"Sir! Sir!" The heavily breathing young man spoke as though he'd been trying to catch 'Sir's' attention for some time now.
"Yes, underling!" replied a snappy, enthused, voice.
"Sir, we are good to go."
"Show of horrors! Send in the number fifteen then, and, dear, do make sure that this one comes home for tea. Lest you find yourself having a rather nasty calava in the ladies bathrooms later this evening."
The young mans breathing became harsher. "Sir-"
"Nay!" Cried the voice. "We shall not hear of it today. Go back to your busy-ness, and allow me to viddy my screen in a peaceful silence."
"...Sir." The young man left the room. As soon as he was out of sight of his superior, he broke into a hurried jog, to the surveillance control room.
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Terra picked absently at the remains of her dinner. She was sat on the far end of the cushion pile, nearest to the window, holding a pair of chopsticks in one hand, and a silver tin-tray in the other. She was also staring out of the adjacent window, a faraway look on her face.
The skies were calmer now, and there was a fresh feel about the way the earth felt.
The sun was going to go down soon, and the world was calling to her.
It did that sometimes. The earth and Terra had a fairly close relationship. She had the power to move it, and in fair return, it had the power to move her, in its own mighty ways. The bond between them had grown since her time as a figure of stone. All she had known for those months was the earth...
Terra stood up with her tin-tray, and put her chopsticks down on the table. She was still wearing her jacket, but she pulled a scarf off of the back of the chair and wrapped it around her neck with her free hand as she left her cardboard box structure of a house.
She closed the door behind her, and breathed in the smell of almost dusk.
Twenty minutes of leisurely walking brought her to the recycling yard, and she disposed of her tin-tray, happy that she was giving something back. There was too much garbage in the world. She didn't need to scavenge dinner from the church charity, and then create more rubbish.
She began to walk again, not really sure where she was going, but fairly certain that she would not get lost. She walked where the earth called her to, feeling her feet going by themselves, and soaked up the natural feeling of riding the waves of the world beneath.
She was being called somewhere. She felt her powers, living, under the solid beneath the concrete and tarmac.
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"What's going on?" Asked Beast Boy, as he ran into the control room. Raven floated speedily a few yards behind him.
At the computer screen stood Robin, pressing buttons and occasionally giving a "where was that?" and "right, thanks," into the protruding microphone. He stopped pressing buttons, and removed an earpiece, before turning to the fully assembled group.
"We've got a problem," he said.
"What is happening?" Asked Starfire.
"There's... something going on. Down town. Nothing's happened yet."
Cyborg raised a hand. "So why is it a problem?"
"Because it looks like something might."
Raven spoke. "What is it?"
"Yes," agreed Starfire, "perhaps we can determine more successful action if you were to-"
"Is that a Tuberflute?" Interrupted Beast Boy, leaning sideways to look around Robin and at the screen shot on the monitor. "Or..." he cocked his head to one side, "... dude, is that an arm?"
"Tuberflute?" Enquired Raven.
"Yeah, you know, like those things babies have with all the pipes and stuff," he replied, still staring at the screen. "Okay, I give up. What is that?"
Cyborg tried to get closer to the screen, to see for himself. Everyone except Robin leaned forwards at the image.
The Boy Wonder pressed a remote button.
The image appeared on the larger screen at the other end of the room, toward which Robin was facing. He coughed pointedly. They all turned around.
"Uh... what is that?" was Cyborgs somewhat delayed reaction.
"Most unidentifiable," said Starfire, cocking her head to the side in contemplation.
"...Okay." Said Raven.
"Itso is a Tuberflute," said Beast Boy.
"Actually," interjected Robin, "That's what Commissioner Walker seemed to think, too."
"What about the... arm, and... stuff?" Asked Cyborg. His eyebrow was raised in mild disgust, coupled with amusement, coupled also with something that implied he wasn't entirely sure what to think.
"I guess," said Robin, "that's just an arm."
"And chicken feet?" Asked Beast Boy.
"It resembles one of your planets merry-go-around devices," observed the only alien in the room. "With additional fowl-design based manoeuvring structures, and three quarter a human arm as... a... arm," she finished, looking puzzled.
"Yep," agreed Raven. "That's definitely what it looks like."
They all stared at the image on screen for almost a full minute.
"So," said Robin quite suddenly, "as you can imagine, this is causing quite a fuss. The police don't want to handle it in case it, well, explodes, or starts attacking things with superpowers or anything."
"Right," said Cyborg. "So we're gonna go and what, detain it?"
"It doesn't look like it's really... doing anything," said Beast Boy. "Do we even know if it's a thing, and not just a... thing?"
"No," said Robin. "It appeared about twenty minutes ago, and it hasn't even moved. We just have to, and I quote, 'do something about it'."
"What are we waiting for?" Asked Cyborg.
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The young man almost skidded as he rounded the corner. He dashed into the control room, flushed, and quickly recovered his breath as he dropped into a chair in front of a large screen and hit some unlabelled buttons.
