Gang Wars II: The Long Night Begins
"What did you say?" Raven snapped in disbelief, dragging herself to her feat.
"Deaths… lots of them… soon," Skye mumbled between gasps of pain as he gripped his chest and struggled for air. He seemed to be in a strange kind of agony, the blank wall of his shields keeping Raven out, but the taste she'd gotten a moment ago leaving her with little doubt that he deserved a moment to recover. He was shaking slightly, but quickly regained control, Raven taking the opportunity to question him about the outburst.
"What is going on?" then as an afterthought, when he keeled over yet again, "are you going to be okay?"
"Psychic shock… no time… come on!" Skye pulled himself together at last, regaining his footing and gesturing for Raven to come closer. Lacking any earthly clue what was happening, Raven frowned magnificently and shot Skye a dirty glare.
"Listen, in a matter of minutes, more people than I'd care to guess at are going to die, something like five miles in that direction," and he waved off toward the heart of the city, where the endless lights of the night lit the sky. There was an urgency in his voice, but now that he had gotten past the shock, it was calm and businesslike, his haste under strict control as he responded to the emergency.
Raven almost asked if he was sure, but bit back the redundant comment. Benefit of the doubt now, that was what she'd promised. Instead she leapt into action.
"We need to go get the others—" she began, and reached for her communicator. The Titan alert would wake them all and they could hop in the T-Car, be down there in… not minutes.
"Raven, I don't know if we have time—" Skye mimicked her own thoughts, so she cut him off at the same moment she preempted the indecision creeping into her mind.
"I know—we've got to go now. I can get us there fast, but you have to show me the way. So show me." Raven was letting go, giving it a shot, taking a chance, even though she'd promised herself she wasn't going to open herself up like this again. She was beginning to think she was just a glutton for punishment.
"If you're sure, then fine, we'll call your friends when there's time. But how are we going to get there?" It seemed that despite everything else he'd learned, he didn't know about this power yet. Raven felt herself grow a grin almost against her will.
"I'll take care of that, you just show me where we need to be," she said, grabbing him by the cuff of his long-sleeved button-down and pulling him a long stride closer. He had grace enough not to look too pleased by his sudden proximity, and she soon felt a mental contact around her shields. The moment she let him in, her awareness expanded exponentially.
"Oh wow," she breathed, as the darkness around her drained away, leaving everything with a sharp clarity. Before she could begin to explore how much more of the world she could see, her mind was filled with an urgent presence, a sensation that called her attention like nothing she'd ever experienced. When she turned to try and satisfy the nagging, the city came into view, and a gasp escaped her lips as the blood-red aura that enveloped the business district registered.
"That's our destination," Skye spoke into her mind, "The red is an image of where my danger sense has tipped me off to violence. My senses wouldn't transfer well to your perceptions, so what you're seeing, the enhanced vision and all, is after they've been through a filter. Now… how are we going to get there?"
"Just hold on," Raven shot back at him, before she activated her powers and sucked them both into an inky black shadow. She felt a satisfying thrill of surprise from Skye as she secreted them into a shadowy pocket dimension, then blasted them both into the air as the shadow became a great raven and began to jet across the sky.
"Incredible," Skye transmitted to her mind, even from the silent blackness she'd enveloped them in for travel. His wonder was a delight, before it faded, and Raven decided that some risks did pay off, now and then. "A thaumokinetic dimensional waveform transformation," he continued to analyze what she'd done, "using a technique I've never even heard of before! I really didn't know you could use a tetrathaumic energy configuration like that."
"You know about magic?" Raven responded to his highly technical but completely accurate conclusion, unable to keep the deep interest out of her mental tone.
"Don't get me wrong, I'm an esper through and through—I mean, I've got the magical aptitude of the average hunk of scrap lead. That doesn't mean I haven't taken an interest in theoretical thaumaturgy. I… hung out with a young Thurellian archmage during this one undercover operation… and his enthusiasm for it kind of rubbed off on me, even though I can't use it for anything. But anyway, damn! I've never seen casting patters used to manipulate spirit energy like that, especially not in extraplanar conversion. Who taught you that?"
"I taught myself," she found herself bragging, barely able to remember the last time someone had had both the interest and the knowledge to appreciate her personalized technique. Though neither had forgotten the task at hand, and Raven's concentration on keeping them hurtling toward Skye's mark never faltered, they still found themselves majorly geeking out to an unexpected common interest. A delight of quasi-meaningless jargon was all that could have followed. "I studied basic extraplanar conversion along the Mrriplax-Gostrogn theoretical lines, then devised this technique on my own. By utilizing a slightly offplanar wave phase I can go non-corporeal, the core of MG theory, but my dimensional fold allows me to carry more weight than the Seratin paradox limitation could ever account for, and planar-kineteic induction with the tetrathaumic energy configuration gives me speed."
"All the advantages of teleportation without the range limitations. Brilliant." He complimented, and Raven would have definitely blushed this time if she hadn't been enveloped in the pitch black of her pocket dimension.
"I tend to prefer teleportation when the distance isn't too great though—much less of a strain." Another subtle brag from Raven, who at least now had regained a detached monotone in her mental voice.
"Great, is there any form of thaumokinetic transportation you can't use?" and now he sounded jealous, of all things. That an esper and power-mind like him was jealous of her abilities tickled her vanity, and the extra emotion actually messed with her waveform somewhat, the shadow raven that encompassed them beginning to do ecstatic spirals through the air.
"I guess I'm just talented like that—" but her rather graceless dismissal of his envy was cut off.
"DOWN!" he shouted into her mind, and to her credit, Raven didn't miss the cue.
In an instant the shadow raven touched down on an office building, sank into a puddle of shadow, and expelled the two heroes onto the rooftop. To their right was a WaneCorp building several stories taller than their own, and all other sides held nondescript office space bearing a variety of signs and billboards. The blackness of the night was held back by countless lights, so that innumerable faint shadows stretched and overlapped over every surface, the stars blocked out by the illuminated city. No sooner had he regained a complete physical presence in reality than Skye pressed his hands to his head and began mumbling to himself.
"So close… but where? Something—some one, will cause it, soon soon… moments… seconds…. where?" Suddenly his head jerked up and he turned to the taller building next to them.
"Raven—there—GO!" snapped into her mind, carrying a force that didn't bear argument. Tailing on the end of the thought's flash speed through her mind was a quick visual of the rooftop of the WaneCorp building, an aura view of two people staring off the ledge. Before her next heartbeat, Raven had jumped through space, a swirl of black sweeping her instantly up to the next building. As she stepped forth from the exiting swirl of her power, she floated into the air, hands glowing and ready for blood.
Without wasting a moment, she jetted up and over the neon WaneCorp sign and came down just to the right of a small group exactly where Skye had shown her they'd be. There were more than two, and the hesitation she suffered as she noticed this gave her enough time to recognize a sinister silhouette.
The moment the broad shoulders, the blunt masked head, and the chiseled muscular outline registered, a flare of hate she hadn't thought herself vulnerable to anymore threatened to overwhelm her. With this particular foe, she didn't even try to suppress the rage. Riding the emotion, she muttered her mantra, summoning enough power to crack the building open, leveling it at this completely unexpected specter of the past, determined, no matter if this be truly him or some strange apparition, to send him back to hell where he belonged.
Advancing with a stealth that belied the homicidal fury this particular man had instantly elicited from her, she stopped a few yards away and behind them to consider the best way to take them all down at once. It was this momentary consideration that brought the figure at his side to her rage-clouded attention, and the comparatively diminutive form was instantly familiar, stopping her dead in the air. The red bled from her eyes as her rage was replaced by shock all the way down to the core of her being. This one had to be a ghost.
Her final hesitation proved to be the fateful one, as the small form raised its hands to point at a building across and below from them, diagonal from where Skye still stood. Raven was beyond stunned, shocked so deeply by the sight of someone who was supposed to be enshrined in a volcano, who was supposed to be dead as the stone, and, she was forced to bitterly admit, who she was never supposed to have to deal with again, that she didn't even notice the ground begin to shake. It was not until the explosion that she was shocked back to awareness. Bearing witness to a thousand deaths has a tendency to do that.
The ground bucked so violently that Raven could feel it while airborne, a sound louder than any thunderclap blasting through the sky as a pinnacle of stone impaled the heart of that building, rending it apart like a melon on a spike. With the backdrop of the building crumbling across from them, a stone and glass cascade around a rock core, Raven felt her heart drop out of her chest. As nearby lights around the city died, something inside herself fell to nothingness as well, and like rushing water, a fury without boundaries filled the empty spot, and she opened four red eyes to glare at the world with hate as her only guide.
"I WILL MAKE YOU TWO PAY FOR THAT!" she bellowed, in a voice more demon than human. Slade flashed around from his lurid glare at the death Terra had just caused to stare in momentary surprise at the vessel of demonic fury that had so unexpectedly appeared behind him. Unlike Raven, his shock motivated action rather than hesitation, and he motioned for his Slade-bots to attack the very instant he recognized the threat.
With her rage in full gear, Raven's body distorted and twisted, her cloak enveloping her form and growing down to the rooftop, shadows of her spirit seeping into the ground. As the robots simultaneously leveled their weapons at her, they were grabbed from below and sucked into the floor. The humanoid forms struggled pathetically against the inhuman strength of the inky black that dragged them down, but metal acquiesced just as easily as flesh to the force of Raven's rage, and they were torn limb from limb as the blackness consumed them. Slade looked on in disappointment at the performance of his weapons, then looked up at the seething vortex of spiritual power that was Raven, not the slightest hint of fear in his stance.
"Terra, get us out of here. We have more important problems to deal with," he said, and there was the slightest sense of amusement in his tone, as though the surprise appearance of the raging sorceress was somehow funny. Terra complied instantly, the stone slab they stood on taking off smoothly and jetting away, only to be caught by tendrils of power from Raven's distorted body.
"HOW COULD YOU? HOW COULD YOU TRICK US LIKE THAT AGAIN? I WILL MAKE SURE YOU CAN'T HURT ANYONE THIS TIME!" Raven's demon voice was deep and powerful, possessing an edge of pure hate that could only route from bloodlust, the consuming desire to see one's enemy dead forming the hot core of her words.
As she sent out enough power down the tendrils to obliterate the rock and rend its occupants into a billion tiny bits of blood and gore, Slade pulled something from his belt and leveled it at her. There was a slight tingling sensation, then a flash of all-consuming agony, then instant oblivion.
(Skye) rewind one minute
As Skye watched Raven vanish from reality, he felt her presence reappear atop the building next to his at the same moment. Able to feel the imminence of death, practically taste the proximity of his precognitive prediction, he tore his attention from her and turned it to the streets below. The threat was manifesting everywhere, like an explosion, so he wasted no time in preparing for the worst.
