8.
Slade ran, he would have to be quick to make this work properly. He'd sowed the seeds that needed to be sown and soon, they would bloom, and then it would be time to reap.
And to reap, you first need Reapers.
His destination was not difficult to find, even though up until this point in his life, he'd avoided the place like the plague. The Jump City Super Max Prison. It was the Titans favourite arch nemesis depository, the Arkham Asylum of Titan town. It was the perfect place to go if you planned on doing a lot of damage very quickly, or at least recruit an army to do that damage for you.
What the guards placed out front saw that night, was in fact very little. It was a dark, starless night, and the humming white flourescent lights on either side of them offered a perfect view of a small space of naught but a few feet in front of them. All of the training in the world could not prepare them for the assault they were about to endure. Then again, the local police were never very good at being anything but punching bags to people like Slade.
If it wasn't for the Titans, the jail behind them would have been empty, and they would probably be dead.
Slade came out of the darkness, moving like a ghost, not staying in one place for long enough for either of them to see anything but the glint of light from his mask. He took the first one out with a right cross, splattering a nice tail of blood along the wall behind the guard, then Slade was quickly on to the other one. This one saw it coming, to a degree, and managed to make a swing with the but end of the rifle he was carrying. This pinged off Slade's mask without making much of difference, Slade barely even registered it. He grabbed the guard by the throat and lifted him two feet into the air.
"Just a bug trying to swat back at the real men..." he muttered, and threw the guard back against the wall. He bounced off and collapsed to the ground, motionless.
Slade's business was within, but thanks to another little invention of his, he would be able to remain without, and let his business handle the hard part. He removed it from his belt, and flipped it over thoughtfully in his hand. Such a small little device, and yet it was about to do so much. He reminded himself to be very proud of himself when all this was over. With all the careful planning, the new trinkets he'd invented, the manipulation of two fools in love, it was a masterpiece worthy of Van Gogh himself.
But enough contemplation, his presence would not remain a secret forever.
With an overhand toss, he threw the device over the wall, and into the main area of the prison, where he hoped, no, really, he knew that it would disable the electronic locks on the doors. A small signal, delivered by the device, would mimic the electronic keys the jailors used. That would, in turn, open all of the cells within the range of the signal, which would be every cell in the prison. Every cell, at exactly the same time. He backed up a few steps, back into the darkness, and waited for a sign.
A few moments later, screams and gunfire roared out of the prison, and a sign is just what he had.
He walked back to the door and set a small charge on it. Another few steps back, and a button pressed, a Slade sized hole was blown out of it. He locked his hands behind him, and walked...strolled into the prison.
Inside, there was a war going on, and the prison staff were losing. The ring of gunfire was all around, and bodies were flying left and right. Slade still walked, slowly, methodically, turning his head this way and that, revelling in the carnage that he had created. A guard came running at him, wielding a nightstick, and was met with a solid fist planted on the bridge of his nose. He fell immediately, out cold. Slade continued walking.
He located one of his former associates, Cinderblock, bulldozing down guards like a mack truck. Actually, located is probably the wrong word, at 12 feet tall, and made of solid concrete, Cinderblock was never located, for he always made his presence felt well ahead of time.
"Cinderblock! Come here!" He feared, for a moment, that Cinderblock would no longer obey him. He was impossibly stupid, but Slade, after all, was the reason that he was in prison in the first place, and he may have held just a bit of a grudge. How they extricated him from Plasmus and Overload Slade would never know, he knew he didn't think of a way to do it. At the moment, he didn't really care, however.
Cinderblock fought his way over to Slade, and stood in front of him, looking down with a blank, vacant stare.
Good, he was still loyal. As loyal as he was ever likely to be, at any rate.
"I think a little crowd control is in order." Slade said to him. Cinderblock responded by turning, slowly and purposefully, and yelling at the top of his lungs. It was an immense noise, the ground shook beneath everyone's feet, and as soon as it was over, everyone had stopped fighting, and were all looking at Cinderblock, and more importantly, Slade.
"Good, I think we have their attention now." Slade walked forward a little bit, until he was in front of Cinderblock, and started to speak, in a voice that he was sure everyone would hear.
"For all the guards and prison staff that are able to leave, I advise you do so now. You will not be offered another chance." A few of the faces staring at him wavered, looking around them, then the bodies attached to them ran out the door. When all of the prison folk were safely away, tail tucked firmly between their legs, Slade addressed the inmates, who were mostly still standing, save for a few of the weaker ones (Slade noticed, in passing, that Mumbo had not faired very well without that little toy wand of his).
"I have given you all your freedom, for that, you owe me." He said, in a commanding voice that everyone of them seemed to listen intently to.
"Most of you will have your reign of the city, but for some of you, I have specific tasks. Some of you, may even get the chance to strike back at those that put you here." Slade was speaking calmly, and quietly. Even at the head of a thousand unruly, bloodthirsty criminals, he was the purest example of composure.
"You mean we'll get to kill the Teen Titans?" Someone yelled out.
