Chapter Seventeen
Nightwing walked over to Raven, speaking quietly so that only she could hear.
"Raven… I think that if you share your memories of Trigon with me, that we could create a more accurate copy of Trigon." Nightwing said. Raven scowled. "I believe that we can defeat Trigon. Maybe it will be difficult. But we can definitely do it." Nightwing said, holding Raven in his arms, kissing her tenderly on the lips.
Raven thought for a long while, then nodded, resting her forehead on Dick's, taking a deep breath and transferring all of her memories of Trigon to him. As the memories flowed into Nightwing's mind, he gasped. She had been right. Trigon was really far more powerful than anything he could have expected. He was effectively omnipotent and was literally an engine of supernatural destruction. There was almost nobody who could effectively counter Trigon.
Raven's ability to defeat Trigon had partially been a result of his surprise at her return and her willingness to defy him. There was no guarantee that they would win this time, especially since Trigon was probably monitoring their growth.
"Raven… Can Trigon see you right now? Does he know of all your new powers?"
"I'm not sure. He has a strong connection to me. If I concentrate, though, I can block him from knowing everything. My willpower has increased since you enhanced me. That doesn't mean I can completely block him, though. I've been meditating more lately, though. My ability to control my connection to him has improved, and any attempts to break into my mind further may be met with pain on his part." Raven said, knowing that there were still ways for him to get into her mind." Raven said, seeming uncertain.
Nightwing smiled, hugging Raven tightly and kissing her.
"I know you can do it. Hold still." Nightwing said, putting his thumb and forefinger on Raven's forehead, taking a deep breath and then breathing out. Raven yelped and slapped a hand to her forehead.
"I programmed some psychic backlash on your telepathic link. If Trigon tries to forcibly enter your mind, it will hurt. Anyone who tries to enter your mind will feel a great deal of pain.
"It's not physical, but empathic. I hacked into your psychic empathy and added that feature so that anyone accessing your telepathic link will feel all the pain you've ever felt in your entire life via your empathy." Nightwing said. Raven raised an eyebrow.
"Wouldn't I feel it too, then?"
"Not necessarily. If you're not concentrating, you might feel a bit of a tingle. But it will never be anything too overwhelming. The amount of pain they feel will increase as you get older as well because as you get older, you'll feel more pain, both physical and emotional. It may not be the biggest part of life, but it is part of life, so the psychic backlash will increase."
"That's really clever… And you think it will affect Trigon? Trigon isn't human, and I'm not sure if he can experience emotional pain like a human does."
"He's not experiencing his own emotional pain. He's experiencing yours. If Trigon can use telepathy and Empathy, which clearly he can, he can experience your pain… And because he doesn't understand it, I'm betting it will hurt a lot more for him than it did for you." Nightwing said with a sadistic smirk.
"That's a little bit cruel…" Raven said. Nightwing laughed.
"Not as cruel as Trigon was to you. I'm just being practical." Nightwing replied. Raven sighed.
"That's true. But what about humans who try to read my mind?"
"It's not your problem they decided to invade your privacy. Don't worry. It won't kill them. All their pain will be psychosomatic… You know, in their heads." He said. Raven nodded hesitantly.
"I know. It's just hard for me to want to cause someone pain, especially when they're in the middle of a telepathic link. It would cause me pain as well."
"Not as much as you might think. I modified the empathic backlash for you. It won't get rid of it altogether, but it will minimize it so that it will feel more like a tingle than a burn. Watch…" Nightwing said, taking a deep breath, knowing that this would hurt.
However, he aimed at Raven's memories, sending a telepathic jolt forward, beginning to probe into her memories, expecting that she would resist. Raven sighed. She didn't want to hurt Nightwing. But she had to know for herself whether her new evolution would work. So she resisted. Suddenly, Nightwing fell to the floor, groaning in pain, struggling to pull his mind back from hers. Raven's eyes widened. She wasn't feeling a thing. Nightwing had been right. She wouldn't feel the pain of her enemy.
