Okay, I know I said this would be a one shot piece, but I got an idea that was too good to let go and decided to attach this to the first chapter. This is a lighter chapter than the first, though when you provoke the Apocalypse you can hardly go darker from there... The phrase 'pre-Terra alternate universe' will prove important here, so be aware. Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Titans in any way, shape or form. That honor belongs to someone connected with Cartoon Network and I have no intent of challenging that person! I don't want to make a profit from this and just hope that this doesn't get me sued... Okay, Review responses and then story.

Blackshield: I am not insinuating that Trigon is the devil; in fact I said that he had fought the devil and lost. (Lucifer the Morningstar is Satan's full biblical name. The stuff you find in books, huh?) He's just so strong, that he ripped quite an impressive dimensional rift as he came through from the Abyss. Don't mean to sound patronizing.

Slayergirl1362: Daemonology 101 lesson: all daemons have a True Name, a name bound to their innermost essence. If another being learns this True Name and recites it aloud, they will acquire absolute power over said daemon. Cyborg is still dead because even if Raven had asked for him back (she didn't), Trigon can't raise the dead. He's good, but not that good... Sorry if I was confusing.

Chance Meetings Amid the Canyons

A Teen Titans Story

By Wordbearer

Titans Tower was a madhouse these days. Raven would have scarcely believed it possible in the days before Trigon's abortive release, but with super heroes running in and out, meetings held, and the general insanity that engulfed the planet since the incident, the tower was filled with noise. To make matters worse for the shaken mystic, her room had been in the part of the tower that had sheered off and lay broken near the tower's base. In angry desperation she had taken residence in one of the basement storage rooms. She had been offered a guest room by Robin but the cheerful décor and view of Jump City, not the most soothing of visages these days, had made her decide to bring a sleeping bag into the basement and hole up there. Not that the basement was empty by any means, as she opened the door and nearly ran into a yellow clad figure who called himself Speedy.

The other stammered, "Sorry Raven. I was sent down here for some more toilet paper. I'll go get it now..." He turned and ran off in the wrong direction, looking over his shoulder fearfully.

Raven sighed and tucked her hood over her head as she thought, "Break a few objects and everyone runs away in fear at your arrival..." She had snapped a few times in the stressful days immediately after her recovery and only her fellow Titans weren't skittish around her, much. Beastboy, half as joke, had taped a crudely written sign to her current door, 'Raven's Room. Do Not Enter. You Have Been Warned!' and someone taped it up again whenever it fell down. This started her on a morbid train of thought that she conscientiously avoided as she entered the main hall.

At this early hour of the morning the place was all but deserted, only Robin present, entranced by a report. This suited Raven perfectly as she set her water to boil and walked over to the masked youth, uncharacteristic doubt slowing her steps.

Setting her emotionless expression firmly in place, the half-daemon asked, "Robin, may I speak with you?"

He looked up at the monotone question, flashed a quick smile as he bookmarked his place and replied, "Sure, Raven. What's on your mind?"

"A lot of things. I need to get out of this place for a couple days. There's nowhere I can safely meditate with all these people around and I think its showing." Her statement was true, more or less. The flyers used the roof to come in and out. The island was dotted with refugee shelters. The tower itself was full of visitors and workers as they effected repairs. Raven had been temperamental as consequence and the Tower was running out of spare appliances.

Robin asked, "You have an idea where you want go?"

Raven answered, "Of course. Are you sure you can spare me?"

She left unspoken the thought, "This is my mess and I need to help clean it up."

Robin spoke confidently, "There are more people here than I know what to do with. Go ahead, I think you are owed some vacation time anyway. Just bring a communicator with you."

Raven nodded slightly in gratitude as the kettle boiled and said softly, "Then I'll be leaving before Beastboy and Starfire get back from night patrol. If I try to go while they're here, they'll insist on coming along. Then I'll get no meditating done." Robin grinned wryly at the comment and turned back to his book as Raven drank her tea.

She gazed out the window toward the rising sun and thought to herself, "If I had to take someone, Starfire might not be too bad a companion for this thing. She's less flighty then she was and actually has joined me for meditation before. Beastboy though... He's been rather clingy lately, acting like he's in love with me or something." She shuddered at the image that sprang into her head at the thought. In response to her emotion, a pillow glistened black quickly, and softly slapped against the window.

