The Albino Telepath Saga

by DBAinsw

Discontinued: I keep this long, long story around as an example of what NOT to do. Once this was my superfantasy played out in a forum others might read it in. Now I see it as typing practice with an embarrasing garystu focus.

18. GW4: The Enduring Darkness

Intro: It looks like I goofed a little bit this time. You see, I got so into writing all these new parts that I spent way too long doing it, and now it's been two weeks since my last update. On the bright side, this chapter rocks, and I've finally gotten a grip on writing the last of the characters I've been disregarding. Look forward to more movement in this plot than ever before in one place at one time, more drama than I've ever even attempted before, and a healthy serving of humor and action to wash it all down if that's not your thing. Please try to pick up on all the things I write that culminate hints from four to ten chapters back or foreshadow momentous plot twists to come, because otherwise I'd feel my efforts here were wasted. Now get in there and read, cause it's a long one.
Chapter 18: The Enduring Darkness

"We've got to snapback now!" Skye shouted at Raven over the siren, and she barely had time to comprehend what he'd said before he vanished, a glimmering silver residue the only trace of where he'd stood.

Raven didn't have time to wonder about what was going on, she didn't even have time to think about how much this was going to hurt. The instant his words registered, that was the time to act, and to her credit, for once Raven didn't hesitate in something involving Skye. By some instinct she couldn't define, she knew that she had to trust him in this, and that very thought became the trigger for the snapback. A quick check showed her tether to be firmly in place, despite the odd dynamics of the constructed world she'd entered, and the slightest pluck set the process in motion.

Like that, she was pierced with the snapback pain, a sharp, enduring agony not unlike being punched in the stomach and popped on the back of the head at the same time. Her eyes snapped open as she fell gracelessly from her meditation pose and struck the rubble below, coughing, sputtering, and gasping for air while struggling to recover her blurred senses. As the first delicious breaths of air entered her lungs, the swirling blur that was the disaster area began to enter focus. As she dragged herself to her knees, the ringing in her ears transformed into screams, and she hurried herself to her feet in response to this new impetuous.

What Raven could see then by the light of flood lamps and road flares was a tide of people fleeing in a panic from the general direction of her left. Doctors and medical personnel struggled to cart the bevy of wounded that Raven had herself pulled from the rubble not even two hours past, sometimes with the help of less injured patients, but often against the rush of panicking souls too frightened or too selfish to lend a hand to those unable to move themselves. Scattered police in their black and silver body armor, their weapons abandoned, helped move the injured as well, apparently having prioritized where their hands were most needed just then. By application of pure logic, Raven traced the line of their flight to her left, catching sight of the object of their terror.

A kind of mechanical spider, black as midnight and weighing two tons at a minimum, was standing with disturbing calm amid the remains of the building. Behind it lay a trail of smoking wreckage that could be distinguished from all the other smoking wreckage by the sporadic claw marks and blade cleavings all over the place, as though it had been leaping about jabbing spears and swords every which way. Her eyes followed the line of its simple caged-in body until they caught what it was so intently and motionlessly examining, and that was when she knew that Skye had had very good reason for his stingingly fast return to this plane.

This was the bemused comment that registered in her still-shaken mind as she watched Skye stare it down, sweat dripping down his face and over his closed eyes, his pale features set into a completely unreadable expression. She tried to walk toward him, but stumbled badly and had to catch a steel beam before her completely drained body hit the ground. It was from this leaning position that she saw Skye, who, if anything, looked way more tired than her, slowly draw his weapon from his side, as though he were trying not to call the machine's attention to the fact. As she watched, he opened his eyes with a grimace of agony tempered by steel willpower, then snapped them shut again, pointed his blaster, and fired.

Raven's eyes were dazzled by the flash of light that followed, a sphere of incandescent intensity consuming the relative darkness, and she allowed herself a sigh of relief that it was over. It was only as her eyes cleared that she realized her premature celebration was completely unwarranted, for the sphere had been an image of the beams arcing around the monster rather than hitting it! She forced her feet through one step, then another, certain that she would have to help now, even as she took in the glowing-hot spots on the rubble where the refracted laser beams had struck and wondered how the fuck she was supposed to manage that.

Her attention was drawn once more to the robot, which had not moved despite the heavy fire which had just glanced harmlessly from whatever shielded it, and to Skye, who had managed by some unknowable process (probably terror) to turn even more pale. As she staggered a bit closer to them, the robot ended its quietude with a powerful lunge, leading with the bladed fore claws. Much as she expected, Skye dodged easily, showing the same disgusting agility that he and Robin had used to face off with in the living room, and her always-neutral expression ticked with a smidgen of relief that he was in no immediate danger despite his ineffective laser weapon. She staggered closer as the battle raged on, the streak of white moving through dodges like an untouchable beam of moonlight, the unexpectedly quick heap of metal leaping and striking like a spindly-legged ball of black greased lighting.

She managed to close about half the distance to the wide-ranging area where the fight was raging before anything changed, her feet becoming surer beneath her with each step as she got used to being in her body again. She cursed the fact that she lacked the energy to fly, even as she tried to ignore the implications this held for her ability to aid Skye, doggedly putting one foot in front of the other as her eyes began to water with the attempt to follow the blurred movements of the two combatants. Suddenly, the thing took a swipe at Skye's legs that would have shortened him at the knees had he not flipped away, coming around with a spearing attack from its other front leg instantaneously and sending Skye into a full out roll across the ground that, for her life, Raven couldn't understand how he'd managed. The moment Skye hit the ground, the robot pushed off the ground with its left legs while its right legs clung down, inverting its body. It used all the momentum of its flip to drive its front claw down onto Skye's shoulder, and this time there was nowhere for him to go.

Raven's whole body twitched involuntarily as she heard the crack of his bones shattering and the accompanying scream, her mind blanking out as she watched him dodge one stab from a spear-like second leg, then become impaled by the next. As the blood flew from the spinning metal bar in his guts, the world fled momentarily from her view. Somewhere deep inside her, the Hate chuckled slyly in her box, reveling in the downfall of the one that had brought her low. To the side of that unwanted presence was the only other thing in her soul that could motivate her power to its greatest heights, that could dig deep into the wellspring of mystical energy within her to pull out her uttermost reserves. What she'd been holding back from Skye since the moment she'd lain eyes on him would no longer be ignored, and Love blossomed forth from a dark corner of her soul, bringing with it a flow of much-needed power. The same thing that always pressed her powers to their limits to defend her dear friends, the same energy that had withstood the brute's earth-cracker not two days back, now came to Skye's rescue in a strike Raven had not chosen, but which was chosen for her by the ultimate arbiter of such things: her heart.

The world snapped back into focus just in time for her to see her power catch a blow that would have split Skye's skull, a beam of black she didn't remember creating linking her glowing hand to the encompassed robot. Now that she had control again, all she could think to do was fling the thing away from the man it was still grinding into a bloody mess. Like being launched from a catapult, the semi-elastic beam of power between her and it jerked it away, accelerated it through a titanic arc, then smashed it into a building behind her so hard that a cloud of dust kicked up and a partially destroyed wall fell on it.

The same instant the beam faded was the one where the power claimed its due, and Raven collapsed again to her knees as a terrifying weakness overcame her. She'd pressed her limits a little too far and now she could barely move, much less continue to fight against the thing she heard dragging itself from the rubble behind her. Panic began to gnaw at her mind, and the only thing she could think of was to see if Skye was okay. Using the dregs of the power that blast of feeling had wrung from her soul, she visualized the space next to him, slicing through the ephemeral barriers of space to arrive there the next moment, emerging from a puddle of shadow. The effort of this small thing struck her brain like a hammer, and she lost vision as the world blurred out again to blackness.

"Skye?" she asked weakly, voice trembling more from the barely controlled terror her visual blackout had caused than anything else just then. Her vision began to come back in fits and false starts, weird blobs of light fading in and out until finally she had a complete, if blurry and somewhat multi-imaged view of the horrifying wound in Skye's gut. He had a silver-gloved hand pressed over it, and blood seeped through the mesh and soaked into his black shirt, a second gout pooling under him through the hole in his back. She was struck by a morbid desire to move his hand and see the ruined tissues below, to take in the cracked bone, the ruptured organs, and the lacerated viscera she knew lay just beneath the interposed palm. The horrific and unwanted desire passed when Skye's body stirred slightly, his head lolling to the side on the ground while blood poured from his lips.

"Raven…" he gasped out now that the mouthful of blood had cleared down his face, and she was shocked that he was able to talk at all considering how ground up his insides were.

"You shouldn't talk—" she tried to warn him to silence, her week voice a bare whisper from the magnitude of her exhaustion. She was silenced when his far hand lifted off the ground to stay her protest with an upraised palm, then dropped down to point at the gem on the glove that now held his insides in place.

"Touch… gem…" he just managed to choke before a spasm of some kind wracked his head and left it completely limp on the stone. Raven could hear the robot fighting its way out of the wall that had collapsed onto it behind her, but she was so wiped out at this point that it didn't really matter to her. She wasn't even sure how much longer she'd be conscious, so she was hardly worried about how close behind her the thing trying to kill Skye was. Freed of reservations by the bubble of undirected despair and complete exhaustion holding up her mind, she reached out a shaking hand to touch the red, blood-coated gemstone that dominated the back of his palm. There was a rush to her head, the strangest impression of darkness and emptiness, and then a presence prickling along her thoughts.

(Shift to Thought-Speed)

"Thanks for the save, though I hope you won't be offended if say that I wish you'd been a little sooner," Skye's mental voice spoke directly into her head. Raven couldn't believe it, but everything from the crystal clear mental connection to the way the now indistinct background of the world had frozen like a single movie frame argued against her. They could only have entered full communication, and now their minds were jacked together as closely as two consciousnesses could ever be.

"Skye…" she tried, but words failed to express how incredibly, lividly, mind-numbingly embarrassed she was, as her training had been rather specific about this kind of mental contact. It was the kind of thing one did with one's parents, one's children, and… well…

"Please spare me," Skye's tone took the wind out of her crushing embarrassment in a real hurry, replacing it with a kind of shock as he continued with "that view of full communication belongs in Victorian England along with prohibitions against hand-holding and blowing kisses. Whoever taught you psi must have been a real stuffy old bat. And besides that," he cut off an attempt on her part to get angry at him, something she hadn't realized she had the energy for until he'd started talking, "this isn't really a full connection, just a shadow of such that I'm creating with the amp gem. A real one involves various… 'Sensations' that I have little doubt you wouldn't appreciate right now. It wouldn't do us much good to plan a way out of this mess if you just up and kill me afterward for taking liberties like that."

Raven's answer came in the form of a storm of images and feelings that Skye was helpless to avoid now that he'd enjambed their minds into thought-speed communication. She pelted him unreservedly with indignation at everything from the way he'd insulted her and her teachers to the massive amount of nerve he had to be lecturing her in a time like this. When it had all passed, she still wasn't quite able to suppress how happy she was that he wasn't dead or acting like he was dying. That slipped through the end of her tirade despite her best efforts, and to her surprise she was met with a reserved but extremely meaningful feeling of gratitude in return. The interchange of emotion cleared the link of all the stress and misunderstanding induced rancor, and suddenly the purpose of this connection snapped back into the forefront of her mind.

"Skye, give it to me straight," she asked him, a calm seriousness in her mental tone as the gravity in her soul that was all she'd allow herself of the despair she should rightly feel began to catch up with her, "are we going to die here?" She asked because she knew he'd know, he couldn't possibly not feel and comprehend the way reality was twisting around them, hinging on their actions like a drop of water that had yet to discover which way it would flow down a pane of glass. No matter how butchered his mind was, he'd know.

"Not necessarily," was his perfectly honest and completely ambiguous response, absolutely failing to satisfy Raven in a way that none the less gave her a beam of hope to hold up her sagging morale. "I've traced it all out, and it looks like there is only one course of action that includes both of us living to see tomorrow. Everything blurs off to infinity after this one event, which means all of possible fate in the local cosmos is percolating around us right now. Do you feel honored yet?"

"I feel tired," she answered without emotion. His sarcasm was not lost on her, but she honestly had little sympathy in her soul to squander on a man who was plagued with knowledge like this, especially when it was about to… hopefully… save their lives.

"And I have a little something up my sleeve to fix that," he came back to her flat expression of the hopelessness of their situation with an enticingly direct infusion of vitality, her mind perking at the mere suggestion of something to give her a fighting chance against that thing.

"Well, don't keep me in suspense here," she demanded calmly, the sudden improvement in her mood shifting her back into comfortably neutral and out of the uncharacteristic slump.

"As I was pouring through myself in a completely fruitless attempt to avoid being impaled, I came across a little something that may be of aid to us. I myself have no way of using it, at least none that I could commit and still live with myself afterward. You however, might just be able to make something of it."

Without further explanation, Raven was granted a vision of that place she'd visited earlier, the mirror of Skye's soul she'd delved into to tap his powers. The view rushed past everything she remembered, her passing glance showing the fantastically organized and compartmentalized space was even more impressive while active than it had been when he was absent. Even now, with his whole consciousness oriented to communicating with her, a great flow of information traveled in rivers and eddies as he processed the world around him with those wonderful senses. All that was quickly left behind, leaving Raven at the bulbous shield behind which his vampiric core still gorged on the Hate's energy. There was something different about it, and as she tried to figure out what it was, he picked up his explanation again.

"Raven, while we were off shooting the breeze on the astral plane, using astral time, my vampiric core was hard at work doing what it does best: feeding its bottomless appetite, in core dimension time, no less. At first, when I noticed the shield's size hadn't decreased after about two hours of work from the core, I thought I was just having a little trouble digesting all that demonic hate. Then I took a closer look, and as I realized what had happened, my powers lined up exactly what I had to do."

"I'm… not sure I understand," Raven answered his almost excited speech with a solidly neutral tone that represented just how far she returned from the pit of despair. With the way Skye was talking, it was difficult to remember that almost certain death was ever-so-slowly bearing down on them as their mental connection compressed their conversation into fractions of a second.

