Raven could hardly wait to vaporize Slade once and for all to bring closure to a dramatic saga that had dragged on for years. She was just about to call him to the main room when a sudden realization hit her like a ton of bricks. This just seemed too easy. Slade had fallen for her trap too easily; something that seemed way out of character for a discerning villain like him who repeatedly outsmarted the titans time and time again.
"He's up to something." Raven realized. "There's no way Slade would be so easily fooled. He's the bamboozler, not the bamboozled. If I were to destroy him now, he could very well leave a nasty parting gift. I can't destroy him until I'm sure that he has nothing on us."
Slade strode purposefully into the main room at that moment.
"And speak of the devil..." thought Raven as she faced him with a wicked expression contorting her face.
"Master, don't you wish to torture the titans?" Asked Slade.
"Torturing them is pointless if they are not conscious to feel the pain and I cannot receive any gratification from hearing their screams." Raven replied sullenly.
"You could heal them." Slade cocked his head to one side. He was secretly testing her.
"Demons do not heal!" Raven thundered. "We only destroy!"
"What about the fire-demons?"
"What about them?"
"They aren't terrorizing the city."
"Fool. I love to hear the music of cries of fear, but I need them to build that fortress on that mountain for me."
"Aren't you going to destroy the city?"
"And what?" snapped Raven. "Destroy the city and gloat to no one about it? What's the point of destroying it if the titans are not awake to watch the show?"
Hearing her words, Slade nodded and walked out of the room. Raven had passed. For now.
After Slade had left, Raven went back to her thoughts.
"Slade is one who frequently sets traps for us. Him falling for my trap is probably to make me fall for his trap. But how can that be? Nobody knows about all the new things I learned from Azar. I went to another plane of existence for goodness sake! No. There's no way that he knows he's played into my trap. I've played the role of a demon perfectly. He may not know that he's been tricked, but he probably has a trap for me as well."
After a quick mental review of Slade's arsenal of weapons and gadgets, it didn't take very long for Raven to discern that Slade's nanobots were to be her greatest worry, because they were small, deadly and difficult to detect and remove. As an experienced crime fighter, Raven knew that villains as a whole often had the tendency to reuse existing technology because producing new gadgets and tools took a lot of time and effort. This made Raven very certain that Slade would make use of them once more. The big problem was that Raven did not know the slightest thing about nanobots, other than the fact that they existed.
"Those tiny things are going to prove my very undoing!" She fumed. "If my powers couldn't detect them then, there's no way they could detect them now! Arrgh. There's got to be some way for me to do this. I could use my powers to create a machine that detects and destroys nanobots. No, that won't work. Magic doesn't fuse with nanotechnology so easily. Technology, yes. Nanotechnology, probably not. It's one thing to create a spaceship with all of its systems and another thing to create something to eradicate something I can't even see!"
Raven realized that she was quickly losing control of herself and made a conscious effort to calm down. Having done so, she returned to her thoughts.
"Think Raven! Think!" She mentally chided herself. "Your friends are depending on you to save them! Arggh! How I wish that I could heal them so that they could help me. Robin would have a plan and Cyborg would be able to help with the nanobots thing. Silly Raven. You know you can't do that or you'll blow your cover and Slade will find out and he might do something terrible. Great. I'm talking to myself in my mind. I'm going to need therapy once this is over!"
By now, Raven was highly stressed and was noisily pacing around the main room, an angry, demonic glare plastered on her face.
"It's official. No matter how powerful I get, I will always need my friends by my side. What's the use of so much power when you can't figure out how to defeat your enemies with it? What's the use of being so powerful if you know nothing about electronics, aliens, martial arts and the animal kingdom? What are you doing Raven? Stop beating about the bush!"
Raven stomped around the room like a bull through a china shop.
