God knows it's been years since I've even thought about it, Animorphs is the product of K.A. Applegate- not the poor Ghostwriter that actually wrote her books. ZING!


"If you think dogs can't count, try keeping three cookies in your pocket, and giving your dog only 2."

-Anonymous

Peaceful Predator

Having prevented Cinderblock from crushing his establishment into an uninsured ruin, the restaurant owner insisted the Titans enjoy a free meal all to themselves with his personal thanks.

Robin enjoyed a prime steak with mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables, their waitress raised an eyebrow when Starfire drowned her ice-cream sundae in mustard and hotsauce. Raven's fork methodically emptied her bowl of Indian rice; quite for the entire meal, Beast Boy just stared blankly down at his untouched salad plate.

Just across the table from him, Cyborg was working hard to make the owner regret the offer of a free meal. Barbecued prime rib, hot wings, a full plate of massive burgers…

How can he eat so much?

No one had ever really questioned the reasons for his vegetarian lifestyle. Oh, it was confusing to them at first; after all, he was Beast Boy, able to turn himself into a tiger, or a panther, a Tyrannosaurus, alligator, bear, lion- the most deadly predators in the world, and he liked veggies? No, 'Dude, I'm been most of these animals!' always seemed to work- now his eating habits were normal.

It never occurred to anyone just how easy it would be.

Beast Boy's sensitive nose caught the smells of Cyborg's all-meat feast. He was ashamed when he caught himself staring. The glistening coat of barbecue sauce over the ribs…bones ridging beneath the meat...his gums tingled and his canines felt raw- stretching a mile long. Flesh cooked in a vat of its own grease and fat…that's what the burgers were. Its scent dug into his nose until the pure ecstasy of it sickened him.

The familiar smells wafted up old memories to the surface. Prowling through a jungle, stalking…hunting…the indescribably thrill of chase…the rewards of catching his prey: meat between his teeth, warm blood flavoring his tongue with copper…

He felt sick when he realized he was drooling.

Shutting his eyes, Beast Boy fell back on his time with Doom Patrol. He had beaten his hunger dammit, controlled his instincts with a dedication he never even knew he had.

I am NOT an animal, he reminded himself as he ran through his old mantra. Sure, it wasn't as cool as Raven's, but it worked. I am not an animal, I am not an animal, I am not an animal, iamnotananimal, iamnotananimal…

"Cyborg," Raven asked. "Would you mind eating that pile of cholesterol you call a meal a little further away? It's making me nauseous."

Had it been BB, Cyborg would have laughed it off; just another battle in their eternal tofu/meat war. But Raven was still recovering from a nasty flu bug- the last thing they needed was Raven emptying her stomach during a nice dinner.

"Sure Rae, sorry." Cyborg nodded politely, taking his plate with him further down the table. Away from both Raven and Beast Boy.

"Your salad's getting cold." Raven commented drearily, returning to her rice.

For just a second, the changeling could have sworn he saw a soft, sympathetic expression on the Empath's face. But no, he guessed it was nothing.

He still smiled gratefully at her. "Thanks."

E'n la sua volontade e nostra pace.

He was a man who had long since been dead. A thing without a heart, without flesh, muscle, nor blood. He but was bones moving only by sheer Will, a crumbling husk trapped in the armor he had burned in.

Now stripped of his power, Slade pulled himself out of the shallow pit of dirt Trigon had buried him in. Being without nerves, he felt no pain; only a weariness in what was left of his soul- the only thing that kept from finally crumbling into dust.

The Great Lord of Demons, Trigon the Terrible, had betrayed him.

Slade had expected this. After all, you don't make a deal with the Devil without having a little insurance first. So, he had plucked the magical ring from the burning ruins of Azar, it power had protected him when Trigon stabbed him in the back. Now it was wrapped around the bone of his finger, safe beneath his glove.

Wherever he was, the aging skeletons of a hundred different warriors lay frozen around him. Most of their weapons and armor were brittle and rusty, and even older swords jutted from the ground to serve as grave markers for even more dead. The remains of others like him, servants of Trigon discarded once their usefulness expired.

Now all that remained was getting to the surface. Knowing Raven, she made sure her friends survived his former-master's arrival on this plane. Loathe as Slade was to admit it, the Titans were integral to his plan.

Silent like blazing ghosts, dozens of Trigon's Fire Demons materialized around Slade, breaking his reverie. Despite being outnumbered and completely surrounded, Slade seemed entirely unconcerned. "Well now, that didn't take long at all, did it?" He said to them. "It would appear your Master isn't as foolish as I thought."

The fire-minions hissed hungrily at him.

Chuckling darkly, Slade calmly crossed his arms behind him back. "Come on," he urged them.

