"—still can't believe you could get Gizmo to wade through the sewer."
Jinx snorted at Cyborg's poor grasp of the obvious. "Gizmo? Wade? How often did you see him walk?"
"Oh yeah, he was into the flying thing, huh."
"Yeah." She rolled her eyes, an expression she was pretty sure he couldn't see since she was leading the way.
His maps of the sewer system were out of date, and even with his stubbornness in the way he knew better than to try fumbling around with no sense of direction. Now that they were past the treatment plant, the rest of the way out was pretty much just following the flow of the water. She'd neglected to mention that, however.
Cyborg continued. "So why'd you ever come down here, anyway? Can't imagine anyone wanting to be stuck in tight spaces with Gizmo."
"Gizmo's never been big on foresight. Or patience. Or silence. He got all the way in one time, just to get caught throwing a tantrum at a door. Security patrols were ramped up because they only found Gizmo and expected the rest of us to show up, whole plan had to be aborted...Decided he needed supervision."
Cyborg was silent for only a second. "I can see how that would be a problem. Couldn't guide him remotely, though?"
"It'd be less aggravating, if it worked. Our communicators didn't have the range, though, especially not down here surrounded by rock and dirt."
"Really?" He seemed genuinely surprised. "Ours work just fine down here...under normal circumstances, anyway."
Jinx sighed. "That's because anyone looking for you can just knock on the Tower door. We needed to keep a low profile, so having transmissions detected across town wasn't an option." She'd had this discussion with her own team—former team—dozens of times. It was still old coming from Cyborg.
"So what, you had the communicators talking to each other over short range?"
"Yes." she hissed. It was like Mammoth had handed Cyborg a script.
"Say, that gives me an idea. Hold up!"
She pivoted on the back of her heel mid-step, smoothly turning to face Cyborg. "What?"
"Let me see your communicator," he calmly responded.
Had the device been more than a bright yellow piece of junk, cut off from the Titan communication network, she'd have asked him what he wanted it for first. As it was, she decided not to waste time; and wordlessly drew the communicator, handing it to him. She was not happy to discover the memory of handing him a H.I.V.E. communicator coming back to her now. Back when he'd infiltrated the academy in disguise as Stone and apparently just for fun had—
The sudden urge to exact retribution was almost overwhelming; only held in check by her self-discipline and sense of self-preservation. Her fist was clinched in anger at herself, knowing that if she'd remembered this properly before, she could've just let the pumpkins get rid of him while she got out of town.
But she had passed that opportunity by, and now it was gone. Leaving her stuck in the city limits, and needing to avoid negative attention. And as much as she loathed it, Cyborg's loud stubbornness made him perfect for drawing attention...or fire. To her chagrin, that made him more useful than intolerable. Getting rid of him, one way or another, wasn't worth the increased risk she'd assume from whatever stupid menace was all over the city.
She took a deep breath, trying to calm down and get her mind away from unhelpful memories. Forcing herself to look at him, it seemed traversing her chain of thought hadn't taken nearly as much time as it felt like it had: a thin, wide gray cable coming out of his torso was plugged into the bottom of her communicator, and he was busy looking at one of his forearms while fingering at some buttons on it with his other hand. Changing some software configuration, she guessed, and oblivious to her interior monologue. All the better.
"Alright," Cyborg said, his enthusiastic tone confirmed the suspected obliviousness. "Got the communicator all set up for encrypted ad hoc mode."
"OK," she answered with a challenging tone, "so what're the other endpoints supposed to be?" If he thought he could impress or cow her with technical terms, he was about to be disappointed. She'd picked up some of the vocabulary on her own, since it was glaringly obvious that Gizmo couldn't explain anything if he wanted to. And he never wanted to.
"Huh? Oh, uh, me. My integrated communication circuitry, at least."
She crossed her arms. "So we can talk to each other over communicators," she said dismissively.
"Yeah, I know, the jamming'll cut down the effective range, but it's good to be prepared and easy enough to do."
She inwardly cursed, as this made him even less disposable. "I guess. And if the fog is as heavy as it was forecasted—"
"Fog?" he interrupted, prompting a growl from Jinx. "I totally forgot about the fog, it hadn't drifted far enough inland to see from where I was. My alternate vision modes aren't gonna cut it."
She suppressed the inappropriate glee at the not-really-that-good fortune. "You really can't see in fog?" she asked a little too eagerly.