Expanding his telepathic presence to the ground, he touched the minds of the hundreds of people directly below him, be they within the offices, strolling along the streets, or driving through the night. His mind was bathed with relief at how few there were, even as he was pierced with the realization that he couldn't reach everyone in the danger zone, not even by half. The event was so close he could read the epicenter out of the immediate future, so he pressed a single driving compulsion into every mind he'd been able to touch. Like a blanket settling over the city streets, the need to be away from the Green Construction office building possessed all at once, a pandemonium of flight following. It was surreal, the chaos of hundreds of people fleeing through the busy city streets, but none of the noise, everyone so stunned by their own involuntary actions that they proceeded in complete silence. At least at first.
The compulsion, as such things tend to, began to spread like an ethereal disease through the crowds, the latent telepathic energies of the mob mentality making itself useful for once, hopping the need to flee from mind to mind without any further effort from Skye, spreading it to more minds than he could ever have hopped to reach. Everywhere, without even knowing why, people began to press quickly through the streets, running to take covers in alleys, behind corners, in sewer drains, each person reacting to the need for escape slightly differently. Inside buildings, people ducked away from windows, hid under tables, stood in doorways, whatever they could to satisfy the need they'd suddenly acquired. Finally, cars in the streets sped away, ignoring traffic laws in one big group of fleeing vehicles. Thank whoever you want that there were no traffic jams tonight.
Just before the compulsion could reach the far side of the building, an almost empty area with some small businesses and storefronts below office space, Skye's danger sense flared almost uncontrollably, and he grabbed an antenna for support while bracing himself. There was a nova of power that Skye saw as a yellow splash, then the world heaved, a blast that would have blown his ears out from any closer roaring over the landscape, and he suddenly had a lot more to worry about.
From what little he could sense in the after-image of yellow power that permeated the air, a spire of stone had blasted through the building diagonal from his perch. The two buildings being around the same height, flying stone became the object of his clairvoyance and danger sense quite completely the next moment. As each flare of his danger sense clued him in, Skye made some small motion to avoid the rain of death that the spire had kicked into the air. With a backward roll from the antenna, he avoided a hunk of masonry that clipped the metal stalk short, then he was forced to roll to his side as a series of stone hunks began pummeling the roof of his building. With a quick flip to his feet he dodged a slice of metal that would have decapitated him on the ground, then dodged to the side with a long lean to avoid another flying rock. He had gotten about halfway through the storm of projectiles when another unreal flash of power bloomed on the building Raven had boarded, distracting him through sheer amazement from the task at hand.
The whole sky was suddenly crowded with power, the emanations of a black energy edged with red rage, tasting so completely of the lower dimensions that Skye had a horrifying and irrational fear that a dimension rift had opened on top of the next building. A scream from his danger sense brought him back just in time for him to stop a storm of falling pebbles from lacerating his face by blocking with his armored hands. Slicing stones still managed to rip his cloths and skin open in a dozen places, but the pummel of rocks on his gauntlets sounded like bullets zinging off of steel, so he was glad he'd managed to block in time.
The instant he was safe again, he turned to stare at the rooftop Raven had gone to occupy, and his senses were just barely able to recognize the black power on the roof as her own. It had taken on a new aspect, a different core personality that altered the overall feel of her energy to something entirely different, and Skye was simply incapable of understanding how that could have happened. Was it something the creators of this catastrophe had done to her? His confusion was so acute that he nearly missed the final flash of his danger sense, managing to raise his hand to catch a flying piece of plastic before it clocked him in the head. After a moment of cool shock at the near miss, he looked at what he held—a toilet seat, of all things—then discarded the offending bathroom fixture as he looked again to the next roof.
The building was well within the range of his aura view and his telepathic touch, but the miasma of Raven's power and rage made any attempt to view with those futile at best. It was just too far away to use clairvoyance, only the most fuzzy of images available to his otherwise all-penetrating gaze. So, with a little bit of reservation, he collapsed to a sitting position and stuck his head between his bent knees, allowing his spirit to leave his body the moment he had stabilized. His consciousness free to the world, he zipped at thought speed to an observational point above the next building, gazing down at the ghastly scene below.
The source of the raging power was evident, a twisted amalgamation of spiritual energy, thaumaturgic shaping structures, and pure demonic force. His clairvoyance, now that he was closer, could perceive that Raven existed somewhere within that beast, her body so enveloped in the swirling powers that twisted the form of her cloak that she was barely visible to any simpler vision. There was nothing human about the hate that emanated from her and polluted the air, it was the sole presence of the worst kind of demonic power, the kind that haunted the very lowest dimensions and hungered to infect places that had yet to feel its lust for destruction. By straining his aura vision to the limit of his ability, Skye could sense the way the white energy, that which usually contained her soul's black power, was overwhelmed and restrained within a red power that tasted of pure demon, of something not truly native to Raven's soul.
His insights into what exactly her terrible burden was all about were cut off by the action at hand, as Raven's black tentacles of power attempted to wrench a flying platform out of the air. The beings he had sensed so hastily as the probable cause of the disaster occupied the stone, which, to his senses, glowed with the same spiritual energy as the murderous pinnacle had. The killers on the rock wore artificial mind shields so powerful that Skye could barely perceive their auras, but that fact became secondary to the weapon the taller male one pulled the next moment. Skye had just enough time to wonder, with a flash of pure terror, where the FUCK the man had gotten one of those before he was forced to take action, striking out with a telepathic warning to Raven that was burned away by the heat of rage surrounding her psyche. His last gambit failed, he watched helplessly as the line of disruption energy, a kind of thought wave harmful only to senstives, struck Raven down, even as she attempted to transform the pair into so much bloody meat.
As the scrambler beam struck her aura, Raven was thrown into a massive convulsion of agony, all the power and rage she'd been so completely controlled by dissipating instantly as the core of her soul was stabbed with a waveform completely the antithesis to all spiritual energy. Her suddenly normal body fell gracelessly to the ground and began twitching and shaking in a seizure as her body reacted to the supreme violation of her spirit. She vomited violently the small contents of her stomach as she twitched on her side, eyes wide open and blankly staring out at the world. Skye wondered at the small mercy that she'd gone to the bathroom recently enough that she didn't soil herself as he had the time he'd been scrambled, then snapped out of his horrified trance and raced down to contact Raven's unconscious mind, determined that whatever this villain (who's flying platform now landed back on the WaneCorp building's rooftop) intended to do now, he'd not find a helpless target in Raven.
(Raven)
Raven didn't so much open her eyes, which had never closed, as she did suddenly become aware of the world again. The return to her senses was instant and complete, and she had enough time to wonder why she smelled vomit before an evil voice began to monologue over her.
"Ah yes, it would seem that this scrambler beam was well worth the exorbitant price that alien arms dealer demanded for it," he said, and Raven remembered in a flash where she was and what had happened. "Now, I have two of the Titan Girls under my power… an unexpected treat on what I expected to be a night of nothing but work." Raven wondered who he was talking to, then remembered the presence of Terra, impossible though it seemed, and had just barely enough of the roof in her field of view that she could see where the thin woman stood motionlessly on the platform she'd been flying around. Raven tried to move, to shout her hate out at the betrayer who had been out doing her dirty deeds the entire time they'd been trying to cure her statue, but found herself immobile, a sudden presence making itself known in her mind.
"Raven, I've brought you back from unconsciousness," said Skye's mental voice, "but you were hit by a scrambler. I'm blocking your connection to your nerves because otherwise the agony would drag you back under again, and now I'm setting up a bypass so you'll be able to move. Sit tight, and get ready to go." He didn't wait for an answer from her, but got back to work. Her outrage at having him in her mind was overtaken by Slade's voice, which continued to talk.
"To think, a power like hers brought low by this little alien toy. Now, I'm free to do with her as I please, much as I was with you after I'd gotten those pesky powers of yours under my thumb with the electronic nervous bypass… right Terra?" Raven listened intently, but Terra simply continued to stand silently on the stone, and Raven couldn't help but wonder what had happened to her. The young woman had always been slim, but the body suit she wore was tight enough that Raven could see her ribs sticking out, and nowhere was there the hard muscle that Raven remembered from their previous encounters. With a shock, she realized that Terra didn't blink, didn't twitch, didn't move a single inch while she stood, just continued to stare silently directly forward.
"Oh, that's right, you haven't been feeling very talkative lately, have you Terra? My but it will be most difficult to reminisce about the old days, as long as you're quiet like that. How will we go over the months of torture, or all the wonderful screams I tore from your body? The red hot coals… the cattleprod… the meat hook… or maybe… my surgical experiments?" Slade stopped here for a moment, having caused no change whatsoever in Terra with his words. Raven meanwhile felt an incredible emptiness begin to form in her mind, a pit of numbness that was her mind trying to shield her from realizing what Slade was talking about, some instinct knowing that an understanding of what exactly Slade was saying would break Raven right now. Slade stopped to examine Terra's expression carefully, then continued to talk to the statue-like super.
"Incredible… Blood's mindwipe job has brought an amazing change in you my dear. Not even at the height of my brain washing's effect were you so utterly under my control. Hmm… maybe he can do the same with this other little girl," and he turned back to look at Raven's motionless body. "If he lacks the power to break her, then perhaps she can replace you as my toy… seeing as you wouldn't be any fun, so tragically cut off from your ability to suffer. A little cranial surgery could contain her powers quite nicely, and then she'd make a perfect replacement for you—don't you agree?"
As Raven realized that he was trying to test the boundaries of Terra's blankness, the protective numbness began to give away in the face of the terrible reality Slade was describing. Torture… brain washing… mindwipe... it all lead in one indescribably terrible direction. However else it had seemed, whatever else had been true or a lie, Terra had been resisting Slade, working against him, and had suffered unimaginably for it. And they'd just left her with him. Months. He'd had months alone with her, both thought dead in the volcano, a statue the only remaining trace, and they'd left her alone with him for all that time. Despite Skye's nerve block, tears began to roll freely down her immobile, impassive face, pouring from her eyes as her heart began to break under the utter enormity of her failure, unable to take the weight of her own betrayal of Terra. No one, not even the most remorseless traitor, deserved what the woman had suffered, and now it was too late, her mind destroyed, and Raven likely to suffer the same fate.
"Ah but these Titans are so deluded," Slade continued, now apparently just for the sake of gloating over his own sadistic accomplishments. "Did you hear her Terra? She thought you were still loyal to me, that you were helping me willingly, that you would be my weapon to murder my enemies of your own free will. Even after that pathetic attempt at betraying me you put forth in the volcano, the one that set me back so far, the one that I beat you to within an inch of oblivion for, she would still assume that you were as evil as I. Such a sickeningly poetic end it would be, if they never realized how truly loyal you've been to them this whole time, if you were to die before they could apologize for thinking you a lifelong traitor. Such resistance you put up during my ministrations, such incredible spine you showed, vowing to never help me again, no matter how many times I brought you near to death, submerged you into a delirium of agony. Alas, if only your mind was intact to suffer this final understanding of how futile that loyalty was, that it was never known, never even hoped for by the only people you cared about, back when you could care about things."