"Raven, your power and your emotions are connected a lot more closely than I ever imagined. I thought I was being careful only to drain out the Hate that powered the creature possessing your body, when in fact I got a bucket load of this at the same time," and he caused the shield to become transparent and allow them a view to the contents. Rather than the cloud of blood thirst and malice that she'd detected upon her original snoop into the energy cage, now their resided within what could only be called a sight for sore eyes. Power, her very own accursed and beloved black energy, and a whole damn lot of it. Just then, she could never remember having seen anything so beautiful, and an uncontrollable feeling of pure relief washed through her, the accompanying wash of other emotions causing the bare fumes of power left in her soul to sparkle in their explosive response.

"My psychic vampirism," Skye continued, seemingly basking in the feeling she sent down the line even as a steadying pulse of caution returned from his side, "allows me to remove any and all forms of energy from a living or spiritual entity. However, the core can only consume emotional energy, leaving any other types completely alone. Otherwise it would eventually drain my life away as well and cease to exist with my expiration, you see. The hate was eaten out of the larger mass and left behind a pristine sea of your energy in my mind. It was quite the piece of luck that I put that energy inside the shield with everything else too, considering the fucking picnic it would have been finding out what that stuff meshing with my spirit would have done."

"Are you done yet?" she couldn't help but snap at him after that long-ass speech, "Damnit Skye, stop running your big mouth and let me have it! There's a killer robot with your name on it knocking at the door, and this girl has a few life debts she'd like to get off her back already." Raven's neutral tone was tinged with eagerness and bravado, her confidence ballooning as she got a sense of just how much power was sitting in Skye's skull. She'd thought the mass of power the Hate had drummed up was lost to the free ether during the process of prying that bitch out of her control core, but now it looked like Skye had saved nearly every drop.

"Great, that's definitely what I wanted to hear, but just hang on and listen for a moment. I've got a feeling that even everything I've got here might not be quite enough. There are… uncertainties in the near future."

"What kind of uncertainties?" she asked reflexively, and realized what a stupid question that was only an instant before the wave of annoyance she'd drawn from Skye slapped her in the metaphysical face.

"Shit Raven, if I knew that, do you think I'd waste time giving you obscure warnings? All I know is that we're in it up to our armpits here, and this power might not be enough. Also, I'm in damn bad shape right now."

"No kidding, if you move your hand I could probably see China through that hole," Raven quipped neutrally, a kind of empty revenge for the way this reminder dampened her good mood.

"Heh, ha, heh, heh," Skye actually laughed, a real and genuine laugh with an accompanying sensation of humor through the link, and Raven almost fell off the connection in surprise. No one ever laughed at her snide remarks (except B.B. who was always rather transparently sucking up). "But all kidding aside, about the only thing I can do to help is back you up with intel. ESP doesn't do shit with this guy, he's fucking invisible, but my danger sense is still going strong—though that's about the only damn thing working in my whole skull right now. Anyway, I'm going to rig it up to your mind and try to piggyback a normal mental contact onto the end of this one, okay? I'm a little too toasted for anything more advanced."

Raven, despite all that had happened, still managed a distrust relapse, the thought of giving him that kind of access making her uncomfortable in a very familiar way. Skye could sense it immediately through the link and made the kind of sound one makes when trying to hold back a scream of frustration, only in thought form, if you can imagine that.

"Shit, Raven please!" he begged, and the sincerity was unimpeachable with their minds jacked together like this. "I'm bleeding to death on the ground, my mind is fucked six ways to Sunday and, oh yeah, I've got a really big hole in me! Please, this is all I can do, the only way I can pitch in here, and I've got a damn strong feeling its necessary, so get off that 'walled island of distrust' you've got going on and give me a fucking chance here… please?"

Raven took a very long moment to consider his words. She wanted to let him in, or at least recognized how much good sense it made, but she'd been doing this the same way for so damn long… it was just hard to let it go. Keeping her mind to herself had been tantamount in her own eyes to protecting the world from her father's influence… and in turn protecting herself from letting others know exactly what a freakish half-breed she was. Then of course, it dawned on her that a guy who, perhaps better than anyone else she'd ever known, understood just exactly what she was, still looked at her with a terrifying emotion when his senses were tuned to surface of her mixed soul. That one thought pierced her enduring distrust at last, and she acquiesced with a feeling rather than a word, unwilling to say anything more to him just then. He responded with a new wave of gratitude that touched her enforced iciness without effect, but persisted none the less.

"Once we drop out of this contact, things are going to go big time crazy, and I don't have enough power to set up another one. Is there anything else you want to ask about before the shit hits the fan?" Raven took his question as sort of peace offering after the strain of what had just gone on, and for the benefit of both of them, scraped herself back up to something like normal for her answer.

"Where haveyou been Skye? The shit hit the fan about five minutes ago, or didn't you notice?" The snappy, curdled-milk answer with its accompanying tone of a rancidity indifferent mood was so utterly her that she actually felt better afterward, and she was forced to wonder if he'd intended that too.

"Damn Raven, I guess you're right. I must have been holed up somewhere at the time," and he snapped the connection before she could go off on him for the pun.

(Realtime)

Returning to the rigors of actual reality after the vacation of pure thought Skye had treated her to was quite the shock, and with her arrival, Raven felt the fatigue in her body like a pair of sandbags had just settled on her shoulders. It occurred to her that she'd been on the razor's edge of consciousness when Skye had invited her to that connection, and now that the world was back she found herself fighting off an encroaching blanket of oblivion that threatened to suck down her mind. She clawed helplessly against the advance of the dark, struggling to keep awake, but the effort was wasted, and panic began to seize at her.

"Touch the other gem," Skye snapped into her mind, and the words came with a wave of energy that pushed the blackness off of her mind just far enough to let her. She couldn't imagine what that small bit of energy had cost Skye's pulverized powers, and so didn't waste the aid, reaching out to touch the opposite gem with an unsteady hand.

This time she got a very different impression, a sense of warmth and completeness, as though all of everything lay within the stone, and then the power returned to her. It was spectacular, a sensation like waking up from some terrible drowsiness with a single infusion of energy that instantly permeated her entire body and mind. As her finger jerked away from the suddenly hot stone, she gazed down at her hands in stunned amazement, for she hadn't gained just some of her power back… she'd gotten it all back. Feeling like she was fresh from a good meal, some sleep, and two hours of intense meditation, she levitated herself to a low hover over Skye's body just as the Robot finished peeling itself off the wall she'd swatted it into.

"Do you like the amp job I did on that energy Raven?" Skye slid the thought gently into her mind, the terrible weakness of his mental tone very obvious to her, "I owe my life to these rocks a million times over, and it looks like we both owe them this time."

"Do you mind? I have some garbage to recycle," she answered, and he said no more, though the tenuous presence in her mind remained.

The robot cleared the rubble at last and started to skitter across the broken ground faster than anything its size should have been capable of. Raven barely saw the streak of black coming before it was already on her, her body flashing to the side to avoid a stab before she really knew what was going on, then jetting higher in the air to avoid a sweeping blade and a second lunging spear. By some process she neither understood nor had time to analyze, her body was dodging its strikes without her actively doing anything at all, and she supposed she had Skye to thank for the way this freed her of the need to shield and gave her the chance to counterattack this horrifically quick opponent.

Her view of the blur-fast black robot was dangerously faint, but she eventually caught her opening as she buzzed around the beast in her blackly glowing way, her own lightning quick dodges keeping her just centimeters out of reach as it tried to strike her down again and again. It was as it followed a scissoring front arm assault with a jab at the area she would have had to dodge through that she spotted it, the shield she was suddenly compelled to call into being catching the twin-spearing second legs and holding them fast as she herself flew up and over the now completely unbalanced foe for the strike. Gathering a pulse of power in her hand, she swept down to cleave the thing in half.

As she brought her hand through a sweeping chop, she formed the energy into a miniscule thread of destructive force, drawing a black arc through the air and driving for the trapped machine. The thing slipped out from within the arc with a cracking snap as the blades stuck in her shield popped off, and Raven immediately reversed the motion of the blow to sweep around the side it had retreated toward. She didn't get a good look, but again her slicing blade of power went wide, the thing seeming to twist and distort away from her attack in a ducking motion that gave it the perfect opening while she was off balance. She was compelled to shift her dimensional phase the next instant, and melted away into shadow as blades came around to gut her. When she reappeared a good distance up in the air, it was to the sight of the thing extending new spear tips on its second legs, repairing the only real damage she'd managed to inflict so far.

"I understand that you have something to do with me dodging it," she commented into the back of her mind where Skye resided, "but how the hell did it avoid me?"

"It's probably using its sensors to read the muscle movements under your skin and anticipate your attacks. I can do the same thing with ESP, and it works really just great. It all comes down to—"

"SKYE! Fighting now—NOT the time!" she cut him off with an audible shout before he could start lecturing again. It was like the guy lived off of spreading around all the crap he'd packed into his freakishly tidy brain.

Armed with her newfound knowledge, Raven muttered her mantra as the thing leapt through the air at her, picking a few good sized rocks and infusing them with her spirit even as she sliced through space as a puddle of black and avoided its lunge. Emerging halfway from her pocket dimension, her head and shoulders melted up out of the ground beneath it, and she leveled her gaze at the thing while directing her projectiles to their target. The stones flew truly, but the thing turned in midair and speared them with its second legs, slamming them together and clinging its body to them. She tired to use them to crush it to the ground, but it had already pried itself free and sent itself flying at her again, forcing her to retreat or have her head spit upon its claws.

She emerged fully some twenty feet away and gathered a veritable armada of stones ranging from baseball to refrigerator in comparative size. They rose into the air all around it as she bellowed her mantra, frustration magnifying her power even as it weakened her control slightly. In a flurry, the stones shot in at it from all sides, her attack coming in earnest now that she realized just how dangerous her opponent really was. The thing was unbelievable, and began to dodge and weave through her striking stones as though it knew where each and every one was coming from before she could even throw it.

Tiny, invisibly quick motions allowed it to dodge the smaller stones while it shrugged off larger ones with blurred scuttling she couldn't anticipate. Finally, she used more power to snatch at its leg and hold it in place, only for it to begin plucking the large rocks out of the air with strong-arm blocks from its claws and impact cage, preventing any real damage while still avoiding her small stones. The next moment it pried loose from her spiritual grip and was moving too fast for her to reestablish it, and now she was on the defensive as it tried to weave through her barrage to attack her. She began to add any bit of wreckage that she could in her attempt to hold it off, the creature getting better and better at dodging her strikes as the conflict wore on. She wondered desperately in her mind what was going on, and was 'rewarded,' by an answer from the wounded one.

"Raven, it's a ROBOT. That, as I mentioned earlier, means sensors. It can read the movements of your attacks just as easily as those of your muscles, probably with ultra-speed tachyon scanners and a positronic processor to boot, 360 degree field of vision with reflexes to put any living thing to shame. …You aren't likely to hit it like that."

"NOW you tell me," she snapped back irritably, all comradery forgotten as she began to feel the sting of his bitter sarcasm. It was particularly bad because it recalled all the times she'd done the same things to her friends, and a taste of her own medicine wasn't what she wanted just then.

Using that frustration as her focus, she dropped everything she'd been about to fling at the robot and took a deep breath, shouting her mantra as she lifted herself into the air, drawing a huge stone slab up into the air beneath her with flowing black beams from her outstretched hands. The robot seemed confused by the end of her last attack and stood still for just long enough that she managed to envelop it with energy and crush it into place, the fabulous power it fought back with making lifting the slab at the same time a spectacular burden.

"Dodge THIS!" she shouted, and flung the slab as hard as she could, then released her grip and let gravity do its thing. The enormous hunk of wall slammed onto the robot like a brick hitting a tarantula, and the screeching-crushing sound made the analogy particularly appropriate, especially along with the bits of leg that stuck out from under the slab on either side.

"Did I get it?" Raven asked out loud as she descended to the ground in exhaustion, gasping for air in great gulps as sweat began to roll down her face and hair in rivulets and dampen her filthy cloak. She still had plenty of spiritual power, but using it up like that was sucking down her body's strength like she couldn't believe.

She was tired enough, in fact, that a sudden explosion of sound and motion from the stone caught her forebrain completely off guard, a snap of impetuous from Skye's powers kicking up a shield she'd never have managed without him and blocking a rain of stones moving faster than bullets with a terrible sound of cracking and ricocheting. She let the shield fall just in time to look into the cloud of dust and completely loose track of the robot, a scuttling sound of its terrible speed taking it away the only indication of what happened.

"How am I supposed to stop this thing?" she asked herself without thinking as she choked on the dirt and tried in vain to locate the machine. It was only when he answered her rhetorical question that she realized she'd been subvocalizing.

"Raven, you've got the power, you just have to bring it to bear on this thing. You've got to think of some way to surprise it, catch it off guard, you know. Its intelligent, but it isn't creative… it can't anticipate an attack outside of its experience." Even as she absorbed this information, the smoke began to clear, and the robot was nowhere to be seen.

"Skye…" she began to ask, as it dawned on her just how dangerous this could be, but he didn't answer so much as pierce her mind with a spike of panic. UP was the general impression, and she found herself falling backward and raising a shield before she was even entirely sure what was going on, then realized the necessity when she caught sight of the black bullet bearing down on her a split instant before it struck her shields. She charged diagonally into the air, springing out from under the shield just in time to avoid the blades that came arcing around the sides of it so hard that even the ground beneath where she'd been was sliced open. The robot didn't loose a stride, rolling off the shield and throwing itself after her then hitting the ground and springing into that skittering, super-fast run it had. In seconds, it was breathing down her neck, gaining ground even as it began to nip at her heels with the swords on its front claws.

Turning to face it as she flew backward away from it, the strikes came within range, and suddenly she was trying to dodge as she retreated. It seemed to have gotten ten times faster, so that even the blur of its movements was impossible to perceive as strike after strike rained in at her, her mind riding Skye's power and her body and powers reacting without her involvement at all. She actually became kind of detached from the whole thing as they began to travel in spectacularly fast circles around the pillar that had gutted the building, her body keeping just out of reach with quick movements to randomly dodge away from attacks she couldn't see for their speed.

The thing began to close in, and suddenly she was creating thin, bar-shaped shields all over the place, seemingly at random but apparently with quite a vital purpose, the sound of one blow after another clanging off them quite apparent. The movements were becoming indescribably quick, and Raven could feel herself tiring, even as Skye's power directed her body in the absolute minimum of defense to keep the thing away. It was as she was feeling the bite of despair then that Raven was struck by inspiration.

