It was a slow day. Crime has been on the low, all the food has been eaten so someone needs to go to the store and there's nothing to watch on TV. Even to Raven her book seemed to be unable to hold her interest all that much. It was very boring. Until,
"Friends!" Starfire called out to her teammates. "I have found of a place where we could go the camping!"
"Camping?" Robin perked up.
"Yes, sleeping in the tents, the hiking through nature, the picnicking, the watching of the animals and stories of the campfire!"
"Man, I've actually forgotten what I can enjoy about camping. The only good thing I can think of is the s'mores."
"Hmmm, s'mores." Cy's best friend licked his lips before realizing, "Oh wait, there's one advantage. No mosquitoes are going to be able to drink out of you! Just a little spray on your head and bam! Mosquito proof."
"Well that's one thing but another is that I'll sink if I try to go into the lake. And likely short circuit."
"Plus there's no toilets." Raven added.
"Actually, camping sounds good." Jinx shrugged. "Cities have their perks but it can get boring after a while. Nature could just be what we need."
"Joy! Then let us start packing for the trip!" Flying off, it was settled that whether they wanted to or not, camping was what they were going to do.
After a 3 1/2 hour road trip in the car, the titans have arrived at the biggest forest nearest to them, the Mendocino National Forest. However, things were not really going as planned upon arrival. Starfire tried to follow instructions on making a tent but got stuck and tangled in the tent parts. And even by the time she finished, it was nothing like a tent.
"Umm...Star? What is that?" Robin asked his alien girlfriend.
"A tent, but it was rather confusing. Perhaps it is more of a statement on tents." A sharp smack was heard as they turned to Jinx whom was wacked by one of the tent supports.
"Ow! Confound these stupid tents!" The witch kicked at her attempt of a tent, her left eye shut with a growing, angry red line appearing on her face.
"Jinx, are you alright?! Want some ice for that?" Cyborg came to her, wanting to help.
"Yeah, ice sounds good." She moaned.
"Well, let's see if there's a perfect spot for my tent to go." Robin said, and looked around. He frowned. Using a grappling hook, he made his way up to a top of a tree and looked down with a telescope, trying to find a perfect spot.
"Yeah, we done mama!" Starfire heard Beast Boy's jubilation and looked to see that he and Raven set their tents up perfectly.
"Oh. How did you two set your tents up good this fast?"
"Magic." The sorceress shrugged.
"I was raised in wild Africa Star. Building a hut is like Fula 101. Which has also included modern tents."
"Interesting." A rip interrupted their brief conversation as they looked to see Cyborg accidentally ripping his tent in half.
"Alright, I'm not roughing it like a normal camper." Taking out his keys, he pressed a button so that the T-Car elongated and make-shifted into a mechanical tent. After all the tents have been set up, the rest of the day was a blast. Hiking on the trails, playing kickball, collecting nature like pine cones and rocks, eating s'mores, the usual. And now for the main event.
"Alright, who wants to go first in telling a scary story?" The Boy Wonder asked his friends.
"Oh, oh, I wants to go first!" Beast Boy raised his hand. "Decades ago, there was this shapeshifter who was born with his powers in a small town. As he grew older, his powers grew stronger, but so did his instincts of said transformations. He's going all crazy, because all sorts of voices are going on through his head, each thing he transformed into trying to say something in his head. He's even been prone to losing sense of his identity at times. Man or woman, tall or short, fat or skinny, he never looked the same he did yesterday. Eventually they became so crazy that they even started eating people because they even lost sense of other people's identity. Just flesh and bone to consume. At first it was just bodies recently buried in graveyards." Everyone recoiled at that. "But eventually even live people were in danger. Everyone went on high alert for this beast, for it could speak any language of both man and animal. Even the noises of inanimate objects. But even then, the rates of animals and children disappearing kept on rising. They even try fighting it but any attacks are healed by the shapeshifter's transformations and they're eaten as consequence. Even sacrifice with the thieves and criminals only slowed down their hunger before it started to consume basically any organic matter, dead or alive. All hope seemed lost for everyone until one of the kids thought of using alcohol to lull it to sleep. Using three wagons of corpses filled with alcohol, they made the shapeshifter drunk and it fell asleep in one of the wagons. Covered and utterly filled with the stuff, it was easy for one of the huntsmen to shot a flaming arrow into its mouth. Filled with fire and threatening to burst and die, everything within the shapeshifter exploded, the thing trying to become everything at once! Everyone was crushed by the growing mass of burning muscle and lit hair, but all the mass growing so quickly and the alcohol weren't mixing well, due to the increasing body heat, causing his transformation to be so unstable he exploded, wiping out the town. There was no survivors."