Slade seemed to be in an evil ecstasy of some kind, the more he considered what that agony would have been to Terra, the more pleasure he received. Raven's mind was beginning to stagnate with horror, the inconsolable prison of her currently limited existence denying her even the release of screaming or the revenge of destroying Slade. Death was too good for him, torture was too good for him, and she staved off insanity by imagining the satisfaction it would bring to dump him into a dark pit of the hell dimensions where he could suffer for a veritable eternity.
"Done," Skye's presence finally returned, "You can move now."
"I thought you'd never say that," Raven responded with relief, a semblance of coherence returning to her mind as her utter helplessness ended. She tried to fire up her powers, to ambush Slade and get his punishment underway, but got absolutely no response from the well of force within her. She nearly snapped right then and there, but managed to hold it together long enough to bitch.
"My powers aren't working," she sent the thought with a venomous singsong tone, redirecting her impotent anger at Slade and herself to Skye for his inability to help her in this. Skye took the burning anger stoically, his position within her mind giving him full access to its origin, and thus he couldn't be upset about it. None the less, he had to get her moving.
"Raven, he shot you with a fucking A-Class scrambler. If the fact that it didn't drop you out of that demonic rage trip in a single blast doesn't tip you off to how badly it damaged you, then let me reinforce the lesson by telling you that if you hadn't been shielded by whatever it was that possessed you, you probably wouldn't ever fully recover from the wounds. That thing is a travesty against nature, a tool created from the harvested brain cells of beings possessing the power of antipsi, designed to eradicate the connections between your mind, body, and soul. I'm a mind-healer, not a miracle worker, and it's everything I can do just to get your body barely working right now, lord only knows how long it'll take us to make you better—now get the hell out of there!"
"NO!" she thought with force, her rage replaced by bitter sadness and guilt, "we can't leave Terra in his hands… not again… not after I heard that. We have to find some way to save her!" Without realizing it, Raven was taking full advantage of the fact that, with her powers all shot to hell, she could feel as much as she wanted to. It was one of fate's cruel twists that it should happen when there was naught but misery in her soul.
"Terra's safety is nearly assured now that her mind has been wiped. We can save her later and she won't be any worse for wear than she already is, but we can't say the same thing about you! I can't get up there, and their mind shields are too good for my powers to work at this range, so I'm helpless here. Later, I won't be, and we can get her back together, with the others for backup. Now please, GO!"
Raven thought she felt an ache in her heart as she processed Skye's compassionless analysis, so much like the ones she always meted out when the other Titans became too emotional, knowing that he was right. Of course, that was impossible, because all sensation was still gone from her body, a fact she appreciated when she remembered the unreal pain the scrambler had caused. With a quiet grunt of effort, she shakily pulled her head from the puddle of her own vomit and began to drag herself to her feet, her balance completely destroyed by the numbness. It was a tribute to how unexpected her movement was that Slade didn't detect it until after she'd regained her feet.
"What in the hell?" asked Slade detachedly, when he noticed that she was standing. He looked askance at his scrambler, wondering if he'd used it improperly, or more likely, if the weapons dealer had robbed him. "You weren't supposed to wake up after that blast for at least a week. I'm impressed."
"I have more resources than you know," she managed to make her voice steady and calm, though the trouble she was having moving right now allowed her to truly feel neither. "Now that I've heard that little monologue of yours, there's no way we'll let you keep Terra. You may have tricked us, used her up, and destroyed her mind… but I will rot in hell before I let you keep her body as your weapon."
"Ah, little witch, little witch, don't delude yourself. By some miracle or another, you were able to overcome my weapon and stand when you should be near death, but you can barely move… how do you expect to escape from me? How exactly do you plan to save her when you can't even save yourself?"
"Well Skye?" Raven asked him, as she wondered the exact same thing. She'd expected enough mobility to run away, or at least enough to walk, but she really was barely standing.
"There's a ledge about ten steps behind you. Back away from Slade slowly, make him think you're just afraid of him. When you get to the ledge, jump, and I'll take care of the rest."
"Skye?" she asked worriedly, not having the slightest idea what he was planning. Then again, she wouldn't exactly have to pretend to be afraid of Slade with her body like this, so she picked the lesser of two evils and placed her trust in Skye's plan as she began to back away from the towering villain before her.
Walking was a terror, and backing away was worse. She couldn't feel where her legs were, and this made taking a step back a work of complete faith. Only a mild burning sensation that ran through her whole body, most likely the residue of agony that Skye's nerve block couldn't compensate for, let her know where any given part of her was, and she used it as much as possible to avoid falling flat on her ass and handing Slade all the time he'd need to sweep her up into the living nightmare that had already consumed Terra. After she'd counted ten times of wanting her legs to step backward, something confirmed more by the way Slade had grown more distant from her than what she could feel from her body, Raven paused at what she hoped was the precipice of the tower.
"Come now Raven, there is no escape. If you desire, I can knock you out swiftly and you won't have to wait long at all before your introduction to your new life of misery." Slade was advancing on her slowly, a look of expectation in his one slanted eye. If ever anything could compel Raven to put her complete trust in Skye, it was the hunger in Slade's eye.
"Remember Slade," she responded quietly, her voice dripping with threat she didn't have to fake, "I will never forgive you for what you did to Terra—I will see you burn for all eternity!"
That final promise made, Raven willed her knees to bend and then pushed off with all the strength she could summon. She had a final view of a furious Slade leaping out to catch her before she was falling backward, the blank city sky her only view.
(Skye)
Skye's clairvoyance gave him a perfect image of Raven as she plummeted from the tower next to his. Her limp, cloaked form was invisible against the night sky, and if not for his extra senses, Skye's plan would have been impossible. In the end, it would turn out that Raven's rescue was owed more to indescribably lucky coincidence than anyone's personal effort.
For example, the buildings were next to one another on a city block, separated by an alley rather than a full street, which made the distance between the two something like fifteen feet. Thus, it was possible, using his clairvoyance as a guide, for Skye to make a desperate, full-power flying leap from the roof of his building, catch Raven in one arm as he flashed toward the solid wall of glass before him, flip forward with bent knees, and plant his feet on the side of the WaneCorp building.
With strain of great effort, he was able to ignore the hideous shocking pain of gripping her so closely for long enough to put every ounce of his strength into kicking off of the building. As he twisted through a backflip with his badly injured cargo, he released the grip, allowing her to fly gracelessly into a waiting window cleaner's scaffold, landing hard after the dangerously long drop. Fighting off unconsciousness, he used his remaining good hand to catch and grip fiercely to the steel cable that ran down to the scaffold's wench, sliding down far faster than even he'd feared with a flash of sparks from his mesh gloves. In a moment, he'd been enveloped by the gray mist of masonry dust that had billowed up form the wrecked building across the street, fading from view. As all real visibility ceased, only the fact that he used clairvoyance allowed him to leap from the cable into a roll just in time to avoid breaking something on the ground-mounted scaffold wench.
As he lay flat on his back in a supply-access alley, he was possessed by the fact that, despite the burn of a dozen cuts, the agony in the arm he'd gripped Raven with, the stinging heat in his opposite hand from cable burn that had even penetrated his gauntlets, and the whole-body ache his landing had earned him, this job wasn't done yet. Quickly going OOB (out of body), he sent his mind up, up, back to the scaffold, looking in to make sure he hadn't killed Raven with his obscenely risky 'rescue.' Sensing instantly that her soul was still firmly attached to her body, he went further up still, finding Slade staring down into black chasm that was the space between the buildings after the localized blackout his strike had caused.
He stared down, emotions invisible to Skye's senses, but possessing an indescribable tension in his form that spoke of true frustration. The next moment, he turned and signaled to the blank one, the one that Raven had called Terra, the same one that had so many mixed emotions attached to her among the Titans. The two sped off on their flying stone, and Skye, pressed by the urgency of Raven's condition, deigned not to follow them, but rather marked the platform they rode with a powerful infusion of his own spirit energy, hoping to trace them later on.
Returning swiftly to his body, Skye peeled himself off the asphalt, bemoaning his battered body even as he used the well of emptiness in his soul to stave off panic at what Raven's status was. Moving over to the auxiliary wench controls, he popped the hatch off with a screwdriver someone had left on the ground nearby, had Vera explain to him how to hotwire it, then got the thing descending. Unable to wait, he reached a thought tendril out and contacted her, finding her in particularly bad way, his nerve block having just worn off.
"Skye… the next time… you want to rescue me… from certain death… —oh never mind," she said the moment she felt his mind touch hers, and he could feel pain like a haze of orange fog in her thoughts, shock having dulled it enough for her to think in the limited way she was managing. He supposed she was having trouble deciding if a slow torturous existence leading to certain death or mind destruction was preferable to the indescribable hurt she felt right now.
"Hold on. I can fix this," Skye said, and began to work on himself as he waited for her to arrive on the ground. Opening further the empty pit of his vampiric core, he let all the pain in his body drain away into it, careful not to numb himself so far as to hinder his movement. By the time he was finished, the scaffold had reached the ground floor, clanging to a stop next to him, a nearly delusional mystic its only occupant.
"Okay Miss Raven, it's your turn now," he said aloud as he carefully pulled her from the scaffold and lay her out in the pitch black alley. As long as he held her with the special metal of the gauntlets, the reaction between their sprits couldn't take place, so he managed to spare her any further agony on that count.
Without waiting for any response from her, seeing as she was so far beyond coherence at this point that it wouldn't have made any sense, he got to work on draining the pain out of her. Very carefully, he placed his hands on either side of her head as he kneeled near her. Careful not to suck up any of her spirit, he drew the pain steadily from every part of her body, destroying it continuously in the endlessly hungry disposal unit of his soul. Soon, he knew that she could truly feel nothing but a mild coolness through every inch of her being, and the consciousness that had been so tortured for the past few minutes (his wake up job had left her unable to pass out) was granted a respite at last.
"Skye…" she said as the relief washed through her, in a completely relaxed tone that he'd never heard from her before, "I love you."
"Raven, that's the post-traumatic euphoria talking, don't confuse love with how happy you are to not hurt anymore. And hey, try not to say anything you'll get angry over and toast me for later."
"Hehehehe!" she actually giggled at his completely deadpan gag, and he was struck by an incredible surge of attraction out of nowhere. He broke out in a cold sweat as the urge to use his clairvoyance to once more pour over the magnificence of her physical form washed through him, then smacked himself harshly to dispel that course of thought. He'd be damned if he'd let his powers lead him around by the gonads, and this was so not the time for it anyway.