Zipping away from the machine, placing shield after innumerable tall, thin shield in her wake to keep it off her, she glanced over her shoulder until she saw what she wanted bearing in from the left. Willing it to be so, the defense she hadn't personally been running bore in that direction, the creature following in its single-minded attempt to remove the final obstruction keeping it from its target. She arrived at her destination, then struck out with an undirected blast of power that flung the thing back a hundred feet easy. Of course, despite the jarring manner in which its obscene forward momentum was reversed and its bulk was cast across the area, it still didn't take any significant damage, and was up again and staring at her in half a second. Good.

Exactly as she predicted, the thing closed about half the distance, then flung itself into another leap that would crush down on her with blades borne. She didn't wait, but flung up a completely opaque black shield like a dome obscuring her from view, then put her plan into action. Once again as predicted, the thing sped down with full force, probably hoping to crack her wall with the spears and trap her before she could fly out from under it. Unfortunately for it, a mere instant before impact, the shield evaporated, and it was not Raven that resided beneath it.

With a jarring thrust, a slightly bent steel beam that had been broken off to a pointed tip rocketed out of the ground like a shot from a cannon, screaming up to impale the robot in a movement no earthly eye could hope to follow. The robot probably saw it coming, but at those speeds it didn't matter, and with the sound of plastic cracking and shattering under unbearable strain, the murder machine was run through like chicken on a spit, the momentum of the blackly glowing beam sending it into a fantastic spin as the two interlocked masses twirled into the air before returning to the ground. Like a pitched sword, the beam wobbled and rolled through the air in uneven loops, then struck the ground point first with a terrible jolt and vibrated slowly to a stop. Raven held her breath as she melted out of her pocket dimension, watching with undisguised hope as the robot's legs continued to twitch and flail on the stake.

After a moment, it became apparent that it wasn't going to stop, and her anticipation soured to such an extent that her sigh was only partly exhaustion when she sent her spirit into a few pieces of steel piping sticking out of the ground at her feet. It was with more than a little satisfaction that she twirled the pipes into the air around the spider, paused a long moment for personal effect, then jammed them through it one by one, piercing it in seven places before spiking the last one through its sensor array, which had avoided the steel beam by some miracle of aerodynamics. After another fitful jerk or two, the thing began to hang limply from the steel spike, a murderous arachnoid beast impaled on grimy steel, the whole grisly affair illuminated by the scattered flood lights and road flares, everything framed by the smoking wreckage of the building and the pillar embossed with the S of Slade.

As a slight wind kicked up behind her, her cloak blew forward around her, her hooded eyes sparkled with fatigue, and she sighed as she crossed her arms over her chest. She almost jumped in surprise when a cheer kicked up from across the shattered ground of the disaster area, and she turned with measured slowness to gaze upon the enormous crowd of medical personnel, police and rescue workers, the walking wounded, and simple rubbernecks that had ignored the curfew imposed by the mayor. All were cheering, sending up yell after yell in nothing less than supreme praise of her.

Whether it was for stopping the apparent threat, for rescuing them a second time in one night, or simply for providing a great show of good winning out over evil, she neither knew nor cared. The thing had not been after them, and she had not been fighting it for them, except in the most round about of senses in that she needed Skye's smarmy ass alive if there was to be any hope of saving anyone. The thing had been after Skye, and only Skye, and it was as she realized this that she allowed herself to fade from sight in a swirl of black power.

The next moment, the swirl of black reappeared next to Skye's body, and she faded back into existence right above him. Without a word, she knelt, then took a seat near him, careful to avoid the already coagulating blood spilled across the stone. She removed her filthy hood to air out her sweat-drenched locks, then cast a sidelong glance at Skye's body, seeing that it had somehow changed since last she looked at him. He no longer looked like he was in any mortal danger, but none the less he still looked like a dried-up shitstain on a bad stretch of road, so much so that she almost regretted coming after him again, his presence having withdrawn from her mind around when the crowd started cheering for her. Careful not to actually touch it, she passed her palm close over the gem, sending in a thought to the mysterious realm of emptiness and cold that was currently clamped over his no longer bleeding abdomen.

"How did you like the show?" she asked neutrally out loud and into his mind at the same time, careful to project every ounce of indifference toward his opinion that she did for nearly everyone else's, only wishing she felt it as truly as she usually did.

"Showoff," he accused her quietly. She took the comment without expression, and, looking back at the fluid-dripping, multi-impaled, totally demolished robot she'd just taken out, she couldn't deny the fact. As though a great weight had been lifted from her, all the strain she'd felt around Skye just evaporated with this one comment, and she fell completely into the neutral, bored, but none the less amiable tone and manner she used with all her friends (when they weren't being annoying).

"Yes," she admitted freely in that classically calm voice and its mental counterpart, "I did kind of show off. You've been touting your abilities so 'modestly' the past few days that I decided I should demonstrate my ability now that I'm actually needed for something. Do you have a problem?"

"No! No," he hurried to qualify his comment, a kind of pleasant spring entering his mental tone at the way she'd spoken to him. "On the contrary, I can understand perfectly, and I've got to apologize. I know I've been something of an ass the past few days, and I mean, when you mix the persona I created to cover my… disability… with a need to gain trust that borders on apocalyptically important, and you don't get an answer that leaves much room for modesty. However, I'd like to assure you that you never needed to prove anything to me."

"What?" she demanded elaboration on this point with a gentle curiosity to match her tiredly calm tone.

"Raven, you've frightened me quite completely since I first laid senses on you. You've got power that I can only begin to fathom with a mind to equal people several times your age and experience. With willpower that borders on unreal, you fight a daily battle against internal forces so great that I had to shatter my brain in the process of weakening it. To a guy whose seen more of this vast reality than anyone his age should ever be subjected to, you, and your friends, are some of the most potentially dangerous beings I've ever come across, engaged in warfare against evil as vicious as anything I've ever faced. Tell me why I shouldn't have respected you enormously since the instant I met you."

"Oh… well… thanks," she managed to keep a stammer out of her voice as this armada of complements sailed into her mind. With a mild shock, she realized that the shielding between them was casual at best, and that she could feel the truth in his words along with the exhaustion permeating his consciousness. "I mean, you certainly did a good job of acting like an aloof bastard then," she managed to tack on the smart remark, feeling the humor bubble out of him in response. It was an extremely unexpected pleasure to have run across a fellow adherent of the Cynical Biting Sarcasm school of humor.

"Yes, I can assure you that covering one's reactions comes much easier when the only time you have more emotion than the average rock is right after you've nearly killed someone from emptying them of an intensely personal spiritual commodity." She felt a wash of amusement as his return remark, even as she clarified her earlier thought in her own mind. Had she actually thought another person with her sense of humor would be a pleasure?

"Okay, let's ditch the self-loathing and get down to business here. Why was that machine after you?"

"While I'm tempted to direct you to the gaping hole in my intestines that even now threatens to overcome my nerve block and send me into a shock induced coma, then let you draw your own conclusions about what it was trying to do, instead I'll simply answer you direct. I have no clue why that thing wanted to kill me, but if I could get a good look at what's left, maybe lay hands on some pieces, I might get some idea. Touch clairvoyance is strong enough that it'll even affect the god forsaken stuff that thing is made out of. Of course, that'll have to wait."

"Are you going to be okay?" she let a hint concern tinge her tone exactly as she would for any of her other friends, and once again drew surprised pleasure from Skye's wracked mind.

"According to my internal diagnostics, I'll have thirty percent functionality back within the hour, which means I should be able to stand and talk, if not a whole hell of a lot else. After that there's really no telling how long the reconstructors will take regenerating the damage. As for my mind, I've just about finished piecing my ESP and everything back into a rudimentary working order, but it'll be days before I've got my real strength back. Uh…" and he seemed a bit embarrassed, of all things, "thanks for asking. Err… how are you?"

"Fine… thanks in a large part to you I suppose. How did you… you know… get me to do that? I've never moved like that before."

"I don't have my strength, but a little temporary rewiring takes only skill. I routed my danger sense through your reflexes and transferred motor control to subconscious directive, taking out the terrible delay that intent involves. After that it was a matter of passing a few suggestions through the back of your mind to get the whole process running. I couldn't have possibly directed the defense personally because I don't have the slightest clue how to use your powers. Except for the whole 'knowing where every strike was coming from before it happened' thing, it was all you. Pretty cool huh?"

"Right, it was definitely the only thing that saved my neck there. Thanks for… not letting me… go it alone." She felt a sting in her chest from admitting this, but when it passed she actually felt a little better. It had been one thing to borrow his powers while he was safely out of body, but letting him piggyback in her skull had been further than she'd ever let anyone transgress, and doing a rewiring job on her brain, no matter how temporary, had been way more than she'd bargained for. It was still a little hard to believe she'd given someone that much trust with her mind and soul and not been betrayed. There really was a first time for everything, then.

"Friends don't let friends face almost certain death by themselves," he commented, having dropped his persona of overbearing pleasantness and continual arrogance for the dour, world-weary being beneath. For the time being, at least, the air between them was clear of everything, no assumed identities, no massive paranoia, no mind numbing misunderstanding, no particular need to impress or intimidate, and they were both so run down that their powers weren't even pressing the hormonal front anymore. Raven took in the moment greedily, hoping to all the beings that ruled over such things that it would not be the last time she felt this comfortable with another sentient being. The moment drew to a close when Skye made another stab a humor with, "And besides, if you had died while protecting me, I'd have been really sad for the minute or two before that thing finished me off. I owe you big time now."

"It was nothing," Raven muttered, some of her natural aversion to complements resurfacing without warning and prompting her to withdraw from the link somewhat, closing into her own mind before continuing. "When I actually thing about it, that wasn't nearly as bad as you made it out to be."

"Uh, Raven, you really shouldn't—" a flash of panic pierced the moment and shot her full of ice water through her connection to his mind. "SHIELD! Raven, on my signal!"

Instantly her mind was filled with images and a countdown that wen all the way down to the milliseconds. Careful not to let how shocked she was show in her outwardly tired and oblivious demeanor, she went through the information he sent her and prepared down to the last second. When the time came, she sprang a wedge shaped shield to their left literally the same moment a blast of red energy came charging out from that direction, parting around the shield like a tide that smelted the stone around them into bubbling slag.

"You just had to question the ESP didn't you?" Skye muttered sarcastically into her mind. "This was bound to happen anyway, I suppose, but crap has a tendency to wait for comments like that… or haven't you noticed? It's one of those odd rules of this reality we live in…"

"SKYE!" Raven snapped with a gasp, her mind flashing through a spectrum of surprised emotions at the arrival of this new threat. Just when things were going good, this had to happen, and now Skye was mouthing off again. It was incomprehensible, and despair began to creep into her heart again as she felt the exhaustion hit her bones like a leaching grip of numbing cold. "I… I don't know if I can take another hit like that!" she choked out, then, "I think we might be fucked this time!"

"No… not necessarily…"

Oscillogenerator Secret Construction Site, moments ago

White sat in his plush, high-backed command chair with an incredibly unpleasant expression on his face, his fingers tapping on the armrest as he gazed at his main view screen. The sight of the kill bot he'd personally designed for the singular purpose of eliminating that man gutted and impaled upon a steel stake riddled him with indescribable fury, and it was with a shaking hand that he reached out to press the call button on his desk.

"Yes Whige?" asked the putrid blob that was Yellow when he appeared on one of the several secondary screens. He appeared unfazed by any emotion, though he could not help but know the result of the battle.

"It would appear that I have won our little wager, Yellow," and the barely suppressed rage in his voice seemed to have little effect on the expressionless criminal genius he was currently trying to intimidate.

"If I mighg remind you Whige, ig was nog so much a wager as ig was a necessigy. Ghe ogher robogs have nog been given ghe progecgive coaging yeg. So—"

"I distinctly recall you saying, 'I donGG, believe GGhe oGGGer roboGGs will be necessary.' That makes this YOUR FAULT! I bet you that, even completely disabled, he'd still find some way to survive an attack from just one of the units! You lost the bet, and as penalty for your incompetence, you will be granted exactly ten percent less of the universe once I own it all! Now send in the other kill bots immediately! For your sake, they'd better be able to handle him without the primary unit!"

"Whige, wighoug ghe coaging, Ageng Skye mighg—"

"I don't care! Send them!"

"Bug ghey wong even sgand a chance!"

"DO IT! DON'T ARGUE WITH ME YOU SIMPERING PILE OF PUKE, I WANT HIM DEAD, NOW!" and White's eyes fairly bulged with indescribable hate. Yellow jiggled in agitation this time, and cut the connection without further talk. White was left alone to stew in his own vile emotions, loathing for that man mixing with loathing of his own violent emotions to create a putrid cocktail of nastiness.

Outside in the work area, the nearest mind-slaves began to feel the feedback, many sickening and falling to their knees as the torturous agony of White's feelings began to grind their numb brains into goo. The nearest slaves actually gripped their head and screamed helplessly as they began to bleed from their eyes, noses, and mouths, their craniums being cooked by the intense power, bathing them in indescribable pain for the few seconds they managed to survive it.

(Yellow)

Yellow was left quivering in his own incomprehensible version of anger as the line to White cut out. The calculating iciness of his alien mind simply can't be described all that accurately in terms humans would understand, but an attempt will be made here anyway. The dialog within his pulsating nerve bundle was divided among the multiple segments of his sentience, but went along something like this, speech impediment free for pure convenience.

"How dare that simian speak to me like that?" he asked himself in the core of his mind while the peripheral sub-minds toiled away at the dozens of different projects he was working on. "He will yet pay for such disrespect!"

Yellow was left to ponder in dismay the waste of the other two kill-bots, doomed to easy destruction at the hands of the vile IDP dog that so vexed White. He'd reread the black market dossier on that agent immediately after he'd been assigned to the assassination, and so while he knew why White had ordered him to invest in the exorbitantly expensive anti-psi plastic, he knew equally well that the two kill-bots without it would be as meet before such a being.

He delegated to one of his sub-minds the process of getting the orders out to the other robots and thusly commence the waste of two fabulously valuable pieces of hardware to no greater purpose than White's unreasoning hate. That done, he put his core mind to the much more interesting task of discovering the connection between White and Skye. Since the moment he'd uncovered White's assassination/distraction attempt and sabotaged it with that subtle clue that had drawn the dog here, he'd been digging through the annals of recorded galactic history to find out just what existed between the two strikingly similar quasi-Terran freaks. His success so far had been… limited.