"That, my friend, depends entirely on you. For now, I want you all to go out, and do what you do best, all but you," he levelled his finger at one of the inmates, "you, you, you and you." It was like he was picking a hockey team for a neighbourhood game of pick up.
"The rest of you, I want you to pillage, plunder, and devastate this city. By this time tomorrow, I want to see hell, everywhere." There was a roar of approval from the assembled mass, and they all left, ran out of the huge steel double doors like the murderous rabble that they were. All, that is, except the ones that Slade had pointed at, they remained fixed to their positions, in a rather odd display of loyalty.
Really, they were afraid. They heard what Slade was capable of, and wanted to stay on whatever good side he had.
"Cinderblock, go and wake Plasmus, will you?" He said, without looking up. Cinderblock moved off without any objection. After all the time behind bars, he still mindlessly followed Slade without a thought to the otherwise.
Slade pulled a small computer chip out of his belt, and threw it on the ground. He looked up, and threw another object, a sharp one, towards an overhanging power cable. It split and sent jolts of electricity everywhere, and when it landed, one of its ends landed on the computer chip. The electricity started to gather, like a pile of sand, slowly forming a hill, with the chip hovering in its centre. Soon enough, the pile sprouted arms, legs, and Overload was reborn.
"Now, for the rest of you, we have work to do."
9.
It was night. A little depressing, since intense cloud coverage buried the moon and stars, leaving a pitch black blanket in its stead. Where Robin was, however, he could not even see the sky. He lay awake, comfortably between the sheets of Starfire's bed, supporting his head in one hand. Starfire slept quietly beside him, her head resting on his shoulder. He was trying very hard not to feel extremely proud of his actions over the past couple of hours, but he couldn't help it. For some reason, Slade had chose to go nuts in the middle of town, and spout off about this and that, killing him, killing her, and that one action had driven them together.
Actually, it had driven them together four times, if Robin's count was accurate.
Starfire stirred beside him. He felt her take a deeper breath, and slowly move her head around. She moved a hand up to his bare chest, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. She looked completely at peace, and still completely beautiful. After a moment, she was asleep again.
He moved the hand that wasn't underneath her up to his face to readjust his mask, before remembering it wasn't there. He had taken it off for her, hadn't he? She had asked, and he had responded, without any deeper thought than 'that sounds about right to me.' He'd had trouble taking off the mask before, lord knows the last person who'd asked him to remove it got more than an earful. In retrospect, he'd wished he'd been a little nicer to her, it wasn't like she was asking him to do...anything, just show her his eyes. She was wearing a mask at the time, too, and she'd removed it in a show of confidence.
'I don't know, Barbara, it's kind of a big deal...' That's what he'd said, and then she walked away, and never put the mask on again. He supposed it wasn't his fault that she left, Bruce was as much to blame, always railing into her about training and technique, and he supposed it also wasn't his fault that she was shot by the Joker and put into a wheelchair for the rest of her life. It wasn't his fault, but he always felt it was.
But the mask...was it so important? For The Batman, it was. For Batman, it was everything, it made him. He'd stopped wearing the mask years ago, the mask was wearing him now. Robin swore he would never become like Bruce, so emotionally detached, an island unto himself. When Starfire...Kori had asked him to take it off, he knew why he'd done it, because he refused to let it wear him. To him, the mask was to conceal his identity, and if it ever became more than that, he would be in trouble. He was in fact, totally confident that he could remove that Robin mask, hang it on a hook and never wear it again. He would never let it wear him, never.
It was then that the alarm went off, and his train of thought was forever derailed.
10.
"How did this happen?" Robin asked, more to himself, and yelled to himself, at that. They were looking at the screen again, for the third time in as many days, but what they were seeing this time was simply not possible. Every criminal they could ever remember putting away was running amok downtown, rioting and stealing, breaking windows and destroying parked cars. From the bottom of the picture, a very familiar face came screaming into view, driving a tricked out, black and red motorcycle.
"Woah yeah! Destruction!" He fired a pistol into a few street lamps and showered the area in glass.
"Didn't we put him in jail?" Raven asked rhetorically.
"We put most of these guys in jail." Cyborg replied. A giant, rampaging robot was pounding on the side of the building. "Atlas?"
"No one defeats Atlas! Come out and fight!"
"Atlas..." they all said in unison, adding an exasperated sigh.
"We've gotta go, right now." Robin said. He was still fixing one of his gloves into its proper place, but he moved to leave as he did.
"Woah, wait a second!" Cyborg said, grabbing onto his shoulder.
"There's 200 criminals tearing up the city, and you want to wait?" Robin spoke with his usual passion. That, they guessed was why he was the leader. This time, however, his passion was overriding his better judgement.
"And what are you gonna do, go and arrest them all? Even if we called in the East coast team, it would still be 200 against 10. We'd get ourselves killed" Cyborg felt he had to yell to get Robin's attention, and whether the volume of his delivery made any difference at all, Robin's attention was what he had.
"What do you suggest?"
"We call in the heavy hitters," he replied, smiling, just a little.
