Chapter 12: Shallow

Writer's Note: In between the events of this arc and the last, the events of "Terra" happened. However, this was Bobcat's version of the events, and in it Gauntlet stopped Terra from leaving, hence negating the whole "Judas Contract" storyline. So, after getting a new member who is now learning to control her powers, the Titans moved on…

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His name was Morris Dees, and he was the principal of Jump City High school. And he was bored out of his mind.

A chubby, balding fellow in his early fifties, Principal Dees was currently overseeing the school's yearly science fair, along with Toddard Field, the school's science teacher, a thin, bony man with creepy looking fingers. The man looked like he was barely keeping himself from reaching out and plucking out your eyes. Dees didn't much like him. Rounding them up were a few other teachers.

Dees was unhappy for two main reasons. The first one was because that this year's exhibits were just so…uninspired. Year after year, students repeated the same old projects, hardly even changing the personal touches. If you'd seen one paper mache volcano erupt with vinegar and baking soda, you'd seen them all.

The other annoying thing was that due to a mixup, the science fair was happening on the same day that something Dees WAS interested in was happening: a meet and greet with two of the city's resident heroes, the Teen Titans: the goth girl Raven and their leader, Robin. Though the fire that Dees had once had for trying to guide kids (a fire that had gone out when he slowly realized over the course of years that many children are stupid, cruel, and uncaring about any form of education, secure in a delusion of immortality and invincibility and a constant thirst for pleasure that makes them block out things one considers unimportant. That, and the few gems tended to be destroyed under the weight of the masses, who were unspecial and uncaring and hated it when someone else wasn't that way. Then again, Principal Dees hadn't just stopped caring. The prospect that he had wasted his life was looming large, and whether that was true or not, the very idea had caused him to grow bitter) was gone, he did had a few shreds of his original beliefs that positive and proper role models could help kids grow up and shake off the apathy so many of them seemed to have at that age. And since the Titans ran around in costumes and fought villains, the kids might actually think they were cool.

But, as mentioned before, a scheduling error had put both the science fair and the meeting on the same day, and Dees was dragged into overseeing the science fair because that was what he ALWAYS did (remember, this was school. Different=evil not just in the minds of the students). His vice principal, Olivia Williams was in the auditorium instead, along with all the other teachers (besides the few Dees had dragged with him, as well as Field, whose interest in science was almost as creepy as his hands), while he was in the gym, looking at half-hearted, hackneyed exhibits of solar power and magnets. He was beginning to think that maybe he should just randomly pick a name, give first prize, and run back to the auditorium before the Titans left.

Dees nodded back to reality as the latest student finished his oral presentation on his project: why seeds grew better in water then in chlorine. He'd seen that kind of experiment at least five times in the history of his supervision, though Toddard was nodding his head, not so much in interest but more of a rapture that the boy was doing some kind of science work. Principal Dees sighed and moved on.

And stopped.

Unlike most of the exhibits, which tried to cover up the generic nature of their projects with nicely colored graphs and general other saccharine nonsense, the next exhibit was composed of a simple table, upon which rested a helmet.

And what a helmet! At first thought to be some crude mockup covered with tin-foil, Dees leaned in and was astounded that it was real. Using a hockey helmet as a base, almost all of the original had been stripped away and replaced with gleaming metal, which was topped by a twin set of glass ovals. The ovals were multi-segmented, like a bug's eyes, and covered virtually all the front of the helmet. It was one hell of a construct…and one Dees couldn't really believe once he recovered.

"And this is…?" Dees said, looking at the person standing behind the table.

It was a teenage girl, about fifteen years old. She had Hispanic features and was pretty good looking, abet a tad boyish. Her dark brown hair was tied behind her in a loose ponytail, and her brown eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. She was dressed in a lab coat that was tied in the front, her hands in its pockets and her head slightly down, as if she was studying the table.

"Mrs. Mori? Splendid! I never knew you had it in you!" Toddard was saying. The girl didn't reply. She kept her eyes on the table. Principal Dees looked at the chart.

"Excuse me? You are Mrs. Mori? Marissa?"

The girl again didn't reply.

"What does it do?" one of the other teachers, a female, asked. Lifting her head, the girl called Marissa finally spoke.

"Personal invention of mine. I call it the Harmonic Beam Discernment Device. The apparatus is worn on the head, and these two parts are inserted into the ears and link up to the neurological system of the wearer. Once that is done, the multi-layered glass and crystal lenses serve as focus points for a rapid series of lights flashed in highly specific patterns chosen by the user's mental commands." Marissa said.

"What?" Dees said. Only Toddard seemed to have any understanding, and he looked to be on the verge of having an orgasm. "What does it do?"

"Whatever you decide. You see, the human animal mostly relies on sight to process the majority of information fed to it. But the human optical system is highly flawed. If certain information is fed to it in a sudden subconscious and unblockable feed, it can easily have it's perception warped to the point where it is not only seeing things that are not there, it utterly BELIEVES that they are there, despite the actual reality that they are NOT. In terms you fucks can understand, it makes you hallucinate so violently that you not only SEE things, all your other senses detect them as well, and react accordingly!"