The history of their professional enmity was quite apparent in those areas of the IDP record database he could access, the reports of their multiple encounters and battles as complete as they were organized (And why not? His species was the one enslaved/hired to work the IDP database, which is also the only reason he couldn't hack it all the way.) And yet, while these described the existence of the furious feud between the two, even detailing the way Skye had won out temporarily and gotten White imprisoned, it gave no clue toward what began the hideous conflict or why exactly they hated each other so. The enigma perplexed Yellow delightfully, and it had absorbed his core consciousness for quite some time now, his subsidiary minds more than enough to engineer his duties, his personal projects, and his enormously convoluted plot against White all at once.

Thinking of White and his insufferable barking of orders drew Yellow out of his involvement in the puzzle quite completely, and he cursed the maniac's overwhelming power even as he turned away from his pet project and focused for a moment on the operations of his own plans. Unable to escape by means of physical force, for which his species had had little use since they'd force-evolved themselves out of bodies including anything other than nervous tissue, he was left hostage to the beastly creature's telepathic abilities and the brute strength of his terrorized underlings. The worst part was, the primitive was brilliant beyond reckoning for his species, and was proving to be impossible to manipulate out of his insane goals, dragging Yellow into the impossible pipe-dreams of a vicious, violent, raving lunatic.

So far Yellow had kept his plotting concealed quite efficiently. Feigning what was, for his species, exceptional stupidity, he concealed his core mind and a number of sub minds behind a screen of his lesser intelligences that White had yet to penetrate with his disinterested but thorough searches of paranoia. He perpetuated the ruse by pretending to fall for White's transparent attempt at placating them with tampered zappers, even going so far as lying to Green about them lest the nasty one discover his knowledge of it and investigate him with all his power. He had a modicum of respect for the dangerously vain photosynthetic crime lord, but he knew that her plans had little chance when compared to his, so he didn't risk anything for her.

The fact was that White was a genius, possessing a pure creativity more than likely born of his extreme emotional imbalance and deeply manic nature than the superiority he claimed for his 'species of one', as he liked to brag. The robot designs and dimensional engineering theories he put forth were unparalleled in all of regular space as far as the pure science went, rivaling higher dimensional technology in a way that set the IDP way over the edge. That this was combined with a telepathic ability able to pierce military-grade mind shields with blasts of brute, unrefined mental strength is what made the creature so very frightening, of course compounded by the fact that he was completely sociopathic and utterly homicidal. Yellow still couldn't understand how Skye had managed it before (the reports got fuzzy here, barely describing a psychic vampirism element in Skye that they refrained from mentioning in the low-security files he could access), but he knew that this disgusting lower life form would be his best bet at liberation from White, and so he let the manipulations run.

It was this fact and little else that had led him to create the slight delay which had held back the plastic coating on the second two kill-bots, certainly saving the life of the currently unprepared and ill-equipped agent. He'd expected White to see the first one fail and recall the others, but the thing continued to refuse to act with any logic when it came to Skye, and now he would loose all the precious parts and labor that had went into those two for naught. Skye might even be able to trace the things back to their separate garage before the self-destruct kicked in, or otherwise extract all kinds of detrimental intelligence from them. While this suited Yellow's plans perfectly, it still stung him deeply to waste like that, and just giving up information was always painful to his secretive species. Oh well.

His core mind was distracted from these thoughts by one of his sub minds as it bumped up some issue or another for higher consideration and integration into the greater reasoning matrix. The battle between Green and the Terran Slade was going poorly for White's forces, negative life readings indicating that Green was either dead or disconnected from the ultra-bug he'd placed on her and all the others. The unjamable, quasi-infinite range, totally invisible spies had cost him a fortune, but fortunes he had aplenty, while intelligence like what they could gather was hard to come by. His connection to the others read that Blue had teleported back to base and entered a regen tank, and that Red was unconscious and his auto-recovery timer was ticking down, so those two would probably make it, not that Yellow really cared. In all, he noted once again the odd nature of this Terran species as he filed this information away and directed that sub mind in what to do in response.

He'd noticed, mostly through his observation of Skye's movements, and now again through this surprising victory from Slade, that Terrans were not equivalent as a species. Slade's victory was not totally unexpected, Yellow himself had sold the exceptional Terran villain quite an impressive amount of advanced firepower from the stocks he'd bought up for White and also those for his own secret operation. The secondary source of distraction for White was meant to keep him concentrated on Green and her end of the conspiracy, but to his surprise, it was quickly shaping up to be a potential escape route for him all by itself. He doubted that Slade would stand a chance against the horrifying power of White, but with the A-class scrambler he'd put in the Terran's hands, anything became possible.

So that end was not totally the product of this odd Terran excellence, but there were a number of much more concerning cases to consider. While most of them, the intense majority in fact, were no better than domesticated livestock in comparison with beings like Yellow's own vaulted species, or the other highly evolved specimens this universe had to offer, there were a few exceptions. White and Skye he had some ideas about, but for all his vast riches, he could not fully comprehend how beings like Slade and the posse of children Skye had fallen in with came to exist among such embarrassingly primitive stock material. He was forced to put these "Super Beings" down to the very same unusual planetary time-space dynamic that White was so fascinated by and leave it alone, unable to spare a sub-mind to churn over the question.

Once again Yellow was distracted by a sub-mind with its accompanying concern, and this one also detailed a battle he'd been supervising. One of Green's important secondary bases, assaulted by Slade in a transparent diversionary ploy that Green's failure to recognize had probably earned her her defeat, was currently occupied by a pair of young Terrans from the group Skye was plotting with. One of them was trying to hack the main database from Green's peripheral access port, an enormous blunder on the part of whoever was making the attempt. It would be easy to set off the explosives in that console, if not simply to blow the whole base and really ruin the night of whoever was foolish enough to tamper with it, but he decided instead to shore up that end of his manipulations.

Letting one of his inner sub-minds, those that were hidden from White, take care of organizing the leak he desired, he recalled the information he had on the two 'Teen Titans' that were currently infesting Green's base. As he went through the information, among which was their entire life stories, educational records, genetic profiles, medical histories, and genealogies back as far as this pathetic species traced such things, he decided that they would indeed be perfect vectors for yet another branch of the invisible corridor he sought to lead Skye down. The manipulations would run indeed, and he would be free.

Pier Park Base

As Cyborg stood down and away from the burning, smoking ruins of the fantastic conflict that had taken place here, he continued to study the computer console he was attempting to access. The ECM in this place was unreal, and sweat dripped down the human side of his face at the terrible risks he was running by trying to hack this thing blind. Lord knows it was common enough to booby-trap such things, and his lack of effective sensors was leaving him sadly ignorant of whether or not this was such an instance. Making the whole thing worse was Beast Boy and his unbearable pestering.

"Would you come on?" he snapped out for about the millionth time, pausing in the hole he'd been pacing in the floor with his impatient, antsy, twitching to nag at Cyborg.

"Just shut up, B.B. and gimme some room here," Cyborg asked, barely restraining the screaming fit the combined stresses were demanding from him. B.B. just couldn't leave it alone though.

"I can't believe you man! What could possibly be so important? Slade's robots and whatever they came here for destroyed each other, and this sorry excuse for a base was wasted with them! We need to go back, we lost contact with Robin and Starfire ages ago!"

"I'm warnin you man, just get offa my back before I do something I regret here," he squeezed through teeth clenched against shouting, the delicate work he was doing at the console suffering badly from the distraction.

"They might need our help Cy!" Beast Boy persisted unreasonably, "you said yourself that if Slade and Terra aren't here then they're probably at the other battle site! We need to get over there and find out what happened! I mean, Starfire and Robin aren't answering, what if they're hurt or something? Raven and that new guy are probably halfway back to the med-bay by now, we need to get out there and check up on them!" It was probably around here that he realized the other guy really wasn't going to acknowledge him, so he forced the matter with an exasperated "…Cyborg!" and he ended his attempt at persuasive shouting by grabbing the arm of the cybernetic goliath so astutely ignoring him. This was a mistake.

"OKAY, that's it!" shouted Cyborg, turning from the console to look way, way down at the much shorter guy, lifting his arm until the green one hung in midair at his side. He waved his arm through the air until Beast Boy was flung from it, then glared at the crumpled heap of green furry annoyance where he lay disoriented on the floor.

"How many times am I gonna have to explain this to you? Robin and Starfire can take care of themselves, Robin assigned us to this place, and we're not leavin until we know what the hell happened here! There's a goddamn WAR raging in the streets of the city man, doesn't that even worry you a little bit? If I can hack this computer, I can find out what touched off this battle and what Slade's robots were fighting against, and right now that's just a bit more important than getting yelled at by Robin for running after him when we're supposed to be here! Got it?"

His fists were crossed over his chest as his red eye glowed dangerously in the dim lighting of the wrecked computer room they'd found. The space was recessed under an old ticket booth, the unimpressive alcove most likely hidden from view under the pier inside one of the massive cement pillars that were supposedly there to support the park's weight. After their arrival, they'd stormed the place, rescuing people and putting out fires in spectacular flair, generally doing the hero thing, all without being troubled by whatever caused the destruction. Survivors they'd questioned on the way detailed a fierce battle between mysterious flying robots and the quite familiar army of Slade.

The two had found remains aplenty, enough robot parts strewn in the water and the docks to account for a frighteningly large force of the nasty things, but not a single functioning droid to be found. Of the victors, there was equally no sign, the wrecked parts of these never large enough even to get a good idea of what they looked like. It was while looking once more for any sign of survivors or antagonists that they came across the hidden room, and Cyborg had been at this console for a good half hour since then.

"Give me a BREAK!" Beast Boy shouted fearlessly as he peeled himself off the floor, "this place isn't going anywhere, so why the hell are we wasting our time here when we could be out helping the others?! We need to go to them! They might be hurt—Terra might be--!" but Cyborg cut him off with a huge step forward that clanged against the metal floor and actually bounced the lighter man up off of it with the reverb.

"I knew it!" he snapped as he looked down at what had once more become a heap of green fuzz, "this isn't about the others, it's not even about getting back at Slade! You've been whining my ear off for the past forty minutes because you wanna see your girlfriend again! I can't believe you man!" and the utter contempt in Cyborg's voice pierced the younger guy's heart.

He couldn't hold it back any longer, and tears began to flow freely from his eyes, the sudden wracking sob that burst from his lungs freezing Cyborg in his mental tracks and leaving him completely speechless. For a long moment, he stood in stunned silence as the little guy let it out, unable to recall the last time he'd been as confused and uncomfortable as right now. Eventually, Beast Boy began to belt out his woes in poorly articulated bursts of misery between gasps.

"Cyborg… you just don't understand… she wasn't my girlfriend… she wasn't my anything… there wasn't time!" He paused for a long wracking series of sobs after this, but finally managed to go on with, "Slade… Slade he… he stole her away before I could tell her how I felt." And now his voice grew quiet as the sobs slowed to a miserable muttering.

"I didn't know what was going on… I'd never felt like that about anyone before… and then when she betrayed us… I thought I'd loose it! She seemed so cold, so damn evil… but I always knew it was just him, using her like he uses everyone and everything. Fuck! How could we have failed like that?! How can we ever do enough to make up for leaving her to him?"

"B.B…." Cyborg tired to articulate some kind of answer, despite the clearly rhetorical nature of the little guy's heartbroken musings, but felt his voice fail in the face of the emotion pouring out before him.

"God… when we thought she was stone… when we thought she was gone for good… I can't even describe it. It was like someone had torn out my heart and put it on a metal spike, I… I… it was just…" he was at a loss for words.

"You were pretty inconsolable," Cyborg supplied for him quietly as he sat down next to the green one with a loud clang, leaning back against one of the small room's nondescript walls. Beast Boy nodded, then continued.

"I was so messed up inside, I just couldn't let her go. I lived every day with the weird feeling that she would be back again, that she would just up and appear, and that I had to be ready at any moment so I wouldn't miss my opportunity to tell her… to tell her how I felt, how I Feel. I wasted so much time with cowardice and indecision… worrying uselessly how she might feel about me… that it was just too late when I finally made up my mind." Beast Boy paused, taking long deep breaths as all the pain and misery was fought back by grim determination.

"Never again Cy… do you understand? I've got to get her back, I've got to see her again so I can know once and for all what this feeling is that's been torturing me all this time." Beast Boy's voice trailed off, and he sat in quiet misery next to his huge friend as the two of them shared a moment of silence. Cyborg felt like a complete ass-monkey for yelling at him the way he had, and gathered his strength to talk it out now, to do what he could to help his best friend with a problem they'd all been ignoring heartlessly for fear of its extreme depth. He hadn't really considered Beast Boy capable of such appallingly serious emotional strife, and this was they price his friend had paid for that ignorance.

"I guess we all knew you took loosin her hardest of all—we would have been blind not to notice. But man, you've got to understand, we were all torn up about it, none of us really wanted to admit we'd never see her again, and so we kept our mouths shut, we pretended she'd never existed, as though that could erase the pain. When you finally came out of that funk you were in, we all kinda had one big sigh of relief, and we moved on too. I never realized how bad you had it for her, otherwise I woulda at least talked to you about it, but you really looked better, and no one wanted to wreck it by bringing it up again. Sorry man."

"I can't really blame you guys," he forgave easily, still wallowing in his own misery, "I pressed the whole thing out of my mind because I just couldn't take it anymore. I sort of tricked myself into believing I was over it all, you know, for my own protection. I can't believe how stupid I was."

"You really did seem over it," Cyborg continued to talk with him, trying his best to find a subject that would get him out of this mood before he broke the good news to him. "I mean, you were joking, laughing, arguing, and choking down tofu like it had never happened, and with the way you were hitting it off with Raven and all—"

"What? Raven?" Beast Boy asked, perking out of his gloom in pure surprise at how the conversation had just turned.

"Uh… Yeah man." Cyborg was glad to have him out of the pits, but uncomprehending the look he was getting now was creeping him out a little. "Don't you think we all noticed the sparks between you two? When that Malchior guy showed up you turned about ten shades of green deeper than usual, then that whole Adonis fiasco kind of wrapped it up. You mean to tell me that you don't have a thing for Raven?" and he couldn't keep the incredulity out of his voice.

"Well… damn…" he seemed at a loss for words now that he was actually confronted about this, turning an odd pink color under the fur on his face, "I don't… I mean I can't really…"

"Just spit it out man!" Cyborg demanded, sounding way more annoyed than the subject really warranted, a fact that would come up again momentarily.

