(Disclaimer: Teen Titans—not mine. My bank account—not that big. So, yeah, you lawyer types might have grounds to sue me, but would you really want to?)
-CHAPTER FOUR-
The Titans split up and headed out from the tower to search for Angry Raven, leaving Sad Raven and Love Raven behind to watch over Starfire, who was still unconscious. Besides, neither of them was very good at fighting. Lazy Raven had also been left behind, but that was because she was still asleep on the floor in the living room—nobody could figure out how to wake her up. Sad and Love stood on the roof of the tower and watched as the others disappeared towards Jump City.
"Well, at least they should be able to find Angry fairly easily," Love said conversationally. "She never was very good at keeping quiet. It was always 'Hatred shall rule!' and 'Rage shall consume you!' Sheesh." She looked down at Sad, whose habitual slouch increased the apparent height difference created by Love's high heels.
"You don't like me, do you?" said Sad. Love got the distinct impression that while it was worded as a question, Sad did not think of it as such.
"Aw, come on," Love said. "Don't be like that. Let's go check on Starfire, okay?"
Sad Raven mumbled assent and the two of them disappeared back inside the tower.
ooo
Beast Boy, Cyborg, and Happy Raven had been told to search the east side of the city. They were currently making their way along the rooftops of an industrial sector.
"I'm telling you, man, there's something weird about that Love clone!" said Beast Boy.
"What do you mean?" asked Cyborg. Happy just floated ahead of them. She was making airplane noises again, and oblivious to the conversation.
"Well, for one thing, she's wearing makeup!" Beast Boy said.
"Okay, sure, but so's Cynical Raven," Cyborg responded.
"And the perfume?"
"Maybe she just wanted to smell nice. Raven always has had good hygiene."
Beast Boy stared at Cyborg.
"What?" asked the robotic teen. "She has!"
"Fine, whatever," said Beast Boy. "But what about her nails? She painted her nails!"
"Once again, same with Cynical Raven," said Cyborg.
"Yeah, but she painted hers black. Love Raven did hers in some shiny light purple stuff."
"Maybe it's a popular colour. I don't know anything about nail polish, and neither do you."
"She painted her toenails, too."
Cyborg thought about this for a moment.
"Okay, you're right," he said. "There really is something wrong with her." He thought for another moment.
"Wait a minute, why were you looking at her feet?" he asked.
Beast Boy blushed, which looks rather odd against green skin, but before he could answer there was and explosion nearby. The two of them rushed off towards it, only pausing to grab Happy Raven, who had moved on to racecar noises.
ooo
"You really should relax, you know," said Spiritual Raven. "Too much tension is bad for your chi."
"Really," said Robin in a tight voice. He had been searching the centre of the city with Spiritual Raven and Cynical Raven for only ten minutes, and already they were getting on his nerves.
"Oh, yes," Spiritual continued, adjusting her poncho as she flew. "Tension in the body constricts the meridians, so chi flow is restricted. It can cause some serious imbalances in the harmonious workings of the body."
"Meridians? You mean like the ones on highways?" said Cynical, her voice positively oozing sarcasm. Spiritual apparently didn't catch it, though, because she continued on regardless.
"Yes, I suppose so. You see, meridians are kind of like energy highways in the body, because…"
She was interrupted by an explosion in the distance.
"Let's go!" yelled Robin, grateful for the distraction. He ran along the roofs of buildings towards the source of the blast. The two Ravens flew after him.
"I knew that was going to happen," said Spiritual. "I could feel it in my chi. I'm very sensitive to the fire element."
"Right," said Cynical.
ooo
Searching the west side of the city was Raven, Brave Raven, and Smart Raven. Raven flew in silence, while Smart Raven was busy performing complex computations to locate Angry Raven under her breath. Brave, on the other hand, was on a non-stop tirade about what she was going to do to Angry once they found her.
"I'll show her who's boss! Oh, yeah! That bitch is going to wish she had never been duplicated!"
"…take the square root of pi, divide that by nine fifty-thirds…"
"I'm going to kick her ass and take her name, man! She won't know what hit her!"
"…take the integral, that's x to the n plus one divided by…"
"And I'll be all like 'I love the smell o' napalm in the morning!'"
"…plus the phi function of cube root x, carry the zeta…"
"Would you two please SHUT UP?!?" Raven screamed; the zeta had been her breaking point. Both duplicates went quiet.
Finally, thought Raven. Some peace and…
An explosion in the distance interrupted her thoughts.
"Dammit! Come on, you two," said Raven as she angled towards the explosion and accelerated.
"Oh, yeah! It's name takin' time, beeyotch!" yelled Brave Raven as she sped after her.
"Wait! My calculations say there's only a seventy-three point five zero nine two percent chance that Angry Raven will be in that direction!" cried Smart Raven.
"Come ON!" Raven yelled over her shoulder.
"Yeah! Get it in gear, four eyes!" added Brave.
Smart Raven sighed and flew after them.
ooo
All three search teams converged on the source of the explosion at the same time. They quickly surveyed the scene.
The red-cloaked Angry Raven was hurling cars at screaming citizens, with an over turned oil tanker truck burning in the background. It seemed that someone had jostled her while she was standing in line to get tickets to see Christmas with the Kranks—luckily, nobody had yet been hurt.
"Titans! GO!" yelled Robin, and all nine of them attacked at once. Angry Raven screamed with rage, and the Titans were repelled by a massive black telekinetic shield.