Looking at the pillow accusingly, she made her way out of the room, stopping on the steps as Robin asked, "When are you going to be back?"

Raven concisely replied, "A week or so," and phased through the wall on her way to her gathered supplies.

Later that day, Raven hovered over the canyons to the east of Jump City. These canyons were familiar to her from a dozen previous visits. After she had left Azarath, but before she joined the Titans, she had used the shadowy confines of this maze of gorges as a safety valve, a place to explosively vent in privacy. No one came here and no one noticed the occasional new crater or shifting arrangement of scattered rock. She hadn't felt the need to do so in years as she mastered her meditative techniques, but with the conditions at the Tower being what they were, Raven felt like exploiting the solitude of this place once more. The mystic lowered herself to the ground, the blue cloak fluttering around her. Raven wore her normal uniform with one exception: her soft shoes were replaced with a pair of battered, yet serviceable boots in concession to the terrain she might face. The shadows of the canyon cast stripes upon her form as she made her way to a familiar cave. Raven stopped at the cave's mouth as the odor of old wood smoke breezed out. She narrowed her eyes in suspicion as she spotted a cluttered pile of camping gear in the corner of the cavern.

"Perfect," she thought, "More refugees." Raven quashed the unkind thought and reprimanded herself as she cautiously extended her empathic senses to see if she could find whoever owned these supplies.

The confusing barrage of messages she received confirmed her reasons for normally not tapping this temperamental gift. She extracted a general heading from the cacophony of desert life and took a path along the canyon floor, not using her energies as she carefully nursed an incipient migraine. Raven came to a bend in the canyon and could hear the sound of someone humming as they threw stones into the water with a dull rhythmic splash.

Walking around the corner, she said sympathetically, for Raven away, to the half seen figure, "Hello? Are you okay?" Raven stopped talking as the figure spun around in a swirl of blond hair. A pair of large blue eyes stared out of a narrow face. The person was female and about 15 years old, though the nearly anorexic girl was about as curved as ruler. She wore a battered outfit and a bandage on one grimy arm.

The girl took one look at Raven, eyes blazing with terror and shouted. She then took off and darted past a corner. The dark mystic sighed to herself, levitated off the ground, and followed the blond. Too many people were like this in the aftermath of the daemonic attack, paranoid and broken. The Titans had evolved a routine to handle people like this: chase, subdue, and then drag back to medical personnel. What happened as soon as Raven cleared the turn was anything but routine however. The girl looked back, halted, and her hand took on a golden glow. Raven's eyes widened slightly but remained alert enough to dodge a flying stone with the same golden aura.

Seeing a dozen or so more rocks about to take to the air as well, Raven muttered under her breath, "Azarath. Medrion. Zinthos." A hastily formed black shield absorbed the hail of stones, but the unknown superhuman had dashed off again.

"I'll get no meditation done with her running around," Raven thought to herself as she continued after her. "Better to catch her now so that I can get some peace."

Catching sight of her target as she dashed around the corner, Raven engulfed a stone in her ebony power and lobbed it at the girl's back. Some sixth sense warned the blond of the projectile and she halted the stone in mid air. The thin superhuman sent the stone back at Raven, who tried to halt it with her power. The stone halted midair, its ebony shell broken by arches of gold lightning. A battle of wills ensued, neither female willing to bend. A heavy pressure gathered in the air as a wall of floating stone formed between the two, drawn by their conflicting fields of power. Something in Raven's daemonic heritage exalted in the conflict and she continually chanted her mantra under her breath to keep her power under control.

The blond was less coherent, screaming at the top of her lungs as a cloud of dust spiraled around her. The terrible scene held still a moment: two mentalists locked in combat their eyes blazing with power and a wall of stone flashing black and gold between them, flexing like a storm ridden sea. The thin blonde's cries took on a higher note as if an old terror was unleashed, and an explosive wall of force engulfed the canyon. Stone crumbled around her, tearing at the walls, dropping her into a newly opened chasm and sending the wall of stone flinging at Raven with unstoppable force. Raven knew she was going to die when something went snap in her mind and the laws of physics twisted as her non-human heritage unfurled.

Her cloak, previously flapping in the wind, dropped downward as it grew and tendrils of absolute darkness flowed from beneath it to shield her body. The rock storm scattered around her expanding form as a second pair of eyes gleamed from the shadows of her hood. The white glow of her eyes turned red, forming a sinister contrast with the blue of her robe which fluttered with fitful life. The barrage of stones continued from below as golden glowing rock flew upward. She dropped into the hole, her tendrils leaving a trails of frost where they touched.