"I guess I'd be lying if I said I didn't kind of have the hots for Raven…" B.B. admitted, his blush deepening, but he rushed to qualify the comment, "really though, she's cute, she's smart, she's got a great smile, what's not to be attracted to?"

"Why do I feel a 'but,' coming on here?" Cyborg asked colloquially, urging the younger man along now that they'd fallen so deeply into guy-talk that he'd left his problems behind.

"But," and Beast Boy grinned now at his metallic buddy, woes temporarily forgotten, "I can't really say if there's anything real between us. I owe her a bundle for the way she helped me cope after Terra… went missing, and I felt really close to her after that. When she discovered that lying piece of shit Malchior, I just couldn't stand the fact that she had someone to make her happy while I was secretly still ten kinds of screwed over about Terra. In other words, I guess the green you noticed was envy, rather than jealousy… for the most part anyway. Then when that soured on her, I felt like crap again for being so envious, and so I tried to help her cope the same way she helped me. Later on, when I got those chemicals all over me, I don't know, I kinda went all crazy. I saw she was in danger and just lost it all over the place trying to protect her."

"Was it cause of what I felt for her? Would I have done it for any of us? I don't know. My feelings have been so scrambled these past few months… I just really don't know. But, Cy, the bottom line is not 'how do I feel about her,' though, it's way more, 'how does she feel about me?'" And really, who the hell knows what she feels about anyone?"

"So you're sayin you haven't really been tryin to catch her eye?" Cyborg asked, an almost hopeful note in his voice that finally let Beast Boy in on what was going down here.

"No, not really anyway. Definitely 'No' until I figure out this whole thing with Terra. And now… I wonder why you don't exactly look heartbroken that I said that?" His question caught Cyborg off guard, and it was the big guy's turn to blush all down the human side of his face.

"Hell man, did you know that girl can construct a complete two, four, or six wheel drive train from memory, knows more about mass stabilization and energy conversion ratios than I do, and she borrows my Sport Compact Car magazines when I'm done with them? What guy wouldn't fall for a girl like that? If not for the way you two were goin at it, and the fact that she just keeps herself so damn distant, I woulda asked her out ages ago."

"Are you still going to try?" asked Beast Boy doubtfully, but with a huge grin, thinking he could probably sell tapes of the scene that was likely to be on the Internet for big bucks. He almost laughed out loud at the incredibly amusing image he got in his head, wondering idly how long it would take to find all of the big guy's pieces afterward.

"Uh… to tell the truth," Cyborg answered sheepishly, "I've kinda moved on. Raven's just too untouchable, way outside anything I'm willing to stick my nose into. I'll always love being around her, and we've got tons of customization on the T-car ahead of us that I can look forward too—she even thinks she could cast enchantments on my baby—but for anything more serious, my eyes have definitely been drawn elsewhere." He raised his voice as though thinking of something very pleasant, and Beast Boy immediately knew what he was talking about.

"Ha! I knew you were crushing on Bumble Bee, you were practically drooling the last time she called!" Beast Boy taunted, loving the way the huge guy blushed, then transformed his embarrassment into pride with a big smile.

"And why not? She's a total FOX man, and I'm not even kiddin. And that left hook, mmm my god, love at first black eye—if you know what I mean," and he held his jaw as though remembering the time she leveled him. The goofy grin on his face was not particularly consistent with people remembering fights they technically lost, and Beast Boy shook his head in submission to the fact that his big friend was just weird.

"Whatever you say man, whatever you say," and he trailed off as his mind turned to something else, something that he hadn't really considered before, but which could be important. "What do think about that new guy, Skye?"

"Whadda you mean?" Cyborg asked, getting something of an idea right away despite his question.

"Come on man, no two people can instantly hate each other as much as he and Raven seemed to and not be hugetime digging one another. I'm willing to call something right there man, I'd even put money on it!"

"Well, I suppose anything is possible," Cyborg admitted, gaining something of a frown at the thought of Raven dating. "Raven has somethin about her, probably that whole dark mystique thing, which makes it pretty well impossible to not feel attracted to her at some point or another. I'd be willing to bet that even Robin, before he got so tightly wound around Starfire that it would take a strategic nuclear weapon to pop him out, probably had somethin of the hots for her. This new guy is probably feelin that same bite."

"You can say that again. Before I realized she was carting around more emotional baggage than an army of freshly dumped sophomores, I was totally working up to asking her out. It was just her habit of shouting her head off at me every time I started to have a little fun anywhere near her that slowed me down."

"Well B.B., you do have a nasty little habit of … BEING AN ANNOYING JACKOFF!" Cyborg shouted, slamming his fist into the metal floor for emphasis.

"HEY!" Beast Boy gave him a dirty look, even as the impact with the floor bounced him off of it slightly again.

"But… you do bring to mind a good point. Raven isn't exactly a 'social butterfly.'" Cyborg commented with a look of consideration on his steel-plated visage.

"Yeah, more like an 'antisocial time bomb with a short fuse'," Beast Boy said with a dour look on his face as he recalled the plethora of times his purely innocent antics had been interrupted by her terrifying outbursts.

"What I mean is," and Cyborg flicked the little guy on the head for badmouthing their friend, receiving a yelp of pain and a second dirty look for his trouble, "I don't see her ever getting close to anybody, no matter if she liked 'em or what. She tried that with that dragon thing and look what happened man, people just don't 'get over' stuff like that, as you demonstrated with that little tearfest."

"Dude—that wasn't what it looked like!" Beast Boy panicked slightly as he realized what he done a moment ago, "I just had something in my eye is all. That's right… I must be allergic to something down here!" and his hopeful smile combined with the cold sweat he spontaneously broke out in to prove that he really was terrible at lying.

"Mmmhmmm," Cyborg hummed his skepticism, and Beast Boy's face fell like a bad soufflé. He crumpled in on himself, becoming quiet for so long that Cyborg thought he might have gone a little too far with his teasing. Just as he was about to up and apologize though, the little guy began to talk in a quiet, distant voice that Cyborg rarely heard from him.

"All I know is… if they do get together (he says, so totally not sure how he feels about the idea)… he'd better not break her heart. …I don't know if I could watch that happen to her again." Beast Boy's voice grew particularly low and slow as he made that particular promise, the ground this assertion was based on being far safer in his mind than the really jumbled Raven/Terra thing going on with him just then.

"Amen to that!" Cyborg agreed readily, his robotic eye gleaming in the dimly lit room, "for his sake, he'd better do right by her. I'll tell you what man, if something does go wrong, I'll break his legs, you can break his arms, and I don't even wanna know where Robin and Star would hit him."

"Ha, ha… right man," he seemed to revive slightly at the thought, "Oh… hey… speaking of those two, how's the pot looking?" Beast Boy at this point was just letting his mouth run, enjoying the distraction from the emotional turmoil in the back of his head so much that any subject was game to keep him off the ache that was even now creeping back into his heart.

"Huh? Oh right, the 'when will they finally get together' pot. Well let's just take a little look-see, shall we?" he said cheerfully as he lifted his arm and turned on his data-readout there. He'd usually just read it off the HUD on his cybernetic eye, but instead, he displayed it on a hologram in the air for the green guy's benefit.

"Looks like the stakes have raised!" he exclaimed in surprise as he got a look at the data, "Raven placed a bet… two hours ago? Wow, she really upped the ante too."

"What date did she put it on?" Beast Boy asked curiously as he let his head loll back onto the wall, staving off the pain with deep breaths and a feigned interest in Cyborg's words.

"You know her man, she's keeping it secret so we don't change our bets to match. She always wins these things, so I dunno why we even try to compete anymore."

"Your bet is still… where?" Beast Boy asked, keeping the fire of conversation stoked.

"February 14, man, definitely. If Robin doesn't put it all together by then, I'm givin up on his clueless ass."

"Heh… mine's on Starfire's birthday," he said in a cheerful bragging voice, and Cy could feel one of the little guy's rants coming on. "I'm pretty sure Robin's been searching for alien merchants on the Internet so he could buy her something special from her homeworld. I figure he's planning on using it as an icebreaker for asking her out." Beast Boy was properly smug as he let Cy in on his 'inside information,' distancing the pain a little bit as he basked in that wash of satisfaction. The other guy just shook his head in disappointment at B.B.'s misplaced hope, almost certain that Raven had found out some actually substantive information to change her bet on.

"Alright man, we've cleared that up pretty well now, it's time to get back to work." Cyborg ended the conversation on that note and pulled himself to his feet. Beast Boy looked disappointed, the end of their chat brining his mind back to the terrible anxiety in his soul.

"Fine… just try and hurry with that thing would ya? The others might really be in trouble," Beast Boy refused to completely give up his argument, even though he had a much better handle on what had been driving him, and in turn Cyborg, right up the wall.

"Oh, I don't know man, I think it might be time to check on them all right now. I'll bet they've already got Terra in their hands, so it'd be a shame to hold off on linkin up with them any longer. I can come back and work on this tomorrow or sumpthin, it's no big deal." Cyborg had a little bit of trouble talking past the smile he wore, his heart warming with the way the younger guy's face lifted.

"YES!" he shouted, leaping to his feet. He was so hyped, he took a random jab at the wall, punching it solidly in exhilaration. Instantly the spot he hit lit up in a large square area, lines of light escaping from that square in every direction to trace all over the walls and floor. The two stood in stunned silence as a mechanical whirring sound struck up in the background, just before a lighting-quick hatch slammed shut over the hole in the ceiling and a siren went off, lighting the room with red strobes.

"Oh crap…" commented Beast Boy, never having moved from the punching stance he held, his fist still pressing the spot.

"Damnit B.B.!" exclaimed Cyborg, but that was when the floor fell out from under them.

Former Site of Green Construction

"Teleport us both… here!" Skye slipped in the thought along with an image of a hidden place a little ways down on the wrecked area they'd been battling across, and Raven didn't argue. Skye could tell she was tired, but none the less they slid smoothly across space, instantly appearing behind their antagonists just before another pair of beams could burn in and eradicate the spot they'd occupied a moment ago.

Now that he'd traced their fire back to their location, he'd planted Raven and himself under some cover very near them and got to work. He didn't know what the hell problem these things had with him, but these two weren't invisible to his powers, and he'd make them regret coming after him like this. Anyway, immediately after they phased back into reality, safely concealed in the alcove he'd led her to, Raven keeled over next to him and began to breath heavily, more than a little spent. He left her to rest as he slipped gently OOB and used the small amount of power he'd managed to horde to engage his ESP from his free mind (which wasn't nearly as easy as using it from within the shell of the body).

Immediately he gained a view to the two robots that had most recently accosted them. They had a very similar construction to their previous assailant, with six forward legs that could be used for walking or attacking and two hind legs designed for walking only. The major differences were that these two had a hard metallic sheen rather than the obsidian black coating, they were about half as large, and instead of the head mounted forward like some kind of spider, their main bodies had enormous beam weapon barrels sticking out the front with the heads on top of the main body. The heads were currently spinning rapidly, trying to reacquire the two of them after their sudden disappearance, the two machines unable to confirm their destruction from the fumes left in the spot they'd vanished from. Skye was certain the things would find them if given enough time, and so he had another very good reason to hurry.

"Raven, I know you're tired… I am too, but this should be very easy," he explained to her as he struggled to maintain the use of his powers while OOB, the infinitely simple task requiring a Herculean effort in his state of exhaustion. He received an agreeable pulse of thought back from her, and so slid filtered versions of what he was getting on his ESP into her mind. Inherent in these was a perfect view into the interior of the killer machines currently searching for them, and he sent her the next stream of thought as soon as he had himself finished running through what all was inside the mechanical beasts.

"These conduits…" he began, changing the view he was sending her until it focused on the thick wires near their internal power sources, "Use your powers to break these and we're home free."

"I… don't know if I can…" she pulsed back to his free-floating mind, carrying with it a feeling of deep, bone tired exhaustion. Skye realized with a sinking feeling that his power input had recharged her spiritual energy without vamping up her mental preparedness and physical endurance. She still had power to spare, but the way his modifications to her reflexes had taxed her body was now taking its toll, and she could barely stay awake for the extent to which she'd pressed her limits. His own ability to maintain the image was fading rapidly, and with a buzz of confirmation, the two robots discovered their hiding place.

"Come on Raven, just this one last thing," he hurried into her mind as the robots turned and began to charge their weapons. He could sense the capacitors building the enormous charge necessary, and he knew that this would be their last chance right here, so he put everything he had left into a pulse at Raven's mind.

With little finesse or subtlety, he cobbled together an image of them both burning to ashes under the incinerating heat of the beams the two robots were about to fire, along with full accompanying sound and smell, then beamed it into her head. With a sudden jerk and a cringe of horror, she snapped her head off the ground, gasped deeply twice, then pressed a wave of her energy into the stone from her hands where she lay on top of them. The carpet of black traveled the small distance between them and the Robots, passing right through their cover, almost instantly touching the legs of the things where they gripped the ground as the robots aimed. The black wave traveled through the machines in a flash, and Skye channeled the vision of the energy coating their insides into her mind so she'd know when she had the right parts in her power.

Instants before the beams could fire, she snapped the conduits apart, the twin murder-bots crumpling in on themselves as they lost all power in that one small movement. Their limp bodies began to fry and melt down slightly as all the charged up energy heating their collection units was suddenly in place without any coolant fields, and in moments the two things were slag heaps to match the plethora of wrecked junk in the clearing under the S marked pillar.

Raven took the opportunity to collapse, muttering her opinion of his motivational tactics along with something about Skye's ancestry that he didn't care to listen too closely to as she faded into a deep sleep on the ground. The last of Skye's power also faded, and he was left alone, a floating mind in the sea of nothingness that the world was without any ESP to illuminate it for his free consciousness. Slowly, he willed himself back to his corporeal shell, his mind falling feather-gentle back into its home as he sighed in satisfied exhaustion. Man it was great to still be alive after something like that.

Of course, now that he thought about it, he was immobilized by his injury for at least another fifty-five minutes minimum (he didn't relish the thought of moving even then), and Raven was out like a light. They were currently hidden quite completely under a dome of wrecked junk that he wasn't sure he could personally move, even in perfect health. That meant they were trapped for the duration. …Damn.

