I actually got two reviews on my first chapter! Yay! lol I'm easily pleased.
Sasori Katana – hehe the whole O one thing will be cleared up shortly.
BBfan4evah – thanks for the review! Glad you liked it.
I don't own Teen Titans! But I do own O one. . .no one else – yet.
So here ya go:
Chapter 2: Nemesis
An alarm split the silence of Titans Tower. Robin was out of bed in an instant. Ten seconds later he stood before a screen scanning the details it presented. The other Titans burst through the doors.
"What-" Cyborg began.
"New villain." Robin didn't wait for the rest of the question. "At an abandoned factory. There." He pointed to a map on the screen.
"Bout time we had a real fight," Cyborg muttered. "What are we waiting for?"
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With a groan of protest, the old machines started up in the abandoned factory. A deep laugh blended with the racket. "The Teen Titans won't be able to refuse this bait. Soon they will come and the city will be mine!"
"Nice plan. Too bad it won't work out the way you wanted." Robin stood on the factory floor, tensed for battle. The other Titans were behind him, glaring at the shadowy figure.
"Ah, Titans! So nice of you to join me." The man leaped down from the catwalk he had been on. As he entered the dim light, the Titans saw that he was middle aged, with badly dyed blue hair. His skin had an almost grayish hue, making him look sick. Most of his body was covered in a sky blue jumpsuit, accented with a white belt, boots, and cape.
"Dude, he looks like a comic book superhero," Beast Boy said.
"He is no hero," Starfire declared. "And he does not seem super to me."
"It doesn't matter what you call him," Cyborg boasted. "We're gonna beat him no problem!"
"TITANS, GO!" Robin cried. Starfire was first to attack, throwing starbolts at the blue-clad villain. Without any effort, he sprang into the air, sailing over her head to land on a machine. Cyborg fired his sonic cannon, but the man slithered behind a pile of rubble. Growling, Cyborg ran towards the debris and shouldered his way through it, but his opponent had disappeared.
Beast Boy became a cheetah, and chased after a shadow. The villain dashed past him at the last second, almost causing Beast Boy to slam into the wall. He swerved, shifting to the form of a sparrow, and pursued the villain. The green sparrow sped along, inches above the ground, and transformed into a ram as he caught up to the man. Beast Boy moved to head-butt him, but he suddenly wasn't there. Confused, Beast Boy skidded to a stop and looked up just in time to see a flash of sky blue come crashing down on him.
Robin extended his bo staff and leaped after the villain. The man dodged the whirling staff, and summoned up a powerful wind, blowing Robin away.
"Azarath Metrion Zinthos!" Raven shouted, her power enveloping several loose, heavy sheets of metal. She hurled them at the villain, who evaded again. She tried again, this time with a pair of barrels standing nearby. As she aimed, the man muttered a few words. A split second later, the entire factory was filled with a thick white mist. Raven heard the barrels slam harmlessly into one of the machines. With an "eep," Starfire flew straight into a tangle of rubber tubes hanging from one of the machines. Beast Boy and Cyborg, both running to Raven's aid, collided and ended up as a heap on the floor. Robin, glimpsing a silhouette flying down on him, prepared to attack, only to realize that it was Starfire.
Raven tried to meditate and lock onto the villain's position, but the roar of machines threaded through her concentration just enough to ruin her efforts. She didn't even notice the blur rushing to meet her through the clouds until, with a grunt, she was kicked backwards. She crashed into Beast Boy, just as he was separating from Cyborg. Using special sensors imbedded in his robotic eye, Cyborg scanned the room for heat, picking out the forms of Raven and Beast Boy to his left, and of Robin and Starfire across the factory. Then, turning slowly, he saw another figure, directly above him.
Cyborg fired a second shot from his sonic cannon. It took the villain by surprise. He barely had time to move before the blast threw him into the wall. He fell to the floor, still hidden by the mist from the other four Titans. Not giving his adversary time to recover, Cyborg slammed into him, pinning him against the floor. "Who are you?" he growled in the villain's ear.
"Oh own," the man hissed. A sudden bolt of lightning from somewhere behind Cyborg struck the Titan, shorting out some of his circuits and making him lose his hold on Oh own. The man slunk away, once again completely invisible. "Your new nemesis."
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As he completed his repairs back in Titan Tower, Cyborg told the rest of the team what he had heard in the factory.
"So it wasn't 01," Robin mused.