The one corner of her mind that was free of bloodlust desperately thought, "I must not kill. I am in control of my emotions. Rage is the destroyer of all. I must not kill. I am in control of..."

The phrases repeated as the girl looked up with golden blazing eyes and fearfully muttered, "Demon. I can stop it. I stopped them before. I just need to get control." A large stone slammed into Raven, who was borne up by it even as her ebony tendrils tore through the barrier. Eager to rend this opponent's flesh, Raven hit the ground in front of the blond, stones futilely impacting her robe as a fierce smile lit up the mystic's normally deadpan face. It was a smile that would only widen at the thought of the world's destruction and laugh at the death of billons. A large glowing rock hit her in the face, but she merely shrugged off the wound, buoyed by extra-dimensional endurance.

The blond looked at her attacker and spoke carefully, "I can't stop you but I want you to know something. My name is Terra and I'm not afraid of you." Inside her head, Raven halted her mantra and fought to regain control in earnest. The floor frosted as her tendrils moved to engulf Terra, her eyes blazing like a nightmare flame. Terra slumped over exhausted, but before she was engulfed Raven reared back against the wall. Amid a hail of floating dust, her tendrils flickered and withdrew.

The grin faded as a determined whisper bled past her lips, "Azarath. Medrion."

The glow of her second set of eyes faded. "Zinthos. Azarath."

Her robe shrank and her legs became visible again. "Medrion. Zinthos." Raven shakily got to her feet, looking down at Terra.

The half-daemon spoke, her voice a shaken mockery of her usual firm control, "Terra. It seems that I may not be the only one with control issues. So much for my alone time." Raven shrugged, wincing at the pain of her bruises, and slowly levitated the two out of the chasm as it continued to crumble around them.

Terra groaned as she regained consciousness. She started as she recalled her last few moments of awareness and realized she was no longer in her self made chasm. Looking around the darkened space, she didn't notice Raven until she spoke, "You're awake."

Terra locked eyes on the blue blur, "Well, yeah. I think that I am anyway. Who are you?"

Raven moved into the light and Terra stiffened in fear, but before she could run the mystic said, "That's not important. What is important is for you to calm down and not break your neck in this place at night. I think we got off on the wrong foot today."

Terra blinked, "Okay. That's one way you can put it. Wait a second..."

She paused as she put two and two together, "You're Raven, aren't you? Of the Teen Titans?"

Raven rolled her eyes in the shadows of her hood, "I see my fame precedes me. I go out here to be alone and I find a super powered groupie."

Terra shook her head in denial, "It's nothing like that. I travel around a lot and hear rumors."

Terra let a cocky grin cross her face as she grew more confident that the other girl wasn't going to kill her. "I was a little jumpy though today. Some clawed freaks tried to jump me a few weeks ago and they weren't going to stop at a mugging either. And you must admit that your 'four-eyed, tendrils of darkness' attack was kind of frightening. I'd heard you were the scary one of the group, but that was over the top. What was up with that?" Terra looked at Raven expectantly.

Though she didn't react externally, Raven scowled inwardly at the comment as she thought to herself, "Great, stereotyping and intrusive questions. You're scoring points with me today, Terra."

Aloud Raven said, "I'll ask you this Terra. What happened with the sudden power level spike mid-battle? If it was controlled, great tactic. Otherwise, it seems someone can't handle their powers." Terra's smile faltered, and Raven knew she had scored a direct hit.

Hesitantly the blond answered, "Ah, never mind that. I'm hungry."

Her stomach rumbled on cue and Raven responded, "I gathered some wood. You light that up and we can have some of the food I brought." Terra brightened at the thought of food and went in to start, leaving Raven alone on the edge looking at the stars.

Raven thought to herself, "This should prove an interesting week. This Terra has more issues than a hydrophobic fish, though I'm not one to talk." Raven closed her eyes and sighed, wrapping her cloak tightly around her as light bloomed in the cave. Terra began cursing at the can opener and Raven went into the cave to help.

So you made it down here. What do you think? Good? Bad? Don't care? If you see fit, leave a review and tell me what I'm doing wrong or right. Hope that you enjoyed this chapter and thank you for your time.