The Return of the Abhorrence
The Hammer Falls
"Misstraut Allen, in welchen der Trieb, zu strafen, maechtig ist!"
--Friedrich
Nietzsche
But it was all a dream. Raven bolted awake, dumping the book that lay in her lap to the floor. It landed face down and crumpled the open pages. A large spot of drool that had formed in the upper left corner began to soak into the carpet. She wiped disgustedly at the stream that leaked from the corner of her mouth down below her chin and beyond, dripping sporadically; it had been exposed to the open air long enough to drop well below body temperature, and thus it was cool to the touch. Yet she succeeded only in smearing the liquid further across her delicate features, and in rendering her hand unusable until she washed it.
Her precious book lay forgotten as she struggled to her feet and staggered out the door towards the communal bathroom. Robin and Starfire stood shoulder to shoulder behind the couch, cheering on Beast Boy and/or Cyborg as their game battle was carried out on the screen. Raucous cheers erupted occasionally as she slinked by in the background and arrived in the bathroom. She wrinkled her nose as she stepped over the soiled towels, puddles of bathwater, and droplets of errant waste spattered across the linoleum tiles and walls. Ignoring the lumps of hair that threatened to clog the sink, she rinsed her slimy hands and chin, and the nauseating reek that went with it. Her sense of disgust receded to its usual level of mere self-loathing.
The issue thus addressed, she turned to leave, her hands still dripping. She looked doubtfully at the array of towels strewn about the floor before drying herself on her cloak and leotard. The din in the living room continued as she slipped through wraithlike once more to return to her shadows. She grabbed a tissue from her bedside table, lifted her fallen book from the floor, and dabbed at the ruined corner of the pages. The book was returned to its place on the bookshelf with a frustrated shove. She used more force than intended, and inadvertently jostled the structure off balance. The trivially calculable falloff of damped harmonic oscillation quickly returned the bookcase to rest, but not before pulling a few titles out of alignment and knocking a small pine box to the floor.
She remembered now. She had used it to hold a few trinkets and pieces of jewelry, small bangles and pairs of earrings for those fleeting moments when she wanted to feel beautiful. She opted for silver because it didn't clash with her blue cloak, and complimented her pale skin. She opened the box to take inventory of its contents. Quite unexpectedly, and quite to her chagrin, a dark wisp claw spilled out of the box and relieved her of half her face.
The accompanying shriek rent the air and banished the day's atmosphere. All time stopped for just a moment. The team had never quite heard a scream like that before, and certainly not from Raven. "Titans, go!" Robin cried reflexively, but the others had already begun their charge. In one fluid motion Beast Boy leapt at the door, morphed into a ram to plow through it, and morphed back again before the slab of metal had landed.
"Raven, what--" Beast Boy was interrupted as a warm, wet mass slammed into his chest. He hobbled back several stops before regaining his balance and grasp on the object. He looked down to see the familiar blue hood. Raven weakly gripped his arms as she raised her gaze to reveal a horrific visage of blood and raw flesh. The fluids had flowed down to saturate the collar and shoulders of her cloak, and now began to soak his own clothing. He felt a pang in his head as reality fractured and spun away; he nearly dropped her and passed out before his senses returned a moment later. Starfire recoiled, and raised her hand to her mouth with a sharp gasp, clutching her other hand to her chest as if in fear of catching whatever now afflicted her dear friend.
"Beast Boy! Get Raven out of here," Robin ordered as he charged into the fray, Cyborg and Starfire close behind. Raven's legs then buckled, and Beast Boy fumbled with her dead weight, trying to devise the best way to transport her other than unceremoniously dragging her out the door.
Meanwhile, Robin vaulted up with his bo and whipped downward feet first, drilling his opponent into the floor where it was further pinned by a sonic blast and a spattering of starbolts. Yet it immediately broke through the haze of smoke from singed carpet and clawed deeply into Robin's ankle. The grip tightened even as he cried out. It tossed him into the wall, grabbed him by the chest as his body rebounded, flung him with the necessary rotational velocity to keep him spinning stationary in midair for a moment, and finally pounded his body downward. Robin landed flat on his rear to crack his tailbone with a paralyzing stab of pain, and an amber cloud of dust spread outward from the impact. His utility belt had slipped below his waist in the tussle, and it too was crushed beneath him,
He sat stunned for a moment trying to catch his breath while the remaining two Titans continued to fend off the beast. They were not faring well. A pair of starbolts sailed by their intended targets. Starfire blinked, rubbed her eyes, and blinked again trying to clear her vision. Something was wrong; they ached and burned as if some irritant had fallen in them, but it persisted despite heavy watering. She floated down to land roughly on the floor, and stood hunched over, continuing to struggle with her impaired vision.
Moments passed, but Robin was not recovering. He noticed his breathing was even more labored than before, and his heart was thundering rapidly. His hands fell limply to his sides, where he noticed his flattened utility belt. The fastenings had all cracked open, allowing some of the contents of the pockets to spill out. Small gray fragments of what apparently had once been a sphere lay just outside the pocket located at his hip; one of his contact grenades. His mind reeled as it made the connection. He looked around at the mist that hung close to the floor. "Nerve gas," his mind shouted at him. He tried to call out to his friends, but instead only managed a constricted cough.
"Robin!" Starfire shouted when she noticed Robin kneeling in the fog and coughing. Having lost the strength to fly, she ran towards him while Cyborg dealt with the battle. She knelt in front of him and checked for injuries through blurred sight.
"The gas...get away," he choked out before collapsing in spasms to the floor. Starfire cried out in dismay and reached out to shake him back to consciousness.
