First, a note or two:

This is the second of my stories, and once again, I beg those of you who know everything about the included series not to complain. I am not trying to be as faithful to the comics or TV series as possible, so if you want accuracy, I suggest you look somewhere else.

KEY:

'Blah' thought

"Blah" speech

I don't own the Teen Titans or any of the undermentioned items. Teen Titans is a trademark of some large comic company and Cartoon Network. The Ender's Game series is copyrighted by Orson Scott Card. Use only #2 pencil when filling in ovals. Unlawful doing of stuff with the story contained herein may lead to fines in excess of $(1/0) and/or removal of certain body parts. This message brought to you by the letter ", the number ð/2, and the color chartreuse.

Please review if you've read this story. I will not continue to update unless I get reviews.

I was planning to make this chapter the last and thus make it appropriately pensive and depressing, but an unexpected event came along quite uninvitedly and decided to rudely interrupt my pensively depressing (depressively pensive?) writing: I got an 800 on the writing SATII. Never really thought that'd happen. Taketh ye that, ye Foul Denizens of the Lit Department.

Anyway, as a result this is not the last chapter. Maybe one or two more, if I can connect the end well enough.

And now, on with the show.

For the second time in only a few hours, the small, yellowish-orange spacecraft touched down gently with a puff of dust on an alien world. For the second time in only a few hours, the hatch of that small, yellowish-orange spacecraft opened. And or the second time in only a few hours, a group of teenagers tumbled out of the craft.

The five Titans stepped out into this second alien world, being careful not to touch the sides of their spacecraft. Robin had recently installed a system on the spacecraft that would allow the outer shell of the craft to act as a heat sink for the cooling engines when they were not running. The benefit to this system was two-fold: first, it would allow the dangerously hot fusion drive engines to cool more rapidly; secondly, it would act as a heat shock to (hopefully) kill any stowaway pathogens that had hitched a ride from planet to planet. The last thing the Titans wanted on their hands was to be responsible for a planet-wide epidemic all on account of a lack of sterility in their space-traveling.

Robin looked at Starfire expectantly, waiting for her to introduce this new planet to the rest of the team.

Starfire, however, merely stared with open-mouthed shock at the landscape in front of her. 'This visage cannot be correct,' she thought in panicked disbelief. She shook her head, trying to clear her vision. Maybe her eyes were blurred or something. She looked again.

No, it was still the same. Starfire turned to Robin. "Are you sure that this is the correct planet, Friend Robin?"

"It's where the computer showed, so I'd say so. The computer's designed to be able to detect one person on a planet 3 light-years from wherever it's currently located, so I doubt it could misplace an entire planet."

"But this cannot be right. Pismiria is lush and tropical. There are fearsome legends on Tamaran of travelers becoming lost forever in the dense jungles that are – were – on this planet. Look, friends. Such devastation cannot happen in such a short time. This cannot be the right planet."

The other four looked bleakly at the world around them. It was as barren as the dead moon of earth, and seemed like a place where only the dead could walk in comfort. The gray and black rocks and dust that coated the surface of the planet were interrupted here and there by patches of brown and much tinier splotches of various other colors. It looked like someone had just shoved the entire planet into a campfire and had then left it in for a bit too long.

"Looks like someone scorched the planet," said Cyborg incredulously. He bent down and squatted near a pile of dirt in front of him. His right hand suddenly retracted into his arm, and a oddly-shaped three-fingered pincer with a small tube at the base appeared in its place. He picked up a piece of the planet's odd surface material and, with a whumph, it was sucked into the small tube. Cyborg then looked at the small graph on his arm and watched it impatiently, tapping his other hand on the ground. Finally, he stood up, and his hand changed back to its normal shape, ejecting the small rock in the process. "Here," he said to Robin. "Look at this. Extremely high levels of carbon. This is definitely the work of a fire."

"Well," said Robin, "I think we know what happened to the lush tropics of Pismiria, but I'll be damned if I know why. What kind of weapon could scorch the whole surface of a planet and yet leave the planet itself fairly intact? Anything magical, perhaps, Raven?"

"Wha-wha-what?" blabbered Raven, who had been staring and the green changeling dreamily and was clearly thinking of completely unrelated magical things. "Um, nothing I can think of."

"I suppose we should start looking around then," said Robin, who was still in shock from the idea that a whole planet could just – literally – go up in smoke.

For a while afterwards, the five Titans walked up and down the valleys of the strangely burnt planet, searching for signs of what had caused immense blaze. The pair of Robin and Starfire was moving slowly through one valley, looking at the rocks and trying to determine the path of the fire as it spread. The rocks showed curious signs of the inferno's wake, like the alluvium of a dried-up river.

