(Author's Note: ...Happy impending Halloween, peoples!)
The giant vines had not assaulted Cyborg further.
He had, however, charged through two doors, shimmied down five floors worth of elevator cable, and hid in a stall in a women's restroom. Just in case.
They were still out there, though. Kneeling on the tiled floor, the seemingly imperceptible vibrations of two massive creatures gently "walking" carried through his body enough for his internal instruments to detect. A patrol around the perimeter of the building.
He pressed a hand against his forehead, in an instinctive—and futile—attempt to accelerate his thought processes. There wasn't enough time to think. Or perhaps more accurately, there was too much to think about. A head full of multiprocessing chips is incredibly useful, when there's much calculation to be done.
But that wasn't the case here. The kind of planning and deduction he needed to do required creative association, and trying to accomplish that with his set of multiprocessors was akin to trying to achieve flight with an ordinary bicycle. While theoretically possible, it would require a contrived set of conditions and luck on par with finding an alien disguised as a ghost in a basket. And he imagined that would also turn his sonic cannon into a radio.
And that, he realized, was an example of the type of connection-making that those chips were unsuited for.
The most useful thing he'd come up with thus far was that the wide jamming was still in effect, and thus Jinx's failure to respond over communicator might be due to her escaping out of the limited range, instead of her demise. While not the most directly helpful conclusion, it cut back his preoccupation over her, improving his capability to consider other chains of thought.
For instance, her theory that the pumpkins' ultimate goal was to capture the core Titans was on the mark: they literally toppled several buildings just to get at her, whereas they were merely holding a vigil outside. If they were trying to kill him, they'd have knocked over this building, too. Secondly, they must have normal sensory perception; if they had the ability to sense his location despite intervening walls, they'd have pried him out of the elevator shaft, like they'd tried with the room they'd seen him land in.
Those two put together, he realized, meant they weren't going to act prior to finding him, which meant he could make the next move. But what move? They weren't going to wait for him to come out, not when they had throngs of zombie-like kids that could easily scour the building for any trace of him. He'd have to make a clever exit, somehow. And before enough kids could be rounded up to saturate the building, a timespan he had no way of knowing.
His thoughts were interrupted by the brief rattling of the simple metal lock of the stall door against its similarly metallic mechanism. For a moment he thought maybe locking the flimsy door wasn't as worthless as his rational mind had thought, but a cramped glance under the door revealed no one. Then the rattling returned, and this time Cyborg could easily feel and almost see the vibrations of the building.
He must've ended up somewhere near the exterior of the building, he decided; he wasn't performing any actual navigating during his tactical withdrawal, such as it was. The giant pumpkins would have a lot of weight to put on the ground, and the closer they were the stronger the vibrations became. They were the immediate threat; he had no means to outrun them on foot, and no means to outmuscle creatures that could rip slabs of concrete from the ground.
Wait.
There was his opening. Literally. That chunk of road was pried up from something, after all; and since the angle on the car's fateful drive was directly vertical, that opening would have to be near the building he was now in.
Worst case scenario would be that the road was extracted from solid ground instead of some open space underneath, in which case he'd need to hurry across the length of the road, use the up-curled road as a visual barrier, until he could get into the debris of the buildings on the other side, amongst which he would be nearly impossible to locate.
And of course, hope he didn't come across a bloody mess of pink hair splattered with pale flesh.
Pushing brief recollections of a myriad splatter films out of his mind, he returned the porcelain throne to full ownership of its containing space. Once his own image in the mirror ceased vibrating, he headed out the door into the corridor, setting off to approach the second floor.
Cyborg's trip down to the second floor was uneventful, though the tremors grew louder as he got nearer to their source. The rhythmic pattern of low booms melded with the rattling of glass grew increasingly unsettling; he managed to convince himself that it was just like when Beast Boy made the TV play that scene from Jurassic Park on repeat: the trick was to not let the giant green monster sneak up on him. Whether that monster held a giant gourd aloft, or was Beast Boy doing a tyrannosaur impersonation for a practical joke.
