Freaking pumpkins.
Jinx had taken to breathing with her elbow covering her mouth. Her lungs did not approve of whatever had been in the mutilated-almost-beyond-recognition things that used to be walls.
Freaking buildings.
She supposed she could be thankful that only most of the walls were so trashed when everything fell over; that what was now the floor was mostly intact and what was now the ceiling was halted by the debris of the other walls, instead of breaking on top of her. Or crushing her like a bug, she had no idea how much weight was behind it. She could hardly look at it.
Freaking gravity.
With only a foot or so of vertical clearance, she couldn't turn on her side. Or her back. She had already done the unthinkable and undone her hair just so she could turn her head and look at something besides the floor. Somewhere, a spirit of vanity was frothing at the mouth.
FREAKING PUMPKINS!
And it probably sounded just like that.
A two-foot wide hole in the "floor" wasn't much help. Looking down through it, she could see what remained of a window—which was a good indicator of the upheaval, since when she ran into the room there was a hallway separating it from any windows—and a long way down towards a toppled building below. Even if she were inclined to try squeezing through the hole, there was no space to position herself to make a landing she could walk away from.
She had no real prospects for escape, either. The glow of a hex idling on her hand wasn't a particularly efficient light source, but it had worked. Sheetwall-like debris formed a box, about seven feet wide and fifteen feet long, that the "ceiling" rested on. She had crawled around the perimeter, without even enough clearance to get on her knees, but it was about the same all around: the weight of the "ceiling" packed the debris too densely to be cleared by hand, and using a hex would almost certainly destroy the floor she was laying on in such a tight space.
And of course, she lost her grip on her communicator when those freaking gourds rammed the building she was standing on. Not that it'd be much direct use, but it'd be helpful to know whether or not Cyborg was remotely nearby. She didn't even know how long she'd actually been here, she lost track of time while straightening out her horn-shaped masses of hair without so much as a comb. And it'd take forever to get all that hair back into place.
She rolled her eyes in frustration. Somehow, out of everything she'd been through thus far, it was her hair and the thing with Mammoth that managed to genuinely bother her. Probably because they were the only things she had caused herself, she decided. In other circumstances, she'd wonder whether she was really so selfish as to put her hair on the same level as any of her friends; but as it was there was simply little else to think about.
Other than how she ended up here in the first place. She mentally replayed the events, trying to see if there was something else she could've done; but she chose the optimal plan as far as she could tell. She didn't have the opportunity to choose where she landed on the building after jumping out of the car, the buildings fell over too quickly for her to have made it to the side to jump out of the way, and she'd have been crushed if she had jumped off of the last building instead of into this one. She had chosen the best course of action, as far as she could tell.
Being confined to a makeshift crawlspace certainly didn't make her feel like it was the best course of action, though. She felt almost nostalgic for the "old days", as they'd started to feel. Sure, the petty crime was hardly fulfilling, but as an instigator she had far more control over the course of events. The type of serial improvisation that led to one becoming trapped in the upper half of a toppled office building, for example, only ever seems to happen to those reacting to events, not those causing them in the first place.
Jinx creased an eyebrow in thought. Maybe she'd been going about this all wrong...
She crawled back towards that hole in the floor. Playing it safe had thus far done a spectacularly poor job of keeping her safe, she decided, and it was time to take some risks.
First off, she needed to get out of here. Throwing a hex would still probably plunge her to her doom; and her solution to that was to not toss a hex near a floor. That meant the hole in the floor. And since she couldn't reach any of the walls from there without intersecting floor, that meant her only viable target was the ceiling.
Would that help? She didn't know. Would it get her crushed? Possibly, but the odds of being found by someone friendly were far slimmer.
She took a deep breath, since the night air floating up through the hole was easily the cleanest breathing room in the entire space. Then she stretched an arm out, gently tossed a purple wave of energy towards the ceiling, and quickly withdrew her arm.
Her squeak of surprise was drowned out by the refrigerator crashing through the weakened ceiling and taking a chunk out of the floor, followed by several large pieces of debris and what sounded like kitchen utensils.
About three seconds later, she heard the muffled sound of the refrigerator hitting brick wall below.
She shuddered. Three seconds of fall time meant the distance was about eighty feet more than she'd estimated, she couldn't handle a fall like that even in optimum conditions. She'd have to try to go up now. She didn't want to think about would've happened if she'd tried squeezing through that hole earlier.
It'd be a lot like if she fell through now, really.
