Robin approached one of the older children, patting down an ice-homunculi. This one had two balls on top of two other balls, maybe meant to be heads, with open mouths, lined by cones of ice, and branches sticking out from the top like horns or antennae.
"What's going on here?"
The child looked up at him. "It's a snow day. We're playing in the snow."
Cyborg processed some information on his arm-panel. "There wasn't supposed to be any precipitation today, or temperatures below the forties."
"I knew this could not have been normal!" Starfire said, pounding her left fist against her palm. "This is surely an extinction event, yes?"
"Weathermen get things wrong all the time," Robin said. "But this is a little strange. Kid, what's your name?"
"Calvin," the child said, not looking away from his sculpture of snow. "Anyway, who you calling kid, kid?"
Robin frowned and gritted his teeth.
"Have you seen anything unusual around here?" Robin asked in a level voice.
The kid shrugged and brushed some snow from the red poofball on his blue hat. "Everything's been pretty quiet since the prince showed up. There's hot chocolate over by the stand if you want some."
Robin hesitated. "Prince?"
The kid nodded. "The Winter Prince. We were all hoping and praying for a snow day, so he gave us one."
A sharp wind kicked up, blinding them with a flurry of dry ice crystals.
The child continued to pack snow onto his object, then finished off the "heads" with a carrot in each. The orange root vegetables stood out in vivid contrast to the white-grey landscape around them.
"Well, thank you." Robin said. "Where is this Winter Prince?"
Calvin pointed at the frozen pond.
"He's out skating on the pond?" Beast Boy asked.
Calvin shook his head and pointed down.
Robin shrugged, and they followed him out onto the ice.
Somebody laughed right behind Starfire's ear. She spun around, starbolts at the ready.
Nobody was near her. Children pushed along the ice in the distance, making grotesque shapes out of the packed snow, or sipping their hot chocolate.
"Wait a moment, please, friends," Starfire said. Raven and Robin stared at her. She flew over to the shack with "FREE HOT CHOCOLATE" in flashing lights above it.
"I would like some heated chocolate, please, sir," Starfire said.
For the first time, she saw an adult in this "winter" landscape. He was similarly insulated by thick, puffy clothing. His brown face was stretched by a warm grin, and his golden eyes were tender.
"Hey hon, what can I get you. Regular hot chocolate? Whipped cream or none? White hot chocolate? Peppermint flavor? Marshmallows or no? Cinnamon stick? I've even got salted caramel hot chocolate!"
"I would like a standard hot chocolate, with marshmallows and whipping cream," Starfire said, cautiously.
"Sure thing!" the man said. His fingers flew over the spigots and valves. Starfire noted that, despite the LED sign saying "Free" above him, he had a cash register. His hands reached towards it and twitched away. He handed Starfire a steaming mug that smelled like safety and home.
Starfire sniffed it. It had no whiff of psychogenic chemicals. She carefully licked at the spire of cream and rapidly-melting marshmallows. She sucked a sip of the contents into her mouth, testing with her layers of taste buds for anything strange.
She swallowed. Nothing happened. Her perspective didn't shift.
"Are you a government employee or perhaps a member of a religious organization?" Starfire asked.
"What are you talking about?" the man asked. He laughed. "I'm agnostic."
"I do not know of the gnostics, but how do you sustain your enterprises if you do not charge currency for food in this capitalist society?" Starfire inquired gently. The hot chocolate was really quite good. It reminded her of the blood stew cooked up by her Gnorfka.
The man laughed louder, slapping his thighs. Starfire had heard this mentioned in many narratives as an expression of humor, but she'd never seen it in person. It looked strange and uncomfortable. "What do you mean? I'm just doing this out of the goodness of my heart! It's almost Christmas after all!"
Starfire looked back to her friends, shuffling on the ice. A lot of the children skirting the ice had stopped around them, and some had brought over large lumps of snow to make vaguely humanoid figures out of it. "May I have four more whipped-cream-and-mallows-of-the-marsh hot chocolate cups, for my friends?" This man was trying to avoid talking about something. She could smell it in the air. A slight glance revealed two empty bottles of vodka on the floor of his shack.
"Of course!" he said, the relief in his voice audible. "Anything for, anything for the kids. Happy to help!"
Starfire took the mugs and strode towards her friends. She didn't trust the air currents and worried that flying might spill the contents. She knew the man at the booth was hiding something from her, but it would help to get Raven or Robin to question him with their superior interrogative skills.
Even though it was frozen over, the pond looked like it was flexing or shuddering. It was as if the stabilized water had an echo of prior motion. Starfire increased her speed.
Robin was arguing with one of the small, young humans. He reached towards them and pulled back his hand. The larva ran off, crying. Robin waved his arms helplessly while Cyborg ran after him.
