A/N: I apologize for the wait, and hope you like the latest installment! Oh, and I don't actually own these characters…. Did I have to say it? Also, I'm trying a slightly different style this time around, and would appreciate if you told me whether it added to the experience or reduced it.
Mind and Body Chapter 17: Night at the Museum
Oracle stared incredulously at Robin, who had come to her with his idea. "Let me get this straight," she said with a false calm, "you want to do something that isn't necessary to get a result that should wait until after we handle the source of the psychic fog over the city, before we've even identified it?"
Robin hesitated, "Err…yeah."
Oracle broke into a grin and glanced at Raven, who was watching curiously from the doorway. "Well alright then!" she said, "go and have fun for once, Robin."
Robin blinked and stared after her as she rolled out of the room. "What?" he said into thin air.
Raven shook her hooded head, "She just thought that this was perfect—apparently she's been trying to break you of the all-work-no-play habit since you first met."
"But…she was the workoholic then," Robin muttered in confusion, "I was helping Batman because he wouldn't let me out of his sight. Even on crime-fighting missions. She was doing it because she wanted too."
"And that's the difference between the two," Beast Boy said with a grin from Raven's second hood, "Work is doing something because you have to and play is doing something because you want to."
"…Oh," he said, slightly less confused, "well…since we got permission, let me show you the museum."
SCENE CHANGE-
Back at the shattered apartment complex, a goggled Gizmo was watching the scene through a spyfly. He grinned and turned to Jynx. "Hey leader," he said, "I think you should see this."
Jynx came over and looked over his shoulder as he replayed the conversation. As it finished, she grinned widely, "Well then…it seems they are about to take the first test. But I'm surprised they would do something so foolish." That was the only real problem with her Chaos magic—it clashed so completely with the natural order of things that even humans had enough instinct left to sense the wrongness.
Calling Cinderblock to her, Jynx gave him his orders and smiled like a cat at the cream as he disappeared once again into the Earth. "Have a taste of Chaos, little heroes," she murmured in satisfaction.
The stone face of the museum seemed unfriendly to Beast Boy, but that was mostly the guard's expression as he let an animal into the 'hallowed halls' of Jump City Natural History Museum for the first time in its' lifespan. The glare coming out of the man's face was enough to curl your toes, but Oracle managed to have a connection with the curator earlier and coaxed an agreement out of him. There was nothing a lowly security guard could do to change the matter.
SCENE CHANGE-
The curator was a short, balding man with a tight-lipped smile that didn't reach his eyes. His forehead had a slight sheen of sweat and he rubbed his hands together as the three approached and said, "You are Madam Gordon's young friends, yes?"
"That's right," Robin said, still wearing his mask.
"Aren't you going to take that thing off?" Raven asked, as much to appease the curator's curiosity as her own.
"No way—I'm never letting anyone know my identity again."
Raven shook her head at that, and spotted Garfield sitting in front of the center display in awed silence. "What is it, Beast Boy?" She asked.
"Big…dinosaur…," he wavered in reply, and Raven had to agree when she looked at the tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. Forty-five feet long—and 13 feet tall at the hip—was quite big, after all. Bigger than anything the two of them had ever seen outside of buildings and trees.
Hoping for a closer look at such an incredible beast, Beast Boy placed his front paws on the plaque and stretched his neck upwards. Suddenly, he was looking right into the skeletal mouth of the model, and all three watching humans had started in surprise.
The curator was stunned as Raven shouted, "Beast Boy!"
"What?" he asked as he turned around, and his neck—which had somehow grown to 10 feet long and gained scales—retracted back into his body.
"How did you—," she began to ask, then she calmed down, setting an example for Robin and the curator, who were gasping like fish out of water, "let me guess, animal parts."
"Yeah," Beast Boy said, "I figured if I can change just my voice-box to a human's to speak English, I could do that with other parts of my body."
Robin turned uncomfortably to the man beside him and asked politely, "Do you think you could forget this ever happened?"
SCENE CHANGE-
A tiny object buzzed lazily down a wide, wintry street until it arrived at a relatively plain door in a large house. It spun down towards its' destination and grew at the doorstep into Bumblebee. She took a deep breath of the cold air, and knocked. No reply greeted her, but she opened the door anyway and stepped inside, to avoid the chill setting into her wings.
She shivered violently and sneezed, rubbing her arms with her hands. "Why do I live here, again?" she asked herself.
"Do I need to answer that question?" a warm, friendly voice said quietly, and the man belonging to that voice came out of a side door to greet her.