After waiting for silence to prevail for a few seconds, she slowly crawled forward, to the edge of the newly-enlarged hole and its ceiling counterpart. She paid special attention to her sense of balance, in case the floor had lost the ability to support her weight, but it seemed reasonably sturdy.
She grabbed the edges of the ceiling above her, and gently applied pressure up and down. The ceiling didn't move. She repeated with the edges of the ceiling across the hole, and again it showed its stability.
Grabbing the far edge with her hands, she pulled herself forward, then lifted her legs through the hole and onto the ceiling, one leg at a time. Then she rolled away from the hole, not willing to trust it to keep supporting her. The only problem she had was accidentally wrapping her own hair around her legs. While its actual impact was negligible, it infuriated her immensely.
She glanced around. The debris being lit by moonlight indicated that it was clear all the way up. The drawers, dishwasher and sink implied this had been a kitchen or break room of some sort. That would explain the refrigerator at least...
After gingerly unraveling her hair from her leg, she stood up. Shaking her head and sighing, she put her hands behind her head and began the almost-unconscious process of restraining her hair in a more conventional manner. It'd taken years for her to first get the hang of maintaining the delightful accentuation of devil-horn hair, after all; and now, going through more mundane techniques by rote was easier than falling off a bicycle.
She'd have greatly preferred to restore her hair to its proper and fashionable state, but there was neither time nor supplies. And she wasn't going to risk losing some fight by tripping over her own hair, that'd just be insulting.
She planned her next move, while working on her hair. The opening at the top was the most obvious way out of the room, but if there had been enough force to pulverize the walls in the room below, these walls must've taken structural damage too. Might be better to intentionally collapse a wall than for it to collapse on her while trying to scale it.
It certainly looked like "up" was the way out, although she realized that could be because that was the only way she could see, asides from a plummet downwards. Exactly how she'd get all the way up there remained to be seen, and the odds were firmly against it being intact up there. But she knew there was a long fall immediately below her, and that she didn't know how wide that fall was. Getting out of the building would let her see its overall positioning, and up was the only direction where getting out wouldn't involve blasting a series of holes in an already mutilated building. To say nothing of the risk of gravity taking her on an involuntary trip if those holes triggered a collapse.
Granted, if anyone were looking she'd be pretty obvious on top of a building, exposed to sight without any cover. But who'd look for her there? She'd have to be quite stupid to climb on top of a toppled, mangled building in the first place. Or extraordinarily confident.
The sound of that refrigerator dropping would be hard to miss, though. Oh well, that just meant staying in here would be an even worse idea. If a welcoming committee came along, she'd just have to deal with it.
She was a little concerned over how exciting the possibility of an actual fight felt at that moment.
But nowhere near concerned enough to reconsider.
Her hands returned to conscious control, having finished assembling and verifying the stability of the large coil of hair on the top of her head. She sighed. While she knew full-well that the military bun was intended to keep hair out of people's faces, and it could work as a legitimate fashion...She simply couldn't shake the feeling that she'd done something wrong to herself. Once again, her vanity had proven itself resistant to her practicality.
Vanity would have to get over it this time.
A creaking sound snapped her out of introspection. If the building was still settling its weight, it was still in danger of falling. Time to get moving. But which way?
She realized that, since the building had tipped over, two of the "walls" would actually lead onto other floors. Unreasonable to expect those to be an improvement over her current situation. So the other two directions would be actual walls, and probably be better choices. But which of those two directions?
And come to think of it, which two ways were those two directions?
She looked at the floor, specifically at the hole she'd come through. It was in the center of an edge, as opposed to a corner. She tapped a finger against her chin as she thought. Since a refrigerator had fallen through, it stood to reason that the hole would be flush with what had been the floor, as the refrigerator would have been when gravity held it there. So that identified the floor direction, as well as the ceiling. And of the other two walls, one of them still had a few drawers hanging on it from a couple pieces of twisted metal, and the floor could probably do without extra damage from things falling into it.
So there was one choice that didn't seem like a bad idea. She shrugged, readied herself to jump if need be, then tossed a hex at the center-top of that "wall". Material crumbled, and more moonlight came through the now clear space.
She repeated the process a few times, each time placing the hex so it would disintegrate portions of the wall at the top, rather than let big pieces fall to, or through, the floor she was standing on. Unfortunately this also meant a great deal of dust went into the air; by the time she reached the bottom of the wall it was almost a haze. She covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve again; she'd inhaled more than her fair share of particles already.
But behind the haze, she saw something helpful: A reasonably-solid-looking section of wall a few dozen feet away, leading up to a wall on its right. A wall with several metal shelves coming out of it at regular intervals, and a couple pipes running through it. She turned her head sideways to verify her guess of what it was...and sure enough, it looked like the supports for an open ceiling. More importantly, the metal strips continued all the way up to what was presently the "top" of the building.
