"Let me get this straight," Cyborg said as he worked on his arm at the wooden table, with...whatever welding tool was integrated in his other arm. Jinx found it slightly disquieting that he could simply detach an entire arm, then go to work on it like it was just another electronic device. "You broke into an ancient temple, found doomsday plans on a mural, and left them there?"
She rolled her eyes and shook her head, as the smell of metallic smoke reminded her why they had time to have a discussion. "What did you expect me to do?" she demanded. "Haul the entire wall all the way to the front door, or blast an irreplaceable piece of history?" While at the time she had briefly considered separating the mural into pieces she could haul out, it was painted on plaster that was already showing signs of water damage. She had no doubt that it'd be pulverized if she tried to partition it with hexes...not that she'd expect Cyborg to appreciate that, even if she bothered to tell him.
The noise of light electrical crackling stopped, and he turned to look at her. "And the doomsday part didn't bother you at all?" He said earlier that he'd already managed to compensate for whatever was going on with his hearing, some volume increase algorithm. That he evidently heard her over the sound of his equipment verified his success.
"No!" she yelled anyway. "Things around that age often claim doom of some sort, assuming no one will actually risk doom to verify it. It's no different than those boxes for closed-circuit security cameras that don't actually have cameras, it's presumed security."
"OK...so what'd it say?"
She'd expected him to argue the point, but she was only caught off guard for a quarter of a second. She made a show of turning her eyes towards the ceiling as she mentally replayed the years-old events, in case more realizations came to her. Jungle, clearing, unmarked ruins, tunnel hidden behind a boulder, plaster mural, taking photographs, resources on Mayan glyphs, translation attempts..."A lot of it was too worn to make out. Mentioned a deity, called the 'Green One', who would do...something to the world so it could do...something to nature. Six...jaguar-men, I think...spread its spirit. Pretty sure that means those bear demons, obeying its commands."
"How do you get from 'jaguar' to 'bear'?"
"It's a little bit of a stretch, but this was in Central America, and—"
"—right, bears aren't indigenous to most of there."
"...Yeah, so whoever did the mural might have had no idea what a bear looked like and had to improvise." That was an oddly specific factoid for a electronics expert to have so readily. "How do you know so much about bears?"
"Umm...when you get turned into one, you kinda get curious," he said awkwardly. "Can we get over this later?" he added, as he got back to work on his arm, looking back at the table it was placed on.
She looked at him with one eyebrow creased. "Fine," she said, reminding herself of priorities, as the crackling resumed. She was sure listening to Cyborg tell a story he didn't want to tell would be a lot less stressful, but getting killed would seriously mess up her calendar. "The next section on the mural was...really faded. I could only make out how it started: how to call the 'king of jaguar-men', I assume one of the bears is designated leader over the rest. The last section was like 'Reader beware, the Green One will end an unworthy world', boilerplate doomsaying basically."
The crackling stopped again. It took a couple seconds for Jinx to notice Cyborg directing a level stare at her. Which was very unnerving with the solid red eye supporting it. "Faded."
"Yes."
"Really."
"Yes."
He creased his eyebrow. She must've taught him that one by accident. "It wasn't really faded, was it?" he half-accused.
She growled. "Now you get attentive. No! I wasn't intending to end up there, I wasn't supposed to be there, and I had to take off before I could photograph the whole thing, so I have no idea what it was saying there! Are you happy?" She was quickly asking herself where that outburst came from, where her composure went, and why she told him so much.
Cyborg's surprised silence only lasted a couple seconds. "Not really," he answered calmly. "Was it something I said?"
"Yes—no!" she corrected herself, fighting her emotions' desire to run wild. "Our first and only real clue to this whole thing, and we don't have all of it because I screwed up; some police tracked me down through a jungle, I'm supposed to be better than that, damn it!" She had to take a couple deep breaths after such a long sentence, all the while cursing inwardly at her dismal attempt to rein herself in. Now she felt irrational and egotistical.
She was still silently fuming when Cyborg responded a few seconds later. "OK, so we're not perfect. That doesn't mean we won't win. When I was briefly the leader of Titans East, I lost my whole team to Brother Blood the first day; and even the team here couldn't stop him. It was down to me, and despite my screw ups I managed to beat him...in a way that I couldn't imagine if I hadn't been there."
"I heard," Jinx commented dismissively.