But would Trigon force her to feel any pain that he felt? It seemed like something her father would do. Still, she was relatively satisfied with Nightwing's upgrades on her. She walked over and sat down next to him, putting a gentle hand on his forehead, using her empathic healing to diminish the pain that he was surely feeling at the moment. Finally, Nightwing sat up, gasping.
"Wow! I had no idea you had such a painful life! I… I'm so…"
"Don't say you're sorry… There's nothing I can do about my past. But the past is the past. I can only control my future." Nightwing nodded, tears still flooding his eyes. It was more than just the pain that he had felt. He had experienced all the painful experiences in her past, compressed into just a few moments. It felt like his body was going to be destroyed in just that short moment.
Nightwing was no stranger to pain in his life, and even though he had weakened his ability to feel pain and numbed his nerve endings, his whole body in those few moments that he was in her mind felt like it was on fire."
"Nightwing… Yes, I've had pain in my life… You've had pain in your life. It was our pain that brought us together. Don't dwell on it." Raven demanded. Nightwing nodded.
He wasn't going to belabor the issue. Maybe one day, Raven would feel comfortable talking about her past in more than passing. But he could wait until she was. Nightwing sighed, going to his lab and taking out a number of bottles that were labelled with a name and a number. He then went out to the main room, calling all the Titans together.
"Alright… I know this next request of mine will be strange. But I want you to all take these pills. There are three cycles for each of you. The pills are tailored to each of you individually by gender, race, body type, and other considerations. For instance, it would not be advisable for Cyborg to take Beast Boy's pills. Beast Boy's DNA is slightly unstable and the pills take that into account.
"Now, before you go thinking that I'm giving you steroids, I'm not. They're pure biomass that's been infused with a command program. No one pill will enhance your bodies enough to even be noticeable. However, once you take all three cycles over the course of approximately the next year and a half, a noticeable change will take place.
"The first cycle has four pills in it. Take one pill per week for four weeks. It's important not to take more than one per week. Genetic and physical instability will result if you do. After you finish the first cycle, your physical and mental abilities will all be enhanced as will your individual powers. Wait one month after you finish the first cycle to begin the second cycle… Why is nobody writing this down?"
"I have perfect recall…" Damian said smugly. Nightwing nodded.
"You should still write it down… Come on, everyone. Cyborg, you can just record it in your memory banks. You have no excuse!" Nightwing argued.
"Good…" He said, continuing as they began writing quickly, taking different surfaces to press on.
"Now, the second cycle has six pills. Take one each month, preferably on a day that you will absolutely remember. I suggest synchronizing your pill schedules with each other. But if you want to take it on the Full Moon, or the New Moon or the first or last of the month, it's up to you. Do you guys have all that? Yes? Good.
"The second cycle will further enhance your physical and mental abilities and will complete the enhancements from the first cycle. It will further enhance your powers and make them easier to use, and faster to be drawn out. Whatever that means for each of you, it will be beneficial. You may begin to notice new powers beginning to develop with the second cycle. They will be closely related to your original powers if not natural extensions of the original powers.
"Now, the third cycle is simply to stabilize and complete the first two cycles. The first cycle enhances, the second cycle perfects and the third cycle stabilizes and completes. That's in simple terms. There are six pills in the third cycle. Take one a week. The third cycle will fully stabilize the powers that have been enhanced and will complete and stabilize the powers that you gained in the second cycle if any. It will also increase the biopools already inside all of you so that you can continue to grow on your own.
"You will gain some intuitive understanding of your new powers. But intuition is no replacement for being well practiced in your abilities as we discovered when fighting Hecate, Athena and Artemis… We were no match then, and we won't be a match until we can master our powers. Now, piling more power on top of the powers we already have isn't an acceptable replacement for mastery of our powers, but with practice and taking the pills on schedule, we'll at least be somewhere.