As Skye kicked back in his own mind to consider what he should do with the boatload of free time he and Raven had bought with that gallon of blood, sweat, and tears, it was Vera who rained on his parade. She took a break from monitoring her ride's health to remind him that he had responsibilities, and that time, no matter what it seemed like, was of the essence. He was the one muttering curses as he instantly dropped all thoughts of recreation and turned to the task he knew he should already have completed. An inaudible moan of exhaustion marked the moment he reinitialized the one power that he knew so well, he could still use it when everything else was wrung out of him.

Under his current… 'ideal' circumstances (it was really weird thinking of his current 'in a potential deathtrap' situation as 'ideal' for anything—but it was), it didn't matter that he couldn't have projected a thought through the air if his life depended on it, or that his mind shield was a complete flat line, because his ESP would still answer to his beckon. Right now, in the pitch black of the hidey-hole, with no particular stress or distraction, with no local ambient psychic disturbance besides the background of tragedy and what had slipped past Raven's shield during her fantastically impressive episode of heroism, there was nothing at all to make it an effort. It was not unlike breathing to him as he let the world come back into focus.

Now that he had the time, he worked his mind around the power until he'd gotten it back into working order. Earlier, he'd had to wing it, and the energy he'd used had tapped him out, so now he had to make adjustments for this fact. He didn't have enough energy for more than a rudimentary clairvoyant idea of what was around him, and his spirit senses were rather shot through, so he dropped everything out of the latter and stuck it in the former. He was left with just enough range and resolution to see the remains of the two things that had tried to bake him.

As he poured through what was left, he began to create a composite in his own mind, memorizing each piece and part before adding it the mental blueprint. Though it was all badly melted, he soon recognized that almost all of the pieces and parts were of extraterrestrial origin. He then knew that the pack of killers he was after were no longer in the dark about his presence, which certainly made his night. He'd kind of figured that the oddly executed but inherently professional assassination attempt had been their doing, but the implications for how that meant the rest of his investigation would go had kept him from admitting it to himself until just now. What intrigued him more by far was the fact that that first robot had had his name on it, tailored specifically to take him out as surely as any of the really well done assassination attempts he'd weathered had been. That meant that, whomever else their posse included besides the blue-eyed bruiser, at least one of them had intimate knowledge of him, more than could be bought on the black market by far. He went through the short list of people that qualified with a growing sense of dread.

As his heart began to freeze up in his chest, he cast his senses into the machines once more, contracting his field of view until he reached microscopic levels. He began to search, his mind numbing over slightly as he entered that particular state of mind, the one where you frantically attempt to find something you are terrified of actually discovering. Quickly he located spots where the micro serial etchings had been expertly removed, but he continued to frantically pour through the machines. Finally, just when he was about to let himself breathe a sigh of relief, he found what he hadn't wanted to find, and a potpourri of emotions erupted within him.

It was kind of hard to believe that a simple micro-etching of a large bird with outstretched wings, not unlike the eagle on a quarter, could arouse such a reaction from one person. He would never fail to recognize that insignia, belonging to that man, and emotions ranging from the purest terror to the fiercest hate bloomed uncontrollably in his soul. For a long moment, he could do nothing but ride the wave of feelings, confusion and anger bubbling into the mix when he was finally able to wonder how the hell this had come about.

He'd put that guy away. He had wanted to kill that guy rather than run the risk that he would ever have another chance to achieve his twisted ambition, and more importantly, as payback for what that guy had stolen from him. The IDP had stepped in and stopped him forcibly, stealing that guy away so his power could be forcibly applied to the desires of the CW much as Skye's were. He'd known, he'd known it all.

In a way, he'd known from the moment that cutthroat had made a stab at him in slipspace that this was somehow related to that guy, they'd always had a connection like that, after all. He'd known that the IDP's holding facilities would be insufficient, he'd known that they'd never be able to get that guy to do anything he didn't personally decide to do, and he'd known that this would come back to bite him in the ass. That it had, as all his premonitions tended to, come true, was just another stinging slap in the face.

The feelings faded slowly (his PV was still gorged), and knowledge of that guy's presence settled into his mind like the start of a migraine, the terrible weight of what that would mean for everyone around him gaining presence in his long list of deep concerns. As this happened, without warning, his power went crazy.

The ether of existence to which his very soul was attuned was shifting on a massive scale, the wracking vibrations and warping structures of the possible striking his reduced senses like someone had placed a huge bell on his head and started hitting a hammer. He would later dread to think what it would have felt like with his full strength senses active, but at the time he was a shade too deep in torturous agony of the extra senses to think to carefully about it.

With a psychic 'sound' like a thousand fingernails scraping across an enormous chalkboard inside Skye's head, the incomprehensibly enormous and ever infinitely branching tree of the possible and the potential was shifting at its base, the Now, twisting and crackling upon its infinitely complicated roots, the Past, and redefining all that it represented, the Future. This is a disgusting simplification, of course, because there are infinite 'Nows' from which infinite branching paths extend to form infinite trees of the 'Future,' all twisting and overlapping through reality to form intermeshings of cause and effect so complicated that even ultra-sensitives like Skye, at the very pinnacle of their perceptive abilities, could only hope to comprehend the closest and most momentously likely of events in terms of rough probabilities. In any case, the fabric of reality turned on its axis, and Skye, able to detect the chaos this entails, suffered in the process.

His body shook with spasm after spasm, the motion lancing through his puréed insides and threatening to overcome his nerve block with the resultant flare of debilitating pain. His almost epileptic episode wracked motion out of his body he hadn't though himself yet capable of, and a flailing leg scraped along Raven's back, shocking him sharply, but making no apparent impact on the dead-asleep woman. His head pounded with a pain that threatened to twist his mind out of shape and leave it as a piece of modern art-esq. sculpture, and everything he had shook at least slightly as he felt the modulation of the ether down to the smallest cell in his body.

Finally he was left in peace, the new set of reality slamming into a place with a finality as real as any Skye had ever felt. He continued to shake uncontrollably for quite a little while as all thought of rest was driven from his mind by what had just happened.

"Fuck… Fuck… Fuck…" he repeated within his mind as he struggled to get a hold on the flood of entirely new and unexpected potentialities that accosted his danger sense, his long-trained mind rushing to evaluate them and prioritize them as best he could considering their unprecedented volume. The winds of fate had just shifted, and he knew already, with a heart sinking faster than a week-old pop music hit on the request charts, that there was still more to overcome before this night was through. And he could barely keep his senses open.

Peer Park Base—Underground

Cyborg shifted where he lay, peeling himself off the hard floor to sit up slightly. As he got his processor back online after that sudden impact with the ground, the hatch slammed shut depressingly far above him, and he was left in complete darkness. His eye automatically switched from regular video to light amplification, and by the dim glow of his own circuitry, he could make out innumerable indistinct shapes out in the darkness.

"B.B.?" he asked quietly, unable to find the guy, even when he switched to thermal scan the next moment.

"MMMPH!" came the muffled sound from underneath him, and suddenly he knew where Beast Boy was. He shifted his rear a few feet to the side and was rewarded by a sudden gasp for air in the dark.

"DUDE! You just totally SAT on me man!" he shouted, like just declaring the obvious would somehow exact some remorse from Cyborg, who was now having trouble keeping a straight face.

"Sorry man, you know: don't got any sense of touch on the cybernetic parts," he said through a smile that Beast Boy couldn't see in the blackness. "But seriously, you know where we are now?"

"How should I know? You're the one with all the fancy, high tech watchamadoodles!" he snapped back irritably as he got out from under the big man.

"I already told you, the scanners don't work against whatever they've got jammin me down here!" he snapped right back, then, "and hey, I don't need that tone from the knucklehead who got us trapped down here in the first place!"

"Give me a break! How was I supposed to know the wall was booby-trapped?" and the righteous indignation in his voice was classic. Cyborg could see him standing up on thermal view, and the little guy's sudden move to the right send him sprawling back to the ground after a loud clang and quick trip over Cyborg's leg.

"Would you watch it? You're gonna scratch my finish!" Cyborg complained loudly in the darkness and he shifted his leg to stand just in time for B.B. to trip over it again, this time with an amusing plopping sound as he hit butt first.

"Ouch! Hey, why don't you watch it? You can buff out a ding in your body but I have to heal my injuries! What am I supposed to say to the ladies if I break a leg tripping over your rusty butt?!" and it was clear that Beast Boy had fallen squarely and thoughtlessly into his competitive streak. Cyborg, having no desire to drag this out, went straight for the kill.

"Would you shut it already man? You know the only girl who even almost gave you the time of day isn't exactly in any state to worry about damage to your 'perfect bod' that big bad Cy causes down in this musty secret basement!" and he said it with just the right amount of contemptuous sarcasm that it hit as a powerful jibe rather than a deadly insult. It was actually kind of funny watching the little guy's thermal signature flare into the yellows and oranges as he blushed.

"Yeah… well…" he struggled in the dark for a comeback, "why don't you give me a hand getting out of here and I can try to, oh, I don't know, save her or something?!"

"What do you suggest I do man? Put a doorknob under my pillow and wait for a visit from the 'magical exit fairy'? I don't know how to get out of here!"

"Dude??" he asked, as though unable to understand something, then he came back with a voice empowered by victory, "you could start by TURNING ON THAT LAMP IN YOUR SHOULDER!!!"

"Uhh… oh yeah," Cyborg stepped back in shock, then nearly kicked himself (something you could actually manage with detachable legs) for his thoughtlessness. He'd been so absorbed by bickering with Beast Boy that he'd forgotten all about that particular option, even with the tool-tip reminder on his HUD suggesting that he engage it. Without further ado, he activated the lamp, lighting up the area with a huge beam from his shoulder. Instantly he was almost blinded by the change, the light seeming to come right back to hit him in the eye. When he was able to see, he was forced to catch his breath in shock, because there was a very readily apparent reason for the reflections.

They were completely surrounded by hundreds of identical robots, every one of which was currently staring at them. The room was enormous and circular, and numberless expanding rings of the robots currently centered directly about the small space they'd been stumbling around in. The reflections that had so stabbed his eye came from the literally innumerable snub-nosed blaster cannons and serrated blades currently arrayed about them and hemming them in like a garden of gleaming murder implements.

"O-Okay… y-you can turn it off now," Beast Boy managed to squeak out with a trembling voice, "I think... heh eheh…" a nervous laugh slipped out without warning, "… I liked it better in the dark."

"No… wait…" Cyborg slapped B.B. away as the spazz actually jumped up on his shoulder and started jamming down on the panel his flashlight extended from. As he went sprawling to the floor, he nearly ran face first into one of the robots, and he went crawling away backward at high speed until he smacked into Cyborg's legs.

"Just chill out wouldja?" demanded Cyborg harshly then, "they're not active right now, they can't hurt ya, so stop cowering all over ma paint job."

Beast Boy took the jibe with grace, his whole face freezing in the mask of panic he'd had, then distorting quickly into a fixed smile as he slunk smoothly to his feet, brushing dirt from his arms. "I knew they weren't on," he said impudently as he crossed his arms.

"Yeah whatever, just follow me. I think I see something over there," Cyborg was looking over the tops of the rows upon rows of machines to one of the walls, not bothering to dignify Beast Boy with skepticism of his transparent boasting. He began to pick his way carefully between the robots, and Beast Boy followed, getting a better look at one of them as Cy's light swung from side to side.

The immediate impression was one of general pointyness and overall blastyness to an extreme degree. Once one got past all the weaponry (no small feat), the design came down to a uniform disk about five feet in diameter with circular eye sensors on both the top and bottom. The blasters extended on twin-linked turrets from either end of both the upper and lower sides, so that all four would be able to turn and track independently in 360 degrees and those on the same side would be able to work together. The edges of the disks were completely coated in serrated blades, giving the distinct image of a buzz saw to the imaginative mind. As he passed between two of them in his effort to catch up with Cyborg, Beast Boy caught a closer look at the three-inch saw-teeth coming out of the edge, specifically because it looked like there was an area on the edge of the disk where blades should be but weren't, as though they'd been removed… or launched off. He couldn't resist, and in a moment he was reaching out to—

"Don't TOUCH that!" snapped Cyborg, and Beast Boy snatched his hand back while turning with a jerk only to find that the big guy had never faltered from picking his way between the huge circular weapons platforms, and had called him out without looking back.

"I thought you said your sensors weren't working?" Beast Boy complained as he hurried to catch up, ever careful not to slice himself open on the long blades.

"I don't need sensors to know what you were about to do. How about this time, instead of messin with stuff and accidentally wakin up all these killing machines, you just keep you hands to yourself, and follow me?" Cyborg asked sarcastically, his voice becoming almost singsong in its undirected anxiety as he got toward the end of his none to friendly indictment of the green one's usual MO in such situations.

"Fine," Beast Boy muttered back irritably, "where are we trying to get to anyway? Dude, I'm going to have a totally unpleasant close encounter with one of these knife-things any second now, and I don't even know where you're going!"

"I think I see a terminal of some kind over at that side of the room. I'm thinkin that maybe I can use it to get us an exit outta this place," Cyborg explained without emotion, the green guy's constant chatter distracting him from the delicate process of squeezing his huge legs between the closely packed machines. With them parked like they were, their blades came right in around his knees, and he'd already gotten at least one bad scratch in his finish from edging between them.

"If the terminal is over there," Beast Boy began with unusual decisiveness in his tone, causing Cyborg to pause in the next open area and look back, "Then why are we messing around back here?" Without giving Cyborg time to question what he was up to, the small guy leapt up into the air and gained about a hundred pounds of lift muscle, shifting into a giant pterodactyl and pumping up into the air just above Cyborg. Before the big guy could do more than bellow and yelp in surprise, Beast Boy had snatched him off the ground by his shoulders and was carting him through the open air of the enormous robot hanger with great beats of his gigantic wings.

As he wobbled and bobbed through the air under the flapping Beast Boy, Cyborg began to scream indistinct curses at him for making him into cargo. After a barrel roll that flung him up and almost cracked his head against the ceiling, then a jolting catch before his return to earth, Cyborg was a just a bit more polite. He was still more than a little short with the guy, however, when he found them both rushing toward the edge of the room and the slightly clear area with the computer far too quickly to stop in time.

"Wall! Beast Boy—WALLL!" he shouted in a panic as they got within twenty feet of the plain metal barrier that threatened to efficiently and very painfully halt their forward momentum. Still they did not slow, and Cyborg held out his arms to catch the impact just as the world fell out around him.

