Chapter 21 – What Lies Beneath the Heart and Mind

On a day when the rain dropped so lightly that it was really much more of a mist than rain, the Teen Titans were thoroughly occupied with the non-combative tasks of the day, which seemed to be huge in number. In the main room, Cyborg and Aqualad stared intently at computer screens while the changeling Beast Boy paced back and forth between them, tugging at his dark green hair every few seconds.

"Haven't you found anything yet?" he whined pointedly.

"Dude, stop asking!" Cyborg said. "I've been looking over the readouts on Terra for the past two days, and I haven't found a single thing. Give it a rest, man. When I find something, I'll let you know."

Beast Boy stormed out of the room in frustration.

"He really ought to lighten up," Aqualad smiled sideways at Cyborg.

"Yeah, everyone else is doin' great, and it's not like Terra's goin' anywhere anytime soon. Well… we hope not anyway. You find anything waterboy?"

"Nah, not really," Aqualad responded. "The dust we scraped off of Terra's statue doesn't show a thing."

A deep squealing sound of glass being scrubbed turned both of their heads. Outside the main room, Starfire was flying in a nonsensical pattern wearing her usual purple tube top and miniskirt, wiping away the stains and condensation that blocked the slightly foggy view of the day. She stopped, seeing the two Titans working hard on the inside and waived ecstatically at them with a cloth in hand.

They both waived back with grins of their own, but her attention was soon drawn to something else that she stared at with her face pressed against the windows and her hands cupped to her temples. The sight she saw made her squeal with joy, and Cyborg was thankful to have the soundproof transparent plate in between it and her. As Star rushed out of view, Cy and Aqualad spun in their chairs to see Robin, beaded with sweat and wearing a desperately exhausted smirk on his face.

"Rob, you look beat, man!" Cyborg said excitedly. "First workout in a long time, huh? How'd it go?"

"I'm… dog-tired," he wheezed, "but I feel like a new man!"

"Hey, that makes two of us!" he put Robin into a friendly headlock as he laughed.

"I think that's three, actually," Aqualad added, lifting up the shirt part of his dark outfit to reveal a dark pink, mangled looking patch of skin that covered most of his side. It had finished healing, and he moved it from side to side with ease.

Suddenly the sound of a screeching Starfire grew louder and louder. The eyes of all three of them widened, knowing the unintentional danger that was about to hit their leader, and Cyborg made sure to hold Robin in front of him where he would be struck deftly by it. Sure enough, as the joyous screeching came to its loudest, Starfire tackled the Boy Wonder across the room in the way that only she could.

"Oh, friend Robin I am so happy to see that your legs and arms are free of the immobilization from the cutting off of the brain! Such a glorious occasion requires the twenty-three hour Tamaranian song of rebirth of which I know all musical movements!"

"Star… my elbows… aren't supposed to be… touching each other!"

"Oh!" she gasped, and she dropped him on to the ground as the others sighed in relief, praying that she had forgotten about her musical interlude. "I am sorry to have squeezed you so hard friend Robin. I am just so happy that you are back to your old self again!"

"I've still got a ways to go," he admitted with wiggling knees. "But I'll be back in business in no time."

He glanced over longingly at the king sized fridge, and he saw the massive stacks of dishes piled on either side of the nearby sink. They were starting to grow blue mold again in the places where the leftover food was still stuck on.

"Cy, why don't you let me take over for you on the computer," Robin suggested, "'cause I think it's your turn to wash dishes."

"Pssh, I got a better idea," he grinned. "Hey, Gizmo! Get down here and was the dishes, pronto!"

A few moments later, like music to his ears, the tiny stomping shoes of the three-foot hive member came echoing into the main room.

"I'm not you're stinkin' janitorial service, you know!" he bellowed, purple in the face.

"You are if you want to stay out of trouble!" Cyborg retorted with a sarcastic smirk that made Gizmo's head fume. The Titans were sure that they heard a few curses throughout the mumbling of his breath, but he did as he was told and grabbed a stool to prop himself up in front of the sink.

"You know," Aqualad slid his chair over to Cyborg and Robin as his voice fell to a whisper, "I still don't think it's a good idea to keep him around. He was a former Hive member, after all."

"I'm pretty skittish about this whole situation too, Cy," Robin said, turning to his mechanical friend. "You sure we can trust him after one act of pseudo kindness toward Raven?"

"Hey, it's not like we had much of a choice when the police dropped him off at our doorstep after what Rae said to them about reforming Giz. If we told them otherwise, then we'd make Raven look bad, or even worse, the Titans could have lost a bit of credibility altogether."