"How did—never mind," Cyborg said, "Point is, we're going to keep punching probability in the face until it keels over and we beat this thing. Even if it takes what's left of the night to do it—"
"Wait." The phrase had triggered something in her brain. "What time is it?"
"Huh? Oh, 3:45AM."
She sighed. "Great, I'm turning into an old lady, get cranky if I stay up past my bedtime." She was trying not to grin, though; it'd explain her emotional...sensitivity, and would certainly be an improvement over possibly losing her mind. Being stuck in a city-wide mind control maelstrom for hours, the possibility existed.
He blinked. "How long have you been awake?"
"About nineteen hours."
"You woke up at nine?"
"Yeah, I got up early—late." She sighed at the brief lapse of recollection. "The whole diurnal cycle thing is kind of a bitch."
"Heh. Well with any luck, we'll get this thing taken care of soon. I'm not sure how we're going to get across the bay to the Tower...but once we're there the rest should easy. Kinda doubt centuries-old monsters are gonna be hacking security systems."
She rolled her eyes. "You probably just jinxed it."
He smirked. "I figured, since you're coming anyway..."
She let out a chuckle. Not so much as a response to Cyborg's incredibly lame implied pun..."I'd normally say leave comedy to the bears, but tonight? It's really a tossup."
Cyborg winced. "Ow."
She smiled briefly, before shaking her head quickly. Focus. "OK, amateur hour at the comedy club can wait. Are you done with your arm?"
"Yeah, just need to reattach it now."
"Good. Do that. We've got a city to save, an abstract concept to oppress, an array of gourds to squash, and ursine manifestations to brutalize."
"Now you're talking!"
She found it significantly easier to watch him connect his arm back to his body, compared to seeing him use his own tools on his own limb. He simply held the shoulder portion to the corresponding socket, and with a magnetic snap it was pulled into place. He waved his arm around, made a fist, extended various combinations of digits..."All good," he reported. "So when were you in Central America, anyway?"
At least he hadn't made a joke about being "rearmed". She briefly considered how to define the time span, and decided on the related events: "Between when you blew up the academy, and when you went out to Steel City."
Cyborg rubbed his chin. "That would explain why you didn't show up the rest of the year...but...um...why?"
"If you had a teacher who was obsessed with an ex-girlfriend of yours," she asked in an annoyed tone, "how long would you hang around?" It may not have been the most rational decision she'd ever made, but she refused to let every moment of the day remind her of Cyborg and what had transpired between the two of them. It hurt more than enough when it actually happened.
Cyborg shuddered. "Good point," he said uncomfortably.
"Any other questions?" she prompted quickly.
"Yeah, actually. How come you didn't mention any of this sooner?"
"I didn't make the connection until the thing mentioned 'Green One'. That was a particularly odd part of the mural, but repeated a few times; it took so much effort to figure out from the various faded copies of the phrase that it was easy to recall."
"Makes sense, remembering the most involved part. What was so odd about it?"
"It was Mayan script, which didn't distinguish green from blue. So the literal translation was something like...'The one of blue-green of tree not blue-green of ocean'. It seemed really strange at the time...but if it were a transliteration of a title from another language, one that differentiated blue and green—"
"—it'd have to express it somehow, gotcha. Wouldn't want to mix up Green One and Blue One. Don't know if Beast Boy or Raven would be more offended."
What a perfect opening. "Pretty sure it'd be Raven. Speaking of, are we ready to find and/or save her yet?" She figured Raven would find that meeting as unappealing as Jinx herself was finding the thought of it, but it was due and should keep Cyborg moving.
He quickly straightened his posture. "You bet!" he proclaimed.
Right before a low metallic ring danced at the edges of her hearing.
Cyborg's demeanor shifted back to slightly skittish. "What was that?"
"Stairwell," she calmly explained, as she started to walked across the carpet towards the curtains on the wall. "Someone just flung open one of the doors leading into it, and the sound of the door hitting the wall carried through the metal railing of the stairs."
"It's gotta be close, if we heard it through the closed door and down the hall!"
"I propped the door to the stairwell on this floor open, so we could hear them sooner. You've seen the kids move; even if their stilted movements don't have problems with stairs, we're a lot faster than they are. We've got time, but we should still hurry." Just in time, she thought; the next question would've been why the demons were described in Mayan script but used Elder Futhark themselves. The connection between the two scripts, separated by half a millennium and the Atlantic Ocean, was an interesting academic matter, but there wasn't enough time to do justice to the subject; practicality is what they needed now.
