TRANSITION
(In the clearing stands a writer
And an author by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of each review that laid him down,
And all the DC lawyers
That want to soil his name.
"I am making no infraction!"
But the copyright remains,
Yes, it still remains …
-Concolor44, with sound apologies to Paul Simon)
CHAPTER 29
… Titans' Tower, Raven's room …
The dark sheets, stained darker still with her cold sweat, twisted around the empath as she wrestled with her dreams.
. . . . . . . fire and death and smoke and darkness . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . darkness everywhere, but most of all there is pain . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . inescapable doom clouds the mind . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . deep despair for the lost ones, despair and anguish for those who will never know, cries for help that go unanswered . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . the cruel laughter of ultimate evil, evil that exists only to delight in the pain of others, evil that will not be quenched . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . pain and loss and unbearable, unknowable, unthinkable sadness . . . . . . .
Through the close link they shared, Jinx picked up the fringes of the dream. She was not trapped in that world, and with the discomfort rising to a crescendo, she woke with a start and jerked upright in their bed, Rachel's moans falling first on her ears. She reached over and took the smaller girl by the shoulders. "Rae! Rae, wake up!"
The dark head whipped back and forth, her arms flailing ineffectively. Her soul-self began to exude questioning tendrils that lashed around, seeking an enemy.
Seeing this, Jinx called up a matrix of hex energy, pulling the tendrils to her, strengthening the connection she had to her lover's mind. This brought the pain home to her more fully, and in truth it scared her. Where was all this coming from?
"Rae, come on! You have to snap out of it! It's just a dream!" She leaned in, pressing their foreheads together. It's just a dream, Rae, fight it! Break free!
And with a gasp, she did. The purple eyes flew open, finally seeing Jinx. She grabbed onto the girl as if this were their last hour together, sobbing into her shoulder.
"Hey! Hey, it's okay. It's just a dream. You're safe now."
"N-n-no. Not … just a dream." She drew a long, stuttering breath and gazed into Jinx's eyes. "Not just a dream. It's a sending." She scrubbed at her face, trying to get her hammering heart to slow down. "Jinx … we have to go. Something's wrong."
A sudden chill shook the pink-haired girl. "Wrong? You mean … with K'Naa?"
Her answer was barely a whisper. "I'm afraid, Jinx. So much pain. So much …"
Her chin firming up, Jinx sat back and said, "Then the rest of my former victims will just have to wait to get their money back." She glanced over at Rachel's clock on the dresser: the dim, red numbers read '04:48'. "Okay, let's get some breakfast. We've got a collection web to construct."
####
… later …
Starfire blew into the main room like a dervish. "Robin, Robin, look!" Zipping over to the Titans' leader, she shoved a piece of note paper into his hands. "Jinx and Raven are gone!"
"Gone?" He frowned darkly. "Why would they …" Scanning the note, his features soon registered confusion. "What sort of 'emergency' could pull them off-world?"
"I do not know. But Jinx was supposed to meet with Captain of the Police Butler this afternoon. He will not be happy that she is gone."
"No, I suppose not. But it's not like he could do anything about it." He looked at the note again. "What's this about 'passing out the goodies'?"
"Goodies? I do not know. This note was on my door." She floated around until she could read over his shoulder. "Perhaps she is making a reference to Halloween, which will be celebrated this weekend. I did not finish the note, since I thought you should know this as soon as … oh, I see." They looked at each other and took off for Raven's room.
The goodies in question turned out to be a sizable pile of what appeared to be washers and bolts, all made of pure gold. There was another note on top. It read,
Yo, Traffic Light –
if you cud see to it that this gets passed out to the right banks and shit, i'll owe ya one – Jinx
p.s. – whatevers left after ya square up ya can keep – get Vic a bigger TV or something
p.s.s – tell Vic i'm sorry about raiding his hardware supply – it was the easiest to work with
Robin looked at the pile, picked up a few of the washers and hefted them, and then whistled. "There must be several million dollars worth of gold here. How am I supposed to …" He saw another piece of paper, folded up and stuck into the pile. Picking it up and opening it, he saw that it was a list of the various institutions she had robbed. About two thirds of them had lines drawn through their names in various colors of pen, crayon, and Sharpie. "Oh. Okay."
"Our new friend has left you a large quantity of work, it would seem."
"Yeah," he replied dryly. "I'll have to thank her next time I see her."
####
… the JLA Moonbase …
"How d'ya want to go about this, Rae?"
"We'll need to curve it, to get maximum exposure. It will have to be significantly larger than the one we used on K'Naa."
"Heard that." She looked over at Green Lantern and J'onn J'onzz, who were feverishly powering up a large set of detection and recording equipment. The girls had offered them the chance to study the collection web and the formation of the warp field in return for the JLA's permission to use the Moonbase as a jumping-off point. "You guys ready yet?"
"Almost," replied the Martian. "And let me take this opportunity to thank you for your cooperation."
"No prob. But we need to get going. There's something bad wrong with K'Naa and we need to get there now."
Only a couple more minutes slipped by before Hal Jordan gave them the thumbs-up. A bubble of Raven's soul-self surrounded the two girls and they floated over to the wall and out into the hard vacuum of the Moon. Stopping directly over Garfield Logan's habitat, they paused while Rachel reached down to her teammate's mind.
Their earlier attempts to repair the damage to his psyche had gone seriously, murderously awry. As Raven had deduced, he was not stuck in his manticore form … he simply preferred to stay that way now. And he promised a quick and grisly death to anyone who got within range of his claws or stinger. In what currently passed for logic in his sick and twisted intellect, he blamed Raven for everything that had gone wrong in his life. She was supposed to be dead! He was supposed to be her avenger! That she had lived didn't fit in anywhere in his scenario. Her continued existence was, therefore, simply wrong and would have to be rectified.
Gar, we are going to take you with us to see K'Naa now.
Come closer, and I will make sure you never see anything again.
She sighed inwardly, squeezed Jinx's hand, and broke the connection. "Okay, let's go."
"Do we really have to take him?"
"We do."
"But you still can't tell me why."
"… No." Her gaze grew distant. "But I know he needs to be with us."
Jinx blew a heartfelt sigh. "Okay. If you say so. Seems awful risk-ish, though."
In the Moonbase, J'onn watched the readouts, giving a small start when the web first formed. "Hal, I do not know if our instruments are going to be up to this."
"It's the best we have. We'll get what we can until they overload."
That turned out to be rather a longer time than either of them feared. After the initial energy of formation, the web rapidly grew in size without putting off appreciably more radiation. After all, it was meant to collect energy, not give it off.
That would come later.
The web grew, and the girls could feel it charging. They didn't have a core to work with, as K'Naa had. She'd built it, tweaked it, perfected it for millions of years. Jinx and Rachel would simply have to make the web big enough and robust enough to hold all the energy they would need by itself.
At a diameter of around ten million kilometers, they began to curve the outer edges toward Sol.
At the end of forty minutes the web subtended a spherical arc of fifty-five million kilometers. Half an hour later it had doubled that, and was collecting fully a third of the sun's output.
"That feel about right to you?" Jinx asked.
"Maybe. Let's let it charge up a while longer. We are pulling Gar with us."
"Yeah. About that. What happens when we get there and the trip zonks us out? If he wakes up first, it could get real ugly real fast."
"I'm going to see to it that you don't 'zonk out'."
"… Can you do that?"
"I think so."
"But not both of us?"
"I'm much less sure of that. I'm going to transfer a portion of your stress to me, and siphon some of my reserves off to you. Also, that's another reason we both ate so much first. You remember how hungry we were the first two times?"
"Oh, sure." She got a knowing light in her eyes. "Ah-ha! We start off with more energy reserves, and you swap some of my stress for me, and I might just hang on to consciousness."
"Also, I'm going to try to load Gar up with as much of the stress as I can. He can certainly take it, and would probably wake up first anyway. That manticore is a hell of a tough form."
Jinx nodded agreement. For several minutes after, they concentrated on solidifying the energy pouring into the web.
In the Moonbase, Hal Jordan was shaking his head in awe. "I'm gonna have to re-tool my lantern after this. They're making me feel like a rank amateur."
"I understand, friend." J'onn's eyes were glued to several readouts. The power levels in the web were staggering his imagination, and he was only able to gauge what was in the immediate vicinity of the Moon. "What I do not understand is how they are able to handle energies of such magnitude. They should be fried to subatomic particles just from the leakage!"
"Hey, you said that this K'Naa being had changed them and they aren't exactly human anymore."
"Yes, well, 'not exactly human' is not a sufficient explanation for the ability to physically manipulate several hundred quadrillion joules of high-grade energy."
Hal trotted over and looked at J'onn's monitors. Eyes round, he whispered, "Great day in the morning."
"Indeed."
One of the devices Hal had set up started buzzing and he ran back over to it. "They're creating the field! Damn, look at that thing!"
"They are doing it. Until this moment I did not really believe they could." Stepping back, he looked out the nearest viewport, entranced by the sight. The bubble of soul-self had grown to include Gar's habitat, and was radiating in every band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The lines of the web, at first so delicate, had swelled to the width of bridge girders and pulsed with untold power. And in the center of things a complex geometric matrix was growing, livid and purple, reaching up and out, pointed about twenty degrees or so to the right of the sun. J'onn knew they were aiming at K'Naa's planet, and hoped that his instruments would accurately record the vector.
With a final, ground-shaking rush, the power in the web flowed into the violet matrix. There was a slight, almost instantaneous contraction, and then the entire tableau vanished.
Hal and J'onn were thrown to the floor, and most of the circuits in their equipment began spitting sparks enthusiastically.
####
… the Rift …
The first thing that registered on Jinx's senses was the smell of smoke.
Had she been unconscious? Hard to say. One doesn't remember that, as a general rule. She rolled over and opened her eyes: the entrance to the giant geode lay several meters past her feet. Opening her mind, she felt around for Rachel …
####
… on Darkseid's world-ship …
"Dread Lord, we have another signal."
The huge, rocklike being turned from his contemplation of the surface of this world and addressed the underling. "Where?"
"At the promontory, Dread Lord."
"How many?"
"Just one, Dread Lord."
"Send parademons. Collect it. Bring it here. Put it with the other one. And tell Desaad to prepare another rack." He didn't bother to listen for the technician's acknowledgement. He knew his word would be followed exactly, and he wanted to study the planet. His parademons had been busy, setting fires and creating various forms of mayhem. At first the fires would mysteriously go out. But then his troops had uncovered a chamber filled with thousands of preserved species – and one living female – and he knew, finally, that he had the right place.
He would have the secret of the warp, if he had to obliterate this troublesome planet to get it.