Suddenly, Robin heard Raven scream. He looked at Starfire in shock, and they bolted at breakneck speed over to Raven's valley. When they got there, they saw Raven kneeling on the ground. She was shaking her head and muttering "No, no, no," to herself again and again. Beast Boy grabbed her and shook her, trying to calm her down enough to get her to speak. Despite the green changeling's best efforts, however, his plan failed miserably – or at least didn't go the way he had planned. Raven, instead of calming down and explaining her sudden outburst of misery, burst into tears and started sobbing into Beast Boy's shoulder.

Beast Boy, who was at first quite shocked, was soon happy at his current unexpected situation. This calm happiness only lasted for a short while, however, as he soon noticed various rocks exploding around him in small puffs of dark energy. He was beginning to fear for the integrity of his own atomic structure when Raven finally managed to grab hold of her emotions and calm herself down.

Raven began to speak, her sentences punctuated by sniffles. "I know -sniffle- of only one thing that -sniffle- can do something like this to an, an, entire -sniffle- planet. It's him. I've let my emotions out of control, and he's fed on them, and now he's powerful enough to destroy an entire planet. A hole fucking planet!"

Raven began to cry softly again and sat down in the gray dust, crushed. Beast Boy sat down beside her, and was about to comfort her, when ground below the five friends suddenly burst apart. A crack appeared in the land, widening as the five watched. The crack suddenly burst wide open with an explosive force, and a dark shadow stood looming in the fissure. It grinned the grin of a thousand lost dreams at the five, and all felt miserable chills running down their spines. The creature looked at them with its two pairs of red, glowing eyes, regarding them imperiously, and then stepped out of the fissure.

Trigon the Terrible spoke once more to his mortal daughter. "Hello again, my precious daughter. I am sorry that I had to cut our last meeting so short, but what can I say? I've been quite busy, as you can see."

The demon gestured around with one red, clawed hand, and began to laugh. Robin, who like the rest of the Titans had been too overcome with shock and/or horror to speak, finally found enough courage to speak, and, about five seconds later, found the voice with which he intended to do so. "What have you done with the Pismirians, Trigon? And if you're behind the attack of Starfire's planet, I swear to God that I'll find someway to–"

Robin was suddenly lifted up as though by an invisible hand and slammed brutally against an overhanging cliff. He slumped to the ground, in a daze. Trigon leered at him, and then continued to speak. "My dear boy, you are quite correct in presuming that I intended to exterminate the Pismirians. However, as evident on lovely Tamaran, I have found them to be quite useful as my own personal army. The burnt planet is merely a reminder of who's in charge here. The Pismirians are quite intact, and their larvae still remain untouched in the breeding caves."

Trigon's second bit of mirth was interrupted by Beast Boy, who suddenly said, "um, Raven?" in a rather uneasy voice. Raven was looking at her father with the utmost hate and repulsion. Her eyes glowed blood-red with anger, and she was surrounded by a flaming cloud of her own dark energy.

"Raven, are you–"

Raven interrupted. "Go, now," she hissed coldly. "I'll deal with him."

"But I–"

"GO!"

The rest of the four Titans returned to the yellow spacecraft and lifted off the small, burnt planet, leaving behind a father and daughter with some serious family issues.

Raven stared at her father, the being for whom she possessed no love. She began to mutter, and lifted into the air. Raven used her energies to create a shadow of a space suit around herself, enclosing her from the vacuum, and zoomed out into the planet's upper atmosphere. She turned around, faced the planet, and began to think. She thought of the frustration at not being able to show that she loved. She thought of every time she had let someone down and every time someone had let her down. She thought of the being that stood gloating on the planet below her. The being that was the cause of so much of her pain. Raven focused on these things until a rage unlike any before filled her heart. She felt herself filling up with the dark powers, the hate filling every corner of her mind. She wasn't sure if she was still breathing, and she expected that her heart might have stopped, so focused was her mind on the hatred. A small black spot appeared on the planet, like a blemish, right where Trigon was standing. It slowly grew, becoming larger and larger, until it had swallowed the entire planet. The huge sphere of dark energy surrounded that planet for an infinite nothingness of time, before a million new souls were suddenly silenced, and the once-lush planet of Pismiria vanished into its subatomic components. Various minds lied scattered in that after-cloud, now dispersed amongst the various protons, neutrons, and electrons that lay in disarray.

The light from the explosion faded in the cosmic night, just as the red glow faded from Ravens eyes. She suddenly gasped, her now normal purple eyes growing wide. She began to feel sick, her heart sinking. "What have I done?" she asked the emptiness in front of her. "I've killed thousands of sentient minds. What have I done?"

She continued to stare in shock at the space in front of her, never noticing the pair of hands that grabbed her from the middle of space, never noticing that those hands dragged her aboard a small, yellow spaceship.

"We shouldn't have left her down there alone," said one unnoticed voice.

"I still can't believe she did that," said another one.

In the cockpit of the small, yellow spacecraft were five friends in utter shock. One of them had just destroyed in her anger an entire planet's worth of minds. No one should ever have to live through such agony.

The small craft drifted on into the empty blackness.