Chapter Three: Just a boy,- ah, whatever!

"Starfire, come in! Where are you?" Robin called into his communicator. Receiving no response he repeated his inquiry, but was forced to cut it short when the robber he was pursuing blocked his path by toppling some file cabinets in his wake just as Robin was approaching them.

Robin threw a smoke bomb at the perp to slow him down, then hurried toward the thinning cloud that resulted to catch up. A metal arm came flying toward his face through the mist, just clipping him on the shoulder as he leapt out of range. "Yo, Robin!" he heard the voice of Cyborg call out, "Stay down and cover your ears!" Cyborg blasted his sonic cannon at the thief, knocking him 10 feet back, but apparently not causing harm as he got up and continued to run away.

"Dude! What gives? I just blasted 200 decibels at him, he shouldn't even be able to STAND, let alone move! And I worked all morning before breakfast on those enhancements!" Cyborg complained, only to see a whimpering Beastboy huddled on the ground, twitching with his hands over his ears. "Oh man, sorry BB, forgot about your sensitive ears"

"WHAT!" Beastboy yelled, dizzily trying to regain his feet, "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

"I'll uh, go back to the drawing board on this one, see if I can customize the frequency so that your ears won't get affected"

"What?" Beastboy repeated.

"I SAID-!"

"Dude! You don't have to yell! I have super hearing, you know! I just wanted to know what you were saying about frisbees!"

"We could use your help, guys!" Robin called to the arguing titans as he and Raven continued to battle the mysteriously impervious bandit, who was now running toward the door with his sack of cash.

His escape was halted when a detached vault door surrounded by a black force field came hurtling towards him. He pressed a button on his suit and a strange glowing shield sprang up in front of him which deflected the vault door, sending it right back towards Raven.

Raven tried to conjure a force field, but her powers were too weakened from the strength it took to throw the door at him in the first place. With a yell the door hit her full force, pinning her down to the ground.

"Raven!" Beastboy, Robin, and Cyborg called, while the thief took off, grateful for their lapse in concentration. Beastboy hurried over to Raven's side, morphing into a gorilla and removing the vault door from her person.

With a frustrated moan Robin asked, "Where is Starfire? The villain might not have gotten away if she were here."

"I don't know, but we have to get Raven back to the T tower; she's unconscious!" Cyborg answered, lifting Raven's limp form and heading out the door with Beastboy right behind him.

Robin sulked behind them, mad at himself for sending Starfire off on her own and allowing the rest of the team to be vulnerable to a point that Raven got hurt. "I'd never forgive myself if something happened to her." He mumbled to himself, in reference to both female members of the team he felt he had just failed

.

"Did you say something?" Cyborg inquired, glancing over his shoulder.

"Yeah, it sounded something like: Ida severed her give by Melf, in dumping pampered to Burr." Beastboy added, "Where's Melf and who's Burr?"

"It was nothing," he replied, "Just thinking aloud to myself."

"Well stop musing and pick up the pace, we need to get Raven back to the tower, and contact Starfire." Cyborg chided, picking up his own pace.

'I know that.' Robin thought to himself, 'Cyborg's right, beating myself up over my mistakes that caused this won't fix the problem'. Still, the boy wonder found it hard not to stop kicking himself. "Starfire, come in"…

[Scene Break]

Starfire called out over the rubble of the bank searching for her friends. "Hello?" she called, "Is anyone here?" She scanned the room, her keen emerald eyes searching for any clues that might help her. Suddenly she spotted a single green hair lying by a pile of rubble that strangely resembled a door and very well might have been one before the battle. "Beastboy." She muttered, holding the hair up for inspection, "At least I know they WERE here, now to find out where they've gone."

Reaching for her communicator, she gasped as she realized it was absent. "I must have misplaced it…" she reasoned aloud, then started to mull over where she might have left it, and more importantly, where her friends were, for which purpose she needed her communicator in the first place.

She decided to just go back to the T-tower and see if her friends and communicator were there. "I do hope they will be able to survive without their 'dew of the mountain' to keep them strong." She said, fretting that their energy might be spent. Starfire took to the air, the mountain dew in hand, and headed towards the island that bore the titan tower upon its face.