"WHAT?" Dees said.

"Oh, don't take my word for it: see for yourself!" Marissa said, as she reached into the helmet and pressed a few switches, even while behind her sunglasses she tightly closed her eyes. The helmet suddenly opened up on the back, exposing a glowing red network of energy lines.

Then the eyes on the helmet flashed.

To an outside observer who was somehow immune to the effect, their naked eye might have seen three rapid flashes. In actually, in the half second the device activated, several million individual flashes had happened, a pattern over the device so quick no human eye could have made it out. They saw it all at once, even as the patterns plunged into the brain and activated electrical impulses in certain areas in a certain order, feeding in mathematical formulas and images and stimuli that the brain couldn't resist. A normal human brain against this device was much like a computer without a firewall: it just didn't have the proper defenses.

That was what was happening inside Principal Dees's brain. Outside, he had just seen a bright flash.

And then he saw the sword, swinging down at him.

When he was a child, Dees had nearly cut his finger off playing with a knife. It had been a terrible experience, and given him a lifelong aversion to blades. The device, having had proper data on the human brain, took this fear and magnified it. As a result, Dees saw a sword chopping down towards him…

That hacked his right arm off at the shoulder.

Dees screamed as he stumbled back. He could feel the terrible pain, the blood gouting out of the wound, the shock as the body lost a part it had had since it had been born. He felt it, as deeply as he had felt any cut or bruise he had ever suffered.

And only him. What everyone else saw was Dees stumbled back as he screamed at the top of his lungs, holding his right shoulder. His right arm dangled, totally lifeless. And it was. Certain that it had been removed, the brain had immediately severed the nerve connections that moved the limb. Despite the fact that his arm was still attached, the information the brain was receiving was telling it IT WASN'T.

Everyone gaped in horror at Dee's pain, even as, in his eyes, he saw the sword swing back up.

"NO!"

And then all he saw was black as the sword "decapitated" him. The brain read the info that a blade had indeed severed the spinal cord at the neck, and went into the "proper" reaction a brain in that situation would: it died. Dees jerked his own neck so violently at the supposed impact of the sword that he broke his own spine, and then he tumbled over, dead.

"Truth doesn't matter. Only perception does. Reality is in the eye of the beholder." Marissa said, completely unperturbed that her device had just killed her principal.

For a moment, there was dead silence.

Then one of the teachers screamed and ran away. The other was still in shock at the sudden, out of nowhere death. And Toddard turned back to Marissa as she removed her hand from the device and picked it up.

"Brilliant! Absolutely marvelous Marissa!" he said. Did I mention Toddard Field had a few screws loose?

Did I also mention he had just said the wrong thing?

The teenager girl's eyes blazed with sudden rage, a rage that had barely been kept in check but was now spilling over as she raised the helmet towards Dr. Field.

"I'M NOT MARISSA!"

"Wait…WAIT NO!" Toddard screamed as he realized that "Marissa" had every intent of using the helmet on him. He tried to cover his eyes…

Too late.

Toddard Field didn't just have his long, graspy fingers because that was how he was born and just that. He had liked to use them to squash insects and pinch women. And when the helmet flashed its signals into his brain, he suddenly felt the air above him shift and looked up to see a gigantic finger descending from the roof.

"NO! IT'S NOT REAL! IT'S NOT REAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Toddard screamed, trying to convince his brain that what he saw was a hallucination, a inflicted visual trick, not real, not real…

Except he could see it. See the grooves on the fingertip. The dry cracked nature of the nail. Hairs the size of his arm coming out of the section just above the knuckle. And his brain believed.

As the finger pressed down on him, squashing him like the bugs he used to squash.

And his body reacted, his muscles shoving him down and pulping its own bones as the brain read data that a huge weight was crushing it. In a second Dr. Toddard's Field own body had reduced itself to roadkill. Blood flowed from the corpse.

"My name is ZIA." Marissa, or perhaps now Zia, said, as she pulled off her labcoat and yanked off her sunglasses. Underneath her coat she wore heavily buckled leather boots and a black cloth pantsuit that had a dragon stretching across its length, the tail looping around her left leg and coming up to the torso, where it roared out at people. Picking up the helmet, she slipped it over her head, the device totally covering her face except for her mouth, as the uplinks hooked into her ear.

By now, everyone in the gym had realized something was wrong. But a few screams wasn't enough to make teenagers run. Neither was a fleeing teacher. Rather, it just piqued their curiosity, as a group gathered to look at what was going on.

A group Zia turned towards as her helmet finished interlinking with her brain.

"Do you see what I see?" she sang.

A giant flash of light blasted into the student's eyes.

And then the gym erupted into pandemonium. Students suddenly found themselves underwater, found bugs crawling and forcing themselves into every orifice, found acid raining down on them from above, as their brains were fed false data that their worst fears were coming true.