"...OK. You said before that you picked this place for a reason. Would it happen to do with how we're going to get out since the stairwell is blocked?"
With suitably dramatic timing, she pulled the curtain off, revealing the glass double door behind it. "Yes." The building across the street was getting another few floors added; scaffolding dominated the view. Which might also explain the makeshift curtain rod above the only window-equivalent item in the whole room; but this was no time for critiquing interior design, either. Titans Tower was visible in the distance, framed by wooden support beams.
"Cool," Cyborg commented from behind her. "So...how are we going to get over there? That stuff'll snap if I try to walk across it."
She frowned, and crouched on the floor so she could see the top of the construction work through the glass. Her plan had been to make a section of it fall over to connect the roofs, but it'd been so long since she had to worry about weight that she hadn't considered Cyborg's. There was certainly enough height to it that she could make a wooden beam fall to form a makeshift bridge, but only she could cross it; she'd have to find some other way to get Cyborg across.
It was then that she noticed an odd shape at the upper-right corner of her view, a stripe of metal in alternating red and white colors. She moved her head to the left, bringing into view the large industrial mechanism attached to the side of the far building. It ended in what appeared to be a hook.
"How about the crane?" she inquired.
She heard Cyborg move closer. "Yeah, those things move a lot more weight than I have. But...do you know how to operate a crane?"
Gizmo had once made the rest of the H.I.V.E. Five watch a short film entitled 'Forklift Driver Klaus'; that was the extent of her heavy industrial knowledge. And as it was a sheer parody of work safety films, there was little actual knowledge to it. "No."
"Darn. I know how to work one, I did a lot of heavy lifting—in more than one sense of the word–when Titans Tower was being built. If we had our communicators I could maybe try to talk you through it when you got to the control cabin, but..."
"You mean if I had my communicator."
"Same thing. Look, there'll probably be three sets of controls; one turns the crane left and right, another raises or lowers it, and the last extends or retracts it. You get the hook part over here and I'll grab on."
She nodded in agreement. "Then I set you down on the other roof, and we figure our way out from there."
He looked askance at her. "Bet you have a plan there, too."
"Sort of. We had to stop going by there once the security was reinforced to the point that Mammoth was inconvenienced trying to get in, so it should keep the kids out until their pumpkin backup comes around. We can get out through the trapdoor in the basement."
"Another place with a hidden basement exit?" Cyborg asked skeptically.
"Yeah, same company owned the warehouse too. Or shared parent company, something like that; we don't have time to discuss fine points of property ownership."
"Right."
She quietly opened the double door, took a step through the gently flowing air, and looked over the edge of the balcony. Her original plan had involved cutting loose a piece of scaffold to form a bridge; but the scaffolding started a few floors below, where the actual roof stopped. She could easily traverse the gap acrobatically, since Cyborg wouldn't be taking the same route. That way, she figured, she wouldn't be detected until she started up the crane. Every second a pumpkin response team wasn't sent was another second they had to get on with the...she supposed it would be called a mission, now.
After locating a landing spot clear of obstructions, she glanced behind her shoulder. More than enough room for the running jump required. Cyborg was standing there near the doors, but he only lingered for a split second before stepping out of the way. She walked in, keeping a straight line and facing the same direction as she mentally measured the distance.
"You're not going to hit the scaffold if you jump over there, are you?" he asked.
She continued forward until she was near the far wall of the apartment, before turning around and responding. "Nope." That was why she wanted such a long running jump, after all. She could handle the vertical drop to the other roof from just a few steps away from the balcony, but she'd have to deal with the scaffolding, and probably in a destructive and obvious way.
"Want me to 'remove' the railing?" he offered.
She paused. "Wouldn't hurt. Can you do it without making a lot of noise, or light, or a mess on the floor?" If a flash of purple light was more subtle, she'd have hexed it into rust herself. It still wasn't necessary, but far be it for her to stop him from being helpful.
While he turned around and cracked his knuckles, which she wasn't sure should be physically capable of popping, she quickly went over her high level plan for the larger mission: Get to the Tower, beat the crap out of pumpkins and bears. She sighed, realizing it wasn't much of a plan. But it was important to remember that at some point they would have to fight the pumpkins they were presently running from. But blasting them at the Tower would serve some purpose; whereas when she and Starfire destroyed the big one in the city it just made a messy backdrop for Jinx to flee and Starfire to be captured.