He hit the ground squarely in the clear area, his massive inertia leaving him in a spark-throwing skid as he slid and scraped along the metal floor. Unable to gain real traction, he was forced to grasp and paw at the plain steel as he skidded at rather high speed toward the computer terminal. Finally, he lifted his hand and slammed it down again, driving his metal fingers into the floor and halting with a sudden jarring jerk. When he relaxed, he spread out slightly on the floor, and his legs actually reached the computer terminal, which he'd apparently come only inches away from smashing to bits.

Beast Boy meanwhile had been doing his thing. After nearly smashing their only hope of egress with his bonehead dive-bombing run, dropping Cy like an enormous living projectile, he shot up into the air from the lessened weight and used the motion in his landing. Five feet from the wall, he transformed into a spider monkey, canceling all his speed with some feather-light simian acrobatics before striking the horizontal surface gently and kicking off backward into a spectacular series of flips and twists. In a very un-monkey manner, he landed a few feet from Cyborg, then thrust his chest out and his arms into the air like an Olympic gymnast, transforming back to normal while holding that pose.

"HA!" he exclaimed without opening his eyes or moving, "Robin's got nothing on me!"

Cyborg didn't wait, he reached out and snatched him by the neck of his costume while still prone, instantly choking him somewhat and forcing his arms to scrabble at his metal wrist in a panic as his eyes bulged at the pressure on his throat. Pulling his own body up off the ground, Cyborg lifted him off his feet, then brought him within inches of his face and began to glare furiously into his eyes at point-blank rage.

"I think what you MEAN… is that you've got nuthin in your HEAD!" Cyborg screamed so loud it actually blew the other guy's hair back somewhat, but then the little guy was beginning to suffocate on his own costume and his frantic scrabbling was growing weak, so Cy dropped him to the ground to once more lie in a graceless heap.

"Heh… eheh heh… no harm done right?" Beast Boy managed to squeeze out past a coughing fit, a nervous smile on his face as he realized the magnitude of his mistake, "computer's… right over there!"

"You," Cyborg spat the word as though to make it stick to Beast Boy's face, "don't move. I'm gonna get this thing runin, and I don't need any more of your 'help,'" and Cyborg's tone left no room for argument.

"Cool… cool dude…." Beast Boy backed away from the furious and much larger man without complaint, glad to be away with all his teeth considering the guy's expression, "I'll just… go scout around… or something—"

"NO!" and Cyborg caught him by his tiny leg before his quickly assumed bat form could get away, his large wings flapping uselessly for some seconds before he realized he'd been caught. Cyborg tossed him to the ground again, then finished with, "juststaythere."

With that final word, Cyborg turned from the dour changeling and shined his lamp on the enormous computer terminal complex that dominated this entire portion of the room. The robots were arrayed in their expanding rings behind him, but here on the edge was a big open area for the apparent controls, currently just as lonely and abandoned as the rest of this hangar seemed in the dark. Searching briefly, he located an access port, extended a data spike from his right index finger and interfaced with the system.

After fiddling with a simplistic password protection for a few seconds, he was granted preliminary access, and the terminal activated. Lights and screens lit up all over the place as the extensive control setup for the base came online. The larger room, however, remained creepily dark, its vast expanses not unlike a cave, barely lit by the reflected light from Cyborg's lamp and the gentle glow of the terminals. Satisfied that his entrance into the system hadn't alerted anyone or anything, Cyborg turned to the task of extracting necessary information from the thing.

As he ran through the databanks, he was quickly confronted by a large problem. Though system access had been a pathetic excuse for an encrypted password, vast tracts of the internal data were not only under cryptorgasmic lockdown ten ways to Tuesday, but as far as he could tell, they were recorded in a language (ahem… programming language) he couldn't even read! Ignoring these parts for now, he instead filtered through until he located something he could read and poured quickly over that.

He almost cried in relief when the unencrypted data was the base schematic and automated control protocol, and he got to work on this right away, informing his depressed buddy of the good news.

"Phew!" Beast Boy shared in his relief, the unspoken terror of being trapped down here with an army of hostile machines that could at any moment awaken and attack leaving them both slowly as the good news sunk in. "At least you're having more luck with this one than the one upstairs!" he added thoughtlessly, and Cyborg was immediately inclined to defend his abilities.

"The way I figure it," he began as he worked through the process of gaining the primitive system AI's trust, "the terminal upstairs was a decoy… you know, to make us think we'd found the base. That little room probably connects to other fake stuff just in case you actually crack that annoying-ass security system that was kicking my butt all over the place. Your crazy luck found some kind of trap and/or emergency access to their actual base!"

"The great Beast Boy strikes again!" he bragged from his lounging position in the dark behind Cyborg, immediately making the big man regret veiling his insult. He'd been trying to take the little shit down a notch.

"Damnit man!" he complained, "we're just damn lucky there wasn't anybody home, or else we woulda been dicked! If those robots back there had been active, they coulda buried what was left of us in the same thimble!"

"Nah… these things don't look that tough," Beast Boy continued to brag despite Cyborg's efforts to impress some caution into him. The metal man truly hoped that Beast Boy's bravado was some kind of reaction to the way he was screwed up inside, because he'd get himself killed if he actually believed what he was saying.

"Okay, let me explain this to you B.B.," Cyborg began, and the distant but serious tone he had actually caught the younger guy's attention, "because this isn't your everyday situation were in right now, so I could see how you might be confused."

"First of all, these aint your daddy's robots we've got lined up behind us. I ran through some blueprints in this database I'm cracking, and I gotta say I'm impressed. These things use some kinda anti-gravity technology I don't even pretend to understand to reach maximum airspeeds right around attack helicopters, but they're about a million times more maneuverable, like hummingbirds with blaster cannons. On top of that, those cannons they mount are checked out for anti-tank duty, or at least to crack open any of the ceramic-composite stuff we use on this planet."

"What do you mean this planet?" Beast Boy asked suspiciously, his voice lighting with sudden excitement. Cyborg could literally feel the obnoxious outburst coming, but he answered anyway, eager to get the episode over with.

"Well, since you seem to have missed the whole anti-grav and super-blaster comments, I'll just go ahead and spell it out for ya. These robots—they aint of this Earth man."

"WHOAH! Why didn't I see it before?" and Cyborg felt something inside wither as it began again, "This is exactly how it happened in 'Invasion of the Brain Eating Martians from Venus III'! Dude, we've got to get out of here before the tentacled brain-sucking horrors show up! I'm too pretty to have suction marks on my forehead!"
"SHUT UP!" Cyborg screamed in frustration as he reached his threshold for Beast Boy's idiotic antics. He was about three seconds from blowing a circuit before he finally lost it, and thankfully his outburst killed Beast Boy's irrational yammering without mercy.

"Thank you," Cyborg said calmly then. "If you'll recall, Skye said he chased some extraterrestrial-type criminals to Earth. If I had to guess, I'd bet this was their stuff. Get me now?" Cyborg seriously doubted that the younger man did, but he held out hope yet.

"So wait," Beast Boy began to wrack his brain over this, apparently trying to reconcile it with his 'what I saw in a movie' style of reasoning, "Five escaped alien cons come to Earth, and then they build an army of robots, and then they have a war with Slade, our human supercriminal."

"Yes!" Cyborg exclaimed in unexpected satisfaction, looking away from his work on the computer to gaze in pleasant surprise at how quickly he'd caught on.

"No Duh Dude, that's like, totally the plot of 'Slimefather Part 2: The Revenge'" he said with a huge smile as he remembered the film, completely forgetting the situation at hand for the time being. Cyborg felt his hopes disintegrate instantly, turning away with a soured smile to shake his head in disgrace.

"Beast Boy, how about you leave all the thinking to the rest of us?" Cyborg suggested sarcastically.

"Now that's something I can handle!" Beast Boy replied enthusiastically, still riding waves of good movie memories, absolutely anything being better than the turmoil waiting just behind the veil of self-absorbed musings.

Former Site of Green Construction—Hiding Place

"…Raven! …Raven! …Raven!" Skye tried again and again to beam a new thought to the prone woman and bring her back to consciousness. Unfortunately, unlike his ESP, his telepathy was taking its sweet time regenerating, as usual, and he truly didn't think he'd be able to span the few inches between them anywhere near soon enough to make a difference in what was coming. He was bordering on desperation, his hopeless worry causing him to breath in quick shallow gasps despite the way this stressed his nerve block with new pain from his guts. It was looking decidedly grim right up until the new presence formed in the pitch black of their hiding place.

Skye's ESP picked up on the third party's arrival instantly, and after a moment of unadulterated shock, he felt himself fill with a wash of sweet relief. Out of beams of sparkling pure white and pure black spirit energy formed the outline of a small animal, one that was very familiar to Skye. In a moment, the beams began to trace fine detail into the outline, filling in the frame with extravagant fur and noble feline features cast in a decidedly aloof expression. Finally, the spiritual illustration was complete, and the small space he and Raven had taken refuge in became somewhat tighter as a new physical presence appeared between them.

"Meow?" said Benvolio the spectral cat. When Skye didn't answer right away, he walked over through the pitch black and placed a paw on the gem gracing Skye's left hand.

(Shift to thought speed)

"Oh damn Ben, am I ever glad to see you!" Skye admitted the instant he was in mental contact with the very special feline his sisters had obtained so many years ago. "I take it that your presence here means that you felt the shift too?" With the promise of aid that his long time companion's arrival entailed, it was suddenly easy to be nonchalant. The cat generated an image of itself along the link, and answered with a twist of its head to the side, giving him a cockeyed stare that he could very easily interpret.

"Yeah, I hear you. That kind of thing only happens once every… what, five hundred years? I can't be sure, but I think it was triggered when I finally admitted to myself what I've been feeling all this time. He's here Ben." The cat hissed viciously, no more explanation necessary for the cat to know exactly whom he meant. Benvolio had every bit as much reason to hate His guts as Skye.

"Even more than that though," and Skye's mental voice lifted with happiness that was usually very rare when mention of him had been made recently, "I've been reading what I can out of the new pathways, and I'll be damned if this isn't it man. This is what we've been waiting for… the threads seem to be aligning for the go ahead. We could get them back!" and Skye's voice almost baked with barely restrained desire before he could reign himself in. He'd been waiting, biding his time, but now finally it was nearly here. Of course, the IDP, four supercriminals, and that guy all stood between him and any chance at rescuing them, but he could deal with this.

It was around then that he remembered that he was on something of a timetable, very much more imminent troubles coming to mind as his excitement was forcibly subdued by his PV. The cat's tail was snaking in excitement at the through of retrieving his favorite two beings in the universe, so it took a bit of doing to recapture his attention.

"Ben, you've got to help me out here!" Skye requested urgently when he'd finally gotten the feline's mind back in the present. He got the usual cattish reluctance in response, a gentle undulation of the cat's tail expressing utter contempt for Skye's whole situation. It could be so hard working with this guy.

"Well excuse me Mr. 'Freshly Groomed Fur', but I'd like to see what shape you'd be in after dealing with a class II demonic manifestation, a specially built esper assassin, and those two follow-up bots! Now please man, just do me a favor and press Zeph's gem against Raven's skin somewhere?" The cat image stretched and preened for a moment, then he broke the connection.

(Realtime)

Ben could be difficult, but he was in essence a great guy, and he carried out Skye's request without further trouble. Digging his claws into the gauntlet currently pressed over Skye's injury, he slowly dragged the cumbersome limb the short distance to where Raven had crumpled to sleep, pressing the gem on the back of his palm to the small of her back. The cloak provided momentary resistance, but Ben pressed down on Skye's arm until he was able to slip a thought directly into her spirit and connect to her mind. He immediately set about the process of giving her the same treatment he'd given Robin the other day in the med-bay. It took a good ten minutes, and he was sweating profusely as he began to shiver in acute weakness, but he finally pulled the rug out from under her sleep cycle and shoved her quite mercilessly back into full consciousness.

(Raven)

"Oooohhhh," Raven moaned in distinct discomfort as she stirred, a splitting headache arcing through her skull as she struggled to get her eyes open. The world had only moments ago faded away, the last distinct memory of hers being the colorful comments she'd arrayed to express her immediate impression of Skye's motivational technique. There was a ghost of that image he'd sent her still floating around her head, and it had been threatening to become a nasty nightmare when everything had suddenly cleared again. Now why the hell was it so hard to get her eyes open?

"Skye?" she asked groggily, knowing it could only be due to him that she was in this miserable state. Until she could figure out why her eyes weren't opening, she was forced to bumble blindly on her stomach in this cramped space, and she wanted very much to let her newest teammate know how she felt about the situation. In graphic detail.

"I'm here Raven," he answered her simply, and the direct telepathic method of the answer combined with a strange weight on her back to tell her that Skye was still seriously out of commission. Oh boo-hoo for him.

"Skye, can I just ask you, what did I ever do to you?" she inquired sarcastically as the headache began to take on epic proportions and the ache of deep and now long-denied fatigue crawled through her body.

"If I'm not mistaken, you put your trust in me. I'm afraid that comes with obligations for the both of us," he passed the thought through the hand on her back and directly into her mind.

"I knew there was a reason I promised myself not to do that anymore," she muttered under her breath as she finally managed to get her knees under her body and pull herself off of the ground slightly. The weight slid unresistingly from her back and hit the ground next to her with a loud clink, but when she turned toward the noise, she created a clank of her own as her head hit the wreckage above them. Cursing bitterly on the inside, she began to feel around in the dark for Skye, understandably reluctant to find him considering the shocking experience it was liable to be. Thankfully, he managed to find her, as a sudden pressure against her knee where she knelt scrunched over in the cramped space carried with it his presence on the edge of her mind once more.

"Skye, do you mind telling me why I can't seem to get my eyes open?" she asked offhandly, way too tired to realize how stupid that question sounded.

"Raven, your eyes are open," he answered without the slightest hint of condensation or contempt, "it's just fucking dark in here. Allow me."

Instantly the space lit up bright as day, a filtered feed of Skye's senses revealing the little area completely to her view. She was able to see every little detail of every nook and cranny, despite the fact that their private hole in the wreckage was darker than a shadow in hell. It was a not-so subtle reminder of just who she was in league with here, and she appreciated the small comfort that came with this knowledge.