Traversing the second floor to the window nearest his escape route was unexpectedly easy. Cyborg had been prepared to use his detachable hand-cams to scout ahead, away from the sight of the giant pumpkins, but it turned out to be unnecessary: This floor employed tall cubicle walls instead of the open floor plan he had seen on the other floors, and the walls' height were sufficient for Cyborg to conceal his height with a slouch instead of a mobility-limiting crawl; and his x-ray vision had no issue with the cheap cloth-covered walls.
A cubicle was situated in his target area; even in the event a search party came through, he had a good chance of escaping detection long enough to make his getaway. The next step...was finding the right moment to move. He hated waiting. Fortunately, he had a plan to cut down on some of it.
He deployed one of his mobile hands and remote controlled it to crawl into the hallway. After a brief moment of feeling like a crew member for the Addams Family, he had it place itself in a walkway junction, where the thing could see both out a large window on the opposite side of the building and the most obvious entry points. When one of the giant pumpkins crossed that spot on the other side or the search team he was expecting came to this floor, he'd see them coming. The interior lights might be off, but the full moon outside provided enough illumination to work with.
Conveniently, he didn't need to wait long. Several seconds later, his hand-cam observed an awkward gait of four oversized vines out the opposite window, crossing from the right side to the left. Each step involved lifting two vines straight up, moving them forward in unison, then plunging them back down in sync with half of the booms he was still hearing. The two guard gourds were obviously not moving in sync, and based on how he had seen these now-awkward things outrunning a car he surmised they weren't suited for guard duty either. Probably grown, and maybe trained, for high speed and heavy hitting, forcing improvisation for the delicate-in-comparison maneuvering.
"Can we play xenobiologist later?"
For a split second, Cyborg's eyes darted all around, thinking he had actually heard Jinx's voice. But even if she was imaginary, or perhaps hallucinatory, she had a point: He was going to lose an opportunity if he didn't start paying more attention to his own plan.
The plan was fairly straightforward: It was not physically possible for two roving patrollers to be able to see all sides of the building at all times, so he would break through the window when neither could see where he went, making it impossible for them to follow. Thanks to the sighting observed through his hand-cam, he could reasonably estimate the location of one of the giant gourds; a quick glance to be sure the other one was conveniently distant was all he'd need before making his move.
By the time he had run the numbers in his head, it was already the optimal time. After his hand-cam verified that no giant pumpkin was waiting around either corner, he directed it back and reattached it to his arm. He looked down with his x-ray vision mode, in case there was something already in his landing zone, but there was simply too much material in the way to get any sort of reading down to street level.
Since there was no way to improve his situation, he took the chance and leapt through the window. Or more accurately, leapt into the vertical cubicle wall and took a portion of it through the window with him. The loud crash of shattering glass was less stealthy than he would have liked, but still acceptable since his entire plan was centered around not being where he landed when the pumpkins came by to investigate.
Once he had cleared the window, the lack of intervening building allowed his x-ray vision to see through the fabric-covered divider...and detect three short humanoid shapes nearby at street level. Grabbing the edges of the partition, he tried to alter the aerodynamics of the flat surface to control his precise landing spot. Unfortunately, the wall had naturally been facing in the direction he'd plunged it through the glass with, and drag had already negated its forward motion; straight down was the only direction left.
Lacking any other idea, Cyborg held the divider under him, nearly flat with respect to the ground. He had no expectations that it would serve to cushion his fall in any manner, but the odds of it surviving the fall were approximately nil in any case, and his instincts told him that a seemingly futile effort was slightly better than a wasted effort. Slightly. He was beginning to wonder if he had actually planned this escape as well as he thought.
The wall was reduced to flinders and small puffs of fuzz when Cyborg's weight smashed it against the pavement. As the sound of the crash resounded between his ears, he got a chance to look at the three kids. A boy and girl dressed as pirates, both with a general white-shirt-and-leather-props scheme; and a kid dressed as a ghost, whose white-sheet-draped-over-the-head look masked any sort of identifying features. The eyes of the pirate lookalikes glowed a light blue, while the exaggerated eyeholes on the ghost were a solid black.