The sound of the railing's two thick horizontal bars snapping from Cyborg's application of brute force was soft from this distance. Almost as gentle as the creaking that followed, as he bent the left and right sides inwards. The railing was no longer an obstacle, and its removal was sufficiently subtle. Anything that saw or heard that would have an easier time noticing her when she landed on the other roof.
Cyborg stepped back inside, out of the way, then with a small smile and slight bow he gestured toward the door, as if inviting her to go first.
"Thank you," she answered, before starting her run. A couple seconds later she was soaring through the air, with sufficient speed to land on the opposite roof without a problem.
Other than the horizontal board that was far too close to her flight path.
Her involuntary gasp didn't quite sound right, probably due to the velocity, but she had other concerns. She pushed against the bottom edge of the board and then grabbed onto it, spinning herself around it. Just before her momentum was perfectly vertical, she released the board, leaving her twirling towards the sky and slightly forward.
A second or two later, she landed on the roof, alighting with her usual grace despite the spontaneous recovery. Her apparent descent into fatigue halted by the sudden jolt of adrenaline, she turned to look back at the balcony she'd just left. Cyborg's face seemed startled, presumably because of the fancy landing maneuver. She shrugged her shoulders in response, and walked off in the direction of the crane.
Infrequent columns of steel jutted up from the roof; Jinx supposed they were extensions of the primary supports in the existing building. Otherwise, the site resembled most other construction areas Jinx had seen: wooden framework in place on half of the roof, stacks of identical boards laying level around the other half, and irregular piles of odd-sized shapes and tarp placed wherever the first guy left the first piece. The use of wood right next to steel drew an odd look from her, but she was no architect; for all she knew it could just be a new cost-saving measure.
The control cabin for the crane was quite ordinary by comparison. The shape resembled the front half of a car more than anything else, complete with a clear transparent plate where the windshield would be. It wasn't a steering wheel she saw when she entered, though. Instead, she was greeted by a square console, with three levers and two buttons. Conveniently they were all labeled: One lever was left and right, another was extend/retract, the two buttons were for raising and lowering, and the last lever needed to be unlocked to turn on the engine.
Engine. She suddenly recalled that construction work was far from the quietest sort of labor. It was more the type that prompted posters warning about hearing protection...like the one on the side of the cabin. Earlier she thought it'd be the motion of the crane that'd give their position away, which would involve someone looking in their direction long enough to confirm the motion. But the sheer volume the engine produced would draw attention to the crane like moths drawn to a bug zapper. Of course, it was usually the moths that had a problem there, this situation was quite the opposite.
Her half-hearted glance for earplugs had turned up a key instead, of an appropriate size for the keyhole on that engine lever. Saved her from having to fine-tune a hex or hotwire a crane, at least. As for the noise, she decided her ears would be fine for as little as she'd have the crane on. She'd just have to trust that Cyborg knew what he was doing.
As the sound of an engine roared to life from the crane, Cyborg hoped he knew what he was doing. And that Jinx had abundant mechanical aptitude.
He was sure she was able to figure the thing out with enough time. "Stone" had seen how bright she was when they had classes together at the H.I.V.E. Academy, and the controls weren't that hard. But he had completely forgotten how loud the engine would be, which put time at a premium.
He briefly considered sneaking out of this building while the crane drew everything else off, but decided it wouldn't work. He couldn't communicate with Jinx until she craned him across, and both of them turning around at that point would highlight exactly where they were. Not to mention there was no guarantee the kids would stop advancing up this building, and escaping to the street unseen was unlikely to work since the other building would draw crowds on the ground itself.
After quickly evaluating the room for barricade material, he hauled the sofa in front of the door leading into the hallway. And then laid two chairs across the cushions, just in case. If there was ever a time when hurriedly carrying furniture across a room might go unheard, it was when that room was permeated by background noise. On the same note, he'd have a hard time identifying any sounds from the other side of the door, but anyone or anything trying to get through the door would be easily noticed.
It occurred to him that going from "early warning system" to "panic beacon" wasn't exactly an upgrade. But a warning system's worth was directly related to the ability to respond, and in light of that going from "no plan" to "half-baked rehashed plan" was a marked improvement. The realization of which caused him to clench his eyebrow in frustration. Normally the Titans would be on their way with a plan for victory by now; tonight was more like a string of narrowly beatable conflicts, where "victory" was defined as "getting into a different narrowly beatable conflict." And even now, the "plan" largely amounted to directing that string of conflicts towards the general direction where victory could be if they get that far, maybe.
