Chapter Seven: The Game is Afoot

Raven still felt completely normal—no pain, no disorientation—but knew what must've happened. They had just been zapped by a souped-up remote from the real world into what was probably the inside of a TV set.

One showing an old movie, apparently . . . everything around her was black and white and all the shades of gray in between. In fact—she glanced down to check—her own skin and clothing had suffered the same transformation. She was standing on a sidewalk in a downtown environment, in broad daylight, and the men and women and automobiles all had an old-fashioned look . . . around the Thirties or Forties, she thought.

Well, how bad could that be? They weren't allowed to show anything so graphic as dismemberment and disembowelment in the black-and-white days, right?

Raven took a moment to review what she knew about the scarier movies of Hollywood's "Golden Age."

Nope, no chainsaw massacres in those days. All you had to worry about was gangsters with tommy guns, and masked desperadoes, and Frankenstein's Monster, and the occasional werewolf or mummy, and maybe Count Dracula creeping into your bedchamber in the middle of the night, and there was always the off chance that King Kong might step on you . . . or, just for a change of pace, you might attract the attention of a psychotic stalker such as The Phantom of the Opera . . .

Um. Okay, maybe it could get pretty rough for an innocent bystander, even in those monochrome days when the bloodstains just looked like black smears against a pale background . . .

Her musings on the situation were cut short by a low groan coming from just around the corner. It sounded suspiciously familiar, so she checked.

Sprawled on the ground in an alley was Beast Boy—although it felt odd to see him looking so gray instead of green. Also odd was the way he was dressed with a trenchcoat and fedora. Who did he think he was, Dick Tracy?

(Even as the question occurred to her, she knew it was unfair. Beast Boy hadn't had any chance to pick out a new wardrobe—must be part of Control Freak's program.)

She crouched beside him, touched his shoulder, and concentrated on focusing her psychic perceptions. There was a bruise on the side of his head, but that was all it was. No cracks in that section of skull, and the brain cells beneath the bone still seemed okay—or should she say no worse than usual, bearing in mind that this was Beast Boy's head she was examining?

But nothing seriously wrong . . . then Beast Boy opened his eyes and started up at her.

"Ow," he muttered. His voice seemed deeper—raspier?—but maybe he just needed to clear his throat.

After a couple of seconds, his gaze focused on Raven's face and he grinned suddenly. "Well, hello there, doll!"

What? Raven rose and hastily stepped back two paces, while saying dubiously, "Beast Boy?"

"Who? Sounds like a sideshow act." His voice still sounded rougher than usual.

Raven was doing some hasty rethinking of her initial assumptions. Was this really her fellow Titan, or just a simulacrum with his face? No, she thought her psychic scan would have picked up on it if he'd been something other than a real human. But last year's tour through a bunch of Control Freak's favorite TV shows had been a surreal experience; she'd never been quite sure how "real" the other people in them were. She thought the football game she'd interrupted had been real . . . but come to think of it, she'd never double-checked afterwards to find out if the real live football players remembered it the same way she did.

On the other hand, she and Beast Boy had been zapped at the same time. They should have ended up in the same place—right?

She decided to stick with that theory until further evidence came along. A teammate deserved the benefit of the doubt. "Okay, if you don't answer to 'Beast Boy,' then just who are you?"

His gloved hands were brushing at his trenchcoat, trying to shake off some clumps of mud, as he said: "Brad Bolton's the name, private inquiries are the game. I was poking around in the Chinatown pawnshops, trying to catch a whiff of a curio a client is dead set on recovering, when something hit me like a ton of bricks . . . and then you came along."

"So tell me . . . Brad . . . who would want to clobber you?"

"Not sure. Maybe some hood I sent up the river finally got paroled and decided to give me a special scalp massage." He rubbed the sore spot on his head. "But if it was personal, you'd think he wouldn't stop after just one swing. Reckon it's more likely some share-the-wealth type wanted to lift my leather and could see I wouldn't cough up the moolah without a fight."

"Lift your leather?"

"Swipe my wallet," he translated. Raven could see now that her friend was still wearing his regular uniform underneath his trenchcoat; Beast Boy patted at his hips and sighed. "Yeah, I must've been rolled." Then he slapped at his left armpit and growled, "Ah, no! They even took my rod!"

