. This comment only caused her to blush even more, and she averted her eyes from his for a moment before she realized that she just couldn't look away for too long.
"You're so warm, it's cute" Beast Boy said, again causing her to deepen in color, and he leaned forward in order to brush noses with hers.
Raven's eyes widened at the proximity and she felt a surge in her powers, and suddenly a tree uprooted completely from the ground and fell, crushing a few other ones in the process. Beast Boy pulled back and laughed, standing up and pulling her with him.
"Okay, you two, you're even worse than the other ones. Let's get out of here so I can make myself some pancakes" Edaniel muttered loud enough for them to hear, and as if on cue the fog wrapped itself around the little group and they were pulled out of the dream. Raven, still in Beast Boy's arms, dared not move as she had no idea how to handle the physical closeness that kept her brain all muddled and most of her emotions doing a dance even wilder than the fairies in the ring.
"Okay, folks" Edaniel said, hopping out of Raven's hood once they were once again in the graveyard, "I guess I'll be seeing you two tomorrow night... Same time, you know whatta do."
"Wait, Edaniel, there's something we want to ask you" Beast Boy said, his arm now around Raven's shoulders.
"Look, I'm not officially allowed to perform weddings, but if you can wait a few more vaults my brother can help you out" Edaniel said cheekily. Beast Boy and Raven both glared at him, although Beast Boy's held a twinkle of amusement. Raven finally had the courage to pull his arm off of her, marching forward and stopping in front of the little green Tower Guard.
"Listen, where we come from we're pretty important when it comes to saving the world and stuff" she said, in a very uncharacteristic manner for Raven.
"Yeah, you're part of the Tween Titans! I gotcha, sister" Edaniel said with a wave of his paw. Raven closed her eyes and fumed silently.
"We only came to this godforsaken town because SOMETHING in our city was snooping around one of our former villain's headquarters, and it was trying to take this" she paused, raising her hand as a black-magic encased book appeared with a pop"book from his lair. It then proceeded to attack and wound Starfire and we don't know what it wants, but it could be a menace to the city. Especially now that we've found out about the Mausoleum and all that's going on in here... Things could get dangerous. Care to help us figure it out?" she finished with a glare that managed to silence even Edaniel and his ramblings.
The little green cat monster took the book from her hand and began to peruse it. "I'll take a look for ya, but only because you asked so nicely. Maybe we can figure it all out together, since whatever it was must have some sort of interest in this place."
Beast Boy had been laughing throughout the entire exchange rather quietly to himself, and just as Raven turned to march back over to him in order to teleport them both back to St. Lymans in order to get some rest, a thought occurred to him.
"Wait, Edaniel... You said earlier that we were "worse" that some others... Who were you talking about?"
Edaniel turned around, the book floating alongside his figure in a puffy cloud of sulphureous smoke; his eyes drooped and were pained almost.
"Dinah and Vincent, of course."
WELL there you go. Sorry to leave it on another cliffhanger, but I started my online course for summer school... Life of a college student. Woo.
I'm going to try to update enough to where I get up to Chapter 10 (at least) before I go on vacation starting in July... Fingers crossed! I'm really enjoying writing this, and I hope all you secret readers (because there are a few of you out there who read it! I know!) like it enough too.
Also, yay for BBRae fluff in this chapter.. Just couldn't resist.
