Chapter VII
Titans Tower, Jump City, the present.
Robin's room was decorated with newspaper clippings, more than half of which were Slade-related articles. His desk was littered with wrenches, screwdrivers, and all the tools he could get his hands on without looking too suspicious. The Teen Titan had locked himself up in his room for the past two hours, trying to make something of the trash that appeared in the gym floor earlier. One good look made him realize what it was – it was the time-traveling device used by one of their enemies, the one named "Warp".
How it got to this timeline, Robin did not know. But he couldn't let such a thing go to waste. He spent the entire two hours trying to repair it. He did manage to get the pieces back together, and succeeded in feeding it power from one of his electro-discs. But beyond that, Robin was lost.
For a fleeting moment, he thought of asking Cyborg for help, but he quickly dismissed the idea. He couldn't afford to let the other Titans in on it. He imagined Raven giving a speech about how it shouldn't be repaired in fear of evil forces that would try to get their hands on it. He imagined Beast Boy smashing the device right after Raven's speech. And he imagined Cyborg bursting out into a quarrel with Beast Boy.
But what really bothered Robin was the way Starfire would react. Their first encounter against Warp had been quite traumatic on her. She accidentally got sent twenty years into the future where she witnessed how much the Titans would drift apart from each other. To a peace-loving, friendly girl like Starfire, it was her worst nightmare come true. Although her actions had managed to get her back to her original timeline and helped change the course of history, Robin knew that there's nothing quite as painful as reliving your worst nightmare again…even if it's just in your memories.
No. He was in this alone.
Finally deciding that he would have to be satisfied with what he can do with the device by himself, he connected on it a chip that allowed him to remotely access and analyze it from his computer (ala-Bluetooth). He studied as much of the complex engineering principles involved. He sooner found out that the device was damaged beyond full-repair. It only had enough functioning parts in it to open a time-portal one last time. And even so, whatever enters that time-portal would not be able stay in the destination timeline for more than two hours. If Robin were to enter it, he only had two hours to spend on his destination timeline before instantly getting transported back to the present.
There were a lot of things in the future that Robin had wanted to see. He always wondered what would become of him and Starfire…and the other Titans, of course. Then again, he had also been longing to see his future self "Nightwing", whom Starfire talked about from her trip to the future.
On the other hand, there were also a lot of past events where two hours could've made a big difference. The time that his family was murdered. Or that time he quarreled with his mentor and ex-girlfriend at the same time…he just remembered that he had not reconciled with either one, yet.
But he knew that he shouldn't meddle with past events that directly involved him for there will be no telling what ramifications his actions in the past might make upon his present. If he was seriously considering time-traveling…there had to be only one destination: ten years before the founding of the Teen Titans…the day that all this began.