"What was that sound?" she asked, and he realized, almost for the first time, that it was beyond dark down here. Oh the things you miss when you don't use eyes.
"That was the sound of an idiot getting his just desserts, don't let it worry you. Now, we need to call your friends… I'm getting the feeling that this night is far from over for any of us. How do you normally—" was as far as he got before a sudden beeping noise started blaring out of Raven, accompanied by a blinking from various items that Skye had thought were jewelry. The noise wasn't really that loud, but after the unreal silence that followed the disaster, it might as well have been an air horn. Doubtless the silence would soon be broken by all kinds of unpleasant sounds, but immediately after the disaster, the site had been quiet as the grave it truly was. In any case, Skye nearly jumped out of his skin at the first sound, then tracked down its source and pulled the Titan communicator carefully from Raven's prone form. He flipped it open and got an image of Robin's masked face instantly.
"Raven, where the heck are you? There was an alert and you weren't in the—Skye?"
Skye was forced to cringe away from the lighted LCD image on the communicator screen, suddenly realizing that he'd lost his sunglasses somewhere back during the acrobatics. The pitch black of the alley had made it easy to forget. He looked out into the shadows as he answered then.
"Hey Robin, sorry to have worried you, but Raven and I are already at the scene. We were… working things out on the roof when I got a vision of this happening. There wasn't time to get the rest of you."
"What? What the hell is going on out there?"
"Some guy named Slade—"
"SLADE? He's back? I KNEW IT!" Robin cut Skye off completely, apparently overcome by some emotion or another at the knowledge that this Slade guy had started operating in the city again. Vindication, or something like that.
"Yeah, but as you can see, we couldn't quite stop him. Listen man, get out here, now—we'll need everyone's help for the rescue operation. I was clearing people out of the streets with my powers before hand, but I don't even want to think about how many were buried alive… or how many just outright died." Skye's voice trailed of to a sadness that his PV was too charged up for him to really feel. Using it too much was as bad as not feeding it as far as icing his soul went.
"Damn that Slade! How could he do something like this!? We'll…we'll be there soon, Starfire is flying ahead and the rest of us will arrive by vehicle, so sit tight and try to help where you can. Now… where's Raven?"
"She's with me, and she's safe, if not quite sound. While I was clearing the streets, she tried to take out Slade before he could commit this… this… atrocity. I don't know how, but he got his hands on some seriously rare alien hardware, particularly a little crime against nature known as a scrambler. It a kind of beam gun that only works on sensitives, people with ESP like Raven and me. To make a long story short, it was a miserable brush with death followed by exceptional agony. I did what I could, and she's stabilized now, but I'm not sure how long it'll take to get her back on her feet."
"Raven… shit!" Robin cursed sadly, probably mounting that much more hate for the villain Slade, with whom he obviously had quite a history. "Can you two use that quick heal on her? We're going to need all the help we can get on this."
"I don't know if it would work in the first place, and really, I'm not sure if she can use any of her powers at all right now anyway. In any case, there's more you need to know. That girl Terra you were trying to tell me about earlier? Well I don't know where she's supposed to be, but where she is is with Slade!"
"WHAT? How… why… WHAT?"
"And that's not all. Once again, I don't know how, but that bastard managed to mindwipe her. She's a blank—a mindless, remorseless, weapon of mass destruction."
"Gahhrrr!" Robin shouted in utter frustration, managing to express all kinds of impotent rage and hate in a single bellow. For a moment Skye was afraid he'd been mistaken in laying it all on the young leader at once, but Robin contained his paroxysm of emotion the next moment and launched into a rave of a sort.
"He tricked us! He tricked us and we fell for it! Terra… poor Terra… alone with him… I can't even… NO!" and he covered his face with his hand, as though it would shield him from how terribly they'd failed her.
"Robin, we'll get her back, okay? I managed to place a tracer of a sort on their transportation, so after we get this disaster under control we can go after him and rescue her. And man, you're talking to one of the galaxy's most talented mind healers, remember? I won't make any promises I can't keep, but I can assure that if it's within my power to restore her memories, I won't rest until I have, okay?"
"Skye…" and Robin seemed overcome by emotion once more, though Skye didn't care to guess at this one.
"Just get out here. It isn't pretty and—"
Skye paused as his danger sense flared wildly, impelling him to jump backward for his very life. When he landed again, his senses told him that something freaky was going on with Raven, something involving a demonic red aura, and his guts twisted in surprise at the power that suddenly sprung out and obliterated the area where he'd been standing. Only his extra senses let him detect the difference between the alley's palpable darkness and the truly solid black of Demon-Raven's sprit energy, and once again he owed his life to his danger sense, the stuff he'd dodged being more than enough to fry him beyond hope.
"OH SHIT! Get out here Robin!" he shouted into the communicator before cutting the connection to the stunned boy wonder and pocketing it. Meanwhile, a sickeningly hateful presence filled the alleyway much as it had filled the sky only moments ago. Skye felt fear begin to well up in his mind at the sheer malice of the mind he faced, and he cranked his PV to ice his soul, more afraid of how fear would affect him than how being emotionless would. The vision of terror rising from the puddle of blacker than black was possessed of horrendous power, and had it been almost anyone but Raven, Skye would have turned tail and come back with an army at least. As it was, that option simply didn't exist, or so said his ESP driven instincts. The next moment, Demon-Raven was up, its distorted form turning to confront the powerful mind it sensed.
"WHAT DO WE HAVE HERE?" rumbled a terrible mockery of Raven's voice as four slanted red eyes stared down at Skye. "SO THIS IS THE MORTAL SCUM THAT WE OWE OUR VESSEL'S QUICK RECOVERY TO?"
"Alright shit-face, who the hell are you and what have you done with Raven?" queried Skye coldly, a complete change overtaking him as he drained the last bit of feeling from his soul. Even in the face of the spine-chilling evil that was manifesting before him, Skye was cold, the very image of calm, collected, and dangerous.
"HA! THE MORTAL HAS SPINE! IT AMUSES US!" bellowed the inhuman creature as it towered over him. Having arisen not from Raven's rage, but from her complete loss of control over her power, the creature acted wholly independent of her will, not even almost being representative of the woman Skye knew. What he saw now, he was quite sure, was naught but a demon talking through Raven's mouth, a beast using her body and soul as a medium to penetrate from the hell dimensions.
"I'm only going to ask you one more time," and the ice in his voice could have chilled lava, "who the hell are you, and what have you done with Raven?"
"WHAT IS THIS? RAVEN DID NOT TELL YOU OF HER BETTER SIDE? I TOO AM RAVEN; NOT THE WEAK, SIMPERING MORTAL YOU KNOW, BUT HER HATE, THAT WHICH MAKES HER CHILD OF TRIGON THE TERRIBLE, DESTROYER OF DIMENSIONS!"
"Please. I've known of Raven's demon side since the moment I saw her. Your kind's stink has a habit of tainting even the most beautiful of souls." Normally, Skye would have been intimidated by the unbridled force flowing off this creature's aura—hell, anyone with the slightest instinct of self preservation would have been terrified, but with his soul iced, doubt and fear were only two of the things he didn't have to worry about anymore.
"FOOL! HOW DARE YOU INSULT US? YOU WILL BE THE FIRST TO DIE, THEN ALL INHABITANTS OF THIS DIMENSION WILL FOLLOW!" and the creature struck out with a black tentacle, attempting to decapitate him with a blade of spirit energy. Sensing the attack coming, Skye took a small sidestep to avoid it, then struck out with a single ribbon to pierce the blade, dragging a mild shriek of pain from the beast.
"Shut up and listen you!" Skye said fearlessly, and the Demon's utter amazement at his bravado actually prompted it to obey momentarily. "Do you think your paltry power impresses me? I saw the way that scrambler dropped you in a single blast, and something that will fail in the face of that is hardly something to be frightened of!"
"GRRR!" the demon growled in frustration and perhaps embarrassment, Skye having found exactly the right button to push, "WE FAILED ONLY BECAUSE THE WEEKLING STILL HELD US BACK FROM FULFILLING THE MURDER SHE SO WANTED! WITHOUT HER INTERFERENCE WE ARE FAR MORE POWERFUL!"
"Give me a break! I'll bet your 'incredible power' couldn't even reorganize the mind-soul-body connections that scrambler beam fucked over and expelled you with."
"STUPID MORTAL! WE HAVE ALREADY REPAIRED WHAT THAT PATHETIC TOY HAD DONE TO US! OUR POWER IS TOO GREAT TO BE RESTRAINED BY SUCH TRIFALS!"
"Fine, I was just making sure," and Skye would have felt a thrill of victory at the Demon's slip up, if he was capable of feeling anything at all. "In that case, maybe you are worth my time. If you think you can take me… then come get me."
The demon complied with a shriek of hate, twisting through the air toward him, distorting wildly as its cloaked body stretched out to strike at him. From every direction at once, black tentacles arced out to impale him, one after another leaping forth to skewer his body or beat him to the ground. Following his danger sense, he dodged and flipped with incredible grace, twisting and turning through the web of black death, bounding down the wide alley from ground to wall to air, always a ribbon here or there to intercept that which he could not dodge. Soon, the beast was livid with uncontrollable murderous rage, jetting forward with a dozen tentacles at once to grip him with destructive energy.
Unable to dodge the solid wall of power, Skye enveloped himself in ribbons before the monster could touch the murderous black spirit energy to his flesh, and soon he was coated in the black energy as it pressed in around him, binding him tight. Thousands upon thousands of pounds of telekinetic force crushed away at him, and the effort or resisting it was grinding his mind to dust, but still Skye felt not the slightest hint of distress. He even began to mock the monster that had nearly killed him now.
"What, is that all you've got?" he asked, as he felt the last vestiges of his strength well up for a final effort. The taunt brought still greater rage from the beast, and it leaned forward to answer him up close and personal, its four red eyes glaring into his silver albino pools.
"MORTAL DOG, YOU WILL DIE NOW, AND I WILL SUCK YOU DOWN TO THE PITS OF THE LOWER DIMENSIONS WHERE YOU WILL BE SLOWLY CONSUMED BY THE GREAT TRIGON AS HE PREPARES TO FEAST ON YOUR DIMENSION!"
Skye played his last desperate ploy then, burning out his power to lash a ribbon of concentrated thought through the black bindings that held his left arm. In a flash of movement, he reached up and grabbed the demon by the face, yanking it forward until it was only inches from his own.