From his position, the man seemed identical to the old painting behind him: white, neatly combed hair on top, a full, white beard adorning his face, and sparkling blue eyes looking up at his young charge. However, as the painting certainly ignored any less-than-paintable features of the subject, it was equally certain that Niles "The Chief" Caulder was more handsome than his ancestor—even when restricted to a wheelchair.
Bumblebee grinned, despite the shivers wracking her spine. "I guess not," she said, "and I did what you asked me to, Mr. Chief Sir."
Niles leaned forward then, quite interested in her news, "And? How does he fare? How did you find him?"
"He's fine," Bumblebee said with a shrug, "he has his own team now, and a girlfriend too. I found them because of the other mission you gave me - to check on each team as they are made."
"Is that so," Niles said quietly, "that boy always did know how to land on his feet. Even after 14 years were stolen from him."
"Can I please go into the kitchen now?" Bumblebee asked, "I really need to get warm."
"Of course, child," Niles said, and watched her go down the hallway, a mysterious look in his eye.
When Bumblebee entered the high-ceilinged, white-walled kitchen, the first thing that greeted her was the sight of her real teammates either sitting at the tables—like Mento or Elasti-girl—or standing near the door like Robotman was, watching her steadily from his steel mask of a face, or even slumped in a corner as Negative Man was. As she watched, NM's photo-negative self rose from the floor, entered the heavily bandaged body, and stood, having reanimated it.
"Hey guys," Bumblebee said cheerfully, "I'm back."
The two veterans at the table waved at her absently as they continued to talk quietly, and Negative Man just snorted at her, but Robotman was a little friendlier.
"It's good to see you, Bumblebee," he said calmly, "what news do you have?"
And so Bumblebee told her story again, though this time she gave more detail about their missing member. Robotman seemed more animated as the story continued; Mento and Elasti-girl stood up abruptly when they heard the subject of her report in order to get close enough to hear the whole thing, and even Negative Man showed great interest, though he pretended to be more concerned about his food.
"I'm so glad he really survived," Elasti-girl said as she squeezed the younger woman's hand, "I never really had the guts to believe Niles you know, for all that I acted like it."
Mento was silent, but the relief in his face made Bumblebee jealous of the instigator of such a reaction: Mento hardly spoke at all these days if not to Niles or Elasti-Girl.
Suddenly, two bronze arms went around her waist and Robotman hugged her tightly, lifting her into the air. Even through her meta-human exoskeleton, Bumblebee could feel a few ribs crack. "OK!" she said urgently. "I get it, you miss him! Please don't crush me!"
"Sorry," Robotman said as he loosened his grip, "I couldn't help it. It's just been a very long time since any of us saw Beast Boy."
SCENE CHANGE-
The monster moved smoothly through the earth, melded so completely with the soil that it could see anything that made contact with it as clearly as if it were in its' face. And while it couldn't currently see its' prey, it had easily seen where it was going. Picking up speed, Cinderblock barreled through the earth's crust in the direction of the Natural History museum.
SCENE CHANGE-
The three super-teens were walking through the temporary Ancient Egypt exhibit—Raven admiring the papyri of Cleopatra and other pharaohs, Robin brooding over the sarcophagi, and Beast Boy proudly comparing himself to the statuettes of Bastet—when a rumble shook the room gently.
In the instant they came to realize that it wasn't just a passing car, a massive, stone gray fist smashed through the wall between Raven and Beast Boy with no more warning than the chunks of marble that flew out in front of it.
The three of them initially didn't react, too stunned by the stone, fragments of papyri and pieces of statue that flew mere inches in front of their faces. The few other visitors, however, were not so numb to danger that they couldn't scream and scramble into each other's way as they escaped the room.
Raven took in a sharp breath as she sensed a peculiar nothingness beyond the wall, and turned to escape the blast zone as the rest of Cinderblock's massive body came pounding in after his hand.
Robin, well away from the behemoth's position, took a little longer to recover. But it was still less than a second before he leapt out of range of a second punch. He incredulously calculated the fist to be his own height from side to side as he flipped and landed lightly on a glass case. As his body settled into a defensive stance, he saw that the fist had not only cratered the ground it had contacted, but had shattered it so thoroughly that there was nothing but marble dust floating around the room.
Beast Boy had been unfortunate enough to be directly in the fist's path, so he was the only one who learned that it had actually thrust through as a palm first, then closed into a fist.
The reason he knew this was that when it had closed, it had plucked him right off of the stone table.
Raven and Robin stared as Cinderblock's 15-foot body slowly approached them through the choking dust, his footsteps echoing throughout the room, both wondering in their own way how something that large could've escaped their senses.
