Mercury teetered atop a step ladder with one leg, the other braced against the wall. She shouldered the weight of a flat screen monitor and shifted until it fell flush with the housing she installed earlier. Mercury took a screw in her hand and reached behind the screen. After almost a full minute of fiddling with the screw and missing the thread, she sighed deeply.

This would be so much easier with my powers.

Repairing the surveillance room had proven a more daunting task than Mercury originally imagined. She could have fused all the monitors to the wall in a matter of seconds. However, Cyborg refused and insisted she do it the old-fashioned way. He said it was important to "preserve modularity and variable position capability".

Still wants to play with his toys when I'm done.

Because of this, Mercury had spent the last three days fixing displays to the wall and linking the mess of wires to the central relay. After hours of and hours of work, this was the last screen. Mercury fastened two fittings on each side of the housing and then stepped down from the ladder. She slowly backed away with arms raised. Didn't want to have another screen fall on her. Once she was sure the monitor was secure, Mercury sighed relief. She retracted the metal coating from her hand to wipe her forehead. After, she took a few moments to admire the fruits of her labor.

"I should be in charge of the tech room," she mused.

"Yo, Merc!" Cyborg said. He entered the control room and marveled at her progress. "Hey, it's looking good in here."

"You're welcome," Mercury said.

"Oh, don't even," Cyborg said. "You didn't melt anything in here, did you?" he asked, glaring.

Mercury rolled her eyes. "Maybe I'll melt you if you don't quit asking."

Cyborg laughed. "That's low," he said. He turned to leave. "Hey, we need a sixth for Hero Shooter, you in?"

"Ranked?"

Cyborg shook his head.

"Good," Mercury said. She followed Cyborg to the lounge room. "Ranked is so toxic."

The Titans had lost track of time.

It was midnight. The whole team was seated around the big screen, huge enough to combine all of their POV's. They were twelve games in (or maybe it was twenty). They were a great team, only two losses for the whole night and still going strong. Everyone picked a character that was strangely fitting of themselves in real life. Beast Boy, a transforming druid, Raven, a black mage, Robin, a ninja, and so on. Mercury couldn't tell if they were being ironic or not.

Everything was going well until they encountered a new character on an enemy team. It had just been patched in yesterday, no balance passed had been made yet.

"Hypno, watch out!" Beast Boy called.

"We need a location," Robin said.

"He's downtown," Raven said. "…going market."

"What's a hypno?" Mercury asked after picking off a sniper with her speedster character.

"Hypnotist, they can control enemy characters," Cyborg informed.

"Sounds kinda OP," Mercury said. "I'll get him." She clicked her controller, speeding down to market.

"Be careful, you're alone," Robin said. "We're going for the flag."

"I shall assist if I can," Starfire said.

Mercury darted through the marketplace looking for this 'hypnotist' character. She was the only one on the team in the area to keep him from getting to their flag. Though, once she got sight of the enemy, she didn't even have time to shoot before she was overtaken.

"Wait, what?" Mercury asked, watching her character move on its own. She jammed on the controller but could not direct her character at all. "Dammit, he got me!"

"Don't worry, we're about to score," Robin said.

"Rob, I can't move my guy," Mercury said. "This is bullshit!"

She could only watch as her enemy commanded her character to run into their base and grab their flag. Meanwhile, Robin and Beast Boy captured the enemy flag while Raven disrupted the enemy on that side of the map. Starfire and Cyborg headed back to their base but it was too late. The hypnotist enemy jumped Mercury's character off the map.

Mercury's jaw was tight. She stood up in a huff and walked away. The controller fell from her hand on her way out, it was red-hot, smoldering.

"Merc, it's just a game…" Beast Boy said.

"Yeah, well, I wasn't having fun."

After leaving the game, Mercury laid down and went to sleep. Maybe it was unreasonable to storm out like that. Something about someone else taking control over her really rubbed her the wrong way. But it was just a game. It wasn't like someone took over her body and mind in real life…

A knock on her door. Mercury groaned as she turned over in bed, the sunlight being quite unkind to her blurred eyes. She tumbled onto the floor as the knocking came again.

"Okay!" she called. She threw on a sweatshirt long enough to be decent. Her shiny new blue and black supersuit was currently draped on the back of her desk chair. "I'm coming."

She slid the door open and found Robin on the other side, staring at her. "Hey, Robin…"

"You wouldn't leave us like that in the field, would you?"

"What?" Mercury asked. She shook head. "No way, that was just a dumb game."

"Just a dumb game that made you mad enough to burn the controller." Robin raised Mercury's controller from last night.

Mercury took the controller and swallowed. "What… what are you trying to say?"

Robin was silent for a long moment, judging her with his masked eyes.

"Training in thirty minutes," he said finally. "No powers." With that, he left.

Mercury looked down at the controller and frowned.

She threw it on her bed and got dressed.

Continued in Electronegativity