"Not if I eat you first," he said, and cracked its head onto his, touching his chakra to hers, right on the jewel she's set to it. With none of the reservation he usually exercised when activating the draining, he unleashed its full fury on the demonic creature currently occupying Raven's body. Instantly the beast tried to pull away, to separate itself from the prey that had suddenly mutated into a predator, but to no avail, Skye's powerful grip fueled by the knowledge that his life rested on this single attack.
Shrieking with such a fury that blood began to drip from Skye's ears, the demon began to fail, the hate that fueled its existence in this plane draining away to the oblivion in Skye's soul, weakening its grip on the rest of Raven's consciousness dramatically. As his ESP had allowed him to predict, the moment the beast's control faltered, she began to resurface, helping him to fight the monster back down to the pit of her unconscious where it was supposed to remain forever bound. As the draining dragged on, the beast's shriek died out, the twisted form began to shrink down to Raven's normal body, and the four slanted red eyes faded into two big violet orbs. At long last then, the creature gave out, it's last piteous wails of frustration audible only on a telepathic level, Raven left kneeling opposite Skye, heads pressed together. Any potential romance of the moment was ruined by the sudden shock of power that blasted him back off of her and onto the ground. He did not move.
"Skye?" asked Raven, when she could finally find it in herself to speak.
(Raven)
It had been the final heart crushing touch on the worst experience of her recent memory. As she'd lain in an ecstasy of numbness after her ordeal of pain, floating along on a wave of relief greater than any drug high she could imagine possible, the Hate in her soul had found its way back into the forefront. Had she not been pressed by more immediate concerns, it would have very quickly occurred to her to wonder what happened to the rage when it was expelled artificially rather than being fought down as she had always had to control it in the past. As it was, she'd found out the hard way, without ever expecting it.
She supposed she should be grateful in a sense, the way the demon side of her soul had regenerated the horrific damage the scrambler had done to her spirit and her mind's connection to her powers like it was nothing at all probably saved her from a terrible inconvenience there. On the other hand, that it had reemerged twice as powerful as before and taken her unprepared and vulnerable from her recuperations kind of killed her desire to show any gratitude. It had overwhelmed her, more completely than ever before, as utterly as only her deepest nightmares could possibly have predicted, and she had lost all control over it. It was the first step to the end of this universe, and it had happened.
Drowned in hate, her body and powers had taken on a new will, her very mind submerging in a pool of bloodlust and fury that she'd bound and shielded and warded with every power at her command for as long as she'd lived. It had been like being forced to watch as you transform into a different person, then feeling that which was you begin to fade away as the new person moved around in your body. She'd had just enough time to see herself turn on Skye before she knew no more.
When next she felt, it was to realize the hate was leaving her, draining away in torrent that defied her understanding. Never had it faltered like this, never had it fled from the forefront of her consciousness with so little effort, and in the next moment she was within her mind, opening her eyes to look at the representation of her spirit she'd constructed during all those countless hours of meditation. She was standing in the mental box she had created to contain the Hate, wrapped in the very bonds she placed anew upon the Hate with every meditation session. The core of her consciousness, that which was truly her, which had divided itself into the various partitioned emotions for self-preservation, busted through the weakened bonds with ease and instantly split back into the various aspects of emotion, Happy, Timid, Brave, and all the rest.
Freed from the prison of her mind, Raven and her aspects elevated to the core, advancing quickly to the portal that marked the way back into the outside world. As one they leveled their powers on the portal and began to pull Hate back through and away from her position of control. When the red-cloaked, four eyed aspect was finally wrenched back into the subconscious, she was still cloaked in a gorgeous silver haze, ribbons and streamers of terrible beauty trailing back through the portal, sucking the power from Hate even as Raven began to bind her once more. When the bindings were in place, the silver streamers sheared off, ceasing their parasitic draw on Raven's darkest emotion and allowing her to pitch the offending aspect back into the box where she belonged. Raven had wasted no time in returning to command of her body.
The instant she had surfaced from her trance, a shock at her forehead announced the presence of Skye, whose body she could hear falling back and onto the ground. At first she wasn't sure she'd fully regained command, because even with her eyes open she couldn't see, and she felt none of the injury she'd been left with when the Hate had consumed her. It was not until she reconciled herself to the facts that it was black as her own spirit in the alley and that she'd been healed somehow that she ventured a word.
"Skye?" she asked, and it carried only the neutral tone she addressed everyone with. "Are you alright?" she tried again, but as before got no response from the utterly dark alley.
Pulling herself to her feet, she looked around, searching for any gleam of light at all in the dust-choked chasm they occupied. Suddenly, she caught the slightest red twinkling, and she leaned down to bring it closer, her eyes feasting on the first thing other than black they'd seen since her last look at Slade's vicious visage. Her limited ESP placed the twin lights in collusion with where Skye's eyes should be on the large man's aura, and she reached out unthinkingly to shake wakefulness into his still form. As one might expect, her hands were burnt back by a shock the instant she touched him, and she cursed in pain as she shook some feeling back into her fingers. More carefully then, she used her powers to lift him on a telekinetic stretcher, pulling him into the air next to her. Reaching out to the right, she came to a plain stone wall, and she felt her way along it carefully as she navigated over tumbled rocks.
There was a faint light growing ahead of her, spotlights from rescue helicopters that had only now arrived on the scene, their rotors blowing the clouds of dust away in ever expanding circles, exposing the night once more to Raven's view. As she looked down then at the limp body with its glowing red eyes, she felt a sickening concern grow in her stomach. She couldn't help but fear for the safety of a guy that, for lack of a better way of putting it, had just saved the universe… from her.
Disaster Site, a few minutes later
"Friend Skye? Why do you not answer? Raven, what has happened to him?" asked a very concerned Starfire as she stood over Skye's prone form. Hey lay now on an extra gurney Raven had commandeered from an ambulance as it passed through to whisk the first load of injured persons to the hospital. Heavier equipment had arrived when the magnitude of the emergency became apparent, and minor injuries were being treated at a field hospital just getting set up at the outskirts of the destruction. Raven, knowing nothing they could do for him would help, had declined all offers of medical aid for Skye, leaving him in a peaceful corner of the hospital as she moved to put her enormous telekinetic powers behind the preliminary rescue work. By the time Starfire arrived, she'd just gotten started clearing fallen stone into dump trucks to free up the main thoroughfare so emergency vehicles could get through.
"I… he… he helped me out when I was in trouble, and now he's hurt Starfire. I… it's my fault he's like this." Raven used the same monotone as always, but the hesitation in her words was something new, and Starfire felt a terrible fear for Skye's safety at the way his injury had affected Raven.
"Friend Skye, please awaken! It is I, Starfire, you were going to help free Heartwind for me, do you not remember? You cannot sleep now, we all are in need of your aid!" As she begged for his return to consciousness, she leaned over him, the completely limp and lifeless set of his body terrifying her slightly. Only Raven's assurances that he still lived could keep her from assuming the worst.
"Starfire, you need to calm down. I… I'm pretty sure he's only resting," Raven admonished her, and she somehow managed to make it sound far more certain than her actual words implied.
"Raven, he does not move, he barely breaths, there is no true life in his body! The mentrans are in the spingle but there is no one to mind the hostog!" Tears began to run down her cheeks as she finished this oddly mixed Tamaranean/English saying, and Raven felt some of the uncertainty in her own mind boil up at the other woman's distress.
"Starfire, it's okay. Do you remember how I've gone into trances after taking bad injuries in the past?" Raven waited a moment for the distraught woman to nod, then continued, "Well, I remember him telling me that, when he's badly injured, he retreats to the astral plane to repair his mind. He's probably just out fixing himself up right now, so there's really nothing to worry about." Once again, she said the words with far more certainty than she actually held herself, but at least it quelled Starfire's tears of distress. "In any case, there isn't time to worry about him now. There are people trapped in that wreckage who need our help, and Skye would want us to attend to them first, alright?"
Raven earned a second small nod of comprehension from Starfire, just in time for the screech of tires to announce another new arrival. The next moment, Cyborg's blue and silver T-Car peeled out around several emergency vehicles and skidded to a stop dangerously close to the medical workers where they unpacked equipment the helicopters had dropped in. Further roaring of engines announced the arrival of the birdcycle, Robin jumping it recklessly over some piled rubble to land it in a heap of broken glass that its special tires took without the slightest complaint. Their leader hopped out, issued orders for Cyborg and Beast Boy to find the disaster relief coordinator and learn what they could do to help, then rushed over to Raven, a million questions evident in his face.
"Raven? What the hell happened? Skye had just told me that you were hurt and he was fine, then he hung up on me with panic in his voice, then I get here and you're fine while he's out of it!" His voice raised to a shout, pent up frustrations and the clear shame that his best efforts to preempt Slade's return had failed both contributing to a state of mind not fit for civil conversation. Raven gave him one of her best looks, the kind that tended to make petty crooks wet themselves, and Robin realized that he was being an ass, apologizing hastily. Starfire looked on in concern, knowing that only Slade could bring this change about in him and fearing as she often did for his health with the way he let the villain get to him.
"The situation changed Robin, and now I'm the one who's not sure how long Skye will be down. I'll tell you about it later," and it was clear to Robin that she didn't want Starfire to hear the details, especially since they hadn't told anyone else about Terra yet, "but right now we should all get to work on the rescue. Come on."
"Raven, wait! What are we supposed to do? I mean, sure, we can move rock around a lot faster than any machines they're liable to get out here any time soon, but I was counting on Skye's ESP find where people were trapped. Cyborg's scanners and Beast Boy's nose can only do so much. You're a psychic too, isn't there anything you can do to help him?"
"Don't you think I've tried!" Raven snapped suddenly at his needling, jolting both Robin and Starfire with her vicious outburst. Her eyes clouded and she looked away before continuing, "I didn't ask him to do that for me… he could have just tried to get away… he could have done all kinds of things… but now I owe him, and I can't even help him now that he's hurt." The ache of her own powerlessness penetrated her neutrality without exception, and small pebbles at her feet began to explode in quick crackling succession as her frustration manifested.
"Raven, what happened between you two?" asked Starfire, and her tone was laced with a warm caring that bit straight to Raven's heart.
"I'll tell you later. I will. As for now…" she sighs deeply, a grimace gracing her face as she turned back to them, "there is something I can try. His spirit does not currently occupy his body."
"And? What do you mean?" questioned Robin, much more gently now that he had an idea of just what state of mind she was in.
"It's dangerous, but I can try to tap into his powers. If I can manage it, I'll be able to find people who need rescuing much as he would have."
"Do you think it's worth the risk?" asked Robin, and Raven had to consider the question for a moment.