"Besides, Raven believes that Trigon may be coming back. If that happens, we need to have as much power as we can and we need to have mastered them as best we can. Other than that… You know, it's up to you. I'm planning on offering them to Batman… He's getting up there in years, and Gotham isn't ready to lose Batman. Here are the pills if you want them… If not, I'll just reabsorb the biomass and be done with it. Cool?" Nightwing asked. Raven stepped forward and took the three bottles.
Slowly after that, one by one the rest of the Titans came forward and took their pills as well.
"Great… That's it, then… Just take the pills on schedule."
"Aren't you going to take the pills? I noticed you don't have any with your name on them."
"I don't need the pills. Biological manipulation allows me to do everything the pills can do anytime I want. I know, doesn't seem fair, right?
"But eventually, your powers will be unmatched in your own right."
"D'ya know what powers we'll get with these drugs?"
"First off, they're not drugs. They're simply programmed biomass… Second of all, Beast Boy, no. I don't know. I can't know. The powers are as individualistic as any person. Any other questions?" Nightwing asked. Terra raised her hand.
"Oh, you don't need to raise your hand. This isn't high school math class, but go ahead." The young leader replied. Terra blushed slightly, seeming nervous.
"Um… What are the odds that these pills will hurt us?"
"About 1 in 10,000,000. There's about a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that there could be minor side effects that will likely be taken care of by your enhanced healing factors.
"People with physical abilities as high as yours are unlikely to suffer any lasting detrimental effects."
"You're sure of this?" Terra asked. She was still a little ambivalent as to the benefit of taking ability enhancing pills. Whether they were steroids or not, they surely were not all they seemed.
"About 98.9 repeating percent sure." Nightwing said. Terra raised an eyebrow.
"What about the other 1.0001%?" The blonde Titan demanded.
"Margin of error. Without human testing, I can't get it down much lower than that. Maybe to a solid 1% if I were to do more computer projections. But somewhere along the way, I need to do human testing. Batman always said that human testing is the most effective way to test a product."
"Didn't Batman use criminals to test his gadgets?" Beast Boy asked. Nightwing nodded.
"Yeah… Who else?" He asked. The rest of the team shrugged and all swallowed the pills.
"Good… Make sure to keep to the schedule I laid out. You should have an intuitive knowledge now of when to take each pill. I programmed the first pill with knowledge of the schedule of the cycle."
"How did you know which pill we would each take first?"
"I didn't… There was an equal chance that any pill in the first cycle would be taken first. So I programmed all of them with the knowledge.
"However, when the other pills sense that you've already taken a pill, that aspect will be auto-removed." Nightwing said. The Titans nodded.
"Good… Then you should be feeling the effects increasing over the next seven days… I programmed the pills to work slowly so that you weren't overwhelmed by the effects. So by the time you take the next pill, the full effects of the previous pill will be realized.
"You will still have to train your powers to fully learn to control them. But you will have the powers nonetheless. Now, while you're taking the first cycle, you'll feel immense energy. We can start training more… In fact, that energy should be setting in any minute." Nightwing said, smirking upon seeing that the team was starting to look restless.
"Let's go train, now. We can set the timer on triple time."
"Triple time? What exactly does that mean?" Beast Boy asked.
"Well… It means that three times the normal amount of time will pass in the training room as normal. So if an hour is going by outside, six hours will go by in the room. Six hours can see a lot of training done. As we get better and more efficient, we can turn up the time dilation so more time goes by. Eventually, maybe we can train for an entire year inside the period of an hour."
"Wouldn't we starve?"
"No… Again, your brains will know that it was only an hour, even if your bodies experience a full year… You will need to get haircuts once we leave the room, though." Nightwing said with a laugh. The Titans looked at him.
"Was that a joke?" Beast Boy asked. Nightwing smirked, not answering the question.
"Alright… Down to the training room!" Nightwing said. "We'll train for an hour in real world time. It'll be closer to 6 hours in in-room time."
"6 hours! You trying to kill us!" Beast Boy demanded angrily. Nightwing laughed.
"6 or 16 hours wouldn't make much difference in your current level of energy. Besides, remember that you are drastically enhanced physically." Nightwing finished, walking down to the training room.
