Illusion

(Part 1)

Ann was sitting on the ground next to the helicopter with her knees tucked into her chest as she studied the cloudless sky above her. When Terra and Torrent emerged from the dark interior of the shed Ann shot to her feet and ran over to meet them. She looked worried the unexpected implosion of the lab but relived that the ceiling didn't cave in on her friends,

"What the hell was that? Are you guys ok?" Terra waved her aside,

"We're fine, but thanks for asking." Blood from the small cut on her face had already hardened into a scab.

Suddenly Torrent stopped walking, and then slowly turned to look back at the tool shed. Ann noticed that he stopped and turned to look as well; she gasped and stumble a few steps backward. Terra whirled with her fists rose expecting another fight. Torrent was standing complacently and calmly, he didn't seem to be concerned at all at the presence atop the shed that startled Ann so. Then Terra saw why and dropped her hands to her side, the Jester sat with her feet dangling over the edge of the roof just as she had when she watched Terra battle the Titans in the gorge. Terra's eyes narrowed and she signed with audible distain,

"What the hell do you want?" Sparks, the jester, mocked at emotional injury for being addressed so condescendingly by Terra. She put a hand to her chest and gasped,

"Is that really necessary Terra? After all I am here to help." She smiled and the act melted away to give in to her normal mysteriously pleasant mood. She leapt from atop the shed to the ground and stood several yards away from the other three, "You guys have been busy, one lab down, two to go. I don't think I could have done a better…" Sparks trailed off, Torrent had walked up to her and he was sniffing her in various places over her body. She blushed and looked very surprised. Ann crossed her arms and glared at Torrent as she spoke,

"Torrent, what the hell are you doing?" Anger burned behind her words. Torrent sniffed several more times as if double checking then stood, with his inspection complete. He leaned very close to the jesters face and looked deep into her eyes, Sparks blushed even more. Then Torrent smiled and stood erect again, Ann was fuming and resisting the urge to scream. He kept eye contact with Sparks for several more seconds the spoke.

"She's not real. She has no sent and the sun does not reflect in her eyes… a hologram maybe but she's not real." Torrent turned and walked back to the others. Sparks blinked in surprise several times and said nothing. Ann calmed slightly but still glared at Torrent as he walked by, then Ann observed the jester for several seconds then turned to Terra.

"He's right I can detect no audible thoughts coming from her but I can sense some presence there, maybe it's an illusion or an astral projection or something." Sparks put her hands of her hips and it seemed as though she was in fact really offended by that remark this time,

"Illusion? Please, I am a creation not an intangible thing of smoke and mirrors. My master created me to act a messenger for her, she did not want her presence to be known unless absolutely necessary but you're nosey friend Torrent figured things out regardless. I guess it is about time you meat her though… but she can't come." Sparks extended a long gloved finger in the direction of Terra. Ann gasped and spoke out in protest,

"What? Why not? Terra's our leaded there's no way we're going with out her!"

"No… its ok. I have more important things to do. Someone must save Beast Boy." Terra turned away from the group and began to walk westward. Suddenly Sparks was in front of her, she grasped her by the shoulders and shook Terra as she spoke,

"Where is Beast Boy? What did you find out?" Terra pushed Sparks off of her with one hand and snapped back in rage,

"Why the hell do you care Jester?! He is in danger and I seem to be the only one who gives a shit, then all the sudden you want in now that I know something! You have your meeting with my friends, I have better things to do! He is being held in another lab to the west, and I go to see that he isn't forced in to the fate that was destined for me." The ground beneath Terra's feet broke apart and she rose into the air levitated on a large stone. She glared down at Sparks, "Don't follow me." Terra and the rock she stood on flew west and into the distance. Ann and Torrent watched as she dissipated below the horizon. Sparks watched to, when Terra was gone the jester tuned and faced the remaining two,

"Lets go, the master is waiting." Sparks waked north, followed by Torrent and Ann.

Love

(Part 2)

The wind whistled past Terra's ears as she flew. Her eyes watered and she was forced to clinch her teeth to keep her mouth closed. She found herself missing her goggles. They had served well in shielding her eyes from the wind when she flew at high speeds. The mountains where disappearing behind her and the hills beneath her where steadily decreasing in size, soon she would be over the desert. The exertion it took to move the rock didn't take nearly as much concentration as it had before, her powers where returning. She could feel the rock under her control, she could feel it as she could feel her hands, and it was like an extension of her body. With this new revelation Terra decided to bring the rock to a lower altitude. Her makeshift vehicle slowly descended. Terra skimmed over the tops of hills and clearings, the trees bent after her when she rocketed by. The hills ended and a large flat expanse of dry earth expanded from horizon to horizon. With a little more effort she pushed to rock to an even faster speed, a typhoon of dust and sand lifted behind her as the skimmed across the desert. Terra could feel the ground beneath her, she could feel the dust in the air, and she could fell the rock deep below the surface. She pushed the dust in the air of her out of the way as she flew forward to keep it from hitting her face. The bottom of her rock skimmed the ground beneath her, leaving a thin line in the dust to be swallowed up by the enormous wave of rock and sand she left in her wake. Terra see now that the small pieces of earth where not striking her in the eyes, when she open them she saw a thin tower of black smoke rising into the sky directly in front of her. She starred at the black line for several moments as possibilities to explain the smoke maturated in her thoughts, but the fact that it was coming from the exact direction in witch the lab laid gave little indulgence to imagination. Panic gripped her and she pushed the rock to move even faster.