It was possible to lose one's self in another's mind, especially if it was a power mind, and if she'd ever doubted it before, she knew now that this was a perfect description of Skye's. On the other hand, her preliminary probing into his outer mind had proven unbearably fascinating, the methods and constructions he'd placed within his own psyche being completely unlike anything she herself used. Many of the places she'd used magic in her own mind had been done with pure psi power in his, and the journey through its now unshielded reaches had been an education in telepathic technique that she could never have acquired from the heavily magic-dominated studies she pursued on her own. She felt more than a little guilty about it, but he'd gotten to see hers during her emergency, so she justified it to herself as only fair, thinly concealing how much she desired to delve deeper into his mind from herself this way.
"Yes," she finally responded, deciding that the bottom line was really the lives that would be saved if it worked, and Robin nodded, bowing to her experience in this instance. Without further words, he left her to her work, taking Starfire by the hand to catch up with the others, the Tamaranean looking back at the pair of psychics as she departed.
Within Skye's Mind
As she had during her first examination, Raven let her mind sink into the empty vessel of Skye's body, this time quickly bypassing the outer layers that had so absorbed her attention previously. Once again, she found herself impressed by the supreme organization and compartmentalization of his mind, the entire structure built to exacting specifications much as her own was. Unlike hers, his was not geared toward the buffering of emotion and the containment of barely controllable forces, but rather seemed streamlined for maximum efficiency, a place for everything and everything in its place. If hers was a fortress-prison of divided emotion, his must have been a supercomputer of streamlined processing power. It was quite unlike any mind she'd ever been within, none of the people she'd known with the talent to do this to themselves ever letting her so completely within them. Once again, she felt a little bad for prying like this so very against her nature, but once again she consoled herself with the righteousness of her cause.
Soon, she reached the edge of his outer mind, the boundary that separated it from his deep inner mind, the probable location of the leads she'd need to work his powers. Quashing her last inner complaints, she flowed down into this deeper mind and began to explore.
Almost immediately she noticed an anomaly she wasn't even remotely familiar with, some kind of artificial structure, built of metal and circuits rather than thought energy configurations and neurons. As she examined it, she felt a weird consciousness of a kind, very much unlike anything she'd perceived before, and thus she shied away from that portion of his mind, deciding that caution was the best policy with something like that. He'd mentioned something about a cybernetic implant, but this was nothing like what she'd seen in Cyborg's mind when occasion had brought her there.
The very next thing that came to her attention was another unique construction, a kind of ball of shield energy that hadn't failed, even as his spirit was elsewhere after its injuries. It was currently immense beyond description, taking up so very much of his inner mind that she felt it was little wonder he'd needed to vacate the place. The tiny bit of her own mind she was now threading through his was having a little trouble navigating around it, so she couldn't imagine his whole spirit could fit in here with this mysterious swollen bubble in place.
She advanced on it curiously, then felt a thrill of fear as a familiar emotion began to pulse within her mind, the Hate rebelling violently. She had it under control now, but she wondered at the sudden activation, that is, until she reached out to touch the surface of the shield with her questing thought. The hate had answered the call of its dying essence, she suddenly realized, as it occurred to her that this is where Skye had stored all the horrible power he drained from her. Beyond the shield was a vast ocean of hate, so enormous that it had crowded Skye out of his own mind, and she guessed that it must be this, if not his spiritual damage, that had sent him to his astral beacon for recuperation.
She took one final, much closer look at the shield, using her every wile to gaze past it and into the chasm of emotion within. Just when she was about to give up in disgust at her failure to penetrate the shield of a man who wasn't even around to actively oppose her, she was in, and the mass of Hate nearly jolted with its desire to run down her questing thought and back into its native shell. She staved off the assault, the weakened emotion no match for her very carefully constructed mental contact, and then looked past it all toward the center, seeking to satisfy a curiosity that had consumed her since the moment she realized the opportunity Skye's absence presented her with.
The next moment, she saw it. A sphere, or a circle, or perhaps some shape that couldn't be described by the vocabulary of a three-dimensional world, floating in the ocean of hate, drawing the feeling into itself. She couldn't help but stare at it, this incredible, beautiful, horrifying piece of Skye's soul, sitting amid an emotion that had more than once threatened to consume and destroy her, gobbling it down like so much cherry gelatin. Quickly and surely, it was eradicating her hate, sinking it into the same bottomless pit that had tortured Skye for his entire life. Despite its awful beauty, she was still a little disappointed that the central source of her salvation was so very simplistic, a boundless animal hunger that didn't differentiate between a demonic hate with the potential to eradicate entire dimensions and the average drunken rage of a barroom brawl.
As she exited the cancerously swollen but rapidly shrinking well of hate, she noted the way the shield was structured, interlocking polygons of energy containing the vicious hate, and potentially any other emotion, without even straining. Comparing it to the rather shabby cube she held the Hate within, Raven vowed to reconstruct the prison in her mind to higher specifications, perhaps adding some of the new magical wards she'd been studying as well. This incident had made it painfully clear that new measures were necessary.
She left this portion of his mind behind at last, proceeding in search of that which she needed. In the process, she noticed his memory center, also guarded by a shield in his absence, and decided not to mess with this much more menacing barrier (which was actually oriented to keeping intruders out, rather than emotion in). Now and then she thought she caught flickers of activity within his mind, flashes of movement and thought where none should exist, much like the skittering of basement vermin one can sometimes notice out of the corner of the eye. This became quite disconcerting, though she could detect no malignance around her, and she hurried her search, increasingly worried that the shrewd Skye had placed defenses within his mind to greet people that snooped around while he was OOB.
Finally, she reached his control core, that portion of the inner mind that she represented with a portal and, apparently, he represented with a spectacular crystalline starburst. Rather than plunging in, as she knew this of all things would be trapped, she sent in a single, gentle thought, pressing it into the core with the utmost delicacy, searching for what she needed. This was the moment of truth, whether she succeeded or failed would be determined by this final test.
The questing thought reached into the core and was instantly confronted by a host of defenses, the overall effect being assured mental meltdown for Raven if she even attempted anything but withdrawal. The defenses were frighteningly tight, as complete as her own at least, and containing traps she could barely detect much less conceive the construction of. Of course, she was willing to bet anything that some of her own defenses would befuddle him as much as this, if not more, so she didn't let the look of things expand her uncertainties about her own defenses any further.
Rather than remove the thought then, she waited, her only hope of this working resting squarely on her defying the extreme danger she'd placed her mind in. After a long tense moment where she was almost positive she could feel the teeth of a mind trap closing in on her, the defenses relented, granting her full access. Though she could hardly believe it, he had coded his defenses to recognize her, something she'd barely allowed herself to dream of being possible. Those damn espers were always prepared for these supposedly 'unforeseeable' circumstances.
Disaster Site
Raven opened her eyes, her mission complete, a well-wound connection to the control core of Skye's mind now linking her to him. Though she had no earthly idea of how to use the connection to control his body or most of his abilities, his ESP was a different story, and she tried to fire it up, activating it with a thought much as she'd power up her own. Abilities such as this usually worked all the time without one even thinking about it, but there was always the option of turning it on and off, and his had stopped working when he collapsed.
"AHHHH!" Raven gasped in a kind of nauseous pain the next instant, keeling over onto the ground as she was overcome by the change in her perceptions. Everything was distorted and twisted around her, the whole world going crazy as her mind was overloaded with sensory input. She could see everything, in every direction, in such spectacular detail that her brain actually began to disintegrate under the strain of interpreting it all.
"UUUHHH!" she moaned in pain once more as her mind was bombarded by knowledge of the motion of every dust mote, the crawl of every insect, the exact number of facets on every single piece of ruble, the rushing of blood through her body, and the structure of her bones and the constitution of her every organ down to the lowliest tissue, everything competing for mental capacity that could only focus on a single thing at a time. Though the crush of sensation was annihilating her mind, though she was so overcome by the power that she couldn't even differentiate the sensation of her spasmodic fit on the ground from everything else, some instinct she didn't recognize as her own pierced through it all to elicit exactly the response that would save her.
"Filter filter filter," she chanted quickly, as though the words were an anchor she would throw down to pull herself from the mind disintegrating seizure she'd so suddenly broken into. Almost the moment she'd gotten the short mantra out, the cacophony was silenced, and she ceased her spasms with a sigh of relief. After luxuriating momentarily in the new quiet within her mind, she pulled herself to her knees and edged over to sit on a fallen slab of stone. This was how Beast Boy and Cyborg found her when they returned to the medical area the next moment.
"Raven, are you okay?" asked Beast Boy, his normally obnoxious tone colored by genuine concern as they walked in on her sitting with her face nearly between her knees, so far was she bent over. She didn't answer at first, so he signaled to the bigger guy, whose face was also twisted in concern and surprise, and the two of them together helped her carefully to her feet. They were extremely delicate, as it never paid to touch Raven without either her explicit consent or a dire emergency.
"Come on Raven, talk to us girl. What happened?" asked Cyborg, as he helped Beast Boy sit her on a free gurney next to Skye's. There was again no response, and he was just about to suggest they go get a doctor or something when a sudden flash of activity from her canceled all his other thoughts.
"Hands off," she spoke darkly from where she sat, and the two young men practically leapt away from her in their effort to obey. "I appreciate the concern," she continued to speak in her dark monotone, "but I'm fine. I was tapping into Skye's ESP so we could use it to find survivors. I didn't realize exactly the extent of his power, and so it took a little getting used to." Her tone told them that was pretty well all they'd get out of her, but Beast Boy's sudden curiosity got the better of his survival instincts.
"Wait, so you've got Skye's ESP now? Does it work?" and he was overcome by fantasies of what he'd do with power like that. Girl's locker room ranked quite prominently on the list, just as an example, and he quickly lost interest Raven's answer as he was absorbed in wonderful daydreams.
Raven, before she responded, lifted her head and looked down at her hands, her face suddenly lighting with amazement, as though she'd never seen them before. She actually seemed to forget about the guys then, looking over her body like her same old uniform was something all new and deeply engrossing. Cyborg looked on in confusion as Beast Boy began to drool through his fantasy and Raven started to stare around the room like someone on their first LSD high.
Raven, for her part, couldn't really be blamed for her distraction. It's not every day someone opens their eyes to look at the world with penetrating clairvoyant vision, and that she was taking it for a test drive was only expected. Words can't describe how much more defined and vibrant the world is when one is no longer limited by the electromagnetic spectrum, when everything, regardless of lighting, is bright, distinct, and completely encompassed within one's senses. That the outer boundaries of an object are no longer the limit of one's perception, that to look through something to its core, to understand the inner workings of any given thing, is only the slightest desire away, is an enormous change from the way vision normally works, and an incredibly neat one. Finally, when one's vision improves like that, certain other imperfections involved with using eyes vanish: depth perception, hand-sense coordination, everything increases to levels that those dependent on eyes couldn't ever imagine. In the end, you know longer see where things are, you simply know where they are.
