"Gotta be honest," Cyborg said, "It still doesn't feel right to be breaking and entering like this."
Never mind that the corner store was abandoned other than Jinx and himself. Or that this small employee break room on the second floor offered views of both streets through its windows. Or that they'd managed to get away from those zombie kids by coming in. It just felt wrong; he was supposed to be preventing burglaries, not committing them.
Jinx sighed. "I'm sure Mammoth would've seen things differently, but sneaking around a convenience store isn't my idea of a good time either. But if it'll make you feel better, ring up a frappucino or something before we leave; I'm sure the markup'll more than cover the cost of the zero damage we caused."
Cyborg shook his head, rather displeased that his empty stomach perked up at the thought. Although coffee wasn't really its thing, it would want something like pretzels.
Trying to get his mind off of it, he considered that Jinx did have sort of a point; since they didn't do any damage getting in the unlocked door and didn't have any intentions of committing any crimes inside, they could conceivably be construed as not breaking, though still entering. Maybe. His stomach was still tight with nervousness though, believing he was just trying to convince himself with a really flimsy excuse. On some level, he wished he could disregard proper civilized behavior in lieu of survival as easily as Jinx had.
But he figured that would be only a short step away from ignoring the law whenever it was inconvenient. And then he'd be no better than Brother Blood, Slade, or any of the myriad other villains that inexplicably choose this particular city out of the entire west coast to wreak havoc on. He realized he wasn't even that comfortable with Jinx's restrained version of the same behavior, but he didn't want to get himself killed any more than she did.
Not that this was the best time for philosophy.
The lights were on in the main area of the store. Small shelves stocked with colorful snack food bags, canned beverages in transparent refrigeration units built into the walls. Some of which were now calling Cyborg's stomach with the promise of sugary or salty deliciousness.
But where he and Jinx were now, up the stairway marked with a sign that read "employees only", the lights were off. Not that either of them were impeded in any way; between the moonlight wafting in the two windows and the light making its way up the straight stairway, there was plenty of light for those accustomed to negligible lighting. Even if that wasn't the case, he wouldn't need to rely on his thermograph; his long-installed night vision mode would be fine outside from the fog.
What was on the inside of the building wasn't the important part, of course. Cyborg turned to look out the nearby window. Over the several minutes and several blocks since getting away from the park, the fog had grown more sparse; and Cyborg could almost make out the subtle concrete texture of the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street with his organic eye. The street lights did an excellent job of highlighting shambling children, who showed no aversion to walking directly under the illuminating gaze.
About half a dozen children were walking up and down both sides of the street, hardly a quarter of how many they'd seen when Cyborg and Jinx first got up here. There was one in a skeleton costume, a devil with a plastic pitchfork, a ghost with too many eye holes, an eerily convincing zombie, and a ghost with a jack-o-lantern head. Closer examination of that last one revealed a poorly concealed human neck, confirming that it was a kid in a costume, and not some smaller pumpkin monster.
"Think it's safe here?" Cyborg asked Jinx in the interests of getting a second opinion.
"For now," she half-whispered from the other window. "The kids've all stuck to the streets so far."
"Not that I'm complaining, but that's kind of weird."
"A little, yeah," she agreed. "Haven't seen any cars with shattered windshields or anything either, I'd have expected wanton destruction of some variety with mind control victims. And the only building they've even tried to enter that I've seen, is that warehouse they chased you into."
He restrained his indignation at having been chased anywhere. She was right, though; all the streets he'd gone down when the whole fiasco started, and all the city blocks they'd just gone past, and none of the buildings had looked unexpectedly damaged. A couple of them had been decorated as if they were in various states of abandonment, it being Halloween and all, but there was no genuine structural damage that he could recall. Except at the warehouse, when he'd mangled the door to keep the kids out, and when the flying pumpkin came crashing through the skylight. The flying pumpkin...
"And that's when they brought in the pumpkin," he shared his revelation. "Guess that's the strike team."
"Then the kids would be a detection grid," Jinx added to the chain of thought, "and pumpkins follow up when they find something. But where do those bear...things...come in? The giant pumpkins are physical powerhouses, I can't imagine those bears being any better at it."