A screen popped up, displaying a large and empty looking section of downtown Jump's largest unused industrial estate.
"Time to decorate," muttered a coarse haired man a couple of chairs away. He had headphones on, and looked important.
The young man knew the coarse haired man as Eighty-One.
Eighty-One pushed a couple of buttons, and then the young man leaned back in his chair, breathing in and out, and not looking at the screen.
He closed his eyes, and counted to 100, because he was suddenly and most uncharacteristically very nervous. By the time he reached 100, he opened his eyes again and found the screen was filled with a rather peculiar looking spectacle – a massive white disk. It was thick for its size, standing on two equally up-sized chicken legs (feet and all). Attached to the centre of the disk was a giant arm, severed and rounded off at the centre of the length of the bicep. Around the disks edges were multicoloured tubes, which looked like a cross between the ends of bassoons and some very oddly shaped bells.
"And we're good to go," said Eighty-One, looking sideways at the young man, and breaking into a grin. "Nervous?" He said.
The young man raised his eyebrows momentarily. "This had better go well," he said, "or it's my neck."
"Actually," said Eighty-One, "it'll probably be a little more than your neck."
"Yep," said a deeper voice, from the young mans other side. "I bet he'll take off your... arms. Arms. He has a thing for arms."
Eighty-One chuckled.
"Don't worry Kid," he said. "We're sorted."
Kid breathed out slowly, and pursed his lips. He eyed the scene on screen.
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By the time the Titans reached the scene, people were screaming, and/or running away in all directions.
It was probably the arm, thought Robin. People just weren't used to seeing giant severed arms rounded off like that, and attached to giant toddler toys. Starfire dropped him on the ground a hundred or so yards from the giant chicken-feet, and hovered a short way off the ground.
He pulled out his bo staff, ready, and waited for Raven to cover the thing with energy, to see if he would need to use it.
-
Raven levitated over the giant arm. Whirling around her a few meters up was a green falcon. She centred her energies.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos!"
Her eyes glowed with an absence of light, as she sent a wave of black energy downwards.
She noticed the twitch of the giant arm at the last second.
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(A little ahead)
Terra came up to some buildings. She wasn't sure if she'd ever been here before, it looked more like a collection of industrial estates than a residential area.
She kept walking, and began to see the occasional person. It took her a while to realise that every single one of them was running in the opposite direction to that she was walking in.
It made her mildly curious.
The earth would never send her into harm deliberately. She had no reason to be afraid. Terra kept walking, until she came up to a particularly large section of the estate, and discovered a likely cause of the running persons.Someone new pushed past her, screaming loudly. She winced. The earth called her forwards again, and she found herself walking towards a most peculiar structure.
She noted, vaguely, as the giant hand slammed down, that she wasn't the only one who'd been squashed by it.
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(A little behind)
As soon as the energy hit the... thing, Robin found himself wondering; was it designed to react like that when touched by anything, or was this particular offensive mechanism aimed specifically to target Raven?
It was a puzzling thought, and one he would likely not find the answer to unless he managed to interrogate the creator of this monstrosity. In the time it took for the arm to snap up and firmly grasp the sorceress (or, whatever Raven classified as these days) he also managed to wonder why the girl across the estate-way was just standing there, and why she looked like Terra.
Except... not quite like Terra. Terra wore gloves, and was a little shorter. And her hair was different. And Terra was...
The hand slammed down, hard, into the concrete. Over Raven. And the not-Terra girl.
Robin stared for a second, waiting for something to happen. He registered that none of his team mates were moving. He waited for the hand to move. For the black aura to form around it, and force it up, and off of... the concrete.
The hand stayed where it was, the structure now leant at an even odder angle, the hand stretching the arm forwards in a mimicking of some kind of yoga movement.
The sun set.
The estate they stood on suddenly seemed more like a shadowy plateau. Robin heard someone hollering, as he ran forwards and leapt up at the structure, poised to strike. In his peripheral vision, he caught an image of Cyborg, sending a sonic blast to the arm, and Beast Boy, up above, falling to land on the ground as a mighty T-Rex. Starbolts were beginning to aim at the chicken legs.
And then the bassoon ends sounded.
He couldn't hear the noise they were making, but the bassoon-like endings definitely sounded. The vibrations were incredibly pungent in the air, and overpowering enough to throw him backwards and to the floor. His ears quickly began to hurt, and he dropped his staff to cover them.
No longer able to even see anything through the intense waves, Robin gave in to the urge to yell, and found his vocal cords useless.
Ouch.
They're getting shorter.
Perhaps I can blag this off on... the chapters are slowly decreasing in length to reflect the number of Titans that are still a part of the team ;)
Yes, that's exactly what i'm trying to achieve with this.
Sunshine10 and Autumn Thief, thanking you very much! BlackShield -- Thank you very much too... I so wanted to say something here about the R-BB bit, but it might ruin the plot :( ... no worries about your favourite pairing though, I can pretty much garuntee that it's not gonna happen. Hahaha. Ahem.