"This is real cool!" Beast Boy said gaily. "I've never been to outer space before!"
"Most of us haven't," Raven said dryly. "Though I trust in Starfire's experience with spaceshipsto pilot this thing."
"Your Earthling technology is cruder than what I am used to, but equal in capability to what most of my people's mass transport systems can do," said the young Tamaranian. "I'm sure I can fly this craft. It doesn't seem that complicated."
"Doesn't seem that complicated?" Cyborg repeated incredulously, stupefied by the scores of buttons, dials, and knobs on the control panel. The number of monitors and readouts alone boggled his optics. "I'd hate to see what a Tamaranian ship looks like."
Robin barely heard their banter. He was still thinking about the case. Even when the space shuttle—on loan from Cape Canaveral—started pushing the Gs, he was still turning over the various clues in his mind. Batman always said that there was a logic, no matter how twisted it may be, behind every case. The key to solving a puzzle, the Dark Knight was wont to say, was to figure out how the culprit thought.
In his days as Batman's partner, Robin had went up against the supralogical, like the Riddler, the Cluemaster, and the Clock King, and the insane and neurotic, like the Joker and Two-Face. Since joining the Teen Titans, he had more experience with more conventional minds: Slade, the HIVE, and a dozen other criminals. None of them seemed to match the style of this new enemy, this Poe-inspired mastermind. It was beginning to frustrate him. His jaw ground hard.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Raven quietly asked from where she sat beside him.
"Not right now, Raven. Thanks, though." A blip showed up on the monitors and Robin came out of his reverie. "Coming up on the Fortress of Justice," he said. "Turning on landing cycle. Looks like the fortress isn't responding to our transponder codes. The landing bay doors are still closed."
"I can take care of that," offered Cyborg, whose face components reconfigured into a vacuum-outfitted rebreather. "Just seal the airlock behind me and I'll blast it from there."
A few minutes later, the Titans had blasted their way into the landing bay. They waited a few seconds while the fortress' automatic systems sealed the hull breach with a blast door. They waited a few more seconds while the landing bay pressurized. And then they stood in the Fortress of Justice. A hauntingly silent one.
"Fan out," said Robin. "Starfire, check the command center. Cyborg, you're on engineering. Beast Boy and Raven, go through the living quarters and medical bays. I'll look around here some more." The other Titans nodded, announced their affirmation, and went their own ways. Once he was alone, Robin scanned around the landing bay. The League's shuttle wasn't around, and a quick check of a nearby terminal revealed that it had jettisoned almost nine hours ago—long after the League could have gone to the Batcave to stage a rescue and return.
Robin typed in a few commands, trying to lock on the tracking beacon he knew was hardwired into the shuttle. "It's in Greece," he murmured. Did the League go there after visiting the Batcave? Robin looked at the coordinates again and his eyes widened. The shuttle was in a part of Greece once known as Mycenae—the onetime home of Agamemnon, the main character in Euripedes' play of the same name. Agamemnon was the descendent of Atreus.
Things were clicking into place in Robin's mind. The murky mystery was growing clearer. His thoughts were interrupted by reports from his teammates.
"Cyborg reporting in. The engineering block's been completely destroyed. The fortress is running on emergency power. I'm picking up nitrogen gas deposits and C4 residues again."
"This is Beast Boy. Raven and I checked through the living quarters. Security cameras show the Justice League leaving the fortress almost twelve hours ago. Other records confirm that the League was not on board when the engineering block was hit. However, we found footage of the League returning to the fortress nine hours ago. The video feed cut out immediately, but we could still hear sounds of fighting."
"Starfire here. You guys should come up here."
The urgency in her voice was enough to assemble the Titans in the command center only minutes later. Starfire held up a note.
"What does it say?" Robin pressed.
She read, "'A sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs.'"
"What's a…." Beast Boy began.
Robin cut in, growing a bit impatient with all the digressive questioning. "It's another old term. In a Greek myth, the hero Theseus met Procrusteus, an evil man who would offer hospitality to travelers and then put them on a narrow bed that stretched their limbs until they popped out. The term 'Procrustean bed' refers to a dangerously narrow-minded or rigid point of view, as dangerous and rigid as the bed of Procrusteus."
Raven added, "The note isanother quote from the 'The Purloined Letter.' The term 'Procrustean bed' came up in reference to the Prefect of Paris, whose investigative methods, though thorough, were flawed by the fact that the Prefect only looked for the letter in the places where he would look for them. He didn't try to think like the thief, who hid the letter in the most obvious of places."
"You're right," Robin said. "I'd forgotten about that. That means we have to start thinking like our enemy. So the question is: where would he go?"
"These clues have been referring to Greece a lot," Raven noted.
Robin rubbed his chin in thought. "The stories of both Atreus and Agamemnon share three common elements: revenge, kinship, and location. Atreus paid Thyestes back with cannibalism. Clytemnestra took revenge on her unfaithful husband, Agamemnon. Both Atreus and Agamemnon were related within the same bloodline. Finally, the House of Atreus' homeland is Mycenae, in Greece. A tracking device on the League's shuttle shows that it's in Mycenae right now. This is no coincidence."
"Then why don't we go there already?" Cyborg asked.
"Because that's the obvious place to look," answered the young detective. "But think about it. This whole time everything's been in plain sight: both notes, the Kryptonite ring,the coordinates to the shuttle, the other clues like the security camera footage and the bomb residues. They were all pretty easy to find. All in the obvious place, if you will. The fact that we're looking at this mystery through 'The Purloined Letter' is making us think in a certain way—a Procrustean bed. We have to look at it from another angle. If we don't, we'll be walking right into this guy's hands."
"While that may give us the edge we need to figure out who's behind all this, that doesn't give us a direction," Raven said. She pointed at the note. "Everything's going to Greece, Robin. We might as well play it his way for now, even if it is a trap."
Robin reluctantly agreed. Ten minutes later, the Teen Titans wereheaded forGreece.