They lunged.

Beneath his mask, a skull grinned.

Kicking at the ground, an aged sword whirled up from the dirt and cut into the first demon mere feet from Slade. As the shredded fire faded and died, Slade caught the old sword in the air. Sidestepped into the throng, he wielded the blade easily with one hand. A handful more of the burning minions fell to pieces in seconds before the others bore down on him; without a break in his speed, Slade crouch low and swept his leg across the demon's vulnerable feet, pouncing back up with a flashing arc of the sword that neatly dissected an unlucky demon groin to crown.

But the old sword broke when Slade raised it to block a strike, so he wedged what remained of it into the chest of a demon, then deftly flipped onto the shoulders of another and crushed it beneath his weight. It was a rush of life he hadn't felt since Terra him in a volcano so long ago. His feet were bulldozers as he spun in the air, a defiance of gravity that cleared crowds of blazing figures with blows that could shatter boulders. He rolled beneath a flurry of fireballs without thinking, pulling another sword from the ground as he sprung to his feet and dispatched every demon that rose against him until it too broke under the strain.

His weapon more like an awkward dagger, Slade stabbed a demon in it fiery chest and punched the weapon straight through- catching the next two fire-minions down the line. Then he spied it- next to the remains of what might have been an ancient samurai warrior: a sheathed katana. Demon claws pressing at him from all sides, Slade's boot punted the sword up to him. An armored first curled around the pommel in mid-fall…

And the air sang.

With expert slices faster than the normal eye could see, Slade separated nine demons torsos from their feet. Sadly, the katana was not made to without the intense heat of so many beings of fire- the steel of the blade hand melted by the last stroke. Still, that did not prevent him from bludgeoning a demon's skull with its pommel. Elbowing a minion at his left and kicking aside another at his right, Slade stepped, twisted, and backhanded the last demon and sent it spinning to ground where it splashed against the sharp rocks.

All was silent but the dead. He was the last one standing.

Flexing his arms and neck experimentally, Slade loosened himself as his joints crackled and popped garishly. "Now then, where was I?"

Strolling with all the complacency of taking a relaxing walk through the woods, Slade waded through Hell with his eye set for the surface.

Redundant

To her credit, Raven didn't even bat an eye when Beast Boy popped up from behind the couch and flung himself on the cushions. "Hey Rae, I was just thinking…"

Levitating in her usual lotus position, Raven turned with page of her book without looking his way. "That's debatable, but go on."

To jab at his intelligence didn't phase the green shifter. Those kinds of exchanges were just part of their relationship. "If you could have any super power, what would it be?"

After a few moments of the question running amok in her head, Raven realized she had been reading the same sentence over and over again. She looked up at him. "You're kidding me, right?

Stranger than Fiction

He had to tell himself he was seeing things. It just didn't make sense otherwise.

There Beast Boy was, sitting comfortably on the couch surrounded by piles of paperback books. Beast Boy was reading. Reading books,for that matter.

"Uh…are you okay, Beast Boy?" Robin asked slowly.

Somehow, the little changeling hadn't heard him. Robin had to repeat himself several times before Beast Boy finally startled and glanced around the room before finally spotting Robin.

"Dude! I found these things in my closet! I like, completely forgot I had them!"

No. Clearly he wasn't imagining things. "What is all of this?" Robin said.

"Animorphs, dude! It was like, my favorite books when I was a kid!"

Robin blinked slowly. Several times. Beast Boy used to read works of fiction involving kids that could turn into animals. There was a joke somewhere in there, he just couldn't find it. "You've read all of these books? There must be dozens of them!"

"Fifty-four, actually. Not including The Andalite's gift, In the Time of the Dinosaurs, Elfangor's Secret…"

"Okay, okay," the Teen Wonder cut in. "I get the picture. But…Beast Boy…you actually can turn into animals? Doesn't that kind of…I don't know, dull some of the excitement?"

The shifter gasped as if Robin had spoken some terrible blasphemy. "Are you crazy? Animorphs is awesome! So who cares if I can turn into animals? They can only do it for two hours! Plus their morphing is slower, they hafta go from animal back to human if they wanna turn into another animal, they have a cool alien friend…"

"Starfire's an alien." Robin pointed out.

"Yeah, but I didn't know her when I was kid," Beast Boy snorted. "Plus, I even mailed the author to tell her she was screwing some things up. I mean, being an ant isn't that bad…"

Robin rose an eyebrow. "Let me get this straight: you wrote to the author of the Animorphs books to correct her on her bestseller books by explaining you really could turn into animals?"

"Well…yeah."

"Did she believe you?"

"She believed me when a green-tailed-hawk knocked on her window."