He found a new understanding of Jinx's frustration. Half the night they'd been running from defeat, and they still weren't any farther away from it then when they started. And victory wasn't even technically in sight; odds were good that whatever was responsible was at the Tower, but he didn't know how they were going to get there, or what they were going to do when they got there, or even what they were going to find.
The sight of a cable entering the view out of the door to the balcony ended Cyborg's brief introspection. Aggravated or not, there was no way they could afford the time to be distracted. As if to reinforce the point, he heard rattling on the nearer door's doorknob, from the direction of the hallway. It quickly turned into pounding as Cyborg walked over to the balcony. His first instinct had been to run; but some part of his brain convinced him not to make his presence known so overtly.
By the time he was outside, the cable was immediately outside the window, dangling gently. He was impressed that Jinx had figured out which door he was in and managed to position the cable so precisely. He imagined anyone who relied on flips as a mode of transportation must have a well-developed sense of spatial awareness, but it was still quite a feat for someone who didn't have integrated rangefinding or inertial positioning systems.
He'd have been happier if the hook had been carrying a pallet or something else he could stand on, though. As it was, he grabbed onto the cable and planted a foot directly on the hook. As he gently adjusted his posture to reduce the chance of his metal foot sliding off the metal hook, the crane started rising higher into the air, carrying him with it. For a brief moment he squealed in alarm; he considered himself fortunate that the background noise from the crane would prevent anyone from hearing that.
After he suppressed his fear of a crushing fall down to street level, he looked in the direction of the building that was his intended direction. The height of the scaffolding explained why the crane was going up; he certainly didn't think they were in enough of a hurry to warrant crashing him through it. He looked down to the street next, and wasn't surprised that there were kids milling around down there, not with all the commotion. He didn't really understand why they weren't all approaching the buildings below, though...
He looked straight down, and realized that the street between the two buildings was in fact clear of kids. The lack of obstruction only continued in one direction, from what he could tell; he looked off in that direction...and made out an orange shape approaching at high speed.
The gentle movement of the crane suddenly felt far too slow. "Hurry it up!" he yelled futilely at the crane's control cabin, despite being aware there was no way she'd be able to hear him. Beginning to panic at the prospect of being a sitting duck when the thing arrived, he tried to figure out how else he could communicate with her. She had no communicator, so his equipment couldn't help. He tried pointing at the impending abomination, but she showed no sign of response; since he couldn't make out her shape inside the cabin, it stood to reason that she couldn't identify any motion he made.
He supposed he could try shooting at her...if it would accomplish anything other than getting her attention, and if his sonic cannon hadn't been mauled to the point of needing to be replaced. He still had several of the small rockets in his hidden torso launchers; but trying to explode her and the crane would be a really dumb idea, and they didn't have the kind of range they'd need to hit the gourd at this distance.
Then he smiled. He then fired one of the rockets in the general direction of the monster, having rigged it to explode after two seconds. It didn't even clear the width of the building, but the movement of the crane stopped. A couple seconds later, he saw some sort of motion within the cabin, followed by a pink shape leaning out of the side of the cabin nearest the street. It then disappeared inside the cabin again, and the sound of the crane took on a strained tone as the hook started quickly turning in the direction of his destination, through the intervening scaffolding.
A sudden increase in turbulence drew Cyborg's attention back to the street as he attempted to maintain his footing. The pumpkin had already made its way below, and was presently doing some variant of a spider climb between the buildings, shoving vines through windows to aid its assent. He looked at the scaffolding, back down to the rapidly approaching creature, then back at the scaffolding again. Still too slow for his liking. He resigned himself to jumping, and hoping for the best. The pink blur launching itself out of the cabin indicated Jinx's plan was very similar.
Unfortunately, balancing on a hook complicated the situation. Bending his knees to get the necessary leverage caused the hook to drift in the opposite direction, and his feet slipped off at the sharp angle. He yelled, while he instinctively tightened his grip. A tug on his arm caused him to look up: It wasn't a "tug", so much as his hand stopping where the cable met the base of the hook, and kept the rest of him from falling any further.