"Yeah, I agree," Robin still breathed heavily. "There's not much we can do about it right now, but I'm still worried about our security."

Cy just shrugged. "He hasn't caused any problems, and he has been pretty nice as our little maid boy."

"But how can we just assume that he isn't still working for the rest of his Hive buddies?" Aqualad murmured.

Cyborg rubbed the mechanical side of his head thoughtfully. "I'm betting word has gotten out about how he's here and about how were supposedly 'reforming' him."

"If that's the case," said Robin, glancing backward at him over at the sink, "then he probably doesn't have anywhere else to go but here. His Hive friends have probably ostracized him."

Starfire plowed her head into the three quietly gossiping boys and said with an unnecessarily loud intonation, "Ooh, I like to whisper too! Please tell me friends, what is the discussion that we are keeping so entertainingly silent?"

Gizmo scoffed and chucked the bowl he was washing into the sink as he stormed off. Watching the midget child storm off was normally quite humorous, but the bitter expressions pointed at Starfire told her that this was not such a situation.

"As much as I hate to say it," spoke the Titan leader, "If he's going to be staying with us, we shouldn't treat him like dirt. After all, if he did help Raven, then there is the slightest chance that he could become our ally."

"I'm not letting down my guard," Aqualad huffed skeptically.

"Nobody's saying you should," Robin retorted. He looked out at the pale sky, crossed arms helping him to ponder the difficult decision of whether or not to harbor this known criminal. He had always believed that people deserved second chances, so he turned back to his fellow Titans, all of them awaiting the words of wisdom that he always had to come up with. "He is still a human being, and we should treat him like one as long as he keeps up the good behavior."

"Aw, maaaan. You're no fun at all," Cyborg whimpered, the childish voice not matching his massive frame.

Gloomily, he vacated Robin's seat and went for the dishes.

The Boy Wonder plunked down into the accommodating seat in relief. "Now then, have we found out anything about Terra?" he asked.

"As we were just telling Beast Boy… no."

"Great, not even on that symbol that showed up on her hand?"

Aqualad shook his head slightly and rubbed his small, black eyes. "It's a simple design, two triangles with a third sitting on top to make a little pyramid shape. There are plenty of similar looking designs and logos on everything from baby food to chemical waste barrels, but nothing that actually matches."

"Perhaps," Starfire slipped in, "if friend X and fellow Titan Raven were here, we would be having more success in the search for Terra's plight."

"Yeah, it's been about eight days since they left," Cyborg said from the kitchen area. "I wonder if they're havin' a good time?"

Starfire bounced giddily. "I am sure they are having a most glorious time! Raven seems to have been so happy since she and friend X met each other."

"No kidding," said the aquatic Titan, who was enjoying the break from staring at pointless symbols through the computer screen, "I've don't know Raven that well, but she's totally changed from the first time I met her."

"I know," Robin added. "We normally couldn't even get her to come out for Pizza, and now she's going to a royal ball, or something like that. It's still kinda weird for all of us who've been with her for so long."

Robin was now looking at the slicked down black hair on the back of his comrade's head.

"Aqualad…? Aqualad, what is it?"

His eyes seemed to be pointing down to the keyboard as he tapped at it furiously, and he then drew his eyes back to the screen. He cocked his head and Robin slid over to see what was so interesting.

"I know Titans East isn't quite as high-tech as you guys up here, but… isn't this power consumption level unusually high?"

Robin narrowed his masked face at the readout. "Yeah, that's really high. More than twice the normal rate! Where's it all going to?"

Aqualad tapped a few keys, bringing up a holographic display of the energy grid. Toward the top of the T-shaped building, one section was glowing white. Aqualad made no reaction, but Robin face twisted with a mixture of suspicion and confusion.

"Over half of the energy is going straight into Cyborg's room!"

A hunk of porcelain shattered at the other side of the room.

"Say whaaaat?" The metallic man bellowed. Smashing through the hallways, he and the other Titans dropped everything that they had been doing and rushed for Cyborg's invaded abode.

When the door smashed open, Cyborg snarled with rage.

"Gizmo!" he screeched, making the goggled child shriek back in shock. "You little rat bag, I knew you were up to no good!"

"No, no, it's not what you think, I was just…!"

"Just, my ass!" he chucked Gizmo single handedly into the fiercely angry grips of Starfire and Aqualad while Robin went to survey the damage that had been done.

"What the hell is this?" Cyborg said, looking at what was being displayed on his several-foot-wide computer screen. In a luminescent green, there were a number of square and rectangle shapes, and a streaming trail of something else going through the middle.

"I think," Robin began, "this is a topographical map of the city. Gizmo… what were you doing with this?"