"Focus. Since the team is all out for the count, I alone am the team. In order for me to be successful, I must operate like the team does and learn how to play the role of each of the other members in the team. I'll have to do some of that roleplaying that Beast Boy loves so much. Okay, let's see. I need a plan, so I'm going to take on Robin's role. What does Robin do whenever we have a villain to defeat? Usually he yells 'Teen Titans go!' and we all speed off to fight the villain. Hmmm... If he knows nothing about the villain, then he'll lock himself in his room and not come out for days until he finds a lead. That's it! A lead! Robin always does his homework and research on villains like Slade!"
Now that she knew what to do, Raven gleefully sprang into action to learn everything she could about nanobots. With her demonic side allowed to surface, she easily developed a plan to trick Slade once more. Having pretended to lose it because work on her mountain fortress had been hindered by a landslide, Raven threw a huge tantrum in her room. She then used the ensuing chaos and noise as a distraction, allowing her to secretly slip a thin gold bracelet with a white owl-shaped diamond onto her left wrist before covering it up with the cuff of her sleeve. That way, even if Slade was watching her, he could not possibly have seen what she had done.
What Raven had done was to slip the Bracelet of Athena onto her wrist. Just before Raven left Azar in her plane of existence to return to earth, she had given her the bracelet as a parting gift. Raven had stashed it in her room with all of her valuables instead of wearing it everywhere because she didn't think that she would need it and the queer power that it afforded her.
When Azar had given Raven the bracelet, she called it the Bracelet of Wisdom and explained that its power was that it allowed its wearer to instantaneously absorb all the information from the thickest of books by merely waving the hand the wore the bracelet over the book. Having read substantial literature about Greek mythology, Raven renamed it the Bracelet of Athena, after the Greek goddess of wisdom who was often accompanied by an owl. Azar was mildly amused, but little did she know how valuable this gift was going to prove to Raven.
Having forced her way into the Jump City University of Engineering's library and having dragged Slade in with her, Raven announced that they were going to search for the thickest book they could find on nanotechnology. Her explanation? She was planning to torture Beast Boy by forcing him to read the book cover to cover. Why technology? She was going to make Cyborg watch him from another room and Cyborg loved this kind of stuff. Having to watch Beast Boy painfully reading about stuff he loved would drive him nuts. Why nanotechnology? Being nano, she thought that it would be more complex, thus confusing Beast Boy even further and making his head hurt more.
"She sure is Trigon's daughter, but she's evil in a different way." Slade thought as he walked next to her.
Raven waved her hand over the books as she walked from shelf to shelf, pretending to reach for one before withdrawing her hand a moving on. Sometimes, she held her hand by her side and absorbed information from books at that level as she walked by.
"Women. So indecisive." Slade shook his head.
After what seemed like an eternity to Slade, Raven chose a book and frightened the librarians into giving the book to her. Having done so, she teleported them back to her spaceship with a brilliant plan in mind.
However, the moment they got there, Raven pretended to have yet another tantrum because Beast Boy was still unconscious and she wanted to torture him without having to heal him. She subsequently set off the smoke alarms and sprinklers during the course of her eloquent rant; which involved a blow torch and the couch. Everything in the room - including the book - was drenched. Outwardly angry and inwardly relieved, Raven chucked the book into the trash can and stomped to her room, saving herself from the trouble of having to justify visiting the library by torturing Beast Boy with approximately fifteen hundred pages worth of words and diagrams.
Raven's time in the Jump City University of Engineering taught her much about nanotechnology and robots. Thanks to her minute of research, she quickly figured a way to detect the presence of nanobots. Having used her demonic powers to gain access to a hellish plane of existence where she could plot far away from Slade's reach, Raven used the heavenly peace of this hellish world to complete all the tools she needed to detect abnormalities and the presence of nanobots.
"Let's see... Each nanobot emits a nanoscopic pulse that can be detected on a certain wavelength..." Raven thoroughly relished the freedom to think aloud. "Electric field... By tuning this to the frequency of... If the aorta is the largest artery in the whole body, nanobots should exist there in highest concentration..."
Seventeen different plans, one hundred and thirteen diagrams, a hundred and sixty-four nanobots created and destroyed, four hours and a sore right hand later, Raven finally created a blueprint for a special device.
"Now that I have some technological background, I can combine my powers with my knowledge to make the creation of a lifetime." Raven rubbed her hands together gleefully.
"Azarath Phenatria Vertutim!" A very special cattle prod appeared in her hands. "Hehehe!" Raven gloated as she returned to her plane of existence with it tucked safely within the folds of her cloak.
As expected, Slade was waiting for her when she returned.
"Where have you been?" He asked innocently.
"Hell." Raven replied. "That's where the titans will be going and I want to make sure they burn."
Slade looked suspicious and unconvinced. Pretending not to notice his skepticism, Raven beckoned a fire-demon.
"Get me a cattle prod." She ordered.
On her telepathic orders, the fire-demon just hovered in front of her. Angrily, Raven tried to smack it with her hand only to have her hand pass right through its flaming chest. As her hand passed through the fire-demon's body, Raven used her powers to sneakily transfer the cattle prod from her cloak to her hand and into its body.
"Go get me a cattle prod!" She roared after she had pretended to realize that hitting the fire-demon was pointless.
The fire-demon left the room and made its way to Raven's weapon maker. She had infused some of her powers within a machine that would allow her and her fire-demons to create any weapon on the planet. Much to Slade's frustration, the machine didn't work for him even though Raven had given him powers. Raven's explanation was that it was because he was not biologically demon in any way. In Raven's words,
"Powers don't make you a demon. Demonic heritage does."
The fire-demon thrust one arm into a rectangular hole on the top of the machine, transferred the cattle prod Raven had given it from its chest to its hand and pulled it out, making it look as though the machine had created it.
When the fire-demon returned, Raven took the cattle prod and went to the titans' holding chambers. Slade's suspicions vanished as he watched her shock each one of them unmercifully despite the fact that they were all unconscious for some reason. As Raven shocked each one of her friends, the cattle prod she had created sent messages right to her brain informing her of any abnormalities.
"Nanobots detected." It informed Raven. "Nanobots detected. Nanobots detected. Nanobots detected. No abnormalities detected."
"All of them have nanobots injected into them except Terra!" Raven fumed. "Slade must have been using her as his minion until I showed up. That explains why he didn't bother to inject her with nanobots. She working for him!"
"Unknown chip detected. Electronic wiring detected." The cattle prod sounded in her head when Raven angrily slapped Terra's head with it.
"Unknown chip? Is Terra a robot? No. She has a soul. I can feel it. Slade has been controlling Terra! Ugh. Great! Now I feel awful for hitting her and it's my duty to save her from him as well." Raven angrily stalked out of the holding chambers.
"It's not fun when they're not awake!" She yelled as she stomped back to her room. She had to at all costs keep up with the charade.
Back in her room, Raven made another discovery. She discovered that robots - even the nanoscopic ones - usually have component parts made out of metal. This discovery was actually so painfully obvious that Raven felt like an idiot when she realized it. She quickly deduced that the simplest solution was to implant magnets into the titans' bloodstreams, which would magnetically attract the nanobots. Once all the nanobots had been attracted to the magnet, she could retrieve the magnet and destroy everything.
Unfortunately, Raven's solution rapidly brought with it a whole host of problems with regards to Cyborg. She had no idea how his cybernetics worked and wondered if her magnet solution would even work on him because he was mostly made of metal as well. Her first thought was to pay the university another visit but that thought was quickly quashed when she remembered that Cyborg's father had created him and only he and his father truly understood how his body worked.
"Does he even have a blood stream?" Raven wondered. "Probably, since he eats more than anyone I know. After he eats, where does the food go? Does he ever go to the bathroom? Does he have biological parts? If so how do they fuse with his mechanical parts?"
At that moment, Raven turned to the information she had gleaned from her medical books and from her trip to the engineering library to to help her.
Because of the fact that Cyborg ate and slept like everyone else, Raven figured that he must have retained at least his digestive and circulatory systems. The books on robots taught her that the robotic version of the human circulatory system involved a complex system of wires and circuits. Knowing that the nanobots comprised of electrical and metallic parts, she knew that injecting them into Cyborg's robotic systems would be pointless because the current from his power cell would fry them out. This made it very safe to say that if Slade had injected any nanobots, he would've injected it into Cyborg's biological systems, meaning that Raven's magnet solution would apply to him as well.
This conclusion made Raven uncharacteristically elated, because after a long and arduous thought process, she had finally seen the light at the end of the tunnel.
Raven walked into the hallway which led to the chambers where her friends were kept. She knew she was about to do something awful and she felt really bad about it. She entered the room where Beast Boy lay and gazed at him. Outwardly, she looked harsh and unloving but inwardly, her heart was breaking.
"Beast Boy!" Raven's heart cried out. "I can't bear to see you like that. You look so pale, so still. I'm going to have to do something cruel in a little while but it's for your sake. I can't think of any other way to save you. Don't worry, my powers will protect you. No harm will come to you. I promise."
Raven still felt awful about what was to happen, but she did have one remaining piece of consolation. When Trigon came; she had secretly injected Robin, Starfire, Cyborg and Beast Boy with some of her powers to protect them. While the four no longer felt any traces of her power even when they were together because they weren't the source and such powers do wane over time, some of it was still ingrained deep within them because Raven had never withdrawn the power from them. It was because of this dormant power that the titans enjoyed a small form of immortality, allowing Starfire and Beast Boy to live on despite losing more than half of their blood. It would be this same power that would protect them from all the injuries she was about to bestow upon them in a little while.
"What about Terra? What am I going to do with her?" Raven agonized. "She has no nanobots within her, yet if I spare her from the torture Slade would know that something's up."
As much as she didn't like Terra, Raven knew deep down that she had to save her too. Slade had handed her over to Raven to be killed. Though Raven didn't want to admit it, she knew that Terra too was a victim of the whole situation. Reluctantly, she implanted a powerful magnet in Terra's chest. As she did so, she infused within Terra's soul some of her powers as well.
Slade watched Raven implanting magnets within the titans suspiciously. He didn't like where this was going and Raven could sense it. With a demonic chuckle, she ordered some fire-demons to bring the titans to her new mountain fortress. There, a large industrial sized magnet stood waiting, accompanied by an enormous crane.
"Lower the magnet!" Raven ordered as Beast Boy was wheeled under it. Raven accessed her powers within the bodies of all the titans to allow them to regain consciousness at different times on the long journey to the mountain. She had been the one who induced coma on the rest of her friends, but for some reason, Terra's coma seemed to be real because she never woke up even though Raven wasn't controlling her wakefulness. This both puzzled and worried Raven.
"What's going on?" yelled Beast Boy as the magnet above him connected with the equally powerful one in his heart.
"How does it feel to have your heart ripped out of your chest?" Raven thundered as she encased the controls of the crane with her powers. With a flick of the wrist, the crane whirled around in circles. Beast Boy flew through the air, screaming as the two magnets quickly wore the skin on his chest away. He was tossed around in odd, jaunty angles as the magnet picked him up and dropped him again and again.
"Raven!" He screamed. "Raven! Why are you doing this to me?"
"Who is Raven?" Demanded Raven.
"Raven! The girl you used to be!" Beast Boy cried as tears streamed down his face. The pain was unbearable.
"There is no Raven!" She roared in her demonic voice. "Only a demon!"
As Beast Boy's literal heart began to bleed, Raven's inner heart bled with it as well.
"My powers will protect him." She comforted herself. "I need the magnets to attract all the nanobots without Slade finding out. I just hope that he'll be able to forgive me someday."
"I know you're somewhere in there!" Beast Boy refused to give up as a searing pain surged up his chest and gripped his throat. "Raven please! Regain control of yourself!"
"Insignificant, mortal fool!" Raven shouted. "How dare you question me? Take him away!"