He didn't have the chance to feel relieved. The monster hoisted itself to the roof, breaking the arm of the crane as an afterthought. He yelled again as he plummeted through air, then through wood, plastic, metal, and...glass?
It took a moment for him to realize he was neither falling nor pulverized. The crane had managed to make it to the edge of the building, the several layers of scaffolding and a single floor's worth of external wall had halted his descent. Since his legs were outside the window, he reached forward with an arm and pulled himself completely inside the building.
He got back on his feet just in time to see a wide green shape plunge through the ceiling and floor. Followed shortly by a loud crash as the entire gourd crashed through, crushing the far wall and bringing the ceiling down. Cyborg somehow kept his footing despite the pumpkin body landing on the floor only a few feet away. Briefly he thought the thing had failed its attempt to crush him, but then he realized that the body portion was at an angle, its low point where the vine broke the floor. As if it had expected that vine to support its weight. Did it fall?
Whatever the reason, it wasn't extricating itself with any degree of speed; and if the monster big enough to replace the entire room with its body wanted to give Cyborg an opening, who was he to refuse? He jumped on top of the gourd, ran up an orange ridge, grabbed the thing's stem with one hand and starting slamming his other fist against the surface.
The monster's shell refused to yield, and the gourd gave no indication of any damage Cyborg might have been doing. It did, however, lift itself off the floor, taking him with it. When the orange body rose to the roof and turned itself on its side, Cyborg took a last swing at it before releasing his grip.
His instinctive response proved itself warranted, as the orange shell swiftly rammed itself through the crane's cabin. Cyborg would've been part of the twisted chunk of debris that remained, had he resisted the thing's attempt to dislodge him. As it was, Cyborg only had to deal with the unhealthy-looking sight of four green vine-tentacles shoved through the bottom of an oversized pumpkin. At least the noise had stopped once the cabin was crushed.
The patch of roof didn't break when he fell on it, and he quickly got to his feet and ran in the opposite direction from the cabin, while the monster lifted itself off the ground again. He ducked behind a stack of wooden beams, and tried thinking up some tactics.
"What are you doing?"
Jinx's whispered voice startled him, she certainly wasn't next to him a few seconds ago. "Trying not to fall off the roof," he whispered in response. "What are you doing?"
She sighed. "You do realize it's tall enough to look over the obstruction?"
He blinked. She had a point, those vines were huge. But some part of his mind wanted him to take a look at them. He risked a peak over the top. It was certainly tall, but it wasn't standing on the "tips" of its vines. Rather, three of the four were laying in a curve against the roof, in shapes reminding Cyborg of snakes.
It was also moving in their general direction, in sort of a careful walk with its tentacles. Before he ran off to the side, he noted that each step ended gently, limiting its speed.
He also recalled how the one vine had plunged through several floors. "It's too heavy!" Cyborg called out to Jinx. "The roof can't support its full force, or all its weight at two points!"
A wave of purple energy appeared in his peripheral vision, and connected with the roof under one of the vines. All three of the vines plunged through the roof, dropping the gourd down a few feet while it awkwardly flailed the air with its free tentacle. "This one can't float like the little guys, if the balancing act is any clue," she commented.
It plunged its free tentacle through the roof. The vibrations underfoot told him to run, and he narrowly avoided being part of the ravine that was created when the entire length of the vine tore through the top of the building, nearly splitting the roof in half. Shortly before the gourd dropped several more feet, leaving its bottom edge at Cyborg's height, and taking the attack vine back below the roof.
"You have any ideas?" Cyborg called out across the crevice as he ran away from the orange body. "Won't be pretty if it tears out a lower floor and we crash down with the rest of the roof.."
"Do you have a dismember mode?"
"You want me to cut off the vines?" he asked incredulously as he ducked behind another stack of construction resources. "Don't you have those plant-withering, you know, wave things?"
"The vines are too thick at the base. And I'm not picky about the method; don't you have those explosive, you know, rockets?"
"I only have a few left, and they won't do much if they can't penetrate the vines." Normally there was no need to devote any of his limited missile capacity to armor-piercing warheads, since his sonic cannon could weaken and vaporize armor using his ample energy supply.
"So, you need me to make some weak points?"
"...yeah, and then I'll hit them for massive damage." So this is a boss fight, then, he thought to himself. Wonder how deep into video-game parody we'll go...