There was her way out.
Making the short jump across felt a little odd. She'd never have guessed she could feel the air rushing against her hair, much less become accustomed to it, but the evidence suggested otherwise; some corner of her mind had expected a nearly-imperceptible pull on the sides of her scalp, which the bun simply didn't provide. Oh well, just one more thing to make some pumpkins pay for.
Climbing up the side was more annoying than difficult. The apparent ceiling supports had been close enough together that climbing them now was closer to climbing the rungs of a ladder than hoisting herself up repeatedly, which would've required more upper-body strength than she was used to exerting. As it was, she had to force herself to be patient with the much slower rate of vertical progress than her acrobatics supplied, while at the same time being thankful that there were no signs of anything collapsing while she made her way up.
Getting onto the roof turned out to be more of a chore, since the crash hadn't been kind enough to cleanly remove all the glass from the windows. Wasn't a big deal, though; she carefully applied a hex at a crosspiece of what had been a window frame, removing both that crosspiece and the glass around it. After feeling outside to be sure it was free of glass, and then checking that it was wide enough for her to stand on, she hoisted herself up through the opening she had just made.
She stood up, and took a deep breath of the clean night air. The first step of her escape was complete.
No time to take a break, though; up next was the second step. She looked around. The view seemed level, confirming what her sense of balance had told her. In three directions, she could see clearly where the building ended. In the fourth, there appeared to be an angular dip in the distance, followed by a peak; that peak was too distant for her to get a good sense of what happened beyond it.
She slowly headed off in that last direction. Based on which direction the building fell, the many other buildings she had traversed would be off in that direction, supporting this one's weight. Which meant she could descend from one building into the next, and get onto the street from there. More importantly, that part of the building was in less danger from snapping off and falling the rest of the way to the ground.
She watched her step, but aside from the windows, the surface seemed sturdy enough to easily find safe places to step. At least, until she got near that dip she had seen. From there, the scene was considerably more chaotic: twisted pieces of metal jutting out of the building, mangled window frames, and a few clouds of dust still standing on top of the sections of wall they presumably came from.
Thinking an attempt to cross that would be suicidal, she looked down one of the closer windows. It was hard to tell for sure, but it seemed clear through to the bottom, and below the "floor" was the roof of another building, sloping away. She guessed it made sense; the building she was on top of had fallen over the other ones, so where it impacted the angled edges would've taken the most force and thus had the worst damage. She didn't trust it, though; this close to the impact spot there should have been much more damage to—
She darted her eyes around nervously. Did she really just think that?
An ominous creak, and a few muffled snaps, accompanied the surface she was on slowly becoming angled as it descended on one side.
She cursed inwardly. She had jinxed it. Which had long since stopped being ironic.
Trying to cross the urban wasteland in front of her seemed an even worse idea now. That was the weakened portion, and thus where the building would snap off. Having the floor fall out from under her this high would be even worse than falling through the floor she'd started this escape from. That was already too far to be survivable, and didn't include all the rough or sharp edges the building would get when it hit the ground. Plunging through the open window airway was pretty much the same, except the debris would come from above instead of below.
She frowned as she turned, reminding herself not to get used to how slowly the angle was shifting. There was only one way to go, she decided: Back the way she had just come. That'd be where the altitude loss was faster, so that was where her best chance of a survivable descent was. With any luck she'd make a controlled descent instead of a fall.
She ran down the unsettling structure as it began emitting more frequent and louder creaking noises. She gently veered towards the nearby left edge, hardly comforted by the knowledge that she'd already run across several buildings while they were tipping over. Fortunately, she had a plan for this one. All she needed to do was not fall through a window or hole, not trip on the shifting surface underfoot, and not mess up the timing.
All at the same time. Easy enough, she thought.
So easy, she almost missed the key moment while thinking it would be easy. Seeing the roofs of the adjacent street come into view, she shifted away from the edge. She then charged towards that same edge at an angle, brow furled in determination. As those roofs came back into view, she adjusted her angle slightly, a split second before making a full flip off the side.
She didn't quite believe she had made it when she touched down on her target roof, even while she was standing up by instinct. Hearing a continuous sound of creaking metal behind her, though, she quickly covered her ears with her hands. Even that wasn't enough to muffle the sound of snapping that she heard next.
