Cyborg, Beast Boy, and Skuld barely got out the bathroom door before the whole room was filed with Raven's black light. When the initial flash faded, and he recovered his balance, Cyborg peeked in. He could see the four of them, frozen and lit black with white outlines. Raven and Urd were bent over Robin and Starfire; Raven in between and leaning towards their heads, and Urd just past their heads and leaning towards Raven. Aside from a slight pulsing from the black light, the room was entirely still and silent.
"They – they'll be okay, right?" Skuld asked.
"Of course they will," Beast Boy said as he turned back around. "Trust me. When it comes to brain stuff, no one's better at it than Raven!"
"No one?" Cyborg said, facing them. He stared down at Beast Boy.
"Well, you know, in the whole 'creepily get into your head' sense," Beast Boy said, rubbing the back of his head and laughing nervously. "When it comes to building the T-ship and all..."
Cyborg's neutral glower turned into a smirk.
"You just scored on me, didn't you?"
"Yup."
"Great."
"So, um, what do we do now?" Skuld asked into the sudden silence.
"Well, the plan was to investigate the GPS coordinates we pulled from the tower," Cyborg said. "But I really don't want to leave them here alone."
"That's actually what I was talking about. What do we do about that?" She jerked a thumb at the tableau in the bathroom.
"There's not a whole lot we can do about that, except keep an eye on things," he said, quietly. Skuld looked unconvinced, but Beast Boy nodded. "What's happening in there... that's in Raven and Urd's hands, now."
"So we just wait?"
"Nope," Cyborg said. "Hey, BB, how about you take first watch?"
"On it, Cy," Beast Boy said with a wink and a thumbs up. He promptly turned into a very, very large dog, something in between an akita and a bull mastiff. He checked down both sides of the hallway, turned around three times, and then settled down sphinx-like in front of the shattered bathroom door.
"Wait, you can turn into dogs, too?" Skuld said incredulously.
Beast Boy woofed at her, and Cyborg managed – barely – not to chuckle. Skuld walked up to Beast Boy, looked around, then squeed and threw her arms around him. Beast Boy sighed, then panted obediently.
"Ah! You're so cute!" she squealed happily. Then she back away, poked Beast Boy in the chest, and glared at Cyborg. "And if either of you tells anyone I did that, it's your heads! I do have a chainsaw, you know."
"Our secret," Cyborg assured her gravely. She glared at him once more, then shook her head and gave Beast Boy a quick scratch behind the ears.
"So he's got first watch," she said. "What about us?"
Cyborg shrugged.
"You up for sorting broken Sladebot parts?"
She thought for a second.
"Leftovers from last night?"
"Yep."
"Trying, most likely in vain, to find something useful out of all the wreckage?"
"Most likely."
She nodded.
"You're on."
"Well, all right!" Cyborg said, and started down the hall. "We'll be back in a few hours, BB. Call me if anything changes, or if you need one of us to spell you before then."
Beast Boy barked in agreement.
They'd moved the larger parts into a few piles the night before, while they fixed the house and waited for Belldandy to finish cooking. But there were still a bunch of smaller pieces scattered around the yard, and he wanted to get as much of those picked up as possible; it was a nice yard, and needed to be clean. Plus, he still had to go through the piles of destroyed Sladebot to find anything useful, and if Skuld was as talented an engineer as he took her for...
"So where do we start?" Skuld asked.
"We brought a forensic robot on the T-ship," Cyborg said, pointing to where their plane rested in a wide spot on the temple grounds. "The pathfinding subroutines aren't quite right for this environment, so we'll need to watch it, but it'll float around and vacuum stuff up out of the yard. In the meantime," he jerked a thumb at one of the Sladebot piles, "we get to search for a needle in a haystack."
"Got it," Skuld said, nodding. "What sort of needle."
"Won't know that until we find it. How about you get started with that, while I get the 'bot?"
"You got it," she said, grinning half-maniacally and clenching raising a fist in determination. He really, really, wanted to smile at her and pat her on the head, but managed to restrain that particular impulse. Instead he nodded encouragingly, and set off for the T-ship.
"Cyborg?"
"Hmm?"
"When we're done with this, could you help me with Banpei?"
"I... sure? Who's Banpei?"
Raven half expected to find a featureless plain. Projections of her own mind tended to take the form of ragged, wasted landscapes, but there were some pretty good reasons for that. However, the default for this sort of thing tended to be featureless gray plain, with some ill-defined separation between land and sky. Not in this case, though.
"Well, that's odd," she heard a voice say, and she turned to find a one-tenth scale – if that – version of Urd standing on her left shoulder. She was slightly out of proportion, with her head just a little bit too big for the rest of her body.
"What happened to you?"
"I had to split off a part of myself to follow you in," Urd said. "The rest of me is back at the temple, maintaining the connection. And keeping an eye on things."
"I... honestly did not know you could do that."
"Yes, it's one of our less-advertised powers. Lots less spectacular than magic blasts and granting wishes, but very useful at times."
"I see. Just don't let Starfire see you like that. She'll squee."
"I'll keep that mind. So what's with the circus?" Urd gestured expansively – well, as expansively as she could get – at the dimly lit circus ring.
Raven stared up at the empty trapeze, as they slowly swung back and forth.
"We're in Robin's mind," she said quietly. "This is where he would have grown up."
"What do you mean, would have grown up?" Urd said, but then the scenery changed. Again. "And what does a Gordanian spaceship have to do with it?"
"This is... kind of how we met Starfire. We're in both of their minds, remember? I wouldn't expect any of this to remain static, but we will see places important to them."
"I see," Urd said, as the scenery changed to a rainy hilltop, one Raven recognized from back home in Jump City. "So what are we looking for, exactly?"