"Notice me now?" Zia said. "Of course not. You never do. Fucking pieces of shit."

And this girl, this Zia, walked through the gym, flashing her helmet's mind-altering strobe lights at whoever she saw wasn't effected. It must have been like hell in that gym, she mused. Except all she saw were people killing themselves, literally.

She noticed something: a body behind a table. Wearing familiar shoes. She pushed the table aside and found Mrs. Stephanie Audran, one of the teachers the late Principal Dees had dragged along with him. Mostly because she was so nice, almost to a doormat level.

"Marissa…why are you…"

Zia slapped her.

"Marissa's GONE. My name is Zia."

"Marissa…"

"ZIA!" Zia roared. "You want Marissa? Now? Well, TOO LATE. She's gone. She couldn't take it any more. Now I'm in the driver's seat. If you really wanted her you should have spoken up eight months ago. But you didn't."

"Speak…up…?" Stephanie goggled. It was clear she had no idea what was going on.

"Don't act like you don't know. DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE ACT LIKE YOU DON'T KNOW." Zia hissed. "But you want to, don't you? You, above all else with the capacity to care, and yet you act so shallow. Act like nothing is wrong. Act like the rumors are just that and not bothering to see otherwise. Because that would bring ruin to your ordered little world, wouldn't it, Miss Audran? A world you couldn't dare think of, a world where things like that happened. Well, they do. And it did. The rumors are true MISS Audran. I was born out of them."

"No…I wanted to do something…"
"BULLSHIT! YOU DIDN'T WANT TO DO ANYTHING! YOU WERE TOO SCARED! YOU DIDN'T WANT TO GET INVOLVED!" Zia screamed. "Get involved in the messy grief of a girl who lost her mom. Didn't want to get involved even when rumors spread throughout the whole school that the girl's dad was…was…daddy no…it hurts…" Zia said, her hard tone briefly vanishing as a terrible memory washed over her.

It passed, and the rage returned.

"YOU DID NOTHING! YOU ALL KNEW AND YOU DID NOTHING! You just stood by and watched! None of you wanting to get involved! None of you wanting the trouble that would result when the rotten wound was laid bare! You just stood by and watched! And your pity was bad enough, BUT YOU DIDN'T STOP THERE! Eventually, you stopped feeling sorry and you…you dared…YOU LOOKED AT ME LIKE I WAS SOME KIND OF ABOMINATION! LIKE WHAT WAS BEING INFLICTED ON ME WAS SOMEHOW A CHOICE OF MINE, WORTHY OF SCORN, WORTHY OF DISGUST! IT WAS BAD ENOUGH WHEN YOU LOOKED UPON ME AS A VICTIM, BUT THEN YOU STARTED LOOKING AT ME LIKE I WAS SOME MUTATION YOU WANTED OUT OF YOUR PRETTY LITTLE WORLDS! SUCH AN UGLY THING HAPPENING TO ME, AND YOU LOOK AT ME LIKE I'M THE UGLY ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Her anger so great it was practically scouring the paint off the wall, Zia leaned back from the in-your-face position she had been screaming in.

"SO BE IT. You want to look at me like I'm ugly? Ugly in a way that goes beyond vanity and into abnormality? Fine. You brought this on yourselves. You want ugliness? I'll show you ugliness. I'll show you how your precious pretty, unspoiled world is only skin deep, but the ugly things in it go CLEAR TO THE BONE."

"No…I'm sorry…"

"Yes. You are." Zia said. "You know, my name is Zia. But before I send you along to your deserved fate, I think I'll give myself a new name. Call me Eyesore."

And Zia, now Eyesore, began to charge up her light blast.

And then one of her victims slammed into her, lost in his own phantasm, not even aware Eyesore was there, but knocking her aside all the same. Eyesore cursed violently and shoved the guy out of the way, but that was all Stephanie Audrum needed for her survival instincts to finally override her shock and she burst from her crouching position, somehow avoiding breaking an ankle with her high heels. With a scream, Eyesore turned towards her, but Stephanie slammed her hands over her eyes even as she closed them. Even with all that and her back turned, the light was still intense enough for some of it to make it into her field of vision, abet not enough to trigger the hallucinations.

She hit the door out of the gym and nearly fell over trying to make a 90-degree turn. Her mind reeled. She had to call the police, call any help at all, call the…

Titans. There were Titans at the school! And if any situation needed a superhero, one with a homicidally psychotic teenage girl with a dangerous mind-warping device was certainly near the top of the list.

And so Stephanie ran, hoping to make it in time, so freaked out she didn't even think to yell warnings at the students walking the hallways, who looked in surprise at the fleeing teacher, even as more of them had their attention drawn by the racket in the gym.

And then Eyesore stepped out, as calm as if she was taking a mid-day stroll. And she was. Marissa Mori was gone. She was Zia now. She had the power, and everyone who had stood by and watched was going to get one hell of a sight.

Their last.