DISCLAIMER: I don't own Teen Titans, or anything directly related to them. That all belongs to Warner Brothers, or Cartoon Network, or DC Comics. The original characters and the plot are mine.
Raven got very little sleep that night. Suddenly, she was turning into Robin, obsessing over why Slade was doing what he was doing. Why would he rob a museum, of all places, and then, take only a disk's worth of data? It didn't make any sense. As she lay on her bed, her mind refused to fall asleep, until finally, it and her body called a truce, and she fell into that half-asleep state common to all high-stress people.
The other Titans returned shortly after Raven fell asleep, tired and frustrated. Robin stayed up all night again, watching and reviewing both recordings of the fights. His mind took note of changes in tactics, appearance, abilities, and more.
When morning came, Robin was still awake, though barely. The other Titans were sleeping in, as it was a Saturday. Raven managed to acquire sufficient rest to become functional, and when she emerged from her room, she got to work helping the near-unconscious Robin, firstly by making him some coffee.
As the two brainstormed, Raven told Robin of the occurrences with Slade. She provided him all the data she had found Slade stealing, and this confused Robin too. "Why would Slade go to all the trouble to break into a museum, then take information about pottery?" he asked.
Raven shrugged. "I don't know. I can't claim to know the mind of Slade, but what he told me was that he was… he was learning from history. He said that after too many battles against us, he… agreed with the people who said to learn from history. It could just be Slade-babble, but something tells me he was trying to hint at something."
"He could just be messing with our minds. That would be just like him. He'd want us to stress ourselves out in vain attempts to figure out cryptic clues that lead to dead end after dead end." Robin pounded his fist on the table. "He's done it to us before, and he's bound to do it again. I'm not falling for Slade's mind games again!" He calmed slightly. "Anyway, this other criminal is worrying me almost as much as Slade is. He knows us far too well for someone we've never encountered before. The second time we saw him, he had more abilities, but he didn't use them against us. It's like… he was trying not to fight us. He spent the entire battle defending instead of attacking. I hate to admit it, but he could have beaten us all if he had chosen to."
Raven nodded. "I figured that out after watching the first battle. He was too fast even then, and if what you say is true, then he's bound to be faster now. His strength surpasses Cyborg's, and with that combination, unless you got extremely lucky, you can't defeat him." Then an even more frightening thought dawned on her. "Didn't you say his new abilities came after he stole that blue substance?"
Robin's eyes widened. "He just stole an entire tank of that stuff! If his abilities come from it… the entire city is doomed."
At that very moment, the thief had hacked into the Titan's mainframe from his own base of operations. He watched the two Titans' conversation, then turned his attention to the database of criminal activity. After pulling Slade's files, he copied them down, then deleted them. He studied the past files on Slade, then compared it to the new information he had. His brain compared old to new, integrated likely patterns of behavior in known egomaniacal criminals, and finally analyzed the surprising pottery revelation. Knowing Slade was fascinated with magic and power, he searched the Internet for any information on pottery believed or rumored to have magical power. Nothing. Then another thought popped to the front of his whirring mind. Pottery often have pictures and inscriptions. He began a painstaking image search for every piece of pottery in every museum. He then downloaded all the images to his neural uplink and sifted through them at high speed until he found exactly what he was looking for. And as luck would have it, it was in Jump City. Time to get to work.
A/N: Sorry for the short chapter, but if I combined the next one and this one into one chapter, it would have been over 2,000 words long. So I broke it up into two.
Stay tuned, for the next chapter will be the best!
R&R, please.