"It was Oh Own," Starfire completed.
Beast Boy beamed, and opened his mouth. Raven interrupted him: "Don't even think about it. Now isn't the time to brag about being right."
"We still don't know what that means," Robin agreed. "Or what O one's plan is."
"Or how to beat him," Cyborg added.
"So what shall we do?" Starfire asked. "Shall we look for him or wait for his next move?"
"He hasn't presented himself as a public threat," Robin said. "At least not yet."
"But he has the potential to do some serious damage," Cyborg argued. "We can't just let him roam free around the city!"
"Then where do you propose we start looking?" Robin reasoned. "As far as we know, he doesn't have ties to any other place. We can check at that factory, but I doubt he'll come back. It's too obvious."
"Perhaps he will chose a similar abandoned factory to inhabit," Starfire suggested. "We could search those first."
"Dude, do you know how long that would take!" Beast Boy cried.
"If we narrowed down the possibilities it wouldn't take so long," Raven pointed out monotonously.
"How?" Robin asked. "What details would we look for?"
"That factory was shut down years ago because the management refused to observe the emissions regulations," Raven informed them. "It was releasing too much pollution."
Robin turned to the computer, understanding where Raven was headed. "So if we run a search on all the factories in the city shut down for polluting . . ." His voice trailed off as he hit a few keys. A handful of blinking green lights appeared on a map of the city.
"It narrows our search," Cyborg said.
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Starfire peeked through the dusty windows of a factory. "I don't see anyone in there," she whispered.
"Let's go inside," Robin replied from the ground. They stepped silently through the door, carefully staying in the shadows. Everything inside was covered in an inch-thick layer of dust. Robin checked the floor, and all the offices and storage rooms. Starfire flew up, thoroughly inspecting every machine and catwalk. Neither found a trace of anything.
"On to the next one," Robin sighed.
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"What do you suppose they made here?" Cyborg wondered aloud. His voice echoed around the empty space.
"I don't know," Raven said distractedly.
"Looks like someone got here before us and took all the machines," Cyborg observed.
"Yep."
Raven levitated near the ceiling, scanning the floor and corroded scaffolding. It appeared someone had been working on the walls before the factory was shut down. Besides herself and Cyborg, she didn't sense any movement. On the floor, Cyborg scrutinized the large area and small adjacent rooms with various filters and scanners. After a few minutes he shook his head.
"I don't think anyone's here."
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Thousands of flies swarmed around the trash piled outside the abandoned factory. Hardly discernable in the chaos, one fly had a slightly greenish tint. This individual flew through a broken window and settled on a pile of rotten wood. Beast Boy reverted to his usual shape and hopped down off the wood. He tiptoed around the various mechanisms, poking his head into every crevice. Finally, he became a barn owl, flying up into the highest corners of the enclosure. He listened intently, hearing the buzz of the flies outside, the splash of water on the docks a few hundred feet away, and the occasional clink or pop as something in the abandoned factory shifted slightly. What he didn't hear was a heartbeat or breathing of another person in the building. He didn't even hear a rustle of clothing or footstep.
No one here, he thought. Not wasting another second, he once again took on the shape of a fly and sped out the broken window.
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After a long, weary day, the Titans made their way back to the Tower. They had searched every abandoned factory on the list, with no results. As the sun set the lights went out. Soon the Teen Titans were asleep.
The image of the Titan Tower flickered on a screen and vanished. O one chuckled to himself. They were so naïve. If they thought he would hide in a place as evident as another abandoned factory . . . He let the thought rest at that. He had no need to worry about them ruining his plot. Of course, he didn't have everything he needed yet. The plan would proceed as planned.
There it is – chapter 2! Again, please review! Did you like the action in this chapter? I sometimes don't do too well with battles, but I'm kinda pleased with that scene. There should be more fighting in the next chapter, too. I hope there was at least some suspense in there. I like adding suspense, but I always worry that I make the truth too obvious.
Sorry if the whole "O one" thing confuses you. It's pronounced "oh own" but it is spelled "O one". There is a reason for that, and I'll explain it eventually. Maybe in the next chapter; I'm not sure.
Unless by some miracle I write another chapter and post it by next Tuesday, I won't update again until July 24 or later. (I'll be at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp!) I'll try and type it up as quickly as I can when I get back so you all won't have to wait quite so long.
Anyway, enough rambling out of me! Review, review, review!