He thought about it for a bit. She wasn't in much of a condition to analyze the thing while he was fighting it, after all. "Maybe...they're some kind of specialists?" he suggested. "Have to assume they were communicating with that weird bark thing, and that one..." He paused for a split second, trying to figure out how to phrase it in a way that wouldn't tick her off. "Well it did prove able to incapacitate someone."
He looked in her direction in case she had reacted poorly, but if she had a visible reaction he must've missed it. "Maybe..." she started.
Then he saw something out on the street, out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head to look at it. "Wait, is that...a Terra costume? Really?"
"What?" Jinx said with some surprise as she moved to "his" window to see for herself. "Huh, it is," she said with some detached bemusement, as she placed her left hand against the wall. "Goggles, gloves and all. Who decided to market that?"
But Cyborg was distracted. The position of Jinx's arm revealed a conspicuous tear on her sleeve that he hadn't noticed before, its jagged edges of black material surrounding a streak of crimson across her forearm. "Yo," he exclaimed, "What happened to your arm?"
"What? Oh, " she said while turning her head towards him, "flying debris while fighting that pumpkin in the water."
Made sense, that was the only serious fighting she'd been involved in. "When were you gonna tell me?"
"...never," she admitted while turning eyes towards the window.
"Why?", he asked, hoping the confusion in his voice would mask the irritation.
"Because I'm fine," she countered, frowning at him. "My arm works just fine, and I can worry long term after we take care of that," she said, gesturing towards the window with the arm in question.
He couldn't fault her prioritizing. Still..."Let me see that."
"What? No!" she growled.
"Are you packing sensors for that kind of thing?"
"I can take care of myself, I don't need your help."
He was faulting her prioritizing now. "Wouldn't you rather know sooner if there's some sort of pumpkin goo sprouting or something in there?"
She spent a couple seconds slowly glancing between her arm and the window. "Fine," she relented as she stepped forward and held out her arm.
The impatient frown never left her face. As he fired up the scanners in his arm, the back of his mind was trying to determine which was more confusing: her insistence on self-reliance, or that he actually got her to budge on the subject.
"Wound's sealed, nothing odd in there. None of those weird pumpkin compounds, no tetanus toxin, no other toxins I can detect."
"Well since you're there, anything leftover from whatever that bear hit me with?"
He adjusted the scan range to her whole system. "Umm...don't see anything unexpected, but I could be missing trace amounts since I don't know what signature I'm looking for."
She furled an eyebrow as she retracted her arm. "You really didn't scan the bear?"
"I didn't have a chance," he explained in a defensive fashion, "it just fell apart into a cloud of hair that floated into the grass and disappeared! Like it was never there in the first place!"
She looked out the window before answering. "Might've been a conjured creature. Created from nothing, turned back into nothing."
"And maybe that's why my analyzer couldn't hear that barking stuff."
Jinx shrugged. "Could be. But even if all that's true...who's behind all of this?"
A cycle of villains flitted through Cyborg's mind, as he grasped out for ones that seemed likely candidates. First stop, that mass mind controller..."Brother Blood?"
"Doubt it," Jinx replied quickly. "Haven't heard anyone praise his overgrown ego. Slade?"
"Nah. If he was behind this, we'd already be down; he's the type to arrange things before striking, this looks too sloppy. Can't imagine him picking pumpkins over his robots anyway." A fleeting green image flew past in his brainstorm. "Who was that who controlled plants? Poison Ivy or something?"
Jinx had to think about this one for a couple seconds. "Name sounds right...But doesn't she operate out of Gotham City? On the other coast?"
"Hmm, that seems right. Normally I'd check with Robin, if she did work out of there I'm sure he could tell me what she was doing like two weeks and seventeen seconds ago, off the top of his spiky head. But—"
"They could be after the Titans personally," Jinx said with a trace of excited revelation. "I mean, after I left Starfire they didn't follow me, we established that they got to Raven somehow, and the only time the kids went up against a building was when they were after you."
