The 31st Night
Tria A Nox Noctis
Chapter 3: Gula
The next morning burned too brightly. Raven was thrown back to consciousness cruelly as a patch of light mingled itself through the various levels of cloth she had put over the windows.
No matter how she enchanted those curtains, light got threw. What were her odds anyway?
The girl tossed her blankets away, stretching as she rose. There was an odd feeling to the room that caused her to swerve her neck around to look. There was nothing but her mask faces both smiling and frowning back at her.
She grabbed a new cloak and exited the room quickly.
Robin was the first to make his rounds downstairs. He yawned and started for the kitchen first. If you didn't get to the food before Cyborg, there wasn't any left.
A quick look through held no results, when was the last time they had gone out grocery shopping? The boy sighed and shut the refrigerator door, maybe they'd go out to eat this morning.
He moved towards the couch area intending on checking the morning news. The crunch of glass under his boots caught his attention.
Robin glanced down at the couch area, his mouth going slack. A rare curse found its way past his lips as Robin rushed over to a furry green boy.
There was blood and glass cascaded across the floor and Beast Boy was facedown between the coffee table and the couch, right in the midst. Robin bent down to immediately check for a pulse and breath.
The green skin was frigid and still. Robin's throat went pasty dry as he reached for his communicator to hit the emergency signal.
"Beast Boy…" He muttered as the red alarm started blasting through the tower. There was no heartbeat and no breath. The changeling seemed frozen.
Raven arrived first, nearly a second after the alarm had sounded. Her hair still looked damp from what might have been a shower. "What's-" Her eyes had scanned the room for the one who had started the signal.
They landed on her leader, hunched over a green boy. "Robin?" There was a horrible feeling that surrounded the room and she was almost afraid to move any closer. Her neck prickled uncomfortably and energy buzzed across the undersides of her arms.
Cyborg arrived next, Starfire not far behind. The two froze just behind Raven when they spotted the displeased expression on her face. The red light still blazed on above them all.
Raven rushed forward, it cued the other two to get closer.
"I don't know, I just found him." Robin sounded emotionless. He had reverted back into himself and stuck in autopilot. He moved aside to let Raven see.
It was terrible. He laid prone on the floor, unmoving in every sense. Starfire may have shrieked in the background and started sobbing, Cyborg may have cursed blackly, Raven didn't know. That world had fallen away from her senses.
There was an aura pulsing from him. Curious for someone who looked… dead.
She reached out a careful hand to touch him. When she did, a sort of shock ran up her arm. The action caused her to rear back quickly, a surprised cry rise from her mouth.
Her balance was disrupted, but Cyborg steadied her from behind.
A moan came from the green boy. Raven took a step further back, alarmed that he was moving at all. Starfire, who had indeed been crying, suddenly stopped.
"Beast Boy?" Robin called stepping around the three titans to get to the boy.
There was a groan, then green limbs started moving. Beast Boy pushed himself up carefully, his hands pressing into the broken glass. "Ohh." He called.
Robin grabbed his arm gingerly and pulled him up onto the couch "Peroxide." He ordered to no one in particular. Raven took the excuse to get again.
There was something so ominous about that aura, when she had touched him…
It chilled a part of her that was not impervious to fear. With a flurry of her blue cloak she headed for the kitchen, they kept an extra First Aid kit under the sink.
Cyborg had done a complete check on the changeling to find nothing but minor scratches from the glass.
"I'm telling you, I had a bad dream and rolled off the couch." Beast Boy insisted for what had to be the eleventh time.
"And the glass?" Robin asked once again. He wasn't sure at all about the story.
"I must have hit it off the table in my nightmare." The boy shrugged him off and tried to grab the remote.
"But you weren't even moving." Robin added, accentuating the last word as a hinting. You had to have been dead. He couldn't say that, Starfire was still sitting beside him recovering.
Cyborg ran his vitals again, snatching the remote away. Raven was across the room, eyes cast the opposite direction.
"Dude, I'm fine!" He grinned toothily. "Though I am hungry…" He raised an eyebrow.
Robin sighed and got off the couch. The glass hadn't been cleaned up and it crunched into smaller pieces under his shoes. "Well we're out of food, I guess we should go out for breakfast."
"Yes!" Beast Boy pumped an arm in the air, raising a giggle out of Starfire.
