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. This story does not turn on red. Caution: wide load. I have just finished the first marking period. Please remark on this story. This statement validated by the occipital lobe of your brain. Warning: excessive reading may lead to death and/or seizures. Do not point directly at son - may cause malfunctioning.

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

Happy friggin New Year.

This could be the last chapter. Could be. I guess you'll know when I've finished. Or maybe you won't. Maybe you'll never know. Mwahahahaha! Vanishes in cloud of green smoke. This could be the last time. This could be the last time. Maybe the last time. I don't know. (Oh no...) (Thank you to Mick Jagger for these useful lyrics)

And, as usual, on with the show.

The dark fires of Hell lapped repeatedly at the stones around him as Trigon sat placidly in his lair, contemplating the coming demise of his offspring. There was no trace of remorse – or much less pain – in his blackened soul. He knew exactly where she was. He had engineered this whole scheme so that he could wipe out his pesky daughter and those annoying Tameranians in one fell swoop. Trigon had purposely provoked her beyond all tolerance, telepathically chanting the name of Raven's mother over and over again in her head. He knew what her response would be. How she would lash out at the planet so horrifically. How Robin would feel obliged to contain her on the only planet that could.

In the darkest regions of the Pit, Trigon stood up, turned, and smiled. It was time.

There was (and most likely still is) a region of space that always preferred to keep to itself. It didn't meddle in the affairs of other regions of space, and certainly didn't allow them to interfere in its own matters. This region of space was existing – as it usually did – quite peacefully one afternoon when it was disturbed by the sudden appearance of a small, yellow spacecraft. The space recoiled in disgust at having been disturbed so suddenly.

Inside the spacecraft, four creatures blasted streams of radio waves at each other, blinked at indicator lights on their control panels, and then blasted more radio waves at each other. The lead creature, whom we might call the alpha male, was telling his underlings that which they already knew. He wasn't stupid, by any means. He was just completely shocked out of all reasonable thought.

"We've dropped out on the other side of the galaxy from Tameran!"

Raven sat up suddenly, and screamed. Her head felt like it was ripping in two. The pain was so great that she almost instantly fainted again.

When she came to, Raven looked bleakly around the room in which she had been placed. It was made of concrete, or something very like it, and studded with row after row of expensive-looking jewels that would make any Earthside thief drool. Her Containment Facility. Her asylum. That's what it felt like to her; although the other Titans had told her that this probably had nothing to do with her personally, but more her father, she still felt like she was in an asylum. Come to think of it though, she couldn't deny that she wasn't crazy. Wasn't that one of the major paradoxes of insanity? That one who was really crazy couldn't tell if they were crazy or not?

Raven was still thinking about all this, trying to wrap her brain around this paradoxical craziness, when she felt the mind-tearing pain again. She knew what – or rather who – was causing it. Figuring that out wasn't the tough part. It was driving him away that was giving her problems.

But she was tired. She'd had enough of this now. It was time to put a stop to her father's tormenting her. So Raven focused her mind, centering in on that abominable creature that was her father. She focused solely on that image, seeing the red, demonic body of her father in her minds eye, focusing on the image of the double sets of eyes.

And then, still holding this image in her mind, Raven focused on the one power that the elders of Azerath had only promised to teach her if she promised never to use it unless there was no other way: the power to obliterate a spirit. Killing a planet full of barely-conscious aliens was not that difficult from a purely rational, mental standpoint. It wasn't the aliens in that case that she was trying to destroy – it was the planet on which her father happened to be. She was essentially doing no more than simple demolition work. Just randomly dissolving enough molecular bonds that the structure of the planet literally fell apart.

This kind of destruction required a lot more focus. One could not simply kill a demon; the demonic soul could just as easily infect another source and bend that to its evil will. Destroying her father would not be a mere matter of dropping a large object on him or something like that that could have destroyed practically all of the Titans' mortal enemies. Raven would have to perform the holy forbidden ritual that would obliterate her father's soul once and for all.

She stood up and went to the window of her facility. She pressed the intercom button, listening as the faint hiss of the carrier wave announced the activation of the communication system. A moment later, a bored Tameranian voice inquired, "yes?"

"Could I have a white candle? I have some work to do."

"Have you discovered the cause of our displacement yet, Dear Robin?"

The four free Titans were still attempting to figure out what had happened. As far as they could tell, some malfunction in the hyperspatial navigation system had reversed their target coordinates in relation to the center of the Milky Way galaxy. It was like one of those annoying mistakes one makes on a math test where one forgets to factor in negatives, positives, and zeros: it seemed as if the nav computer had merely forgotten how to perform simple arithmetic. Even more strangely, Cyborg had tested the circuitry extensively with his fault prediction center, and had picked up no signs of any anomalies. This meant that either something had screwed up Cyborg's circuitry, which was extremely unlikely since Cyborg had installed numerous primary and redundant security measures in his programming after the both the incident with the virus from Beast Boy's bootleg copy of Mega-Monkeys 4 and the incident with Brother Blood's hacking Cyborg's internally kept plans, or that something much more sinister was at work among the wires of the Titans' space sub.

This left the Titans with a predicament. They were trying to determine whether they should attempt another hyperspace jump and risk being thrown into an even more distant corner of the galaxy, or attempt to risk the nearest habitable planet.

As it just so happened, something much more sinister was at work among the wires of the Titans' space sub. In this particular case, that sinister thing was Trigon. Now, as he jumped out across the great expanse of space like a slingshot, he laughed; he knew he had stalled his daughter's dear friends for the time being. Trigon could have just as easily initiated a fatal error in the ship's life-support system, or just outright blown up the ship. However, the demon wanted to have a little challenge in the destruction of his insolent offspring. 'Not', he told himself, 'that it really would be any appreciable challenge for one with such infinite power' He settled his spirit in a dark corner of Tameran, and focused on his next task: assuming control of his daughter's powers and playing a nice little game of Iago-Othello.

Raven immediately stopped what she was doing. A shiver ran down her spine. She felt his presence. It wasn't a physical feeling; it was more like an emotional one, like one feels when a loved one is hurt severely. Though they were father and daughter, bound by blood, there was no love between them. The only emotion that reared its head in the relationship between Raven and Trigon was Hate. Bitter, cold, resenting Hate.

And then, it happened. Raven suddenly convulsed as she felt her father's mind violently attack her own. She collapsed on the floor of her jewel-encrusted room, waiting for the pain of his invading her soul to leave. It didn't. Raven opened her mouth to scream, to cry, to yell anything to relieve the mental agony that coursed through her veins. Her mouth wouldn't open. She tried to widen her eyes in shock. Her eyes stayed as placid as they were before. That was when she realized something so horrible that, had she been able to, she would have cried out in an anguished scream.

Trigon was now in complete and unwavering control of Raven, and was in command of all of her powers.