"You mean a gun? Beast Boy, you don't carry firearms! You're not even old enough for a permit for a concealed weapon!"

"Are you kidding, doll? I'm old enough to vote."

"When did you turn eighteen? "

He stared at her. "Voting age is twenty-one. You from another country?"

Ah. Raven couldn't recall, offhand, when the U.S. Constitution had acquired its Twenty-Sixth Amendment, but apparently it had been after this movie was made. She said truthfully, "As a matter of fact, I did grow up on a distant island . . ." (An island floating in the void of another dimensional reality, rather than being surrounded by an ocean, but there was no need to confuse the issue.)

Beast Boy shrugged, already losing interest in the matter. "Just wondered. The point is I'm old enough to vote, drink whiskey, pack a rod, run a detective agency . . . so what's this 'boy' stuff? People have called me a 'beast' before," he added in the tone of a man who was trying hard to be fair.

Raven wished she knew more about hard-boiled pulp fiction and film noir. Was Beast Boy a bigger fan of that junk than she had realized? Did that make him more susceptible to whatever Control Freak had done to them? (More importantly: If he were in his right mind, perhaps because Raven went in and stirred up his real memories to bring them to the fore, would he know the entire plot of this movie the way he'd known how to overcome a Space Samurai in the universe of Clash of the Planets?)

On the other hand, a psychic intrusion into his brain, without his permission, was not an appetizing prospect. Would sweet reason work on him—for once?

"Look," she said, "my name's Raven. You don't remember, but we've met before. Even worked together on other cases."

"Well, that's a new approach," he said, tilting his head as he studied her carefully. "Normally a hot tomato like yourself would just say, 'Haven't we met somewhere?' Leaves a graceful way out in case I ain't interested in playing along."

This was probably the first time in her life that Raven had been accused of pretending to be some stranger's old acquaintance just so she'd have an excuse to keep talking to him after he'd caught her eye . . . but she kept a lid on her temper. This isn't really Beast Boy speaking; it's the brainwashing, she reminded herself. And if I can get him out of this movie, maybe he'll snap back to normal. That would be an improvement—at least marginally—over this "tough guy from seventy years ago" routine.

"Take my hand and brace yourself for a shock," she said, extending her own left hand.

Beast Boy grasped it carefully. "Okay, lady, but what's the shock—"

Then he gulped as he found out. Raven levitated both of them straight up, up, and away, until they were hovering a hundred feet above street level, which meant they were also above all the nearby buildings.

Raven had half-expected so much sudden vertical movement to take them right out of the movie and into whatever another TV was showing at this moment; she thought that was the way this had worked that other time Control Freak turned them into digital gate-crashers.

Not this time! Scanning her surroundings, she could see all the way to the horizon and there was no clear sign of any shimmering boundary or other limit to this "world." As a matter of fact, some of the taller buildings a mile or so away looked suspiciously like ones in modern Jump City . . . had this movie been set there, several skyscrapers ago?

"I'm dreaming," Beast Boy was muttering beside her. "Maybe somebody slipped me the needle and now I feel higher than a kite, so I think I really am?" As Raven glanced over at him, he added with a clumsy gallantry, "Of course as long as the company is easy on the eyes, I'm not in much hurry to wake up. Besides, when I was a kid I always wondered what this felt like for Peter Pan."

Raven instinctively looked toward the island in the bay where the Tower ought to be. Of course it wasn't. Just a little clump of land sticking up above the seawater. "I think we're stuck here for awhile—so we need a place to sit down and talk. Know any good prospects?"

"My office," he said immediately. "In the Wein Building—Barreto Street."

"Good enough." Raven started flying them in that direction.

"I was thinking of catching a streetcar," he said in a carefully controlled voice.

"This is faster."

He took a hint and shut up for the rest of the flight. Raven supposed he was being the strong, silent type. An interesting change of pace from the Beast Boy she remembered, who would've been talking her ear off all along the way.

Author's Note: I know, I know. Not much happened in this chapter. I was originally planning to have it go another thousand words or more after they arrive at the small office of a one-man detective agency, but finally decided to post what I already had. The planned scene with Raven trying, at length, to persuade Beast Boy that he isn't really a hard-boiled private eye in the 1930s, but rather a teen superhero from the 2000s who can change into any type of animal, will just have to wait.