She finished enjoying her new view to the world around the room, then turned her head to look at Beast Boy and Cyborg. At the sight of them, she started somewhat, then leaned forward to get a better look, more out of habit than any need for proximity. Her eyes were wider than the guys could remember having seen them recently, and for Beast Boy, it was only a small jump from his own thoughts to an explanation for her apparent shock.
"HEY!" he shrieked indignantly, hands rushing to protect his modesty as he sort of twisted to one side and scrunched up.
Raven's face darkened viciously, her abstract admiration of the male form taken entirely wrong by Beast Boy. She'd simply never seen a view to the masculine musculature like that, Skye's ESP being better than DaVinci sketches as far as perceiving the purity of human form (even though neither specimen was exactly magnificent).
"Don't flatter yourself," she muttered in exasperation, and she felt a slight sting as she remembered saying that to Skye, "I was admiring Cyborg's construction. I'd never seen it from the inside before." A white lie, meant to assuage B.B. and discourage teasing.
"You can see inside me?" Cyborg wondered aloud, then registered the compliment. "Yeah well, hey, I don't blame you for being impressed, I am one incredible hunk of hardware—every system absolutely cutting edge!" and he began to preen slightly as he was reminded of how impressive his own technology was. Beast Boy looked to Cyborg's relaxed state, his embarrassment forgotten with his jealousy for Raven's rare compliments, and he began to bicker with the bigger man almost right away. Raven almost chuckled as she admired the effect stroking the ego could have on the immature and irresponsible.
"So why exactly aren't you two off digging for survivors?" she asked, not quite accusatorily, shaking them from the childish fight they'd broken into. The two looked sheepish for a moment, then Cyborg caught himself and started the explanation.
"My scanners are being jammed by something, I don't know what. It's like whatever was in that building that fell, it was protected by some kind of crazy advanced electronic countermeasures to prevent prying electronic eyes from seein' in. I came over to get the T-car and see if I could boost the signal, but it ain't lookin' too good." His reason explained, Raven turned her new senses on Beast Boy's face, trying to see if she could control how deep the clairvoyance penetrated and having little luck. He actually grew nervous under her stare as he stammered his response, the look she gave him while she tried to keep the perception on his skin rather than his brain matter apparently quite disturbing.
"Ah heh… Robin sent me! He wanted to know if you're ready. It looks like you are so…"
"I am, and I think it's about time I show you all how saving lives was meant to be done." Though it was phrased as a brag, she said it like a hopeful promise, then floated up and began to fly over the wreckage toward the spire of stone. She got about ten feet before she stopped dead in the air.
The moment she'd gotten a little ways off, the perception had begun to grow fuzzy, the world going out of focus faster than an ineptly wielded camera. She immediately returned to the ground, the world snapping back to crystal clarity, and the look of pure rancor on her face keeping the curious duo quiet. It took her a long moment of thought before it occurred to her what had gone wrong, at which point she snapped in satisfaction, the selfsame gesture hefting Skye's body into the air on a sheet of black.
"Where're you goin with him? Isn't he still hurt?" asked Cyborg after her, but she merely continued to fly off. This time the world remained distinct, and she chewed herself out for not realizing how short-range his power was sooner. She was tapping the effect, but it was still generated by his brain, she couldn't carry it around with her like he would if he astral projected or something. This is what she thought of as she reached a point next to the still-smoking spire of rock and set down, Skye's body floating upright just behind her, and two things suddenly occurred to her. First, it would take forever to find everyone by using active clairvoyance (even now she could see only about twenty feet beneath her), and second, her using his powers here in the real world might screw with his spirit's ability to use them on the astral plane, if that was really where he was (not that she really cared if it bothered him).
In a flash of inspiration, once again that she couldn't particularly attribute to herself, she opened her spiritual senses to the world instead, trying to feel the space around her through the miasma of misery, pain, and Terra's residual power. What had felt to her like a meaningless mosh of departing souls, human suffering, and the earthy energy their wayward ally had saturated the area with was suddenly blown into whole new proportions.
The filter already in place, Raven was still staggered by the enormous amount of information flooding into her mind. It suddenly became extremely difficult to shield out the terrible misery and pain of the dead souls currently migrating in such massive force, her empathetic powers drawing the disembodied ghosts like a beacon. She muttered a ward she'd learned to chase away such creatures, their all-consuming hunger for more life forcing them to seek out mediums like herself. They generally dissipated to the afterlife or whatever after a few days, but in the meantime they were like landmines of misery to sensitives, sucking and clinging to mind shields like ethereal lampreys.
As the magic chased away the ghosts, she was struck by further inspiration, and drew Skye in until he was only inches behind her. Activating his mind shields and overlapping them with hers, she was finally able to appreciate the rest of the landscape without the glare of clinging feelings. On a side note, she began to sweat lightly under the strain of using her powers and his at the same time.
In any case, Skye's aura vision was something else entirely. The dead landscape of smoking rocks and metal was black as night, illuminated only by the waves of despondent emotion and sensation still wafting over them from the dead souls, which glowed like misty blobs of multicolored torch fire from the safe distance they were keeping from her ward. Everything containing the faintest spark of life in any reasonable proximity to her lit up like a lighthouse to her senses, standing out from the dull and often unintelligible background, even from behind walls and barriers.
Allowing herself a mild thrill of victory, she turned the senses downward, immediately spotting dozens of spirits in various states of disrepair. Here and there was the dull flickering of the suffocating brain, one winking out and floating upward as ghost only to flee away from her protections. Faded and distorted spirits abounded as those whose bodies had been broken by the rock fall awaited death in blissful unconsciousness. Everywhere, however, were the shells, voids in the background spirit noise that marked a corpse, dead as dead can be, and Raven staved off tears as she tried to ignore the automatic tallying going on in the back of her mind (a.k.a. Skye's vacant brain, right now). The slight sadness she couldn't block was replaced with determination after a moment, as the ones that still had a hope of living began to stand out among the already lost.
Wasting no more time, Raven spoke her mantra softly, pointing her hand toward the still-rising medical facility and wrapping dozens of hand stretchers and gurneys in her spirit, then dragging them into the air. As the fleet of platforms closed in on her, a set of brightly living spirits advanced from her side. Only one ventured to disturb her concentration with conversation, that, unfortunately, being the only one she couldn't get really angry at, and she announced her curiosity with a sudden gasp.
"Raven! Why do you carry friend Skye at your back like a murdwurp with her young? Oh! Is it one of your 'magic rituals'?" and the woman flew closer with a spectacularly sweet tone of interest in her words.
Raven nearly lost her composure as she recognized this reference, barely keeping a trailing gurney from clipping a rescue worker on the head. Starfire's perfectly innocent question routed from a disgustingly embarrassing incident Raven had suffered with the naive one, an incident involving a racy little book that had somehow found its way into a box of random titles she gotten cheap from her favorite bookstore's clearance sale. She'd left the box outside her door for five minutes clear shelf space, and when she'd gotten back, Starfire had mystically discovered the embarrassing title and begun practicing her increasingly accurate English skills on a passage where the characters were, shall we say, "getting friendly." Her hastily snapped answer to Starfire's "inquiry as to why a man and a woman would be in that position?" had been "Magic Rituals!" then a quick snatch for the offending paperback and a hasty retreat back to her room. She'd left the confused alien in a swirl of dust, slamming the door shut just in time to block out the floor-cracking explosion that rocked her room, flipping furniture and overturning pedestals. The book had felt the fury of her emotions next, disintegrating to dust under the force of her embarrassment. Oh the number of times Starfire had almost started talking about that again…
Her heart had just slowed back down to a regular pace as she set the medical platforms down on in neat rows before her, when a sudden impulse caused her to stop merely perceiving the location of her friends and really sense them. She couldn't place the feeling that made her turn, but she later decided it must have been subconscious longing, for when she actually concentrated on the brilliant spirits of her two friends, her heart nearly leapt into her throat and it was all she could do not to melt the nearby rocks to slag.
Starfire… Starfire was gorgeous! The interlocking orange and green radiance of her soul was like looking into a pool of purity incarnate, emanations of joy and love garnering a vision of glorious beauty like none Raven had ever been visited by before. Even though it was completely outside of her tastes in artistic style, mood, and color scheme, she still fought to keep the uplifting happiness blossoming in her heart off of her face as her soul resonated in sympathy with the loveliness before her. She had to tear her senses from the woman before she began to cry at the sight.
When her senses pried loose from Starfire, they landed squarely on Robin, and the wash of royal blue across her mind was like a cool wind of hope. If Starfire embodied purity, Robin was an incarnation of nobility and strength, his soul a pinnacle of masculine energy. The part of Raven that was a woman, the part that had always noticed Robin's looks and personality, melted like butter on a hotplate, and it took every ounce of Raven's control not to go goo-goo eyed and blush as a completely guttural physical reaction was wrenched forth by this insight into his soul. As she killed the feeling like she would any other, she was washed with shame at the bottomless desire she'd felt, as though her friendship to Starfire meant nothing. Though the two were taking forever to get together, she would never dream of blemishing the relationship, her feelings for Robin an entirely controllable impulse compared to her complete trust with Starfire. She was recovering once more when a final realization struck her with just under hurricane force.
Deciding the safe place to concentrate her senses while she regained her composure was between the two radiant souls, that was where her focus landed, bringing Skye's powerful ESP to bear on the gossamer strand of spirit energy that connected the man and woman before her. She wondered briefly what the hell it was before that mysterious intuition struck again, telling her that the two were connected in a very spiritual sense, infested with the kind of connection that would only grow with time. With this pair, it could only be love, and that they'd finally gotten together came as almost as much of a shock as it was the fulfillment of an expectation she'd held for months. A passing whim to taunt them with her insight was struck down like the folly it was, and Raven decided that she'd been around Beast Boy to much to even consider revealing their secret before the two decided they were ready to tell. It was right around here then that she realized they were talking to her.
"Raven, I asked if you need any help?" Robin prompted a second time, and she shook herself back into reality as the magnificence of their spirits became a controllable thing. She was forced to actually consider his question for a moment, because she still wasn't exactly sure how this was going to work. Finally, she used her powers to heft Skye from her back and over to Starfire, who caught him gracelessly by the arms with his legs trailing down to the ground.
"Take him off my back," Raven instructed her, even as she cringed at the blossom of intensity in the ambient spirit noise. Now that she had a better sense of how it worked, she toned down the sensitivity herself, leaving her with a much sharper idea of where everyone was. So, with the others waiting and stretchers lain out in rows, she got to work.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos," she said calmly but powerfully, extending her hands out in front of herself as black power blossomed from her eyes and coated her body. A wind kicked up to answer the extreme ethereal displacement her spell was causing, and so her cloak blew back on her neck and set to flapping in the gale. The next moment, the power took shape.