"I do enjoy the rest-er-raunting." Starfire glanced at Robin with a smile, already dreaming up her perfect meal…
Despite the morning's activities Robin felt himself grinning, he could see where Starfire's fantasies had run off to. He turned to Raven.
"You coming?"
Raven continued her staring, had she even heard him? Robin walked a little closer. "Hey," He tapped her shoulder, causing her to snap her attention to him. "We're going to breakfast, you comin?"
Contemplating over his words, Raven gave him a dull look. Finally, she shook her head. "No, I need to get some research done."
Just then, it clicked back into Robin's mind the reason she might be doing research. The reason he had been badgering after the girl the last day…
She was gone. Robin ran a hand through his hair in an exasperated manner. "Let's just go." He called to the other four before marching over to turn off the neglected alarm.
At one of the lesser known restaurants (for Titans valued their privacy), two teenagers were locked in a battle of… consumption.
Beast Boy had been the instigator as always, seeing the two heartiest eaters stare each other down across the table.
Robin had an elbow on the table, his chin resting on his hand and shaking his head. Starfire and Cyborg had arranged a large array of foods on either side. All breakfast foods were present, plus a variety of mustards, condiments and meat.
Lots of meat.
"Ready?" Beast Boy was hunched forward in his booth seat, eagerly watching the contestants.
Starfire grinned in a devious manner, quite unlike her usual sweetness. A cloth napkin was spread across her lap in a tidy manner. Cyborg had his tied around the neck, fork and knife in hands.
"Set."
Robin cringed at the ready warriors. He knew that this day would eventually come, but was unprepared when it did. It would not be a pretty end. Literally.
"Go!" Beast Boy shouted, startling a few people near by who had just received their small breakfast.
And then they were off. Piling food and filling their mouths. There was the scrape of utensils and the slick noise of open-mouthed chewing. Beast Boy counted the food as they consumed and egged each on.
Robin's forehead slipped to the table and hit with a solid clank. Why?
Neither contestant noticed and Beast Boy was too busy counting the hot dogs Cyborg was inhaling.
He could hear bottles of mustard being squeezed out and thrown to the side. Starfire was making slight noises of contentment. A few people had moved closer to see what was going on.
"Any bets? Tin man versus the alien with nine stomachs." Beast Boy called, still rapidly writing down the tally of foods. Robin wished he had stayed at the tower.
Raven threw books aside, tearing through her stacks. Where was that spell book?
When she had finished her inventory she headed for Robin's room. If he had taken and kept it, it would most likely be stashed in his room. She crossed the hall and slid through the door barrier with ease.
All she needed was to check. Just to reassure herself the spell was perfect. Raven tried not to doubt herself often, but…
That aura from Beast Boy would not leave her. It had quickly disappeared when she touched him, but there was something so… unholy about it.
She switched on the light switch for the boy's room. It was very clean, leading up to a messy bed. Where, oh where was it?
Cyborg had given up the fight. The man with a hunger to rival any, apparently could not rival the Tameranian.
When he had ceremoniously run for the bathroom, Robin had called the contest to an end. Starfire gloated all the way home, hugging her trophy bottle of mustard.
The rest of the day had been relatively quiet compared to the morning scene. Cyborg had stalked off to the garage to work, sulking in his first defeat. Starfire was finishing up the last of her Halloween books and pestering Robin about the "tricko-treating" while Beast Boy stayed on his Gaming Station.
The panic of the early morning was gone.
Robin finally had enough of the anxious girl and asked her to go get groceries, ordering Beast Boy to go with her to make sure she got edible foods.
The green boy had muttered about the physical energy it took to go all the way down to the store, but did it nonetheless. Robin sighed and returned to his room. Things may have settled back into a calm manner, but the morning panic was still bothering him.
He had an underlying suspicion that Raven's secret castings had something to do with it. It was just all too coincidental. He plopped back down on his sheets, arms curling under his head. White ceiling was spread wide above him.
What was she hiding?
Cyborg wrenched his arm, tightening one of the larger bolts of his engine. He was building the engine for a jet, better than the previous models he had built. It could be utilized for sea, air or space travel.
