"HAAA!" Jinx launches a pink stream of hex at me.

I cross my arms and block with a shield of black telekinesis. FL-FLASH! I part my arms. My violet eyes widen.

Jinx is charging at me. She cartwheels, leaps, and flings her platform shoe straight at my skull.

"Nnngh!" I grit my teeth and pump a hand up, wrist flicking. A black energy 'talon' rises and grabs Jinx's ankle. Gripping the girl's limb, the talon jerks and tosses her across the space of a construction site.

Jinx twirls in the air and lands in a slide with her purple and black stockinged feet nimbly spread.

I take a deep breath and face her in a meditative pose. The sounds of the other Titans battling Gizmo and Mammoth on the other end of the construction site lightly echo in my ears. The night is cold. The stars twinkle. And the edges of the dusty, post-industrial detritus light up in a pink aura as Jinx charges another pulse of hex and flings it at me. "HAAAA!"

"Azarath….Metrion….ZINTHOS!" I produce a bubble of black energy and explode it outward from my center upon contact with the hex.

The energy fields converge in the center and form a huge crater in the dusty earth.

CRUNNNCHHH!

Shockwaves surge through the floor. The steel support structures of a half-constructed building looming beside us wobble and shake. Steel girders crack and start to tip over.

Jinx gasps and looks up.

I swivel about, teeth gritting.

GROAAAANNNNNN!

A huge tower of steel mesh teeters over and collapses over us.

"Aack!" Jinx dives.

I take a huge breath and summon energy to teleport….

CLANGGGGG!

Too late….

The steel girders fall on top of us.

Thunder and dust.

I'm coughing before I realize that I'm lying prostrate with a steel girder trapping my body to the earth. No broken limbs, thank Azar. Just stuck…..

And from the proximity of a faint scent of strawberries….

"Nnngh….Nnnnghhh!" Jinx struggles a few feet before me. She too is trapped under the giant pick-up sticks of steel.

"Well….," I drone. "This is fun…."

"Oh, just shut it, you ice princess!" Jinx hisses.

I frown at her. "You're the ones trying to sabotage construction projects all throughout the City! So don't start complaining if the collateral damage of your efforts serves only to bite you back in the rear end!"

"Oh, yeah, thanks. Like I really needed a lecture in law school…," she rolls her pink cat eyes. "The soonest I'm out of here, you are SO going to suffer an 'unlucky' concussion!"

I don't have to look in a mirror to know that my eyes are glowing a hot gray. "Try it, and it will be the last thing you ever do."

"Ooooh! I'm so scared, Missy Frankestein!"

Silence.

"…..," I frown at her. "Are you trying to infer that I'm the monster or the scientist?"

"Excuse me?"

"Victor Frankenstein is the Creator of the monster, not the monster itself. So if you're trying to insult me…"

"I know who Frankenstein is! And of course it's an insult! By calling you Frankenstein, I made an analogy to Victor's Close Minded, Obsessive Selfishness!"

"It was not so much close-mindedness as it was obsession that forced him to toil and make the creature out of dead human matter! The close-mindedness is simply what forced him to lose his wife on his honeymoon!"

"Yes, but one cannot argue that Mary Shelley's sketch of Frankenstein could very well be an anecdotal statement of misogynist patriarchy attempting to manipulate the powers of maternal fertility for its own selfish uses. The creature was not so much evil as it was needing of the care that Victor Frankenstein neglected to give him because he was turned off by the hideous progeny!"

"True, but if you've familiarized yourself with the life of Mary Shelley, you'll realize that her novel is simultaneously a metaphorical sketch of the horrors of post-partum depression. After all, Mary had already suffered two or three miscarriages by the time she wrote the horror story. And at the same time, she was dealing with Percy Shelley's and Lord Byron's promiscuous, dishonest affairs with various women while the whole troupe of artists and writers were on the go in central Europe. Then when you add the nature of Mary's mother—Wollstonecraft's death, combined with the suicide of Mary's sister upon discovering that she was given birth to out of wedlock, you have the grounds of an allegory made to represent the anxiety of a young mother coming to terms with her feminine past and potential failure as a mother."

"Wow, I never heard it explicated so analytically before. Are you a contemporary of Shelley?"

"I've written two theses on Shelley, as well as an extensive overview of her mother Wollstonecraft. I think there are far more feminine suffrage arguments to be extracted out of Vindication of the Rights of Women and used towards support of the Women's Movement than Wollstonecraft is given credit for."

"Not to mention the poetry of Sor Juana de la Cruz, who may very well be the first feminist writer ever…."

"True….True…."

"…….."

"………"

Jinx blinks.

I blink.

Jinx frowns.

I frown.

We both tense our bodies at the same time.

"HAAA!"

"Nnngh!"

FLASH!

FL-FLASH!

The steel girders fly off of us.

CL-CLANG!

Sprung back on our feet, we shake the dust off and charge at each other with pink and black energy streaming.

"HAAAA!"

"Azarath Metrion Zinthos!"

FLASH!