Cyborg looked at her, brow furled, for half a second before answering. "I can see, yeah; but the coastal fog is supposed to be pretty heavy. Water density 'll be too much to get any extra range on the thermal mode, and the x-ray mode won't work at all."
So he could see just as far as she could. Dang it. "Might need those communicators more than you thought." And more than she thought, but no need to mention that. "This is actually a good thing, I had no idea how we could sneak around town undetected until now." And it'd make it easier to ditch him if the crap hit the fan, too.
"Yeah. So...do you want it?" he asked, reaching out with the communicator in hand.
Jinx made no comment about forgetting that her arms were still crossed, simply taking the communicator. "I'm surprised these things don't automatically fall back to an ad hoc mode," she said to distract herself from reliving the passing-of-the-communicator memory. "It'd be a lot less trouble than setting it up manually."
"Used to. Used to be wide-open, too; turn on one communicator and you could get any other conversations across the whole set of 'em." He scoffed in derision. "Was real convenient, the Brain sure appreciated it."
Her eyes darted around, instinctively at attention. She was sure she'd heard something in the distance, something reminiscent of water. But it had been overlapped by Cyborg's voice, so she couldn't guess the distance from the volume. It'd also reached both ears at the same time, so she couldn't tell if it came in front or from behind. Not seeing anything unexpected in front of her, she glanced over her shoulder. Nothing out of the ordinary, there either.
"What's up?" Cyborg asked.
Jinx shook her head. "Thought I heard something." Might've been her imagination, as she didn't hear it again, but she didn't trust in that.
"I didn't hear anything." But of course he wouldn't hear anything, his voice would've drowned out any sound reaching his ears, or the equivalent auditory system.
"We should still get going," she said as she turned around and started in the direction of their goal. Best chance of getting away from whatever hypothetical might be there; they'd have to deal with anything in that direction regardless, and there was no reason to mess with something coming from the opposite direction.
"Uh, yeah," Cyborg agreed as he fell into step behind her. "Don't wanna wait for anything to catch up with us."
Silence reigned for a couple minutes. Might've been restful, if Jinx wasn't on alert for whatever she might've heard. And she hoped Cyborg was equally on guard.
Rounding a corner, she finally saw something out of the ordinary. "Hold on," she told Cyborg.
"Is it...lit up there?"
"Sure looks like it," she answered. Whatever was at the end of the section of tunnel they were now in, it was certainly well lit. She had expected Cyborg to make some joke about "the light at the end of the tunnel"; but if he had the comment, he graciously kept it to himself. "Wait here," she said, "I'm gonna check it out."
She made a quiet advancement towards the end of the tunnel, hoping to avoid becoming the target of an unpleasant surprise. Fortunately this tunnel was sufficiently wide that she didn't need to set foot in the small stream of water down the middle. She was almost to the end, when she heard a squishing sound under her own foot.
Jinx immediately stopped, looked around quickly for any potential observers, then lifted up her foot to see what she managed to step in while she wasn't paying attention to the ground. It was a vivid green, and looked like a slimy patch. Algae, most likely. As if that weren't odd enough, the floor in front of her had several more clumps of the stuff, the density increasing as it neared the edge of a wide chamber.
Seemed time to put the communicator to the test. "Get over here," she whispered into the device. Followed soon by the sound of splashing footsteps. She had to shake her head at his ineptitude when it came to stealth, but that wasn't what she was keeping him around for. Once he was close enough, she gestured with a hand for him to check out the stuff. Then she carefully made her way to the edge of the tunnel, this time making sure she paid attention to the ground as well as the view in front of her.
The chamber was circular, allowing her to see the whole thing without getting into the light. It appeared to be a large basin of some sort, as the water level was as wide as the chamber itself, and the water was too deep to see the floor. There were three other shaded tunnel exits like the one she was in, equally spaced around the chamber. In theory Cyborg could make himself useful with his thermal vision or other way of seeing in the dark; this place was too removed from the outside environment for fog to gather here.
A ring of gray metal grating surrounded the edge, with some green spread here and there. And two level bridges of the same grating ran across from this tunnel to the one on the opposite end of the basin, and between the two other tunnels...except the point where the two should've crossed was missing, and the surrounding chunk was mangled. She could see a bunch of thin supports descending from the grating into the water three feet below. Water whose surface was densely speckled with clumps of what she still believed was algae, and even concentrated in wider masses at points.