The cacophony of metal, glass and drywall was felt much more than it was heard; the force almost knocked her off her feet since her arms weren't free for balance. As it was, she shifted a leg to adjust, before turning the movement into a crouch and then clinching her eyes shut.
It was only a few seconds before the noise and vibrations ceased, but it felt far longer. She took a series of deep breaths, thinking she'd had way too much of a workout tonight. A few seconds later, she stood back up and looked over the edge of the roof behind her.
The downed section managed to look like it used to be part of a building, barely. The clouds of dust masked the actual area of impact, but what she saw rising above showed deep cracks and the occasional hole in the walls. It also looked as though it had lost several feet in height; although her estimate of its original height was only a guess, the few straight sections on the roof were slanted enough to be noticeable, so it must have lost a lot of material off the bottom at some point.
She shook her head in an effort to refocus. As glad as she was not to be part of the scenery, there were other concerns. Even though the collapse wasn't caused by her own actions, noise of that magnitude was bound to draw attention. She briefly pondered whether it was better to get moving now and risk running into observers, or to wait it out and risk observers running into her. They were more interested in Cyborg than herself, it was possible they'd move on when they didn't find him here.
"JINX!"
She flinched. So not only was Cyborg down there somewhere, he'd just announced the fact. Loudly. That certainly changed the scenario; if they were looking for him then his voice wouldn't be overlooked. At least he'd removed the uncertainty. As well as any use for subtlety.
"WHAT?!" she responded with as much annoyance as she could muster, before taking a few more slow, deep breaths.
For a moment, there was no response.
"Down here," he finally said, a little less loudly than before.
She rolled her eyes, before walking to one of the corners opposite the wreckage and looking over the edge of the roof. The dust cloud hadn't spread that far yet, and the color of Cyborg's metallic frame stood in stark contrast to the rest of the scene.
It was also only two floors down to the street. She walked a little ways along the edge of the roof, then simply made a controlled drop down, landing only a few feet away from Cyborg.
The bear hug Cyborg gave her was unexpected. She'd have kept more distance, had she known it was coming.
"You're alive!" he said, as she grunted in surprise.
She thought the gesture was sort of touching. But mostly awkward, and threatening to bring up fleeting memories. She felt it'd be cruel to outright reject it though, so she needed to convince him to stop and let him think it was his idea...
"You're not hitting on me, are you?"
That did the trick. He released her half a second later, dropping her several inches down to the ground, and took a couple steps back. "No! I just...umm...What happened to your hair?"
She glared back at him. "Almost got crushed, couldn't move with the horns, could trip on loose hair, this is the compromise. Now what were you thinking yelling like you were, we're trying not to be found, remember?!"
"Only way I could find you," he answered.
She creased an eyebrow. "That wasn't why you yelled, was it?"
He looked like he was about to give an excuse, but he suddenly looked distracted. "Did you hear that?"
She hadn't noticed anything. She inhaled, then held her breath while she attempted to hear whatever it was Cyborg might be hearing, on the odd chance it was too soft to be heard over her own breathing. It was a couple seconds later that she first heard it: a soft rumble, vaguely resembling the sounds of an active thunderstorm. But storms didn't come so close to the ground that their thunder echoed between buildings and shattered husks thereof.
Come to think of it, the ground was shaking slightly, too. She hadn't actively noticed it, compared to the earth-shaking collapse just a couple minutes ago; but these were definitely originating from far away. And they were definitely moving. And definitely getting closer...
"OK," she said, "that's not good. We need to get moving, now."
"Right, it's not too far to the place where you and Starfire took down that giant pumpkin."
That was sounding like the exact kind of defensive approach that'd almost gotten her killed twice, with the same building. "I don't know about you, but I'm tired of getting thrown into things while we're failing to avoid confrontations. We should cut to the chase and head to the Tower now, not look for clues."
"But one of those bear things is there right now."
It sounded more like a suitably direct avenue of investigation all of a sudden. "What? How do you know that?"
"Fixit's got these little robots with cameras, some are watching that place."
"Fixit? Who's...Never mind," she interrupted herself with a shake of her head, "you can tell me later. Is it alone?"
"Sure looked that way. He said it's just been circling the block, by itself."
Good enough for Jinx. "Alright, let's go. If we can figure out this pumpkin thing, or take the bear out preemptively, we're doing good."
Cyborg seemed taken aback. "You sure are aggressive all of a sudden."
"Yeah, well, I'm not going to wait for them to find more buildings for me to dodge. Not anymore."
By now, the rumbling sounds were close enough to confirm as pumpkin vines hitting the pavement at high speed. "And that means we're not waiting for them to get the drop on us. Let's go."