While he attached parts and worked the circuitry, his mind pulled up databases of mechanic research he had downloaded. With part of himself inhuman it was so much easier to store information. Memory could not be switched out on disk to be stored and never forgotten.
He grabbed a stack of white metal flaps for what would be a turbine and rearranged them on the other side of him for easy reach. A socket wrench was gripped in his other hand, he searched around for the right size socket piece.
She only won because of her multiple stomachs. Nine at that! He found the socket and attached it to the wrench. Unfair was what it was.
Cyborg had bent over his partly built machine, about to start justifying his loss, when something clattered loudly behind him. He twisted his head around expecting to see a Titan. He was alone.
A bunch of screws and bolts were scattered across the floor. Some were still rolling away. Cyborg shook his head before turning back to his work, he'd clean them up later.
"Gula." There was a whisper of a voice.
Cyborg spun around, intending to catch the trickster. There was nothing. His red eye scanned the area, no signs of body head in the room other than his. Perhaps he was just being hypersensitive.
The tin man shifted his focus back to the engine. Electric blue eyes stared back at him.
"Ahh!" Cyborg yelled, tumbling back away from whatever it was. He couldn't make out a body… the eyes consumed him…
And then it was on it, around him, in him. There was grating through his mind, a shrieking, caterwauling noise. He was distantly aware of the world tilting, splitting, shredding…
He hit the table behind him, knocking things carelessly to the floor. Cyborg fell to his knees. The thing would not leave him, it's eyes penetrated everything.
The boy might have yelled, but he found no air for his hungry lungs. He gave one last rearing back, smashing his backside into something metal. There was a loud clang and he fell face forward to the garage floor.
Starfire had gone into the store by herself. Beast Boy had told her he needed to stay outside the pick up someone. The girl was unsure how he would be doing this without a means of transportation, but didn't argue.
It was one of the rare times she got out alone and she intended to enjoy it.
Not to mention load up on her favorite foods.
So far she had half a cart full. Gathering things the others would eat first had consumed the hour or so she'd been in the store. Now it was time to treat herself.
Starfire knew where she was going and quickened her pace. The third isle was empty and the girl grinned. Her platforms clicked on the newly waxed floor as she hunted down her prey.
The shiny bottles came into view.
Raven stalked up and down her room. There was no book to be found within Robin's room. He must have expected her, hidden it elsewhere. Her footsteps were rapid to waste away the extra energy that part of her wanted to use towards harming him.
All she needed was a little reassurance.
Where else could it be?
The masks watched on as she contemplated the situation.
Robin sat up in his bed after staring at the ceiling for some time. He scanned the room, wishing answers would just jump out at him. The trail lead his eyes back to the bed he was still seated on.
Aggravated, he pushed the blankets away. As he did so, something on his light colored sheet caught his attention. It was- he leaned forward and picked it off- a hair.
Holding it up in the light, he frowned. There was no reason for a violet hair to be in his room. But there it was.
His eyes narrowed. And she was griping about people barging into her room?
Starfire had stacked the rest of her cart full of yellow jars when she heard someone speak.
"Gula…"
She looked up. "Pardon?" Her cat-like eyes looked up and down the isle. There wasn't a person as far as she could see.
The alien shrugged to herself and picked up her basket. It tottered under the unbalanced weight.
"Te nefas la gula!" The voice was louder.
Starfire looked around her. "Hello?"
"Macto te."
"Where are you?" Starfire was starting to feel uneasy. Glancing around quickly now, she started to head out of the isle.
Something snatched the basket out of her hands. She turned to see it, only to fall into darkness to parallel a black hole. Not a scream escaped.
Beast Boy had just about lost his patients when Starfire strolled out of the grocery store, arms full of grocery bags.
"Any troubles?" He asked, catching up with the girl. Even with the weight of the food, her pace was still faster than his.
She seemed to pause a moment, an uncertainty falling across her features. "No?" She answered as thought she wasn't sure. A second later she shook it off, the cheery smile returning.
Beast Boy shrugged and hurried further to keep up with her steps. "You did pick up some tofu, right?"
Starfire sped up to avoid answering.
Gula: Also known as Gluttony. Starfire is a glutton of food, Cyborg is a glutton of food and information.
Next chapter: Avaritia
Most of the Lain based language is saying "you are guilty of gluttony, punish thee". Review.
:Bloody Fae: