Harry jerked awake in his first class airplane seat, breathing heavily with cold sweat on his face, barely keeping himself from screaming. His heart was racing in his chest and his hands were clutching the armrests in a death grip. He grit his teeth and closed his eyes, trying to shake off the memories.

"Are you alright, Harry?" Alice asked from the window seat to his right, her copy of the first book of The Wheel of Time in her lap as she gazed at him.

Harry let out a breath and ran his fingers through his sweaty black hair. "I'm fine, Alice. Just a dream."

Alice studied him, trying to discern the truth in his words. "Have you been having many?"

Harry attempted to wave it off. "Nothing I can't handle."

Alice continued to observe him, so Harry turned to see what Lara and Beast Boy were doing on the other side of the aisle.

Lara was taking advantage of the time to continue her research, the small tray table in front of her covered in papers and a couple of old books, all of which she was studying intently.

Beast Boy was in his illusion, making him look like a normal boy. He had his phone out and earphones on his head as he watched something on Netflix.

"Do you know why I began studying psychology, Harry?" Alice finally said, making him turn his attention back to her.

"Beast Boy bought you Psychology for Dummies, and you enjoyed it and began looking into studying it." He said, remembering her initial distaste at being given something labeled 'for Dummies' and the verbal thrashing she'd given BB.

"That's part of it, yes…" She turned to look out the window at Europe passing below them. "Mostly, however, I wanted to help you, Harry."

Harry was confused. "Help me, Alice?"

She nodded, turning back to him. "Even before you told me about your experiences in that town, I knew something haunted you. It was in the little things you did. The sudden silences, the dark eyes you had when you thought nobody was looking. I thought that, maybe, I could help you somehow." She smiled softly. "You did save me, after all. I wanted to do something to repay that…"

Harry shook his head. "I didn't do anything, Alice."

"You're wrong." She closed her eyes briefly and took a breath. "I may have gotten rid of Bumby, Harry, but I had nothing beyond that. I would have been on the streets till I found some way to support myself, and it likely would not have been pleasant. Some of the only options for someone such as me in my home time aren't… pleasant, as I'm sure you well know. But you came along and, rather than haul me in to the police, you listened to my story and gave me a place alongside you and Garfield. You even brought me along when you left to try to get home, allowing me to do things I never imagined." She glanced out the window briefly with a small smile. "Like fly." She turned back to him. "I owe you more than I can say. And Garfield, of course. But mostly you, as you were the one to give me a chance." She took his hand, serious green eyes gazing into his. "You have these dreams often, don't you?"

Harry considered lying, but in the end sighed and nodded. "Every night since I left Silent Hill. Mostly memories about that accursed town, with differences that make things… worse. I wake up screaming, some nights…"

Alice looked pained. "Why didn't we hear anything, then? I'm a rather light sleeper."

He shrugged uncomfortably. "Silencing charms, mostly."

Alice scowled. "Harry, I think it's fairly obvious that you have some form of PTSD. You shouldn't be hiding it from us." Harry didn't say anything, so she sighed and squeezed his hand. "I may be a beginner, but I'm now your personal therapist, Mister Potter. I know you don't want me entering your mind at this moment, but that doesn't mean I can't use more mundane methods to assist you."

Harry frowned. "Alice…"

She raised an eyebrow challengingly. "You don't have a say in this. You need help, and you're getting it, whether you like it or not." She gave his hand one last squeeze before turning back to her book. "This isn't the place for us to have a first session, but we're going to set aside an hour at least once every other day. Understood?"

Harry let out a defeated sigh, though he couldn't help the rueful smile on his face. "Yes, Dr. Liddel."

Alice smiled before once again becoming engrossed in her story.

Feeling more relaxed now, Harry put on his headphones and began listening to music, closing his eyes and relaxing to the soothing tones of Queen.

Beast Boy stretched as he stepped out into the Venetian sun with the others, relieved to finally be out of the city's Marco Polo airport. He hated commercial air travel. At least Alice had enjoyed herself, it being the first time she'd flown, or left Britain, for that matter.

Speaking of Alice, her eyes were flitting about, taking everything she could in as Lara led the way to the water taxis, smiling at the attendant who helped them stow the two bags they brought. Wishing he could just turn into a dolphin and swim to their destination, BB got into the boat after the girls got in, Harry getting in last and giving the address of their hotel.

Alice eagerly began taking dozens of pictures as they entered the canals of Venice, and Lara grinned at the younger woman. "Amazing, isn't it?"

Alice nodded emphatically, eyes wide and roaming, a large smile on her face. BB felt a grin come to his own lips, the sight of the girl's happiness infectious.

Harry, he noted, was also looking around appreciatively, but his eyes scanned for more than just the aesthetic beauty of the city. He was warily looking for snipers or scouts that might be watching. BB began to do the same. There's no way Trinity didn't already know they were in the city. They'd have to be complete idiots to not prepare once they realized that the group was coming for them.

Thankfully the four of them arrived at their hotel without incident, checking into the large penthouse suite, which had enough room for all of them. Beast Boy entered the rather extravagant apartment with a grin, glad that Harry and Lara decided to jointly pay for the trip, making it pretty comfortable. Lara would have preferred to be a bit more frugal, but Harry had decided there was no reason not to spend a little extra on comfort. It's not like they couldn't afford it. Something which BB thanked Harry profusely for.

He hated flying coach with all his being.

"Beast Boy, if you would." Harry said as he and the girls remained in the entrance hall, not going forward. Beast Boy's smile dropped and he nodded seriously, turning into a German Shepard and beginning to sniff around for explosives or anything else unsavory.

After a ten minute sweep he returned to human form and gave the others a thumbs up. "We're in the clear, guys."

The other three entered and began making themselves comfortable, Harry pausing at each window to cast an unbreakable spell on them to prevent any snipers from getting them. Alice eagerly went to her room and lay down on the bed, luxuriating in its softness as Lara pulled out her phone to call Sam.

Sam had not been happy that the four of them were heading to Venice without her. She'd pleaded with Lara to let her come, but they all put their feet down. Unlike Lara, Sam didn't have any combat skills to fall back on against Trinity. When she'd argued that she would be safer with them since otherwise Trinity could just kidnap her for leverage, Harry spent an hour warding the manor so she'd be safe there, shutting that argument down. She'd finally, rather angrily, let them go, though she demanded that Lara contact her frequently, something her friend had no problem acquiescing to. She knew it was simply Sam being terrified of losing Lara again, this time in a more permanent fashion.

Beast Boy went ahead and ordered them all some room service, hungry from the trip and wanting to have something in his stomach when the time came to go over their next steps. After a hearty meal of pizza, pasta and salad, the group began to talk about what came next.

"Okay BB, where exactly is their base of operations in the city again?" Harry asked as he sipped his tea, leaning back in his seat.

Beast Boy gulped down the last of his veggie pizza before speaking. "There's an old church near the Doge's Palace. The tourists help mask the comings and goings of their agents. There's a way down underneath it. Pretty cliché, honestly."

Lara chuckled. "Trinity has been around long enough that such things weren't clichés when they set up." She sighed. "It's a pity that this isn't their main headquarters, but hopefully we can get some information and cause them some damage."

Alice shrugged. "True, but we should take what we can get. Now then, what's the plan?"

Harry rubbed his chin. "I was thinking I could use some glamours to disguise us and get into the church. Security will be on alert since they'll know we're coming, but they can't get us if we look nothing like ourselves. After that…" He shrugged. "I'm not exactly against just ripping through them once we're inside and away from the tourists."

Beast Boy's eyes gleamed as he leaned forward. "I have an idea…"

The next day a trio of blond, tanned siblings, two girls and a boy, entered a small but beautiful church, discussing something in German as they snapped pictures with the cameras around their necks, marking them as obvious tourists. They weren't the only ones doing that, so the Trinity guard sitting and acting as though he was praying didn't pay them much mind beyond tensing slightly when they passed the entrance to the rest of the church and the complex beyond it.

He never noticed a small green lizard slip out from under the boy's pants and under the crack in the door.

Beast Boy slowly and carefully made his way through the church hallways, sticking to the shadows and using the memories he'd taken from the Trinity agent to head straight for the entrance to their underground lair. The trip took longer than he'd wanted, but they had accounted for the possibility. Finally he reached the entrance, a normal looking wall marked only by the large crucifix on it. All the while finding the cliché's hilarious, he looked around for cameras before changing briefly to his human form and turning the crucifix exactly nighty degrees. There was a click before the wall shifted slightly. He pushed it open a crack before slipping back into being a lizard and slipped into the stairway beyond.

He hurried down the stairs as quickly as his tiny legs could carry him, reaching the shadows at the bottom just as the steel door opened on well-oiled hinges, letting a woman in a Trinity uniform come out, a pistol in her holster, obviously heading up to check why the wall opened.

Beast Boy let her pass before silently shifting back into human form. Before she had a chance to react he wrapped an arm around her throat and kicked her in the back of the knee so she'd be below him. He kept the chokehold up while she struggled till she slumped, unconscious. He set her down in the corner beside the steel door before shifting into the form of a house cat. Not as stealthy as a lizard, but would let him get around faster.

BB stalked through the underground complex, eyes taking everything in. Quite a bit of the base was packed up, hardware and items of interest in boxes and paper shredded in wastebaskets. Trinity was preparing to abandon the base and were trying to get rid of anything that could be used against them. He briefly debated changing back into a martian to get information, but decided against it. He wasn't practiced with it, and it gave him a huge headache. Besides, he'd be noticed instantly and wouldn't be able to focus on probing for intel while being shot at.

When he got back home he'd be going to J'onn for some pointers.

He'd managed to make his way pretty deep into the complex before he was spotted. A lab tech came out of what looked like a research lab carrying a box of what looked like old artifacts and stopped as she spotted BB. "What's a cat doing here?" She mumbled, not registering the problem for a moment before her eyes widened. "Wait, a green cat…?" She opened her mouth to scream. "INTRU-!"

BB didn't give her a chance to finish, jumping and shifting in mid-air, his fist extended to slam into the woman's face, knocking her against the wall and making her drop the box with a crash.

He sighed as he heard the sound of rushing feet making their way to his location. Well, stealth was officially not an option anymore. As the base alarms began to sound, he shifted into a tiger and pounced on the first poor mook to turn the corner with a roar.

Back topside, the guard jerked when his earpiece informed him of the intruder below. He got up unhurriedly and made his way to the door, trying to be surreptitious. He didn't notice the German tourists follow him. He quickly rushed to the entrance to the stairs once away from the crowds, pausing when he saw it was already open. He began to draw his hidden pistol when he felt a hand touch his back before it all went black.

Harry let the red spell dissipate from around his hand, the glamour that made him look like a blond boy wavering and disappearing. He opened the passageway as the girls came up behind him, Alice already in her blue dress while Lara was tying her hair back in a messy ponytail. They made their way down, Harry Stupefying the unconscious guard for good measure, before they entered the base proper, hearing the ringing alarms and the sounds of gunshots.

Harry pulled a marble out of his pocket before it shifted into his revolver with a whispered word as Alice summoned a parasol to her hands and Lara whispered her trigger word to have her pistols come to her hands from the charms on the bracelet Harry had enchanted for her, 'Endurance'.

Now armed, the trio moved further into the base, spotting the same things Beast Boy had. Lara frowned as she pulled a mass of shredded paper out of a wastebasket. "It seems like we'll need to focus on the computers if we want any information…"

Harry nodded and pulled a portable hard drive out of his bag. "Here, start collecting what you can find. Alice will stay here to cover you while I go help BB." His head snapped up as a group of lab techs and maintenance personnel came around the corner, obviously intending to escape. More than one person's eyes widened as they spotted the three, and several began trying to run back the other way when they saw Harry raise his revolver, tripping over the people behind them.

Harry began to fire his gun, stunning bullets hitting the fleeing Trinity workers, making them drop to the floor, more than one breaking their nose on impact with the ground. He turned to the girls. "You ladies good on your own?"

Alice twirled her parasol. "We'll be fine, Harry. Go help Garfield."

He nodded before making his way deeper into the facility, following the sounds of roaring animals and panicked shooting.

Beast Boy was leaving a trail of devastation. He left Trinity soldiers strewn about the ground, lacerations and/or broken bones on every single one. His opponents found him to be an enormous pain in the ass due to his constant shifting. One moment a bear was launching a soldier several yards away, the next a small monkey was crawling on another, only to turn into an anaconda that promptly strangled his foe, dropping to the ground as a squirrel when about to be shot, then charging at the shooter and changing into a bull midway. It was driving his enemies mad.

Things didn't improve for the Trinity agents when Harry came onto the scene. With one hand he fired his gun, while the other spit out streams of colored light that had various effects on his opponents, from turning them into chickens to making them dance uncontrollably, wreaking even more chaos among their number. It didn't take long before every base defender was down, Beast Boy turning back to human and stretching out from the exertion.

"I'm out of shape." The green boy complained. "Haven't needed to shift so often and so quickly in a while."

Harry chuckled. "Something tells me you'll be getting plenty of practice, BB." He looked at a nearby room full of artifacts, apparently from various digs around the world. "Hmm… We should probably secure these…" He began to use his magic to shrink and store everything into a bag he brought along for just such an event.

Back with the girls, Lara had moved from office to lab to office, saving as much information as she could find. One thing she found very interesting was a list of potential artifacts of power, their suspected locations, and plans for retrieval. The young woman's grin was gleeful as she saved that to study later.

Alice was twirling her parasol as she kept watch. She turned to Lara, curious. "Have you found anything of interest?"

Lara nodded. "Yes. Well, of interest to me, at least. Nothing on Trinity's other bases. I'd guess that's the first information they deleted. What I'm finding now is the lower priority stuff they hadn't gotten around to backing up and deleting."

"A pity, but unsurprising." Alice said calmly. "It would have been foolish in the extreme for them to leave further breadcrumbs when they knew we were coming."

Further conversation was interrupted when a trio of soldiers came into view, immediately raising their assault rifles and firing. Lara reached for her pistol, but Alice set her feet and set her parasol in front of her like a shield, twirling it. To the attackers' (and to a lesser extent, Lara's) surprise, the shots hit the parasol and ricocheted, many travelling back to strike the shooters, who went down with cries of pain. Once the assault was over the girl set her parasol over her shoulder and glanced back with a small smile. "Nothing to worry about."

Lara chuckled and went back to work. She was interrupted again, this time by the base's alarm changing tone before a voice began to speak. The archeologist's face went deadpan before she sighed. "Seriously…?"

Beast Boy, who had been about to change into his martian form to attempt some information gathering, groaned in irritation. "Why does this always freaking happen? This isn't a damn action movie!"

Harry listened to the self-destruct notification before shrugging. "Guess we're done here. Let's go get the girls and leave."

The two made their way through the strewn bodies of the Trinity soldiers, the self-destruct warning grating their ears. Soon they reached the others, Lara just finishing unplugging the hard drive from a computer's port and handing it to Harry. "Got as much as I could. Interesting stuff I'll want to go over later, but nothing of immediate use."

Harry nodded. "Well, we knew it was a longshot. C'mon, let's get out of here."

The group nodded and began to leave, Lara leading the way with her pistols at the ready. They stopped when they heard a gunshot and Harry felt something impact the back of his head, forcing it forward from the force. The he turned to look at the lab tech who had shot him with an annoyed look on his face. Said tech looked like he was pissing his pants. "Wh-wha-what…?"

Harry glared at the terrified man. "Believe it or not, I do learn from my mistakes." He turned and launched a red light at him, making him drop, unconscious.

"You okay, dude?" Beast Boy asked, Alice and Lara looking concerned.

"Fine, guys. Just a headache now. C'mon, let's get back to the hotel. These freaking alarms are pissing me off…"

Nodding they left. Shortly thereafter the entire base went up in an explosion which shook Venice like a small earthquake. No one was hurt.

No one other than Trinity, at least…

Relatively short chapter I'm not all that satisfied with. The entire base assault wasn't up to my standards, but I can't figure out how to improve it without making it beyond unnecessary. *sigh* Oh well…

I don't have too much to say regarding the chapter at the moment. It was mainly a small action piece with some character development and setup for the next part of our time in Lara's world.

Now then, I have a question for all of you.

I have a bunch of ideas I haven't written a first chapter for that I want to get out of my head. However, I can't decide which one to do first. So I'm posting a poll on my profile with my ideas. The one that gets the most votes will be the one I work on. I'll give it a week since I intend to take this coming week off writing to catch up on anime and such. Here are the options (they'll be described in the poll too):

Harry Potter/Castlevania: Inspired by Survival of the Fittest and an alternate idea for the beginning of Brightest in Shadow which would have replaced SH, the basic premise is Harry is captured and stuck in a certain castle without even a wand by Voldemort with a monitoring charm stuck to him so snake face can watch our hero die horribly by the hands of the various denizens. To secure himself more power and fear, he makes it so the events are also shown in the Hogwarts Great Hall. So Harry has to survive a castle full of monsters, all the while unaware his every move is being watched by friends and enemies alike.

Harry Potter: Based on the classic Make A Wish, this is a more serious take where Harry leaves Britain to see the world and learns from various people along the way, making friends and allies, and gaining new tools and skills. I'd basically be winging it when it comes to Harry's itinerary, but… well, that's nothing new for me.

RWBY/Disgaea: Jaune is on a mission with his team hunting down kidnappers when it turns out they're cultists. Through classic Jaune luck he trips over his own two feet, and next thing he knows, a giant penguin is staring at him. Welcome to the mayhem, Jaune.

Legend of Zelda: Primarily based on OoT/MM with elements of other games in the series, and based on the excellent, if weird I Just Want a Vacation. Link has returned to Hyrule after traveling through various lands in his search for Navi, fighting even more apocalyptic beings and gaining a greater arsenal than he has any right to. He has excellent timing, because a great tournament is beginning in Hyrule. Should be fun… Right?

I have other ideas, but they're more nebulous or in need of further information. I have an idea for a Pokemon story, for example, but haven't seen the anime since Hoenn. I plan, some day, to watch the Japanese version of the entire series, but that will, uh, take a while. .

Anyway, the poll will be up till Fri 27th. Please vote for your choice before then. I won't be taking into account any review voting, though. Sorry.

I think that's all for now. Till next time, all. Review!