Hot chocolate sloshed on Starfire's bare pseudodermis, even though she was walking carefully. She looked down. A faint line of fractures ran through the frozen water, like the webs woven by an eight-legged predatory arthropod or a damaged airlock.
Starfire increased her speed. The hot chocolate sizzled as it splashed on the ice.
She dropped the cups when a hand reached out of the ice. It closed over Robin's utility belt and yanked it off. He tumbled backwards into the water.
Starfire's abdominal arteries skipped a few beats. Even as she shot towards the dark hole in the ice, Robin's head broke the water and his gloved hand seized a large chunk of ice. He spread out his arms and legs, kicking with the same force that could decapitate a Slade-bot despite the weakness of flimsy, un-augmented human muscles. He paddled with one hand and kept his weight on the other to keep afloat.
Something slammed into him from below. He bit his lip. The ice was still breaking up around him, and the dark green shape shoved him towards the shore.
With the help of a push from below, Robin scrambled out of the water and slide along to a thicker patch of ice. His whole body shuddered and trembled like one of Raven's battery-powered massage tools. His breath was still coming clear, though, in steamy endothermic puffs.
The shape in the water rose up, and Starfire slowed down a little. It was green. The seal clapped its fins together and barked happily.
Starfire wrapped up Robin in a tight hug, conjuring up pulses of un-discharged starbolts to heat his cold wet body.
He made a strange noise, but she couldn't make it out through the rattling noise of his bony teeth slamming against each other.
When he spoke clearly, Starfire dropped him and spun around.
"Cyborg!"
Their metal friend wasn't crying for help or flailing around. His head was barely above the surface, mouth slack, eyes glazed.
A ripple crossed the water and he vanished.
Human bodies were well-insulated and buoyant, but Cyborg was mostly heat-conducting, high-density metal. Robin was strong, but he was still just a human. He couldn't lift 385 pounds of dead weight while swimming. His body was pouring all its energy into restoring the lost heat with friction.
"Beast Boy, turn into something that glows!" Starfire shouted. The seal became a ribbon-shaped water monster with transparent greenish flesh and a pulsing luminous carbuncle. Starfire punched straight through the ice below her, heedless of the damage to surroundings, while Beast Boy writhed ahead of her.
She saw no trace of the pale figure that had reached up through the ice, but the circle of light was small. Maybe it wasn't the only one. Maybe the pond was filled with...whatever they were, like newborns crawling through the rotting corpse of a giant traarg.
The faintest glint of green reflected back to them. Beast Boy plunged straight down. In this restricted environment, Starfire actually had to struggle to keep up with him.
The bubbles also helped. Cyborgs pupil was wide, and it didn't shrink even when Beast Boy's bioluminescent fish-form was right in front of it.
Humans didn't just need oxygen to heal, or to reproduce, they needed a constant stream of it, every minute, second-to-second, just to maintain their brain function. Oxygenated gas was more essential than fresh water, sunlight, or food. Did Cyborg have some back-up system to deliver oxygen to his brain or storage pumps linked to his remaining lung? How much air was in him when he went under? How much time did it take before that unreliable centralized nervous system would run down?
No time to worry about that now. She clasped his cold, cold hands, kicked towards the surface, and hoped for the best. Beast Boy shifted into something more buoyant, casting them into utter darkness as they vaulted towards air.
Starfire plunged out of the surface and returned to the blessed sky. Taking no chances with the jagged surface of frozen water, she swooped down to the edge of the shore, blowing the snow from a park bench before settling him onto it. She snapped off dead tree branches, ripped the top off a public trash receptacle, melted the ice from them, dried them out with a low-intensity starbolt pulse, and then ignited them with her laser-vision. She set the improvised firepit under the bench.
Beast Boy had flopped out of the water and darted over in cheetah form before resuming his human shape. He parted Cyborg's lips, checked his mouth, and pressed his mouth against Cyborg's, cheeks bulging. Was this like the thing that mother birds did to their offspring? She knew humans couldn't share languages like she could.
Beast Boy pumped ineffectually at the metal chest with his pipe-cleaner arms, then shifted into a gorilla. He pumped it like he was squeezing the juices out of a fruit, and then again did the strange kiss-like motion. Starfire felt strangely powerless.
She was just starting to mumble the words to a basic prayer when Cyborg vomited icy water onto Beast Boy's face. He rolled over, coughing and spitting, but he was clearly alive and breathing.
Some children had come over with blankets and dry winter clothes. Robin was sprinting over, even though he was shuddering so hard he could barely walk straight.
"Oh no, I am so, so sorry!" said a voice that sounded sincere. "Really didn't mean to do that. Sorry. Unintended consequences. My bad."