He didn't answer. His face held peculiar features that the Boy Wonder hadn't seen in him before. They were not that of a bratty, immature child, but rather of one who was more discouraged with the fact that he had done something wrong and wanted simply to conceal it. Robin turned his back, showing Gizmo only the black cape and matching ruffled hairstyle while he communicated with a simple look to Cyborg.

"Gizmo, if you really want to make something of yourself, then lying to us isn't going to help. If you can't go back to your old Hive friends, and you can't live with us, then what will you do?"

The young inventor stared down, avoiding Robin's gaze even though it wasn't resting upon him at all. It was enough for him to even think about staring down at the green pants of the one person who had the power to keep him here or send him onto the streets where he would never be accepted by anyone.

"It's…" he sighed, "a complex energy wave tracking program that I had installed back when I was living with Hive. I can access the program there and make it run through the systems here."

The Titans all exchanged glances. Gizmo kept his head down.

"I believe that only tells us the 'what' and not the 'why'," Starfire observed.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," snapped Gizmo, sounding a bit more the way they knew him. "Back when I was with the Hive five, I had tried out the program to see if I could detect any unusually strong readings. Figured it might give us all the heads up on anything new and powerful in town that we could get our hands on. Then I noticed some strange things going on."

"What sort of strange things?" Aqualad probed, still with an arm on him.

"Energy signatures where there shouldn't have been any and strange waves of power that the scans were picking up that weren't of any kind ever heard of before."

"Explain," Robin demanded. The leather gloves he wore made that special crunching sound when one squeezes them hard enough with arms crossed.

"Well, one of the things I noticed that shouldn't have happened was some freaky form of energy that was in the exact shape of a human. The program couldn't even tell me what it was, and when I looked for e-news on the street where it happened, I found out that there was a bad car accident."

"I heard about that on TV," Aqualad said, loosening his grip.

"Well, the exact spot where the energy was, I guess an old lady with osteoporosis and arthritis managed to lift up a car and save her trapped grandson."

"So?" Cyborg sneered. "There have been lots of times when people are in dire situations and suddenly get what looks like super human strength."

"I know that, rust bucket!" Gizmo said in his irritated, shrieking voice. "But this lady didn't just pick up the car a couple of feet. Eye witnesses said that she tossed the car aside! I don't care what people say about adrenaline and endorphins and all that crap, no seventy year old bag with her bones falling apart could do that without help."

Robin and Cyborg shifted their gazes between their mostly unwanted houseguest and the peculiar looking screen, different glowing shapes constantly flickering on and off in this grid of chaos. It was hard to tell if Gizmo was telling the truth from the lack of understanding that they had for it.

"Why the power drain?" Robin asked, not knowing what else to press him with.

"The program takes up tons of memory to detect every single source of energy; electrical, nuclear, radio waves, combustion engines; everything and anything! And it catalogs most of the data, which I have to store at an external site because it's so huge."

The dark skinned, hulking man who had become suddenly enthralled with this new device tried to navigate the system himself, his one human eye moving separately from the red mechanical one.

"What is it Cy?"

A tiny section on the outskirts of the grid magnified itself into closer view. The scanner then seemed to burrow through the solid stone ground at a waste disposal center near the docks. There, little flickers of energy that the program had detected were vanishing and reappearing.

"Look guys," he said. The fleeting anger turned into pure curiosity. "This is Terra's cave. Hey Giz, is this the same type of energy that you picked up in that old lady?"

"Oh, now you want my help…" he shrugged off Starfire's and Aqualad's already loosened grip and hopped on the stool that he had been on before, yet he still remained a head shorter than Cyborg, and just barely stood above Batman's young protégée.

"No, this is totally different, but it's still nothing I've ever seen or heard of before." Gizmo turned to the others, his eyes pointing accusation at the others. "What the hell has that watchamacallhim… Hunter, X, Mega-moron thingy been doing since he got here? None of this showed up before he came."

A scattered chorus of "What?" came from everyone in the room; even Beast Boy, but his was because he had just entered. The

"I do not understand," the orange haired Tamaranian said with confusion. "Why would friend X want to give old ladies the 'super powers' and make things very strange in the cave of Terra?"

"What? Who's making things weird in Terra's…"

"Not now Beast Boy!" Robin silenced him, which he obeyed amidst the confusion. "Star, as for your question, I haven't got a clue."

"Maybe he doesn't…" Gizmo whispered before silencing his own tongue.

"Maybe he doesn't what?" Cy stared him down into his stool.

Gizmo swallowed hard. "Maybe he doesn't know that he's doing it, or that he brought it here. And maybe… just maybe… it might be the reason that all the other robots came here in the first place."