Trust a stranger…

"Um…excuse me?" a small voice said.

Having been interrupted as she browsed the shelves of the bookstore's fantasy selection, Raven scowled as she regarded a little boy with short black hair, blue-jeans, and a T-shirt with something call 'Thomas the Tank engine' on it.

"What?" she said irritably.

He couldn't have been older than six or seven, shuffling nervously with his eyes glued to ground. "Y-you're a superhero…aren't you?" he stuttered.

"I prefer 'pro-bono civil servant', actually." She replied. Having worked up a little more courage, the boy stared up at her without saying another word. Impatient, Raven turned back to the shelf of books. Bartimaeus,Cast in Shadow, Elric of Melniboné, and…what the heck was Eragon?

"I'm sorry…" the boy spoke up. "But…um…"

Exhaling a controlling breath, Raven looked back down at the little boy. "'But' what? Out with it already."

"I'm lost," he managed. "I don't know where my Mommy is."

Sighing, Raven rolled her eyes. Just my luck. "Fine, fine. Let's go find your mom." She felt the kid's elation mushroom as pulled out her book choices and made her way to the check-out counter with her new shadow right behind her. "What's your name, anyway?" she asked as she paid for her books.

"Anthony," was the cheerful answer.

"…I'm Raven."

"I know," Anthony smiled at her with missing teeth. "You're a Teen Tattin."

"Titan," Raven corrected him sharply.

"That's what I said." He said stubbornly. Raven was vaguely reminded of a green pest she had back at the Tower. Growling, she reluctantly took the boy's hand and led him out of the bookstore into the mall proper.

It was a weekend, so the mall was more crowded than usual. Raven pulled the boy along between the flower river of people as she eased the hold on her senses.

"How come you dress so weird?" Anthony asked with childish curiosity.

"This is how we dress where I'm from," she said matter-of-factly. "Why are you dressed so weird?"

"I'm not dressed weird…" he whined defensively.

"You have a train with a face on your shirt. The only reason people aren't giving you worried looks is because you're six."

"Six-and-a-half." With much significance.

"This way," Raven abruptly pulled him to the side with a particular store in mind. It wasn't exactly subtle; with the frantic panic the woman was in, she might as well have been screaming at the top of her lungs. Thankfully, the panic deflated almost instantaneously when the woman spotted Raven and her son. Now the empathy was overwhelmed with titanic relief. "Anthony!"

"Mommy!"

Tearing free of her hand, little Anthony scurried into his mother's waiting arms. "Oh Anthony! Where have you been? I've been worried sick for an hour!"

Anthony buried his face into his mother's chest, almost in tears. "I'm sorry Mommy…I was looking at the toys in window and then you weren't there and then…"

She shushed him soothingly, ruffling her son's hair. "It's okay, it's okay. All that matter's is that I've found you, okay?"

Squirming out of the hug, Anthony was ecstatic when he remembered how he had found his mommy again. "Mom! Mom! I met a Raven!"

"Who?"

"Raven the superhero! I found her at the bookstore and she led me to you! She's right over there."

But the spot he had pointed out was empty- Raven had already gone.

------------------

"That was a most kind thing you did, Raven." Starfire told her.

Weighed down by their shopping bag, the Titan girls talked as they made their way out of the mall. "What was I supposed to do, shoo him away? I don't even understand why he came up to me in the first place."

"Perhaps this is true to human children as well," Starfire mused. "But it is in my experience that Tamaranean children somehow know who is kind; who is trustworthy. He came to you because you are you, friend Raven."

The dark girl bit her lip, her belly fluttering at old memories of three little children she had watched over. They had trusted her too. Her, Raven, the creepy one.

"Well, it's a good thing we found the kid's mom," Raven said. "We have enough kids at our tower as it is."

Starfire giggled at that. "Yes. No doubt the boys are competing in a tournament of video games."

"Let's just go home, Star."

Peaceful Predator was my own idea why Beast Boy refused to eat meat. Deep, eh? Actually, the college food is so bad here I'M practically a vegetarian. Sorry if you guys didn't enjoy Slade's sudden arrival- I've just been aching for a little action ever since that story with Red-X. The title E'n la sua volontade e nostra pace means 'And in His will is our peace', a famous quote from Dante's Inferno. As for Redundant…well…how many times have you had that conversation?

Compared with Saiyoko, I had a normal childhood. God, does anyone here remember Animorphs? Christ, I feel old. That's nostalgia for you. Again, reviews are always welcome. Feedback, constructive criticism, or maybe you just liked the story. Whatever, just feed the hungry writer please!

I'm helping Sai with the flood of suggestions for the Beast Boy list, so expect a new chapter maybe as soon as tomorrow.

Until next time,

-Cyrus