A shadow raven of enormous size sprouted from Raven's body and took flight directly up into the air. Turing through a tight spin, in came back to the ground and plunged in, seeping between the stones and passing down to the trapped survivors below. Their spirits lit like glowing targets in the night to her new senses, it was simple to find their exactly location in time-space and pluck them from this physical reality. Like a black wind of hungry emptiness, the spirit construction swept through the rubble, drawing each survivor into itself before moving on to the next, quickly vacating the enormous disaster site of every living victim.
When she could no longer sense a single bright sprit beneath her for fifty feet in every direction, she brought the shadow bird of her soul's power back to the surface, its heavily loaded form as perfectly flat and billowing as ever. Sweeping over the rows of stretchers and gurneys, it deposited its payload, a single pass empting its total contents quickly and safely onto the surface. As she allowed the dimensional transference construct to die, Raven idly noted that there was exactly one stretcher or gurney for every single person she'd saved, a situation that she hadn't even attempted to plan out. How the fuck had she managed that?
"Raven… you did it!" shouted Starfire with glee, twirling Skye's limp form around like a big rag doll in her exuberance. She actually slung the rather big guy into her left arm so she could embrace Robin with her right, the shorter man gagging under the crushing force, even as he too congratulated Raven on her success. When he got away from his lady friend's celebratory squeeze, he staggered over to Raven where she'd collapsed and placed a hand on her shoulder.
"Great job Raven—I had no idea you could do that!" There was real admiration in his voice, and Raven wasn't in the mood for the pride and embarrassment this elicited in her.
"It was simple. I used Skye's power to find them, I used my power to bring them out. Tell the clearing crew that they'll have to dig the rest out themselves… I'm not touching my mind to any corpses tonight, not with senses like these." She spoke with calm conviction and a slight attitude, and Robin immediately realized that she was more tired that she would ever let on. He once again wondered what the hell had happened between his talk with Skye and his arrival here, but he knew that the last thing that would get him an answer would be pressing Raven why she was pretending not to be exhausted.
"Okay then, that means the immediate emergency here has passed. We need to get back to the tower and figure out what Slade's planning to do next. Starfire, put him down and go get the others, we've got things to…"
Raven stopped listening as another new sensation ran through her from her connection to Skye's powers, a mild surge of fear, anger, pain, and sadness striking her so suddenly that she yelped, drawing the surprised attention of the other Titans. The feeling persisted, and the next thing she knew there was more: directions, images, sounds, and knowledge. As she watched some scenes play through her mind, the fact that what she was seeing was a vision of the future penetrated her own amazement and shocked her into action.
"Robin, we've got problems," she said ominously from the ground as she vainly attempted to pull her fantastically tired body to her feet. "Fighting, death, Slade isn't done with them yet tonight. We have to try to…" and she was cut off by the effort it took her to come to her knee, Robin easing her back to the ground in concern even as he listened with dire interest to her prophecy.
"Raven, please, just sit down. What are you talking about? Where is Slade going to strike?"
"Skye's powers… detect violence as it creeps up in the future. Slade is going to war, some kind of fight with someone else. There will be two more battles soon, one of them is downtown, the other is by the park. I… I don't know how soon, but—"
"Right! Okay, let's go. Starfire?" and his question was answered with a nod as the fair alien took off toward where Beast Boy and Cyborg were already waiting.
"Hey! What about me?" asked Raven indignantly, even as she still struggled hopelessly to stand.
"You're not going anywhere Raven, not in your condition," Robin called back over his shoulder, "just stay here and keep Skye company!" Raven was livid at being left behind, even as she knew she wouldn't be using any more destructive power tonight. She was simply too drained after all the shit she'd been through, and yet there was more to do. Reaching out with a mental contact then, she telepathed a last message into Robin's mind.
"Robin, if you're going to fight Slade, you'll have to tell the others about her before hand," she reminded him forcefully, then camped out in his head till she got a sense that he agreed. "She's not the woman we knew right now, she can't be reasoned with or appealed to, so don't bother. We can't let him keep her Robin, we can't fail her again." This last was said with a solemn sadness that he could probably feel through their connection it was so pronounced, and she in turn felt his answering sadness and frustration. It was a damned sad situation.
That final warning granted to her leader, Raven pulled herself along the ground toward Skye's prone form. As she arrived next to him, she sensed the rescue workers approaching and beginning to rush the people she'd just saved off to receive medical attention, and was thus not surprised when one dust-covered firefighter approached and asked if she needed a lift back to the tower or something.
"No, we'll be fine here," she responded, then recognized once more the extent of her own fatigue and amended her answer. "If, however, I could get a blanket and a free gurney over in the medical camp, I would be extremely appreciative."
"Miss" answered the rescue worker with a smile, "you just saved more lives in five minutes than we normally manage in half a year of explosions, fires, and super-battle damage. I think you've earned a bed and a blanket. Oh, and is your friend going to be—"
"He'll be fine. I think I can see to that myself," she cut him off, then smiled to herself in exhaustion as she considered the long road ahead, the weight of impending deaths still pressing down on her through Skye's ESP.
Downtown (Slade)
As he moved methodically through the back of the nondescript van he'd had Terra land by, Slade continually obtained and equipped the deadly tools of his trade. Lining the sides of his chest then were six pistols: two 9mm custom automatics, two small-focus needle lasers, and two wide beam phasers, extra ammunition and power cells strapped along his back and down his thighs. At either hip was a Colt .45 Single Action Army (think 'six shooters'), loaded with his own very special custom bullets, a bandolier of which was belted around his waist. As he finished attaching explosives to his belt and vest, he picked up the coup de grace, an enormous rifle with a chain of oddly enormous canister-like rounds trailing out of it. The rifle was at least six feet long, its blunt nose proceeding uniformly to the contoured grip and shoulder brace, the intricate tracings of circuitry and energy pathways down the side the only accoutrement. He wrapped the ammunition belt around the feeding mechanism then slung the whole big thing onto his back, a good two feet sticking up over his shoulder.
"Ah but that alien gun-runner was a most provident investment," Slade said to himself as he admired the last item he'd bought off the creature. The disruptor rifle had been a magnificent addition to his arsenal, his old high-velocity solid slug cannon frankly deficient as far as pure destructive power went. Now that he was back to nearly square one as far as his man and robot power went, he was going to have to do most of the work himself, just like in the old days. What fun.
"Here, take this," he ordered Terra out of hand, passing her an extra phaser pistol. The characteristic blunt nose of all beam weapons was present, and the whole weapon was so large that it barely fit in her hands. None the less, she took it without complaint and handled it with the grace he'd ingrained into her. "If your powers won't cut it, I want you to shoot to kill," he commanded again, and she took the order with a silence he knew could be naught but compliance.
"Hmf," he grunted, simultaneously pleased at her compliance and slightly disappointed that there was none of his own pre-combat high in the girl. He supposed it was a sacrifice he'd had to make, giving up the chance at having another who reveled in destruction for a tool he could actually rely on, but any desire he'd ever had to make more than a tool of the child were disappointed now. He knew the empty shell could never be his successor, and the thought brought him back to the question of how exactly he would continue his legacy.
"Begin the diversionary strike," he said into a wrist communicator, and elsewhere a small army of robotic soldiers sprung to life, ready to assault a major base he'd identified at his old park-based drug distribution networks. The pier amusement park was a spectacular front, even the Titans missed his operation there while attending all the insipid distractions the front company provided, not to mention the way customers could flock unnoticed in the crowds while they obtained their fix of preference. He knew that to be a place where they'd concentrated their forces, and so that was where the obvious attack should fall. Of course, not only had he found their primary base, but their secondary as well, and that was the building around the corner and down the street.
As he waited, his surveillance equipment picked up a large force of people filing discreetly out the front door, a similarly blank look about them pegging them as mind slaves. His other surveillance camera was suddenly jammed, and he knew a force of robots was leaving by way of the roof access. Leaning back out of the van, he could just detect the sound of antigrav generators humming overhead as airborne units moved to counter his feint.
"Hook, line, and sinker," he said to himself as he stepped out onto the pavement and made final adjustments on his equipment harness. Terra followed, a silent figure at his side, and they passed the slab she'd been transporting them on all night as Slade walked out to the corner around which the opposition's auxiliary fortress was waiting. The platform was specially built for maximum stability and aerodynamic performance, so he was loathe to ditch it even as he knew it was poor practice to hold onto vehicles used to escape the scene of a crime. In any case, he pulled a monocular from a pocket on his thy and leaned around the corner, gazing down the street and into the front area of the open windowed financial services building that fronted their operation.
"Terra, do you know why I refrained from using weaponry on the Titans, even when it looked like I would loose to them?" he asked the young woman rhetorically, still tickled beyond reason by her inability to respond to his taunts. He delayed his point as he caught sight of that woman, the leader of their operation, standing in the front hall of the building with an incredibly annoyed expression on her face. She wore some kind of bodysuit, not exactly amour but a far cry from regular clothing, and from her body language was currently engaged in berating two odd looking men.
"At first it was because I needed them to become stronger, needed Robin to become stronger so he would be ripe for inducting into my service. After that fell through, it was because I wanted them to suffer for their impudence, and a quick victory would have been far too easy. It would have been child's play to assassinate them one by one, stalk and murder them each in turn by taking advantage of their individual weaknesses. Very little in the way of super powers, after all, can withstand the skull exploding into a red cloud after a high velocity bullet impacts with it. Such would not have been an end befitting their talents, it would have been cowardly, and not a true victory at all. I may be what this world calls evil, I may have nothing in my soul to stop me from doing whatever it is I desire, but I did not become the man I am today by taking the cowardly victory over worthy opponents. I gave them a handicap, used subtle and diabolical tactics to torture their minds as well as their bodies, and in the end, they were everything I could have hoped, defeating me at the height of my power. Well, the gloves have come off Terra, they've been promoted to a threat deserving my every talent and attention, and as soon as we've taken care of these outsiders, the Titans will be next. May whatever gods they worship have mercy on their souls."
His monologue complete, he stood back from the corner again, putting away his monocular and crossing his arms before his chest. He'd wait for the explosions to signal the beginning of the conflict at the pier, and then the com-jammer would go up. After that, it would be only him and his tool against whatever was left in that base and their leader. Ah… sweet anticipation.
Preview: MWUAHAHAHAHA! …Oh, excuse the evil laugh, but the time has come for Slade to get his bad on in a big way. He and Terra are going to kick some ass, maybe, and the Titans are going to have a front row seat to the show, definitely. As to who'll be on top when the dust settles, the blood coagulates, and the burns start to pulsate with agony… well… you'll just have to wait and see. Hey, and can you say, "visiting hours at Skye's astral beacon"? I knew you could.