"HATRED SHALL RULE!" screamed Angry Raven in a voice far too deep to truly be hers. All four of her glowing red eyes narrowed. "YOU CANNOT DEFEAT THE POWER OF MY RAGE!"
"Oooh, a new catch phrase for Angry," said Cynical Raven. "Be still my heart!"
With that, the six Ravens formed a loose ring around Angry Raven and began chanting. Glowing black energy radiated from their hands and attacked Angry Raven's shields. Robin, Beast Boy, and Cyborg joined in the attack, with explosive discs, rhinoceros charges, and sonic cannon blasts. Angry Raven was on the defensive now, since she could not afford to take any of her concentration away from maintaining her shield. She screamed with rage and frustration—she hated being on the defensive.
The battle did not last long. Angry Raven was strong, her power fueled by rage, but against Robin, Beast Boy, Cyborg, and no less than six other Ravens, she didn't amount to much. In the end, her shield was broken, and she was subdued without anyone getting injured, although the surrounding buildings and cars had seen better days. The Titans returned to the tower, with the now unconscious Angry Raven held firmly in a glowing black telekinetic bubble maintained by all six Ravens to ensure she did not escape.
-END CHAPTER FOUR-
Author's Note: This chapter has raised a few questions for me. Does Beast Boy have a foot fetish? When you take somebody's name, what are you supposed to do with it? What does napalm smell like, aside from victory? And why on Earth did Angry Raven want to see Christmas with the Kranks? If you want answers, then…look somewhere else because I ain't putting 'em in this story.
Okay, so I suck at writing action sequences. I was going to write in more stuff for Angry Raven, but given how long this already is, and the sheer suckage of my action writing, I decided to cut it short. I guess it was kind of futile trying to develop her character, anyways; Angry Raven is…angry. That's really about it. Yeah, so remember how I said at the end of last chapter that this one would focus on Angry? Yeah, forget I said that. Also, the Brave/Sad and Raven/Love relationships will be showing up later. Sorry about that.
Oh, and just in case anyone is offended by Spiritual Raven being depicted as a bit of a new age hokey religion doofus, I have an explanation. I see Raven's personalities as extreme versions of whatever traits they represent, so in this case Spiritual Raven is someone who sees mystical forces at work in everything. Naturally, she eventually runs out of the halfways reasonable mystical stuff, so has to get into, I don't know, Pythagorean beliefs or something. No, not the geometry—the guy also started his own cult, waaaay back when. And by the way, I do kind of believe in chi, in at least some sense (NOT the Dragon Ball Z-esque or hadou-ken bullshit sense, though). Also, you may notice that I've depicted nearly all the personalities as caricatures of their traits, like Smart Raven doing insane math in her head, and Brave being a violence-crazed psychobitch. Pretty much the only ones not presented this way were Love, Sad, and Lazy; Love because I have bigger things in mind for her, Sad because she only had one freakin' line, and Lazy because she didn't even appear, for God's sake. Anyway, I'll update again in a bit. I am currently in the middle of The Week From Some Non-Denominational Underworld, with two essays and a class presentation all due within five days of each other, which is why this update is a bit late (I think it's late, at least. Brain…fried…).
To My Reviewers:
Nevermore Forevermore: Thanks. As for Beast Boy torture, I'll see what I can do. I don't know, though. I kinda like the guy.
CloudsHalo: I've seen a few stories where Lust was at least hinted at, but I'm not so sure about having that particular emotion show up in this story, although I do consider it to be a part of Love Raven. The way I see it, all the personalities have both good and bad sides to them (which is why I didn't have Good and Evil as separate personalities, something I considered doing in the early conceptual stages of this story). Brave is bold and decisive, but hot-headed and prone to rash behaviour. Smart is intelligent and logical, but aloof and emotionally detached. Sad is considerate of others, but self-destructive. Even Anger can be harnessed to do good (righteous fury and the like), but is often indiscriminately violent. So similarly, Love is caring and affectionate, but is often possessive, and sometimes downright aggressive in pursuing her intended. I don't know if that can be accurately characterized as lust, but that's as close to it as I'm getting. As for a Raven/Beast Boy pairing, sorry, but that's going to be happening here, although nothing will really be coming of it. I think that the show sets them up very clearly as complementary characters, and the old 'opposites attract' theory basically applies itself here, which is why I think Raven/Beast Boy pairings are so popular. I could go on at great length about this, but I won't here. I might include some stuff like this in a kind of director's cut type chapter at the end which will also include an alternate ending and some of the ideas I had that didn't make it into the story. Yeah, so sorry about the romance stuff. Fortunately, I think Love Raven messing around with Beast Boy takes a back seat to Raven dealing with her emotions, so hopefully it won't go too far (I guess I've pretty much given it away at this point anyway, so I'll just say it—yes, Love Raven goes after Beast Boy). And in case you haven't noticed, everything I write turns out to be ungodly long, so don't worry about a few long reviews.
The Mad shoe1: I hope things are progressing further in the way you thought it was starting to get good. Enjoy!
Kate-ttrox: I'm glad that I could have contributed to the rocking of socks in some small way. Someone should organize a Sock-Aid world tour or something, so that socks the world over might be rocked. Oh, and I have no idea what jkjk means, but my excitement over having rocked socks fully overrides my confusion.