The side of the mountain where the lab entrance once stood was now little more then a smoking cavity carved into the cliff side. Pieces of smoldering shrapnel where strewn across the blank sands. The skeletal structure of what looked to have once been a jet, still burned on the air strip. Dead bodies of soldiers and scientists alike where placed among the debris, the majority of them where not intact, they where sliced into two or more pieces, the sand red around them. Places in the sand had been charred black, most from fire but some places where craters formed by some kind of explosive, most likely grenades.

Terra slowed the rock to a halt and leapt off to look upon the nightmarish landscape. She surveyed for only several seconds, then the wake that she had left behind her caught up and she was immersed in screaming winds and burning sands. Terra closed her eyes and raised her hands, then a bubble of clear air formed around her as the sand and dust where pushed away. The few fires that still burned where blown into extinction and most of the smoking metal was covered in a thin layer of sand. She stood unmoving until the gale of earth and air had passed. When it died away Terra dropped her hands to her side and approached the dark scar in the mountain.

Black lines extended upward from the open door, marks where the fire had licked at the stone. The thick doors where bent outward. Something very strong must have broken it from within. The interior was as black as the burned lines on the rock; each of the lights must have been destroyed or extinguished. Terra raised her hand and called on her newly awakened power once more. The ceiling of the gigantic room that lay before her ripped open and daylight spilled into the black room. Terra immediately dropped her hand and looked away. Hundreds of bodies plastered the walls; it looked as though none of these had been left intact. Terra took a deep breath and turned back to the vision of carnage. She slowly took a step forward and passed over the floor that was coated in corpses. There was another metal door in front of her, it had been knocked open and it hung on barely by one of its hinges. Beyond that was more darkness. This time Terra found a large flashlight held by a severed arm. She shook it loose and clicked it on. The opening turned out not to be a room at all but a long empty elevator shaft. Terra looked down the long black pit and saw a destroyed elevator at it end, no doubt containing more bodies. Terra ripped a chunk of cement from the wall and rode in down into an even deeper darkness. Her light scanned the small blank room at the end of the shaft, nothing on the walls nothing on the floor. But yet another door continued to lead farther down, Terra stepped through.

The flashlight fell from her hands and struck the ground with a metallic clink. The large complex laboratory that stood before her was littered with the bodies of dead scientist. Just as Terra began to wonder if nothing had survived this rampage of hate and anger a small noise came from down the ramp atop witch she stood. Terra bent and grabbed the light and jogged down. When her boots clomped against the metal the noise echoed against the walls of the large silent tomb. She reached the base and saw a scientist gripped at a puncture wound the size of a foot ball on his left shoulder. As she was kneeling the question occurred to Terra of just how long this man had been sitting here, no one could remain conscious with a wound like that for more then a half an hour. That meant that whatever happened here must happened less then thirty minutes ago. That was every living thing destroyed and the destruction rained on the building and vehicles outside, not to mention time to get away, in less than thirty minutes. When Terra had arrived she had seen nothing to either direction as far as the eye could see. Not a single dot on the horizon. The man was alive enough to look up at her as she knelt next to him. A name tag attached to his blood stained white coat read, Dr. Spencer. He smiled and laughed to the best of his ability.

"So is it over already? It must be. A little girl like you wouldn't have made it down here alive unless he was long gone. He's grown even more powerful then I could have imagined. It's beautiful." Spencer paused in his adoration of the instrument of his death to cough out blood onto his white sleeve. "I only wish I could see him at his peak."

"Who?" But Terra already knew what Dr. Spencer was going to say.

"The Beast Boy." He smiled at the tears that formed in her eyes, "So you knew my creation before he was born again then did you? In that case I am sorry, but there is nothing you can do now but watch him in his devastating magnificence." She grasped him by the collar of his dress shirt and lifted him several inches from the pool of blood he had left on the floor.

"Why!" Terra could only manage small single word sentences through clinched teeth and eyes full of tears. Spencer looked at her for several seconds then pointed to a blood splattered control panel near by.

"Push the large blue button." Terra dropped him back into his place and walked to the panel. She pushed a body to one side and saw the button. She clicked it and small lights began to click on around the room.

A large central screen flickered on and Beast Boy's photo appeared. It was the same photo that she had seen in the other lab, him in the tube with cords attached to his body. Then another photo replaced that one, Beast boy had longer ears and black hair. Another appeared with his ears dramatically larger and where his now black hair hanging down past his shoulders, large black stripes covered his body and his eyes where solid white. The center of the room suddenly illuminated to reveal the large tube in witch Beast Boy had been imprisoned. The glass was shattered outward and tubes hung out of the opening. When Spencer spoke his words where weak, for he was nearing death.

"He broke free. He was angry for what we had done to him, why I do not know. The power that is now in his hands is beyond any other. What it is that he could want that is greater then the power we have given him I can not imagine." Terra stood and threw the flash light at Spencer's feet,

"Love." She turned and walked back up the ramp to leave the scientist to his death, she would destroy this lab as she had the other, but that would not undo what had been done.