"Oh my. I have never heard of such a thing." Starfire shivered.
"Sounds like something that would come from a Japanese movie." Cyborg. remarked. "Still pretty good."
"I now wish to attempt of telling the spooky story." The Tamaranean princess raised her hand. "On my home planet, there are stories of these aliens your human language would call 'Spikes'. They travel from planet to planet, and they just so happen to finally find Earth. These creatures are small. Very small. Only about a gram and meter of the milli. But what they have that makes them so dangerous throughout the cosmos is their collective size, reproduction rate and carnivorous appetite. Hundreds of trillions of them swarming with enough size to block out a planet's star so efficiently it is perpetually night wherever they go. However, they are sentient enough to know that eating everything at once will not give all of them something to eat, so spawns of swarms are sent." She then began to whisper. "Over time, the humans have noticed that forests have become much more quiet. No animals making any noises. That is before they are eaten. The incidents are kept quiet and the spikes are investigated, but any attempts are eaten. The only thing that can be determined are red spots on the planet detected by satellites which are clumps of sleeping spikes. No matter how far people run and evacuate, the swarms catch up to them and eat them, leaving none to remain except bone. The spread is so quick, it is too late. The America that is South is doomed, and it's spreading to the North. Drones were used to determine what they specifically are, and nukes were dropped on them. But they have eaten species with far more advanced means of wiping them out. So humans with their basic understandings of nuclear power and explosive use only put a tiny dent into their numbers. However, they have come across something that they have never experienced. The sound of overly patriotic American music." Everyone became confused.
"What?" Jinx inquired.
"Yes. This country's music was so overly glorifying and obnoxiously loud that the spikes ate themselves to stop listening to it. While the world has lost a heavy amount, they were able to save themselves by annoying the spikes into leaving so that they didn't have to listen to such annoying music. However, that was just the first the Earth will encounter, for a meteor-"
"Uh, Star?" Robin politely inturrupted. "Sorry for cutting in but I just need to know. Do you find patriotic music annoying? You don't seem annoyed around 4th of July. Doesn't your planet have its own songs to inspire others to fight wars?"
"Well, the amount of making yourselves does sound great is excessive. The 4th of July is an exception since it's a holiday and I more than anyone know about celebrating with song on holidays. And while my people do have songs about winning wars and relishing in the blood of our enemies, it is usually for after since we don't really need music to inspire us because we are a warrior race. It is our culture both mentally and biologically to be the winner in combat. It is just a good thing we can also be diplomatic or else we would be galaxy wide conquerors."
"Well, at least you don't toot your own horn too much like we do." Jinx shrugged. "Come to think of it, I think Robin and Cyborg are the only North American natives of this group. Beast Boy's Caucasion but he didn't grow up here, Star's an alien, Raven came from an alternate dimension, and I grew up in India."
"Indeed. Anyway, there was a meteor coming, inhabiting a beast that the Earth is not prepared for."
"Huh, okay then. That spikes thing really does sound creepy."
"Although the music thing ruined the tension." Jinx mumbled to herself.
"Alright then, who wants to go next?"
"Me!" Cyborg yelled. "It's my time for a scary story." He growled that last bit, trying to be spooky. "There's this dude, taking a late night drive in his sports car, eating some peanuts and got some of that sweet music going, when suddenly he crashed! It was a trap he was unfortunate to come across, as a scientist took the dude and his car with him. He's been tinkered with, experimented like a guinea pig against his will. He had his brain taken out of his skull, and implanted into a mechanical body that used to be his car. He's a mechanical Frankenstein now! But now he's mad! Furious! Hostile! He kills his kidnapper and destroys the lab before escaping, going into the city. Turns out in the process, his impulse control is gone, because he's going after every person that scientist was in cahoots with or basically anybody that slighted him for any reason! The police try to catch him, but his lack of nerves and super strength lets him escape every time. But one day, he's on the run from the police, and was cornered on the edge of a local canyon. Rather than be captured, he jumped down the canyon, screaming curses before self-destructing, exploding with so much force the canyon around him to collapse! The nearest police fell in, but for the most part everyone else was safe. He may have destroyed part of a canyon but nothing short of a Tsar bomb will cause an earthquake or anything, and even then it would have to be at a weak point. Just one bad night, this perfectly average Joe became a monster who went out on his own terms."
"Freaky." Beast Boy commented.