Robin took a breath in preparation to launch a kick at the thing's head, but in doing so he took in a breath of dissolved marble and fell into a coughing fit that shook his body.
Seeing his difficulty, Raven immediately assumed her meditative position and began searching for a method to blow away the dust. When identifying every particle separately failed, she temporarily gave up hope until she realized that she could identify things in reverse and specify what would not be affected.
Being careful to exclude her teammates from her mind, Raven let loose with rings of dark energy. Like a massive wave of wind they blew all the dust into the walls, but when it tried to push Cinderblock away, his right fist refused to go anywhere. With a more powerful thrust, the rest of his body flew before the dark energy, leaving the fist in place to drop to the floor.
A yowl of protest echoed hollowly from inside the fist, eliciting a response from Raven, "Are you all right, Beast Boy?"
With a growl, he transformed into a curled-up armadillo and shattered the stone around him with a heave. "Where is it?" He shouted angrily, "Let me at 'em! How dare he pick me off the table like a cookie from a plate!"
She pointed wordlessly behind him, where Cinderblock was rising ponderously to tower above the three of them. Beast Boy laid his ears back to align with his skull.
"Oh."
SCENE CHANGE-
Two figures stood in front of a screen watching the chaos at the museum, the taller one dressed in a red, skin-tight suit with yellow and the younger in a smaller duplicate with reversed colors.
"If you want to help them, little dude," the man said, "then go ahead! I 'aint gonna stop you."
"But," the boy said, "I thought duty was supposed to be above all?"
"Dude," the man said, shaking his head, "saving lives is our duty. And when you're a fully fledged member, you'll be expected to handle lesser threats on your own."
Another man, this time in a black cape, appeared at the doorway and said, "if you are going to help them, wait for a better moment to strike: go in too early and you might ruin their chances…and who knows, maybe they'll handle it on their own."
"Oh, it's you," the first man said wryly, "not sulking around your Gothic City?"
"It's Gotham City, and what's your point?"
"Just that it's your boy that's already down there—maybe you want him to be able to take the credit? Or maybe it's another test?"
"All right, enough you two," a woman said severely.
Flash, Kid Flash and Batman all turned to see Superman and Watchtower in the other doorway, the former looking at them in amusement and the latter in affectionate exasperation, "Don't you have other things to do, Batman? And why are you encouraging the boy, Flash? Which one of you is teaching whom?"
Batman sighed and simply left the room, while Flash blushed, scratched his head and zipped out the other door, leaving a faint, crimson trail behind him.
"It's always fun to watch you do that," Superman said with a chuckle, before leaving them for his own rooms.
This left Watchtower alone with the young boy, who asked her "why are you still here?" with a slightly sullen tone of voice.
"I happen to think this might make good television," she said casually as she quickly made herself popcorn and sat down next to him, "and I think it would be a better plot point if they handled it themselves than if a completely new character suddenly appeared and stole the show. I believe they call that a 'Gary Stu'."
Kid Flash pouted and said, "Okay, I'll wait, but if it gets too far I'm going in!"
Watchtower smiled at him warmly and said, "well, I must say that the death of a main character would be an even worse plot point at this stage of the show, so I won't stop you."
Kid Flash grinned at that and dashed to pick up a chair and bring it back before sitting down and taking a handful of popcorn. It really was good television.
SCENE CHANGE-
Back in the museum, the three teens watched silently as Cinderblock thrust the stump of his right arm into the ground and grunted. Right in front of their incredulous eyes, he pulled a new hand—already attached and animated—out of the soil beneath the floor.
"Creepy," Robin said as he took a small hop back onto the floor, "looks like just taking off pieces isn't going to work." He took a batarang out of his belt and threw it at the oncoming Cinderblock.
Raven, thinking to make it more effective, pushed black energy into the batarang almost to the breaking point as it stabbed into Cinderblock's side…but it had already been an explosive.
A massive, black-and-red explosion blasted Cinderblock straight back out of the hole he had previously made, skidding him across the already-upturned lawn as it knocked down the door, shattered all glass in the vicinity, plastered Raven and Robin to the wall, and was only drowned out by Beast Boy's animal shriek at the noise.
Raven felt pain travel up her spine as she sensed Beast Boy's condition.
A moment of silence, where the three tried to recover from the Batarang's surprising efficiency, was punctuated by screams coming from the lobby. They rushed out, wondering what else could go wrong, and saw Cinderblock once again, cracks running all the way down its' left side, missing a nice chunk of ribs, blocking the front doors.
A little old woman with a walker had somehow managed to be right in front of it, hobbling desperately for the door, and she banged her walker against Cinderblock's lower leg, though it would've been hardly enough to make even another human to react. "Get out of my way!" she said in a weak voice, I have to get out of here!"