Aside from that, the only points of interest were the lights higher up. Otherwise it was just a large basin. She certainly didn't remember any sort of interior lighting being down here before, though, that development would have to have been relatively recent.
She heard Cyborg coming up from behind. After a second, he quietly announced: "All clear, those tunnels are empty, far as I can see."
The two of them walked forward into the light and slightly off to the side, Jinx still on guard while Cyborg continued his report. "That green stuff is algae. It's alive, but it's just regular algae, nothing special about it. I don't get what this area is supposed to be for, though. Or why there's algae at all. We're past the treatment plant so the water's supposed to be all clean, right?"
"Yeah, it should be. This might be a place for maintenance crews to get access to, but that wouldn't explain the algae here. They need nutrients to grow like this, and the water should be purified back here. Unless it's coming from somewhere else—wait. You said that algae back there's alive?"
"Yeah...so? I bet all the stuff down in the water's alive too."
But Jinx's mind was already racing. The water was too low for it to have recently deposited algae all the way back in the tunnel. And if this was a maintenance spot it likely wouldn't have wildly varying heights of water. Unless something caused waves in the water. Something that could also have broken through the middle of the bridges.
Her head suddenly turned towards the water; she had seen some movement through her peripheral vision. Slight ripples where she had seen wide masses of algae before.
And where she didn't see them now.
Her instincts told her to move. She obliged them with a backflip. She heard Cyborg about to voice his confusion, before she heard a loud slam against the wall. Even before she fully landed, she saw that there was now a giant vine, with leaves that resembled oversized lily pads more than anything else, pressed against the wall where she had been less than a second ago.
Cyborg wasn't so lucky. As that one vine curled back into the water, another whipped out and hit Cyborg. He hadn't ventured far enough away from the tunnel, and the force threw him back down it. Jinx heard his squeal of surprise grow quieter in short order.
She glanced off to the side, and saw a large green pumpkin, floating in the gap between the bridges that she'd seen earlier.
"So much for the meat shield."
Another vine lashed out at Jinx, after the other vine had rolled back under the water.
She jumped back out of the way, having seen the incoming vine, and it impacted against the wall again. This vine curled itself back under the water as well, which Jinx thought was odd. Perhaps it lacked the range of motion to reach out to the side. Anything with the strength to push Cyborg's weight around would crush her like a twig, though, so even if it did lack the agility it could still end very badly for her.
She started sprinting around the edge of the basin, looking back to toss a hex just above the tunnel she'd come out of, and that Cyborg was presumably disabled in. And meat shield or not, she couldn't allow both of them to be taken out.
The green pumpkin in the water reacted by shoving a vine out in the water in front of her path, the curling retraction tearing a chunk out of the catwalk and spraying metal fragments into the air. It had made the mistake of striking too far in front of her, and she effortlessly flipped over the newly missing section of grating.
It reacted by repeating the same maneuver at the point of her landing, sending her up in the air with a surprised yell. She recovered from her shock quickly enough, and as she neared the brick wall she pushed off of it with her feet, landing on her feet at the edge of one of the bridges leading into the middle of the algae splotched pool.
She pushed off against the bridge as soon as she touched down, making a simple backwards jump to the grating around the edge, and tossed a hex at the point where she had landed. The instinctive move paid off: A vine shoved its way through the bridge support with a series of metallic snaps, and the hex impacted against one of the vine's lily-pad-like leaves.
A short, high-pitched moan reverberated through the basin chamber. Jinx saw the leaf wither and a patch of the vine around it turn brown, before the whole vine was hurriedly rolled back into the water. The pumpkin then rapidly lowered itself under the water, the sudden displacement causing a splash and sending ripples throughout the pool's surface.
Silence reigned. Jinx sidestepped carefully around the wall, towards the nearest tunnel. She kept her eyes peeled for movement in the center of the pool, fully expecting the thing to come back up at any moment. Knowing the rippling would certainly mask the effects of any subtle movement only heightened her attention, and her pulse rate.
She involuntarily jumped up a foot when the silence was broken by Cyborg's voice.
"Huh?"
She instinctively looked at the direction of his voice, which turned out to be the tunnel to her right. Her peripheral vision noticed the green shape popping out of the center of the water, and she quickly jumped back away from the tunnel entrance.
The pumpkin shot out three vines, one through the supports of each remaining bridge fragment, the cacophony of metal echoing all around. The vines curled back to their origin under the water, the three bridges submerging as the vines ceased supporting their weight. The pumpkin itself then retreated once more under the water.
"What the hell was that?"
Jinx growled at Cyborg's obliviousness. "Can you see that thing?" she half-shouted, trying herself to track any movement through the new set of waves rippling across the surface.
"No, too much refraction." he answered.
So he couldn't see past the ripples either. Typical uselessness. "It's—"
She was cut off by the green gourd surfacing, and she dodged out of the way before the predicted vine tried to crush her against the wall. Cyborg managed to get far enough out of its way this time to avoid the same.
With a growl, he armed his sonic cannon and fired a salvo of blue beams at the pumpkin. "Take that you son of a...vine!" Jinx, meanwhile, dodged backwards, expecting another attack any second.
She wasn't disappointed, as two vines immediately shot out again, one going under the grating where her feet used to be, and the other where Cyborg's still were. The vine near her curled up shooting more pieces of metal into the air. She didn't quite get as much headway this time, and grunted as a jagged metal edge scraped her left sleeve.
The pain wasn't distracting enough for her to miss the other vine enveloping Cyborg as it curled up under the water with no apparent loss in speed, nor the flurry of motion splashing on the water's surface near the pumpkin, in the angle Cyborg was in. Did he need to breathe?
She repeatedly flipped forward with newfound resolve, totally aware that anything capable of moving Cyborg without slowing would easily reduce her body to a bloody paste. Searing pain in her arm or not, she had no intention of becoming a condiment for the thing's next meal.
To her surprise, there were no more attacks. Three seconds later, she hazarded a look over at the pumpkin. It was still there, but it seemed to be...rotating in the water, slowly. The motion indicative of Cyborg continued, but was now offset, and following the rotation of the pumpkin itself. Then she realized, that whenever the thing attacked with multiple vines they were always spaced at right angles apart.
She had a plan now. She sprinted forward, slowing at the point where Cyborg seemed to be at a forty-five degree angle from her, and tossed a series of hexes from her right hand at the abomination. It weathered each attack, its shell browning slightly with each one, and tried turning towards her. But as she suspected, holding Cyborg's weight was seriously hampering its mobility, and a couple steps every second as it tried to figure out which way to turn was all it took to remain out of harm's way.
When the thing tried to submerge, she threw a hex with both hands at the water near by. The water level at the spot lowered a couple feet, and the depression carried over to the center of the pool before suddenly erupting and tossing the pumpkin into the air.
It didn't seem damaged at all, but it did release its grasp on Cyborg, who grabbed the vine that had been holding him, and threw it and the attached pumpkin directly against the wall.
Before he splashed into the water.
Jinx quickly ducked, to ensure that the vine flying over her head remained over her head, and watched the gourd and its vines impact the wall. There was a high-pitched shriek, and the entire chamber shook from the force of the impact. The wall didn't break however, and thankfully the ceiling didn't come down on top of her head either.
The thing fell onto the grating below it, but the pumpkin was too large to fit on the grating's width and rolled unceremoniously into the water. Its vines were limp, like long deflated balloons, and their edges still laid on the grating, while presumably still attached to the pumpkin in the water on their other ends.
After checking for any motion for a couple of seconds, Jinx jogged around to the spot where she last saw Cyborg, hopping over a couple of the gaps in the grating on the way. She didn't find any indication of movement in the water, however. She was ready to head off on her own, when a soft splashing sound got her attention. She reasonably assumed it was the pumpkin coming back to life, having no way to tell if the thing was knocked out or dead or whatever after it sank into the water.
It turned out to be Cyborg, though. Or more accurately, Cyborg's two extendable hands grabbing onto the junction between the ring of grating and the remaining piece of the fourth bridge, which the monster had neglected to totally demolish when it obliterated the other three. As Jinx ran over there, Cyborg rose out of the water, before eventually propping a leg against the grating and pushing himself the rest of the way out of the water.
He then collapsed onto the grating, spit a ton of water out over the side, and tried to take deep breaths while coughing profusely. Then he put a hand against his back, and sat up with an audible crack and a grunt of pain as he bent his back against his hand. Then he sighed with relief.
"I've decided...not to eat...lobster anymore," he said between breaths. "For now."
She eyed him for a couple seconds, but other than the splotches of algae stuck over various parts of his robotic frame, he appeared no worse for wear. Still, with as hard as he was breathing..."Are you going to live?" Tossing the thing around was easily the most useful thing he'd managed to do, only fair to check if he could do anything of the sort again.
"Yeah." A couple deep breaths later, and his breathing seemed back to normal. "Wouldn't want to try that again, and all this slimy stuff feels...well, slimy; but otherwise I'll be fine." Then he coughed a few times.
Jinx grit her teeth, as the pain in her arm suddenly drew attention to itself. She made a play of crossing her arms. "Really," she said skeptically to Cyborg as she glanced down at her left forearm.
Sure enough, there was a tear in the top of her sleeve, and the pale gray skin underneath bore a streak of crimson. She gave Cyborg a skeptical glare as she as adjusted her right hand over the wound and applied pressure with her palm, in case it was still bleeding.
"I know, I don't get it either!" Cyborg retaliated as he stood up. "It's like it wasn't trying to crush me, it was just holding me under the water. Expected to have a lot more joints to pop back into place."
"Is that what that was?"
"Yeah, the thing doubled me over when it pulled me under the water."
Green motion across the pool caught her eye, and she turned her head to get a better look. There was the pumpkin again, approaching the two of them with its vines floating on top of the water.
"Aww man," Cyborg said with dejection, "Can't that thing just quit?"
Jinx scowled. She checked the angles on the vines, amount of rotation. "Guess we'll have to make it quit." Then she hopped onto the bridge and ran full speed down it, towards the pumpkin.
"Yo!" Cyborg said with surprise.
She flipped into the air at the edge of the bridge.
"What are—"
She briefly landed on the pumpkin, jumping back into the air in the same direction as soon as she set down.
"How the—"
She landed smoothly on the grating, on the opposite end of the basin from where she started.
"How did—"
With a little shout, she thrust her arms towards the water and a set of three wide hexes entered the surface. These hexes quickly resolved into a wave that lifted the pumpkin into the air and carried it forward. As it dissipated, it stranded the pumpkin on the bridge section; her careful aim landing it upright so it wouldn't roll off. Now that the pumpkin was finally out of the distortive effects of the water, she could see that it was about half as tall as Cyborg was, and as wide as it was tall. Its vines trailed off into the water, leaving Cyborg a clear path to it down the bridge. Cyborg thankfully saw the opportunity, and ran right up to it. With a prolonged yell, he slammed his fists against the shell, each impact accompanied with a sickening squeal from the thing.
His yell quickly shifted from furious to shocked when his fist punctured a hole in the shell. A high pressure stream of white bubbly foam with streaks of red shot out of the hole, splattering all over the wall and grating behind Cyborg, and presumably on Cyborg's arm as well. After a couple of seconds the foam spray stopped, and the vines shriveled and shrunk towards the punctured pumpkin, itself shriveling up and losing about a third of its size.
"Umm...eww," was the first thing Cyborg managed to say. A sentiment Jinx agreed with, as a smell somewhere between cabbage and uncooked shrimp meat was now filling the chamber. "You think it's gone?" Cyborg asked, the high pitch of his voice presumably caused from plugging his nose.
Jinx frowned as she walked around the edge of the basin, overriding the urge to plug her own nose by reminding herself that she'd seen Mammoth eat things that smelled worse. "Maybe you should use some of those scanners, instead of asking for an opinion from the opposite end of the room," she replied.
"Oh yeah, huh." He took a deep breath, before removing two fingers of his left hand from the bridge of his nose. Then he shook his right arm, flinging off little white blobs, before pushing some spots on his left arm.
Jinx had circled around the basin and was standing next to Cyborg when he finally released his breath and braved the olfactory onslaught. "This is really weird," Cyborg. "It's not alive, and that's a recent development based on the cellular decay. But except for some traces of blood plasma I can't pick up any compounds unusual for a simple plant."
"This thing sure wasn't sessile. No blood cells?"
"Nope. Makes no sense for there to be serum without cells, but if they were ever there they're all gone now. Thing's hollow though, so maybe..."
"Wait," Jinx cut in. "Hollow?"
"Uhh...that's what I said, yeah. There's nothing inside the shell now, it all splashed...over there," he concluded, indicating the wall to his right with a nod of his head.
She looked to the spot. Then looked down on the pool's surface. The foam had made itself into a white mat, resembling bog material more than the foam she saw.
"Anything down there?" she asked.
"Why would there be...whoa!" he exclaimed. "I didn't see that."
Probably too worried about the rest of the pumpkin to be looking behind him. "That foam might've been the blood, and the white stuff the clotting factor. So there should be blood cells and...organs...down there."