While he heard every word she said, his first thought wasn't along the same lines. "Oh man, been so caught up in us staying alive I totally forgot about saving all of them! We've gotta get going right now—"
"And then what?" she interrupted with. "We're not going to save them if we get caught too. And that's what'll happen if we keep running around without any direction. As long as we're here waiting for the patrols to thin out, we may as well try to figure out something that'll help us going forward."
Phrased like that, Cyborg found he couldn't dispute what she was saying. However much he'd like to. "Alright. So assuming that whatever's behind this is after the Titans personally...It'd probably be someone the Titans have dealt with, or at least someone local that's been affected by us. Probably rules out Poison Ivy, don't think any of the Titans have been there, but I can't think of any other plant-themed villains."
"How about mind-controlling ones, then?" Jinx responded as she slowly walked back to 'her' window.
"Good point." He thought about creepy mind-controllers for only a moment. "The Puppet King?"
She turned, and lowered an eyebrow. "Who?"
"Umm..." He struggled to think of how to describe him succinctly. "Psycho body-stealing marionette?" Close enough.
"Not ringing any bells," she said as she shook her head.
"Huh," Cyborg said with minor bewilderment, "thought he was part of that free-for-all with the Brotherhood of Evil."
She scoffed softly. "In case you forgot, I got there late and it was a chaotic mess; I don't remember everything that was were." She turned back toward the window. "Besides, shouldn't he be frozen then?"
"You're probably right. What about...Mother Mae-Eye?"
Jinx's posture subtly straightened, before she half turned to Cyborg. "What?" He wasn't entirely sure that was a question, her tone was rather low.
"Uhh...Psycho pie-enchanting witch?"
She took a deep breath, then turned the rest of the way to face him. "Are you thinking, like, pumpkin pie?"
"No. I mean yes!" he suddenly exclaimed as his mind caught up with him. "Mind-controlling pumpkin pie is the closest connection we've come up with, isn't it?"
"A very hypothetical connection," she intoned skeptically, "but sure. Looks too gloomy out there though. I'd have expected grinning suns and gingerbread buildings and other nauseating cuteness if she was behind this."
"Yeah, you're right. Wait...how did you know so much about her?" He remembered...something to do with her. He remembered that he was in a cherry-filled-pastry haze for most of that fiasco, and found his recollection foggier than the streets outside. Even so, a distressful feeling in his stomach told him he should be able to remember something about it, that was really important right now.
Ignoring the question, Jinx crossed her arms and asked, with a slightly threatening tone, "What'd you do with her after you guys trapped her in a pie?"
"We gave the pie to the H.I..." Oh yeah. That. "...I-I mean Robin gave the—"
"YOU BASTARDS," she hissed, before growling and turning to stare out the window.
Cyborg couldn't blame her. In retrospect, it seemed unusually irresponsible of Robin to send the problem on to someone else. And Cyborg would be at least as ticked off if they had to deal with Mother Mae-Eye again because the H.I.V.E. Five couldn't handle it.
"Is that blood?" Jinx abruptly asked, still staring out the window.
His sense of self-preservation momentarily overridden by the possibility of more significant matters, he quickly walked over to the same window.
Didn't take much time to make out the red splatters on several of kids shambling by. "Sure looks that way, yeah."
"Don't suppose you can tell if that's real blood, and not the costume stuff?"
With a pane of glass in the way, he wasn't going to get anything useful from his scanners. However, it didn't take long for him to notice all of the splattered kids were coming from the same direction, heading left to right from the window's perspective. And from the shape of the little trails, all of the splattered originated from the side of them he couldn't see; none of the kids facing the other direction had anything to match.
"No," he answered, "but they're all coming from the same direction, and all splattered in the same place. Doubt they were coordinated before and after the nightmare hit."
She sighed. "I suppose we're obligated to figure out where all this blood is coming from, in case someone needs saving."
"That's usually how it goes, yeah."
"Fine," she said as she turned towards the stairs, "let's go."
Cyborg wordlessly complied.
Jinx went on, "That was really Robin's best idea?"
"Oh yeah. I wanted to eat it."