"Remember that thing we saw, swirling around inside of them? We're trying to find that." She pulled her cloak shut against the rain; despite existing only in Robin and Starfire's heads, it was still cold. Just like that night, when Slade's hallucinogen had-
She narrowed her eyes and knelt down, half expecting the scenery to change. She touched the imaginary earth. It felt far too real.
"Urd," she said, quietly, "back of my head."
She did not move to look, but she felt the miniature goddess lean back on her shoulder, and examined her head. A quick hiss of breath confirmed her suspicion.
"Hold still," Urd said. She uttered something, an attack spell that Raven did not let herself hear. There was a brief sensation of heat at her back, and then the rain became just one more image, and the ground lost its reality. The picture remained, but it soon began to fade and melt into another scene.
"Any more?"
"No," Urd said. "Just the one tendril. How did you-"
"Their memories shouldn't be real for me," she said. "Touch, smell, taste... these are harder to convey to someone else, compared to sound and light. That hill... I've been on that hill. On a thousand clear days, on a thousand rainy nights. But on that night? I was somewhere else. It shouldn't have been real. But it was, because the thing was drawing on my memories, trying to lure me into the same trap." She touched the back of her head with her left hand. "Where was the contact point, anyway?"
"Neck," Urd said, "right in the middle."
Her hand slid further down, until – ah. Right there. It had not left anything behind, but she could still sense where it had gone into her, had started to feed sensory data into her spirit-self, and who knew what else if it had continued on... Her hands went alight as she got the feel of the thing; it was still glamored against her, but now she knew what that glamor looked and felt like. She glowed, once, from the top her head down to the soles of her feet, as she invoked some protection against future invasion. Potentially it could change its glamor, and thus evade most of her protections, but she would be warned if anything got that close to her again.
Her eyes began to glow black as she looked around the memory-scape. It had transitioned to the interior of a Tamarranian building, or perhaps a space station, but one that looked blasted and charred and war-torn. With a sudden insight, she knew this was the place where Starfire had been captured by the Gordanians.
But those images were only projections, memories flashing on rapid-fire as they passed through Robin and Starfire's minds. She had seen much the same the first time she had gone into Robin's head, and again when she did so after the Sladebot attack. Both times the enemy inside him had driven her out when she probed too deeply.
But this time she had a goddess with her.
Her eyes glowed black with her spirit-self, as she sought to pierce through the illusions of projected memories. She came against something which pressed against her spirit-self like a mighty wind; it was not the trap she had encountered at the tower, nor the trap she figured Robin must have slipped into himself; it was, she realized, the geas itself fighting against her, trying to drive her away until its fell work was completed.
"Oh, no you don't," she snarled through clenched teeth, as her hood blew back and her whole body came alight. "You can't threaten my friends and expect me to sit back and watch..."
She threw up her arms in front of her face, making an x-shape with the forearms, and tried to press forward against the wind. She regained a few steps, but the wind redoubled its pressure, and bit by bit she started to slide back. She could feel herself slipping, her feet lifting up into the air as the wind tried to throw her out of Robin and Starfire's minds.
Then Urd was off her shoulder and flying behind her, using Raven's body to hide from the wind. Her spirit-self was not constrained by so quaint a thing as eyes, so Raven was able to see Urd fly a short distance away from her... and then turn and soar straight at her back. She braced herself, tried to time it just right, and took a single step forward as Urd slammed into her.
They shot forward a good five feet. But still the wind came.
The wind not only made it hard to move, but made it hard for Raven to think, to concentrate enough to bring her powers to bear. But slowly, slowly, with gritted teeth, she focused her powers onto her front. The black light coalesced before her, and formed a steadily growing wedge. With each labored step, and each labored push from Urd, the wedge grew just a little bit more, and deflected just a little bit more of the wind, and made the next step just a little bit easier. Until at last the wedge was taller and wider than she was, and deflected the enemy's power over her and past her. It took a lot out of her to maintain that projection, but Urd was doing more than just pushing her: the goddess was also pouring a little bit of her own power into Raven. Not enough to risk overwhelming her, but just enough that she could keep going one step at a time.
And she knew, now, where she was going. Her sight had finally pierced through the memory projections, and she had at last found the featureless landscape she had expected. Yet, as she looked closer, she realized that it was not so featureless after all.
Somehow, she got the impression of two landscapes, superimposed one atop the other. The one was the aforementioned featureless, gray plain. The other...
The second landscape consisted of finely sculpted tiles, carved out of what looked like marble. The tiles were minute, bas-relief images of faces, people, events, and places. She recognized a few of the faces, and some of the events, and realized that these were Robin and Starfire's actual memories, not just the projections she had seen earlier.
And they moved.
The final effect was beautiful, if very unsettling, but it also threw her certainty askew. She had been pressing forward directly against the wind, towards what she sensed was the locus of Robin and Starfire's linked minds. Admittedly, the wind increased in strength the farther along she went, but it would do that even if it was leading her astray. And, now that she saw the memories, it was also likely that she was simply heading towards a very strong shared memory, rather than towards her friends' center. She could be headed in the wrong direction entirely.
Or she could be right. She needed some additional guidance, some sort of signpost directing her towards her friends. Maybe Urd could-
"Raven," Urd said, breaking into her thoughts. "Can you keep going on your own?"
She increased the height and width of the wedge.
"I think so," she grunted. "Why?"
"Something's coming up behind us," Urd said, conversationally. "I'm going to go deal with it."
"I... Right. Good luck."
"You too. Save your friends, Raven. Stay on the path."
And then she pushed off Raven's back and was gone.
"I will if I can find 'em," Raven whispered.