"Raven!" Screamed Beast Boy as he was hauled away. Raven secretly channeled her powers within him to make him lose consciousness, freeing him from the pain he was in. The torture was repeated with all the other titans. However, Raven could not bear to hear their cries and pleas, so she entered their minds with her powers and only allowed them to scream. Of all the titans, only Beast Boy was allowed to see that their torturer was Raven.
Having justified the implantation of the magnets, Raven began removing them. She held her hand in front of Beast Boy and seized the magnets within him with her powers, vaporizing them and everything stuck to it before creating new ones which she pulled out of his chest.
"This is your reward for being such a loyal servant." Raven said to Slade as she carelessly tossed him the magnet. Slade caught it easily and watched her do the same with the others until she had a stack of four magnets.
"I want those." Slade stated as he held out his hand. Raven relented after a moment and handed them to him. She then headed for the main room with Slade hot on her heels.
Slade stopped short and stared at the sight before him. Standing in the main room was a brown donkey and a white mare. Next to them were a rug, a small christmas tree, a picture of an immaculate lawn and a small porcelain sink.
"What is this?" Slade demanded as he turned to Raven.
"Idiot. Must I spell everything out to you?" Raven growled.
"Yes, I think you must." Slade was both bewildered and curious.
"Fine. Ass-" Raven pointed to the donkey. She slowly continued, naming each item as she went. "-A rug, mare, tree, lawn-" Raven picked up the sink. "Sink toss!" She yelled before hurling the sink across the room. Immediately, a small portion of her soul self left her. Unlike her usual black soul self, this one was transparent because it comprised of too little of her soul to be seen.
"Selective astral projection and a sneaky way to recite my incantation! I love this!" Raven thought gleefully.
"I know what they are. What I don't know is what they are for." Slade was now convinced that Raven had truly lost her mind.
"Tomorrow, we will take over the city. When we do so, I'll ride into the city in a victory parade with you by my side. I'll put the rug on the mare and ride it and you'll ride the ass bareback with the picture of the lawn hanging around his neck. As those tiny little humans worship me, you will throw trees and I will toss sinks at them." Raven finished.
"Why?" Slade began questioning his loyalty to Raven.
"Because that's what kings and queens do! And I am the queen of the earth! Now stop questioning the things I do!" Raven shouted.
Slade quickly backed down and backed out the door in a flash.
Raven followed Slade back to his quarters with the portion of her soul self she had released. She was extremely thankful to Azar for teaching her this new trick. Now, she could spy on Slade anytime she wanted for as long as she wanted since small parts of her soul self could exist outside her physical body for indefinite periods of time. And the best part of this whole deal was that the huge slice of her soul that remained within her physical body would allow her to function as though nothing had happened and nothing was missing.
Raven watched as Slade placed the magnets under a scanner.
"No nanobots. That girl is an idiot." Slade mused aloud, completely unaware that he was being watched. "That idiot puts magnets on the outside of someone's heart when putting it inside would attract all the nanobots and get rid of them. But she wouldn't know that because she's just too dumb." Slade shook his head as he carelessly tossed the magnets into the trash can.
"Oh? I'm the idiot?" Raven thought. "He's the idiot who doesn't bother to check if his little nanobots even exist or not!"
Having picked up a rock that looked downright plain and ordinary, Slade began to speak into it.
"Hell's Princess is so dumb without the help of her teammates and in the control of her demon self that she will not pose a threat."
"He's speaking to someone!" Raven moved in closer to listen.
"Are you certain?" Asked another cool, mysterious voice that was not unlike Slade's. Raven was properly confused.
"Yes. The Princess wants to ride into the city while throwing sinks at its inhabitants. Trust me, she is not a threat."
"If that's the case, meet me six minutes to midnight tonight. Be there on the dot, one minute too early or one minute too late and the spell would not work." The conversation ended and Slade put down the rock.
"Who was he talking to? What spell is he referring to?" Raven wondered as she watched as Slade disappear into the shadows of the dark hallway, never to be called Slade ever again.