"Okay, now this is just neat," she admitted with only the slightest reservation in her now neutral voice, "but why, might I ask, is there a cat in here with us?"

The feline in question circled once where it stood, then flicked its tail arrogantly, as though to say "why wouldn't there be a cat here?" Skye's mental voice huffed in tired amusement, then answered her question.

"You've met Ben, Raven. He caught wind of the same precognitive disturbance I've been suffering through while you were getting your much-deserved rest, then rushed here from my astral beacon to help out. Unfortunately, when the winds of fate changed directions, we wound up with another load on our plate."

"No," Raven said without preamble, just generally rejecting it all. She was too damn tired, even now she could feel unconsciousness creeping up on her through the pounding in her skull, and she just couldn't fight it off this time. "Skye, I don't know who you think I am… but I'm… completely…" she paused to yawn, "wiped out. I'm going to pass out right here, and there's really nothing you could possibly say right now that would stop me."

Having settled that, at least in her own completely run down mind, she keeled over onto a comfortable looking spot on the crumbled-stone floor and pulled her cloak around herself, arranging the hood as a pillow. The process took her out of contact with Skye's hand, and so she was blissfully ignorant of any protest he might make. She nestled into her little space on the edge of their shared hole, closed her eyes, and noticed with a sinking feeling that she could still see every little detail of every nook and cranny, despite the fact that their private hole in the wreckage was darker than… well, you know. Knowing she'd regret it, she reached out a finger to touch that stone, once again getting a feeling of cold emptiness, and she asked simply, "Mind turning out the lights for me?"

"Raven, you know I wouldn't be bothering you at all if this wasn't something you'd really want to be in on," Skye instantly started in on persuading her, and she seriously contemplated just doing the (currently) unthinkable amount of work personally expelling his entire presence from her mind would entail rather than listening.

"I defy you to come up with one reason I shouldn't succumb to unconsciousness right this instant," she muttered unpleasantly as her head began to fill with cotton and she found herself breathing deeply from the exertion of keeping her eyes open.

"It's Terra," he stated immediately, "We're her last hope."

Score one for Skye.

"Damn." She stated once for the record, then felt compelled to continue with, "Damn, Damn, Damn, Damn, DAMN!" Raven repeated it over and over again until she finally shouted her frustration to the unimpressive audience of Skye and a Spectral Cat she couldn't even comprehend the existence of.

"Raven?" he asked with concern, but she cut in with:

"I'm up!" as though to stave off a pestering parent trying to get her to school on time. "There's no rest for the wicked huh?"

"Of course there's rest for the wicked," he answered matter-of-factly, as though everybody knew what he was explaining to her. "It's us responsible ones that are always running ourselves ragged taking care of it all."

"So we're responsible," she muttered miserably as she tried desperately to clear her mind for some teleportation, "Yay us."

"Agreed. Responsibility sucks major ass. But if we don't do it, who will?"

"Please," and Raven was completely serious, "don't ask depressing questions like that when I'm trying to wake up."

Peer Park Base—Underground

As the next barrage of laser fire toasted through the air with that horrendous crackling/burning sound, Cyborg ducked more closely behind the shield of half-destroyed robots. The air was alive with the low-key humming of those god-forsaken anti-gravity drives as the hundred upon hundred of flying saucers buzzed around the spot he and Beast Boy had dug into, their whole force creating a kind of semi-circular wall to close off the rest of the hanger while they stood off about a hundred feet and just blasted at the two of them. The air was getting so hot from continual laser fire that the beams were actually bending and diffracting halfway to them, and so now the things had cut back to launching one inconceivable barrage at a time, giving the quickly depleting air time to cool between each attack. The patient bastards.

"Well B.B. I don't know how you did it, but you did it… again!" Cyborg shouted over the roaring of heat-induction wind and the humming of engines, pausing to take a deep gasp of the furnace-hot air that got thinner with every barrage. Sweat poured down the human side of his face in rivulets as he endured the wasting heat.

"Don't even try to pin this one on me dude!" Beast Boy screamed, then transformed back into a gorilla for a second so he could take a barrage of the metal spikes they were also very fond of. The weird super-tech shields that had been deflecting all the laser blasts for them had no effect on the spikes, and it was only a matter of time before the bots they were hiding behind completely came apart. That was, if the two of them didn't suffocate or pass out from the heat first.

"And why not?" Cyborg questioned when the guy had become human again and another lull had come through. The things had them massively outnumbered, but only a few would attack at a time, as though they were playing with them, picking them apart piece by piece.

"Dude, this is SO your fault. You were the one who couldn't leave well enough alone--" he took another burning barrage with its flash of super hot air, "and had the brilliant idea of planting a BOMB in the enemy hangar!"

"Oh no man, don't go there!" Cyborg protested over the sound of those blades clanging into one of his two shields. "It was our best chance to get rid of these things without actually having to fight them! Besides, we don't even know if that was what set them off!"

"PROCEED TO STAGE TWO OF EMERGENCY BOMB PROTOCOL," spoke an artificially pleasant female voice over the noise of the battle raging in the hangar, and Beast Boy glared unpleasantly as Cyborg took on a decidedly pale expression of embarrassment and defeat.

"Okay, so maybe it is my fault this time, that doesn't change the fact that we gotta get outta here before we're toasted! Stage two is probably when they try and disarm those explosives we set on the fuel tanks! If we don't get outta here and trigger the bomb before that, we're totally screwed!"

"DUDE!?" Beast Boy shouted, his eyes bulging in uncomprehending horror, "If we don't get out of here in the next ten seconds, we're gonna be screwed ANYWAY!"

"Follow me!" Cyborg shouted then, deciding the time had come to make a move after only a second of contemplating his friend's unhappy declaration. There really wasn't time to despair right now.

In a way, he kind of loathed to leave the defensive position they'd set up, considering the ordeal it had been to get even that far. He'd hacked the computer and gotten full access without too much trouble, and opening the sea hatch had been further cake to walk over. The room had pressurized with an explosive hissing, and an enormous porthole had opened in the floor back in the central space they'd landed in. He'd downloaded as much of the coded information as he could hold in his secure storage banks, closed down the system, and they were halfway out when he spotted the fuel tanks and come up with his brilliant strategy.

He'd pulled the mines out of the dispenser compartment in his chassis, set them for radio detonation, and attached them to the enormous tanks of liquid hydrogen without any trouble at all. It had been pathetically easy, and the two of them were working their way back to the ocean access port in high spirits. There were about halfway there when things went way bad, way fast.

Without warning, all the lights in the whole place came on at the same time, the ceiling lamps to the landing lights, and the enormous dome was lit up like the midday sun had just flashed to life underground. With a series of clicking sounds that began quietly at the center of the room, then quickly spread outward until it was like a symphony of mechanical motion, every single robot checked its turrets and blades. By the time the sound had reached its terrible crescendo, the first ones had finished, and that awful humming started to underlay the clicking as they took off. They immediately had issue with the two guys.

Cyborg had popped the first two to come their way with quick sonic blasts to the sensor spots, dropping them to the ground an sending their serrated sides rolling through the ranks of those yet to finish powering up. He tried to drop a third, but they had caught on, and the big discus looking bastards started to buzz around, strafing with their cannons almost indiscriminately. Multiple shots went wide as he dashed over those robots still starting up, making for the ocean portal as bet he could. With every leaping stomp, he crushed the sensor spot of a robot yet to take off, and the spay of lasers was kicking up a hot storm of melted metal behind him as he kept only feet ahead of their targeting programs. He cleared the last row still on the ground and made a flying lunge for the large opening that would be his exit.

Feet from the surface, he'd taken a huge hit in the stomach. One of the flying saucer bastards had rammed him in the chest with those blades at high speed, tossing sparks off his armor as the spines stuck into him, and much more dangerously, carrying him far away from the exit. In seconds he was nearly to the side of the room, and he realized with a shock that the thing was going to try and impale him against the wall. For the moment, he was pinned against the blades by the gees the thing was pulling, but he could still see around the room as he struggled to move.

He caught a glimpse of what the rest were up to, as now around half of all the robots had gotten off the ground. A great cloud of them was broiling through the room at high speed in pursuit of something he couldn't see, but he'd make a guess that it was B.B. in the shape of something fast and flight-ready. The little guy could have split with no trouble, but he was now threading his way through a firestorm of hot light and toward his distressed ally, his erratic flight dragging the robots into one another and forcing their beams to hit their own forces as well. Times like that were the reason Cyborg stuck with the little guy (besides the fact that, every now and then, he actually was pretty funny).

He'd gotten control of his own situation around then as well, smashing his fist into the top sensor and his knee into the bottom sensor at the same time and pinching the thing through its middle, he was able to send the both of them spiraling toward the ground. Snatching it by its top mounted turrets, he turned it upward just in time to start deflecting laser beams from a whole flight of the suckers that had just gotten off the ground and after him. As his feet dug into the metal floor and tossed up great clouds of sparking fire, the beams came in like a rain of burning air. The very instant he came to a stop, they switched to those blades, and rather than the feather-light deflection of the beams, he was staggered back by the impact of a dozen solid slugs.

The next moment, they flew over him, and he pulled his arm cannon on them only instants before they got their cannons turned around, holing all five of them and sending them careening into the corner on their own momentum. Just how insignificant a dent this made in their forces became apparent when the still-increasing mass trying to shoot down B.B. went buzzing by in a cloud of flash-heated air and flying metal spikes. As the little flying dude ducked out of the way too hot conflict and into the cover of the bots Cyborg had just downed, the metal man was left high and dry only a few feet from a swarm of very unhappy seeming automated strike craft. Needless to say, he'd retreated under a withering hail of laser blasts that were deflected by the conveniently active shield on the saucer he was dragging around. Which brings us to the rather hopeless situation we came in on.

"Follow me!" Cyborg shouted again, then took off along the curving edge of the enormous dome hanger. Beast Boy abandoned his cover to rush in behind Cyborg, clinging to his back as a ferret and keeping close behind the cover of the same bot that had tried to impale him only moments ago. As Cyborg dragged the pin-cushion of alien technology around the room and enemy fire slid off its electromagnetic shield like quicksilver off of a slanted table, the entire enemy formation of its many hundreds of members rotated through the center of the room to track them. Its purpose was pretty clearly to keep them away from the exit port, which was exactly what Cyborg had been hoping for.

After the next barrage, he pulled his last mine out of the compartment on his back, set its timer by remote from direct radio access by his brain, then gave it a huge discus throw into the center of the room while the air was still too hot to shine a laser through. His throw sent him through a twirl that exposed both him and his diminutive green rider to the room as a whole, and a series of blades went whizzing uncomfortably close by, but he had the shield up between him and the center of the room again before the explosive went off.

That concussion was enough to blow an enormous hole in the center of their formation, bladed discs careening every which way, smashing into one another and the floor with destructive effect. As the whole mass of them was thrown into a pandemonium of destabilized thrust by the roiling air, Cyborg dumped the shield, grabbed the ferret off his back with his left, and blasted his grappling hand directly for the ocean access with its wide-eyed furry passenger. The beams started in almost right away, but the disruption caused by his bomb ensured his little buddy a safe passage to the water, and he hit it with a huge splash that Cyborg could feel jolting all the way back up the cable extending from his left elbow.

There was the sound of water being displaced in a big way, like say, a whale kicking its tail, and then Cyborg himself was careening toward the water ten times faster than his wench could have pulled him. His legs began to glow with the heat of lasers nearly plugging him, and one lucky shot did put a huge melted mark on his right shoulder, but he cleared the enormous distance between the room's wall and the ocean access in record time, and the water hissed around his hot armor as he entered with a skidding splash. He was going so fast that the water offered quite a resistance to his entrance, and strains screeched through his superstructure as super alloys met their match in the tug of war between the multi-ton mass of swimming muscle Beast Boy had become and the enormous drag his metal can created in the water, but he managed to hold together, and a quick look ahead showed the beastly one dragging him through some kind of underwater, underground tunnel.

The second he was fully immersed and certain that he wasn't about to be parted from some hunk of his body boy his friend's well-meaning but painfully huge motive force, Cyborg triggered the detonator on his mines with a simple command to his internal radio equipment. The whole tunnel rocked with the explosion of the vast supply of liquid hydrogen fuel, the water cushioning the shock for them, but the whole place coming apart around them none the less. There was a flash of light down the tunnel as the incinerating hydrogen-oxygen reaction turned the room they'd been in into an inferno, no doubt the ridiculous expansion forces eradicating anything the intense heat failed to destroy. He could hear earth moving in a big way above him through the conductive water, and he figured the sea floor must have caved in on the base as structural integrity was lost in the dome. As those parts of his system that required air began to protest, not the least of which being the organic part of his brain, he began to wonder in a kind of euphoric haze what would be left of the park when they got back to the surface.

Just then, he and Beast Boy broke out of the tunnel into the pitch-black nighttime waters just off the coast, his massive friend dragging him quickly to the surface. The pressurized air in his lungs began to pain him, so he let it all out as they rose toward the surface, freeing plenty of room for his first explosive breaths as both he and Beast Boy broke the surface at high speed. As his ballast systems sucked in air to keep his heavily armored butt afloat, Beast Boy floated languidly by on his back, a mechanical hand still gripped firmly to his leg. He crawled onto the now-seaworthy craft Cyborg had become and collapsed from his efforts.

"Cyborg?" Beast Boy asked exhaustedly as the two of them lay floating in the ghostly silver waters of the moonlit night.

"Yeah?" he asked with similar fatigue as he watched damage reports march parade-like across his HUD.

"I think… I think I'm done for the night."

"Yeah."

Behind them, part of the Ferris Wheel stuck out of the water, burning steadily. The entirety of the pier and most of the beach was now a bit of scrap wood and some shattered cement pillars. Most noteworthy of all however, was the half of a two hundred-foot crater that had swallowed the road and shore next to the pier, the rest of the depression disappearing into the silent water.

Preview: Hey, guess what. This time, the night really does come to an end, and since I'm already halfway through it, it should be up in a matter of days. I was trying to put it all in this one and call it a single chapter, but it just wouldn't have been right to make people a) wait longer for this, or b) read a chapter that long. We'll follow everyone as the night winds to a close, Skye and Raven get in one last big adventure, and we see if Terra will actually survive the story. Tune back in around Thursday/Friday and you'll be able to get the last of this installment—Dawn.