"Yeah. I guess now is good as any for my turn. There once was an artist who was very good, but he had OCD."
"What is this OCD?" Starfire asked.
"Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It's a mental and behavior disorder where people either think repeatedly about certain thoughts and/or need to complete certain actions repeatedly to the extent of causing distress and impairing general functioning."
"Oh my."
"Yeah. Anyway, if there's one thing he can't help, it's cleaning. He has a schedule to clean everything every day at certain times to try and keep it under control. As he painted he became more popular, but that made for less time for him to keep to cleaning and it was progressively driving him crazy. He tries cleaning whenever he can, he buys robots that clean things for him but now he has to clean each of the robots, and is constantly annoying his friends with frequent update requests. He once again tries to refocus his OCD onto other things, like a healthy diet and excessive, but his need to see things perfectly such as eating foods down to the gram and timing things down to the second adds more to the stress, unintentionally dumping his friends as priority since it doesn't make things perfect. He eventually takes up gardening, and while the garden was good, it was a fateful day when he was trying to fix the roof, arranging the tiles so that they line up within the millimeter, also painting each tile perfectly black. But as he went to re-dip his brush, a tile went loose and he fell. Crack! His head landed against the last stone that completed the look of his garden." Everyone was silent as they just looked uncomfortable.
"That wasn't spooky bro. That was just depressing." Beast Boy said.
"Yeah, that seems like something a person could actually go through." Raven added.
"Sorry. I'm not used to telling this kind of stuff." Robin awkwardly scratched the back of his head.
"Alright the boys had their turn. It's my turn for a story." Jinx said. "Long ago during the Salem witch trials, there was a witch, let's call her Elizabeth. She was the town healer, taking care of anything that the town's people manged to get hurt. Now she was initially liked, but some believed she was too good. Curing fevers over night, fixing sprains and even helping the lame walk again like nothing happened. She was accused of being a witch, and despite what she did the prejudiced men burnt her at the stake. With her dying breath she cursed the inhabitants of the land to suffer bad luck and lose their minds. Drunkards died from falling over, those who laughed too hard have died from laughter, fishermen died by chocking on fish bones, hunter's had their guns backfire on them. Even smokers died if they were also drinking. Even the mortician got crushed by a coffin he made. All sorts of injuries died, even simple bites of the tongue that became infected with gangrene. Everyone thought doing nothing dangerous would work, but that didn't do anything when one house was crushed by a falling tree and a man struck by lightning. Forming a seance, they plead Elizabeth to stop her curse, but all this time she's been happily rolling in her grave, laughing at all those who killed her or didn't stop her death and won't stop. Each day that passed, the people became more and more paranoid leading to insanity, and died either due to bad luck or taking their own lives. The last of the people who managed to keep their minds intact decided that the only thing left to do was burn the place down, for the only thing left were lunatics and murderers that were lost. And the land was never inhabited by man again." The others were disturbed by the nature of her story, which made the metahuman giggle that she succeeded. "Alright Raven, your turn."
"You want a scary story? Sure. Once upon a time, a creature of darkness crawled into the world. A female tiefling. The light hurt her eyes, so she shut all but two of them. To hide herself from the light, she wrapped herself in a cloak of darkness. The lady in the cloak made friends. A man made of steel. An alien princess. An elf druid. And a human rogue. Together they did noble deeds, and for a time the lady in the cloak lived as one of them. But over time she grew weary. "Boo-yah!" yelled the man of steel every day. "Train! Pay attention! Mandatory meetings!" The human rogue commanded every day. The hyena laughed and laughed constantly, and the princess... well, she was cool. But every day, they grew louder, and louder, and louder! Until one night... she snapped! Throwing aside her cloak, they saw she was a monster that had been hiding among them. Her fingers became claws, her teeth, razors. She opened all of her hideous eyes. Then, fast as a serpent, she ate them! One by one." The rest of the titans were huddling together, for they didn't just imagined it, they could see and feel the whole thing since Raven secretly implanted the gruesome images into their heads.
"What uh... what happened to the monster?" Robin asked, quivering in fear.
"Nothing." Raven then transformed into the creature she described. "Because I'm the monster!" The half-demon sorceress then roared into their faces, scaring all her friends into the woods as they screamed with fright and horror. Reverting back, Raven chuckled. "That was fun."
A/N: Well, that's it for Season 2. Now onto the third, but I will be taking a short break from writing this story, for I will need to talk to Eris, Imagination and Tomo if they're still around about how to plan out Season 3. But don't fret, I'll be back.