"Funny, that's exactly what Mammoth said."
"...ow." Somehow, that was more painful than Starfire's generous application of a rolling pin to his head had been.
"I have a whole new appreciation for all that roof-hopping Robin does," Cyborg commented between breaths.
"Yeah," Jinx agreed, "we just make it look ridiculously easy." Robin did have a gift for looking ridiculous, after all. She was just inordinately talented.
They'd gotten here through a fairly consistent cycle: Jinx traversed three buildings rooftop-to-rooftop, then scoped out the streets for thirty seconds while Cyborg caught up to her. Three minutes later, she had found the likely source of what they were looking for.
"Looks like that grocery store straight across the street is it," she explained. "Kids to the right of it have those weird stains, kids to the left don't. Then there's the big hole in the window, with crushed glass fragments and...some kind of red pulp...near it on the sidewalk."
Cyborg put a hand to his head as he looked over the edge of the roof. "Huh. There's some fluid all over that slab of sidewalk too, but it doesn't look like blood. It's all real transparent, almost like water."
"Weird," Jinx replied. That would strongly suggest that the red stuff wasn't flesh...but then, what would it be?
"I guess this puts a hole in the theory about the main Titans being the target, if the kids broke in there," Cyborg commented. "Unless one of the others was in there."
"I don't think so. The glass pieces are on the outside, which means the window was broken from the inside."
"...so somebody broke out of the building, rather than them breaking in."
"Yeah. Not the most thought-out plan in..." Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a kid nearing the site in question window, approaching it from the left. "Shh," she whispered, crouching for emphasis. Cyborg followed suit.
This particular boy wasn't wearing a costume, although Jinx supposed it was possible that the combination of black leather jacket, white t-shirt, jeans and sneakers was meant to evoke a particular person. What concerned her more than the light-blue glow in the eyes, however, was the mostly correct proportions of the body. This wasn't the shape of a twelve-year-old, this was someone close to her own age.
While she never held a belief that simple postpubescence would confer some sort of immunity, the concrete example revealed some disconcerting implications to her mind. First and foremost her own vulnerability; she'd taken enough mental crap from Brother Blood, she didn't need another variety of shit to deal with. Secondly the other potential victims; up until now she'd been assuming Starfire, Raven and the rest of the city's superpowered demographic had been pinned, captured or otherwise incapacitated. The prospect of fighting them all was...disheartening, at the very least.
Still, she found the implications changed nothing at the moment. While a "zombie Starfire" would certainly be more of an issue than any number of roving tweens,there was unlikely to be any advance warning one way or the other. She'd worry about it then, for now there were addressable issues to deal with.
Patiently they watched. The teenager shambled forward listlessly, unlike the slightly more aggressive pacing of the kids who'd tried to chase them down. If he was capable of reacting to the sound of glass pieces crunching underfoot, he didn't do so.
As he crossed the middle of the gap in the window, a muffled sound of metal hitting linoleum came out of the window. A split second later, the sound was replaced with a couple of squishy splatters; tiny pieces sprayed from his side and a spheroid of some sort flew past him entirely, producing its own squish against the building directly beneath them.
Without so much as hesitating in his stride, he deliberately craned his neck to look through the window opening for a second, before returning his head to its forward-facing position. He continued to walk on, whether oblivious or uncaring.
Jinx shook her head. "What the hell was that?"
"You're telling me," Cyborg responded.
"No, seriously," Jinx said as she leaned her head over the edge of the roof. "What the hell was that?" she asked, indicating the splatter below with her hand. The poor lighting, three-story height difference and restrictive angle were enough to mask any sort of visual details; despite the fog thinning out. "Is it the same stuff?"
"Looks like," Cyborg confirmed as he looked down over the edge. "Could do an analysis on it, but...We need to save whoever or figure out whatever didn't need saving first."
"Fine, let's go."
"So," he asked with a little trepidation, "how are we getting across the street? It's like eight lanes wide, with no place to hide, and with the fog lifting it won't take more than a handful of kids to spot us crossing."
"Then we'll have to get them to look elsewhere," she answered. It was sounding suspiciously like he was the only one needing help here.