A young man, shaking violently, managed to reach her side and grab her in his arms.
Citizens were screaming almost constantly as they clung to each other and tried to back away as Cinderblock raised a giant fist high….
The two citizens just barely managed to get out of range—leaving the walker behind—when cinderblock slammed the fist into the ground, breaking apart the marble. He continued to pound at it until soil appeared, leaving all the watchers confused.
"I need to get out!" the old woman sobbed as the man held her, "let me out! Give me back my walker!" but it was already a twisted heap of metal and the tennis balls were bouncing away.
The pounding went on for a couple minutes, to the teens' confusion, and even the citizens were starting to calm down.
But then Cinderblock had cleared a decent area of earth, and moved forward to stand in it. Immediately the cracks filled in, and earth wrapped fluidly around his missing side. Not visible elsewhere on the body as bandages would've been, the earth instead seemed to grow out of what would normally be the open wound.
In moments, Cinderblock was good as new.
"Damn," Robin said, "so it can regenerate…but how the hell did it get back so fast?" but his answer would come all too soon. Cinderblock hunched over, as if straining at something, his eyes actually seemed to glitter pink for a moment, and stone spikes thrust out of the ground.
Completely random in placement, they sprouted like a primordial forest with faint pink sparks coming off of them as Raven urgently wrapped every living being in the hall up in a protective cocoon of black energy. There was even a pair of spikes that had been close enough to form a conduit and an electric pink string of energy went from tip to tip for a couple moments.
POINT OF VIEW-
Jynx broke out of her trance with a twitch, panting as she opened her eyes carefully. Whatever happened now, she could give her beast no more physical aid—the remnants of chaos magic in its' stone veins was now only at the level where she could see what it saw…and use its' mouth as her own.
With a breath meant to calm her, she slipped back into Cinderblock's body.
POINT OF VIEW-
The spikes that would have hit people came in contact with the black energy as it defended the people watching, and a violent reaction dissolved both the pink energy holding the spikes together, and the black barriers. A piercing tone, beyond the human capacity to hear, ripped through the air and sent Beast Boy to screaming as the protective bubble popped and the spike was dismantled at the molecular level.
Once again, Raven felt the stab of shared pain.
The old woman reached for her destroyed walker as she floated off of the ground with the rest of the citizens.
POINT OF VIEW-
Jynx grabbed her head reflexively as she sensed portions of the used chaos magic vanish. In a panic, she tried to find it again, and though her connection was untouched, the curious blind spots remained. It simply did not exist any more.
POINT OF VIEW-
Not knowing just what had happened, Raven reiterated her defense and lifted all her wards high into the air to avoid the spikes. Leaving them there, she and Robin jumped down to land in front of the monster. The pink gleamed in its' eyes again, and a voice emanated from somewhere behind its' head.
"You have done something very foolish by destroying my chaos magic," the young, feminine voice said with a snarl, "and it's a shame you won't live to regret it!"
"Who are you to have such a form?" Robin asked in fear.
The voice laughed, "You think this is my body? I am simply along for the ride—my creation, Cinderblock, is the only one actually with you.
POINT OF VIEW-
Watchtower and Kid Flash leaned forward, staring at the scene on their spy camera. "Oooh," Watchtower said, fascinated, "now that's a good plot twist!
POINT OF VIEW-
Raven was wired, her entire body shivering with tension as she stared at the monstrous creation in front of them. Now that she knew the creator had used chaos magic, Raven could sense the mindless randomity that hung about "Cinderblock" like a miasma—a faint, pink haze that roiled and twisted as the carrier took a step forward.
She was amazed that it even stayed in one piece, though that explained why it could re-grow limbs. The mind holding it had to be extremely powerful….
It could be as powerful as her own…or stronger.
Even as she noticed little clots of energy floating away from the main cloud of chaos incarnate and dying out, she turned to ask Beast Boy for a plan.
But he was oblivious to what was happening, staring once more at the only untouched spot in the building….
A tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.
END OF BOOK 1, VOLUME 2: FAMILY IN ALL BUT BODY, CHAPTER 17. ACCOMPANIES VOLUME 1, JOURNEY OF THE MIND
Next time, on Mind and Body, Chapter 18—Battle at the Jump City Natural History Museum, proves that Jynx has a talent for biting off more than she can chew. And the red corner, secret observers from both sides of the fence realize they may have underestimated their competition.
P.S. I said at the beginning that I do not own the Teen Titans. I know I wish I owned it, but do you wish I owned it?