The pumpkin had extricated itself from the roof just in time for a series of hexes to strike the side of the vine closest to Cyborg. It walked off in that direction, swinging another vine through the air to disperse the stream of energy. And possibly trying to hit Jinx too, he couldn't see where she was.
Opening the slots on either side of his torso that covered his rocket launchers was the easy part, it was finding the target area that would be hard. The other pumpkins had gained brown splotches where Jinx's attacks had connected, but he couldn't see any withered areas on this one. If she couldn't dent it at all...
Still, Cyborg was well aware of how easy and dangerous it was to underestimate Jinx. "You alright over there?" he yelled amidst the purple flashes, "I can't see your weak point."
A crash accompanied the creature's attempt to flatten Jinx against the roof. The vibration had almost subsided when she finally responded. "Maybe you should be looking for its 'weak point'," she said patronizingly, her voice shifting from Cyborg's left to his right as she jumped several feet over his head.
Cyborg didn't have time to process the insinuation. He jumped to his left, to avoid the oversized vine that was coming down diagonally near his spot. He was certain that the force of impact would've knocked him over, if he hadn't been airborne at the time. As he landed, though, he saw it: the creature had adjusted its own "footing" to keep going after Jinx, and the new angle revealed the brown spot that Jinx had been working on, near the base of the orange section of its body.
He wasted no time in firing a salvo of four rockets at the spot. The creature noticed the attack and attempted to whip it's loose vine at the rockets, but the sudden movement put too much pressure on its other vines and it fell about two floors in height, thwarting the defensive movement. Meanwhile, the rockets' guidance systems kept on target, flying low against the roof and turning sharply upward into the damaged vine.
The first rocket exploded shortly after breaking through the cracked "skin" of the vine. A horrible high-pitched squeal filled the air as the vine fell from the rest of the creature. The second rocket hit the base of the vine, producing another squeal along with a small spray of bright red fluid. Cracks appeared on the shell of the orange gourd. The third rocket entered the thing's body, exploding at the top of the shell. Orange fragments sprayed out the top and the side, and more of the red fluid splashed out the hole at the bottom.
The fourth rocket turned out to have been unnecessary; it traveled through the pumpkin entirely, and exploded harmlessly in the air as the abomination's body fell lifelessly to the roof. On impact, the cracked shell split open, oozing copious quantities of that disgusting bloody pumpkin pulp.
A wide purple wave of energy hit the edge of the roof, obliterating the edge and dropping the attached section of roof into a downward slope. "I'm not swimming in that," Jinx declared, as the goo followed the path she had made to a room on the floor below. She stared at the hole for a second, then tossed another hex, shattering the wall separating the room from the outside of the building. "Which means we don't want it backflowing."
Cyborg, meanwhile, had a difficult time reconciling the light feeling in his chest with the burning feeling in his nose. "You know, this victory would feel a lot more...victorious, if it weren't so disgusting."
"No shit," Jinx responded with a shake of her head. "At least we know these things are a lot easier to take down when we aren't fighting on their terms."
"Yeah, that'll make reclaiming the Tower a lot easier."
"What do you have in mind?"
"You've seen the obstacle course, the one with the automated targeting systems. It can pull double duty as a security installation." Cyborg briefly tried to remember if he'd mentioned that upgrade to any of the other Titans, before deciding this wasn't the time to worry about it. "I just gotta connect directly to the Tower's security system to activate it. So we just gotta get there."
"Right, so let's get there, before something else gets here. The stairs down to the basement should be right over...huh."
Cyborg walked over to where she was looking. One of the now-dispatched pumpkin's vine attacks had split open the roof over what was indeed a stairwell. The roof was unlikely to win any contests, but Cyborg didn't see any damage to the stairs themselves. Of course, he couldn't see past the few floors at the top, either.
"Well that's a little too convenient, isn't it?" he commented.
"Yeah. Wish we had a choice...you have any better ideas?" she asked.
He thought for a moment. "Better? No."
"Then let's see how deep this rabbit hole goes."
Cyborg used his shoulder lamp to provide lighting as the two of them slowly descended towards the basement level, and the hidden exit Jinx said was there. The rumbling from the wind blowing across the roof grew slowly quieter as they went deeper, turning into an eerie whistling noise as the solid walls of the stairwell mimicked the effect of a wind tunnel. He wasn't particularly unnerved by it, though. Titans Tower wasn't exactly a short building itself, and those kinds of noises were normal with any significant air movement.
His own footfalls and the intermittent creaks of the stairs were a different matter, though. Every noise the stair made brought to mind the possibility of the staircase collapsing under his weight, much as the roof had with their plant assailant. While falling down to ground level might save some time, he didn't recall a time this evening when it would be beneficial. And though he saw no evidence of damage to the stairs, nor the side of the staircase, nor the underside of the staircase; the noise was clearly present, and enough to keep him from trying to move any faster than walking pace.
If Jinx had any problem with his self-imposed pace, she gave no sign of it. She silently kept a few steps ahead of him, glancing over her shoulder at each creak loud enough for her to hear. He still found it odd that he could only hear his footsteps; he could clearly see that the two of them weren't walking in sync, yet he could never identify a sound that indicated her boots touching the wooden surface of the stairs.
Wordlessly descending down a spiraling stairway in the dark reminded Cyborg quite strongly of the stair chamber in the Scath-related structure below the city, around the time they'd all learned about Raven's heritage. This place was square instead of circular though, and about half the width. It also had a lack of malevolent ghosts assaulting them on the way down, a difference Cyborg approved of wholeheartedly.
They reached the bottom floor, which was technically one floor below ground level, without any actual incident. Cyborg was quietly relieved to feel the solid flooring under his feet as he quickly caught up with Jinx, who was waiting at a door for the basement proper.
"OK," she said in a soft tone as she gently opened the door. "It's not far from...huh."
He saw her staring through the now open doorway, and took a look himself. Most of the overhead lights were still working, probably because of the space and ground between here and all the action on the roof. The room, which could stretch the entire width of the floor for all he knew, was a sea of cubicle walls, with a couple of rolling file cabinet islands he could see down the aisle. It looked more like a Dilbert cartoon than a basement, although he supposed it could be a basement in a Dilbert cartoon.
Didn't take long for him to put the pieces together. "So they rearranged the basement before they went to the trouble of adding to the roof."
"This was all clear space the last time I was here," she commented with some confusion. She then shook her head quickly and sighed. "Well it's not like they could move the passage the trapdoor connects to, it has to be in the same place. Let's go." And with that she walked down the aisle with a deliberate pace. Cyborg followed behind her, assuming she was determining the walking distances from memory.
She made a left turn, then a right turn, continued forward a ways...then stopped in front of a cubicle wall. After a couple seconds she shrugged, and casually tossed a hex at it; over the course of a couple seconds, the barrier cracked and collapsed into a pile of tiny pieces on the floor, with the fuzzy material of its covering more-or-less dissolving into thin air.
They were then faced with a large cubicle enclosure. A ring of counters, interrupted by two copy machines, held three computer printers. The space under the counters was filled with file cabinets and other types of office storage containers.
"Naturally," Jinx said sarcastically, "the perfect place for a copy center is on top of a trapdoor." She sighed, loudly.
"Don't suppose we could just level what's on top of it," Cyborg commented.
Jinx took a deep breath. "No. Aside from not knowing exactly where it is, we're more likely to bury it, or warp it so much that it won't open. Guess we'll just have to do this the old fashioned way."
A patch of ceiling above them crumbled and broke, as what used to be a printer was shoved through it. Both of them saw it and dodged out of the way; Cyborg jumped back while Jinx rolled forward. Four kids, all in bunny costumes, fell through the floor, but managed to remain standing.
"Cyborg," they all intoned in unison, before two started walking towards Cyborg and the others progressed towards Jinx.
"Quick!" Jinx yelled as she back-flipped to land on top of one of the copy machines. "What was your not-better idea? Short version!"
"Build something on the roof!" he answered in kind. He backed up a step, as the sound of other ceiling breakages echoed around him.
"OK," she declared as she looked over the edge of the cubicles from her current height, "That's the new plan, take out the stairs behind you, I'll catch up!"
Cyborg was taken aback. "How are you going to 'catch up' if I take out the stairs?" he asked incredulously.
She growled. "Nothing matters if we can't get to the Tower to stop all these things, I'll keep them busy. We don't have time to discuss this in committee!"
He growled himself, as he obediently turned around and ran for the stairs. "I am not a committee! But fine, you worry about the fighters and I'll worry about the Tower!"
Cyborg thought maybe he should have mentioned that he didn't actually know what he was going to build yet. But, like the woman said, no time to discuss it in committee.