"A distraction? How're we gonna set up a distraction far enough away that they don't just run right where we are?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "I'm all for skipping it and moving on, personally; but I don't see how else you're going to get across the street, unless you want to go underground again."
He shuttered. "Oh no, had enough of that for the day."
He missed the cue to have her go across by herself. Good, that saved her the tedium of refusing. "Well then." She evaluated the street once more, this time keeping an eye out for objects of a conveniently destructible nature.
The pavement that comprised the street wasn't appealing, nor were the sidewalks or all the sturdy-looking buildings. She could make a noticeable display out of them, certainly, but it'd take too long for the full effect. She needed something quicker. Flashier. More explosive.
Something like...cars. There were only nine of them as far as she could see, but that was more than enough. "Is there anyone in any of those cars I see?"
"Huh?" Cyborg asked, briefly thrown off-guard by the sudden question, before doing something with his arm. "Can't find anything like that, only signs of movement are a couple kids. Why?"
"Anyone in our mystery building?" she asked, ignoring the question since she was sure he'd have an issue with the answer.
"I think so, there's something in that direction but I can't pinpoint it."
"Anyone below?" she prompted before he could ask again.
"No. Now you want to tell me what this is all about?"
In response, she drew her communicator and turned it on. "This thing still work?" she said into the device.
Cyborg lowered his eyebrow, before answering over his built-in communication equipment, that'd been configured to work directly with her own communicator and bypass the city-wide interference. "Umm, yeah," he said, his annoyance coming through.
"Good. You get to the front door under here, let me know when you're there and the coast is reasonably clear. I'll tell you when to run across; leave the diversion to me."
He paused for a second. "You're gonna blow up the cars, aren't ya?"
"Yep."
He sighed and shook his head, before turning around and walking towards what seemed to be a fire escape. "Can't believe I'm doing this," he muttered.
"Good thing you're not the one doing it, then," she retorted. "You know, for someone who's swung entire buildings around, you're sure picky about property damage."
While Cyborg climbed, shimmied or otherwise made his way down, Jinx mentally determined the optimum targets. The two criteria were pretty basic, the first being four cars: Two on this side of the street, two on the other; and of each two, one on her left and one on her right. That would ensure the light and sound of the explosions would interfere with detecting Cyborg from all directions as he crossed the street, if timed properly.
The other criterion was to maximize difference of distance from cars to the left and cars to the right. A search party would likely start from the middle, so offsetting the middle from their actual location would buy them extra time.
Cyborg's voice came over her communicator. "So how are you going to get across from up there?"
Not worrying about him seeing her before she responded, she rolled her eyes and shook her head. "Don't worry about me," she said, "worry about the kids that'll get blown to bits if you miscall this."
"Fine," he sighed. "So what's the plan?"
"You give the word, I'll give a countdown," she said as she walked to the far end of the roof. "Time's up, you charge across the street and through the window. I'll handle the diversion and back you up."
"You sure that'll...Wait. OK, all clear."
She turned on her heel. "Eight seconds," she said as she tensed her muscles and readied her sprint. "Seven. Six. Five, count the rest, four."
In a smooth motion she stowed the communicator and launched herself across the roof. One second later, she launched herself through the air.
A third of the way across the many lanes of concrete below, she crossed her arms, tossing a pair of hexes at the nearest of her targets. Not a second later, she spread her arms out, throwing another set of hexes at the remaining targets.
She casually alighted on the edge of the store's roof as the sounds of four scattered explosions roared around her, following by a set of overlapping car alarms. A look around and down at the street below showed Cyborg dutifully charging across the street, taking advantage of the obscuring pillars of smoke she'd graciously provided. A simple hop down off the roof, and she was on the street, in position to follow Cyborg in as he squeezed through the hole in the window.
She was dismayed when Cyborg's plan was more along of the lines of smashing through an adjacent window. She shook her head and followed him in. She'd just have to hope the extra hole wouldn't draw extra attention when the inevitable search team came around...and possibly berate Cyborg over his poor grasp of stealth when this was all over.