None of them made a visible reaction to his arrival, having apparently been caught off guard by the gravity-powered exit strategy. Cyborg's descent had, however, displaced a lot of air, and as he got to his feet he saw the "wind" ripple across the pirates' shirts and under the ghost's sheet.
Wait.
Cyborg hadn't risen fully from the ground, so he saw quite clearly how the bottom edges of the ghost's sheet were blown off the ground, with nothing visible holding the rest of the kid in the air. So either someone's parent spent their entire budget on military grade hover technology and had to cover it up with a bedsheet, Gizmo had learned how to shut his face, or...
On a hunch, Cyborg quickly grabbed the edge of the sheet and yanked it off. The sheet didn't move like Cyborg thought it would, some sort of bulk attached on the inside made it slightly more difficult to remove. But as he had suspected, there was a small pumpkin floating underneath. Or at least, he assumed it could be some form of pumpkin.
A volume of thin green fibers, looking more like unfurled moss than the vines he'd seen on any of the other pumpkins, trailed down from the bottom of the hovering gourd, ending six inches above the ground. The gourd itself didn't appear particularly pumpkin-like, either: An ellipsoid with roughly the proportions of a human head, it didn't have the vertical indentations common to pumpkins, nor a stem of any sort. Instead, its surface was covered with irregular-looking, curved grooves. The unmarred portions of the surface bore a grainy texture that appeared almost wooden, except for the bright orange color. A cyan glow emanated from the grooves.
As he was taking in the bizarre sight, the glow rapidly intensified; and the two actual kids started moving forward. Cyborg followed his instinct and swung a fist at the glowing abomination with a yell. To his surprise, the substance of the gourd gave no resistance to the punch, and the glow blackened immediately as the fist punctured the far side of it.
Red, orange and gray matter splattered on the pavement, and what was left of the creature fell into a heap on the ground, its frail "skin" splitting on Cyborg's wrist. He instinctively used the sheet, which was still in his other hand, to wipe the leftovers off of himself. He couldn't quite identify the faint smell of the stuff, but it was close enough to rancid meat that he thought it might be better that he couldn't tell what it was.
Then he heard the two kids start bawling. He glanced between them warily, prepared for some sort of trick. But from the brief moments when their eyes were open, he saw the glow was gone.
More importantly, he heard and felt those two giant pumpkins sprinting closer.
"Time to go!" he told himself, as he picked up the two kids and covered their high-volume mouths with his hands.
He ran across the street, heading straight for the edge between the mountains of debris from the line of toppled buildings and the still intact buildings alongside them. Carrying two kids, he had lost his capacity to sneak or to fight. All he had left was run and hide, and to that end he needed somewhere to hide.
He tried to ignore the minor tremors of their pursuers as he jogged, hopped and otherwise navigated the paths between chunks of debris. The kids quickly figured out that squirming was not something they should be doing, which made Cyborg's movement easier to manage.
As he passed by a gap between the buildings on his right, a red flash caught his eye. He looked in that direction...and saw two small robots bearing soft red lights, sitting on the edge of a dumpster. The lighting and distance made it difficult to judge detail, but one of them resembled a food processor, including the clear plastic container, given small metal legs. The other appeared to be have been a one-inch-wide cube before similar legs were attached.
After a couple more tremors, their lights blinked some pattern in unison, before the two machines turned around and hopped forward...where there happened to be a hole. Cyborg recognized the light signal as highly accelerated Morse code; the message was "come".
The next deep rumble told Cyborg he didn't have time to argue. He quickly made his way to the hole and, after checking the distance and surface composition, jumped down. The sound of wheels accompanied the sight of the dumpster rolling to block the hole.
A solitary red light glowed patiently at Cyborg. He activated his shoulder lamp. The light was from the cube thing, sitting in the blending portion of the other robot. It turned out to be solitary because the blender robot was facing away from him. The "come" message blinked again, and the larger of the two small robots started hopping away. Cyborg quietly followed.