"Eww. Again. At least we won't have to touch 'em..." And with that, he turned to scan the field of white below.
Jinx set her mind on listening for any sounds out of the ordinary. Sounds such as reinforcements for the pumpkin. As much as they could use any clues, it'd all be worthless if they couldn't act on any of them. All seemed normal, or as normal as a foam-blood-laced basin in a sewer treatment output path could possibly be, but that didn't necessarily mean nothing was out there.
"OK," Cyborg said, "You were right about it being blood, but I can't find any organs down there. Or, well, in this husk here."
"Almost certainly not a normal creature then...No nanotech?"
Cyborg scoffed. "You really think I didn't check for nanites?"
Jinx lowered an eyebrow and crossed her arms, again making use of the distraction to apply pressure to the cut on her arm. "You did forget to look behind you."
"OK, fine, but I did check for any tech and I got nothing."
Jinx sighed. That heavily weighted the odds towards the thing being magically animated, which wasn't the sort of thing she wanted to be dealing with on Halloween night. "So we're probably looking at a spell having made this thing from a normal pumpkin. Don't suppose there's anything unusual in the blood cells?"
"Yeah, actually, some weird compounds bound to the hemoglobin. Can't identify 'em though."
"Can you track them?"
"If we're looking for blood exposed to the air, might be able to pick up a trail; but the signature's too faint otherwise."
Jinx took a deep breath, an action she quickly regretted as the scent in the air seemed to attach itself to her tongue. She spit into the water, hoping to at least lessen the effect. "Gross. Anyway, what kind of range will you have if it is exposed to air?"
"Quarter of a mile, in ideal conditions. But is that really going to help us?"
"Depends on if the huge pumpkin Starfire and I smashed oozes blood as much as the one you smashed at the warehouse did."
"Oh yeah...we still going there then?"
Jinx rolled her eyes. "If you have a better idea, now's the time."
Cyborg answered a little too readily. "Yeah, I got one. How about you track the magic from this thing or somethin' to find the source? You're a sorceress or something, aren't ya?"
"Sure," she said with sarcastic enthusiasm, "all I need is a crystal ball, a pound of calcium salts, and an ounce of the thing's blood. Oh, and a time machine."
"A time machine?"
"Yeah, so we can go back and find someone who actually knows how to do that."
It took a couple of seconds for Cyborg to process all that. "You really can't do it?"
Since he at least could be construed to have been attempting to be respectful by calling her a "sorceress" instead of a "witch", she gifted him with a real response. "No, I can't. Raven may be an all-arounder, but I don't have any gift for spells that locate things. Nor do I know any."
"So what was with all that stuff you mentioned?"
She rolled her eyes, as the list wasn't supposed to be taken seriously. "A crystal ball is the stereotypical, or traditional depending on who you ask, focus for locating; calcium salts burn orange, which seems appropriate for things pumpkin related; and the blood probably has the closest connection to the spell since normal plants don't have blood per se."
"Huh. For not knowing how to do it you sure seem to know a bit about it."
"Knowing a recipe calls for sugar and an oven doesn't help much with the end result on its own. Now let's get going, I don't want to find out if that thing called for reinforcements."
Cyborg shuddered at the thought. "No kidding. So...which way are we goin'? I lost track."
"That way," she said as she pointed across the chamber to the tunnel at the opposite end.
"You sure?"
She glanced at the tunnel behind them. More specifically, at the crescent moon pattern above it, which she'd placed with a hex when the fighting started to mark which way they came in. "Positive."
"OK, let's go."
As they made their way around the chamber and then down the tunnel, Jinx was torn. On one hand, she was thoroughly annoyed that Cyborg had proven himself useful, which put a damper on any plans to ditch him. On the other hand, he had proven himself useful, more so than the teammates she was accustomed to leading.
Several feet into the tunnel, Cyborg cleared his throat. "So, umm...I'm kinda wondering why all sorts of movies and stuff mention virgin's blood as a spell ingredient. Is it really that...I dunno, good?"
Mediocre choice for a conversation topic, but she could work with it. "Can't tell you firsthand, but I've never seen anything that seriously suggested the 'virgin' aspect has any significance. Might just mean that it calls for blood that hasn't been chemically altered, same meaning as virgin olive oil. Although, I guess if you were specifically looking for a virgin it might have some use."
"Well, we are lookin' for Beast Boy..."