No help was forthcoming, as Cyborg had problems of his own. A number of his external sensors began returning increasingly imprecise data as they became coated with a greasy residue. Worse yet, a flood of error messages were dumped into his HUD indicating numerous catastrophic neural interface failures. The density of text began crowding out reality, his hand-crafted operating software parsing the nuances of internal and external data and shifting priority as appropriate. Within seconds a cascade of failures rendered him unable to control his mechanical side and, as he soon became aware, his organic side soon followed.
His remaining muscles beneath his metal plating twitched involuntarily. Neurons fired wildly and at random, sending unpredictable and undefined streams of data into his cybernetic systems. His subsystems alternately recovered and collapsed attempting to interpret the information, until an overzealous neural adaptation daemon at last kicked in to renormalize the environment. It rewrote protocols and parameters, redefining what was to be perceived as normal activity.
Within the span of a handful of processor cycles, everything clicked into place and his body whirled into action again, beyond his conscious control. He flew forward into the wall in a mad charge not seen since his virus infection. He bounced off with a burst of plaster chips and spun around. His sonic cannon suddenly discharged, and random spasms of motion directed it to carve a meandering, smoking trench around the room. Another surge of data propelled him backwards, until his legs tangled up and he tripped over himself. His balance systems, having been reconfigured to a mad scale, didn't even register the event.
Only when his body crashed through the window was the unmistakable shift in orientation noticed. The signal drew the nonsensical response of firing every article of ordnance from his shoulders, as well as a parting burst from his cannon before he fell an unhindered twenty stories to the earth below.
Gravity accelerated him toward the planet's center of gravity at a constant rate of approximately 32 feet per second per second. Its antiderivative, the velocity, could be measured at any point as directly proportional to that same rate, plus an initial condition constant for starting velocity. A further antiderivative, yielding the position as a function of time, modified the relation further, and reduced the 32 feet per second squared to 16 feet per second squared, proportional to the square of time, t. The velocity, as he hung in midair before the inevitable plummet, began at zero and could be ever after neglected, yet a new initial constant was added for the starting height of approximately 160 feet; thus 16t2 + 160. To account for the downward motion, a change in sign to -16t2 + 160 would create a more aesthetically and psychologically pleasing graph of the motion.
At the final impact, a position of zero, the relation became 0 -16t2 + 160. Factoring and dividing out a 16 simplified it to 0 -t2 + 10. Subtracting 10 and multiplying by negative 1 yielded 10 t2, thus resulting in the impact occurring after a time in seconds of the square root of 10. The preceding velocity relation of -32t at a time of radical ten gave an impact velocity of -32r10, or simply 32r10, keeping in mind the negative referred to a downward velocity. He slammed into the rocky ground at approximately 101 feet per second, With 3600 seconds per hour, and 1 mile per 5280 feet, the final product was just short of seventy miles per hour in roughly three seconds. Had he achieved this acceleration with the T-Car he would have been proud, but sadly it was his own body, which blew apart at the seams as it collided with the hard earth of his island home.
His head and torso remained, the chest cavity collapsed and numerous key power circuits severed, to say nothing of the data pathways. His arm, still in formation for his sonic cannon, spun horizontally as it skidded quickly away. His power cell continued unthwarted, though without purpose, as his neural centers were deprived of oxygen and energy. Consciousness winked out of existence.
Three seconds previously, the curtains of the window were billowing outward from Cyborg's exit, Before they had a chance to fall back into place, a blew beam shot into the gaping cavity, followed shortly by nearly a dozen rocketing projectiles. The commotion had finally attracted the attention of Starfire, who had moved to cradle Robin's head in her lap, his warning forgotten. She looked up just in time for the beam to blast her in the face; she shrieked as her head snapped back from the force. Scattered strips of flesh were ripped from her face and neck, and her body was lifted off the floor and propelled into the wall where Cyborg's missiles began impacting in rapid succession moments later.
The concussive blasts shook the tower to its foundations, and utterly shredded Starfire's body. Even after ruinous damage had been dealt the explosions continued, punching holes through the concrete wall until it collapsed outward into the hallway and living room. A single purple boot bounced forward to come to rest where Beast Boy still stood carrying a bloodied Raven. The sounds of the fight had suddenly stopped, leaving only an eerie silence as a yellow-brown cloud spilled out across the floor from the impenetrably black confines of what remained of Raven's room. He set Raven on the couch and cautiously approached. No angle seemed to provide a better view into the room.
He began sweating profusely, and his outfit stuck to his skin. Whether it was from fear or something else, he didn't know. He began to feel disoriented and weak. Having crept up to the edge of the shattered wall he peered in, but failed to resolve any details even as his eyes adjusted to the dim conditions. It was in this way that he slipped on the residue of an upturned slab of debris, and landed flat on his backside on a broken pipe sticking up out of the floor. The jagged end tore through the rectum and several curls of intestinal walls before piercing the omentum and sprouting out of his body into plain sight before his eyes. Too shocked to utter a sound, he curled up trembling around the pipe while a thin trail of blood leaked from his mouth. He sat and waited in the choking mist.
It was sometime later when Raven awoke to find herself paralyzed with convulsions. She found herself unable to catch a breath. A further misfortune was visited upon her as she dimly noticed her shadowy attacker had returned, and had elected to take a humanoid form devoid of all detail and features. It stood over her as if considering her situation, then reached out to relieve her of the remainder of her face. This elicited a scream despite her beleaguered lungs and diaphragm, and which was cut off a moment later when she was thrown into the enormous television. The screen and her skull alike fractured, and a small supernatural nudge brought the set down on top of her, pinning her amid the fumes for her last moments.
Having run out of targets, the shadow dispersed like a cloud of smoke.