Starfire didn't notice Silky digging in to her cold slice of pineapple-and-anchovy pizza. She didn't notice that she'd cut off circulation to her left leg by sitting on it awkwardly or that Beast Boy was spraying spit on her face as he talked about some simulated football game with giant worms. The Tamaranian cultist struggled to spare a nerve cluster or two for the conversation flowing around her.
"In Greek Mythology, the Titans were greater even than the gods. They ruled their universe with absolute power."
That line of dialogue, spoken from one earth human to another earth human, about an athletic competition, impacted her thoughts like an invasive species on the ecosystem of a distant moonlet.
"Back in middle school…" Cyborg said.
"the Titans were greater even than the gods"
"trapeze...juggling..." Robin's words out in the space between moments.
"Don't see the a—" Raven said, in her normal, dry tone with just a hint of lofty contempt.
"greater even than the gods"
The Abrahamic deity shared by multiple planet-wide religions used the title of "God", as if it was the only one, but it still identified as a god. It claimed downright omnipotence. It was still "just" a god, not a "Titan".
Somebody was calling out.
She couldn't remember half of the movie. There had been some humans playing with the ball, and some humans were very unfair about that, and some humans said words that were not "troq" but felt like troq. All the while, those words kept growing in strength, rattling in her mind like a panicked prisoner in a hanging cage.
Translation was never a precise process. She could absorb structure, diction, words, but the meaning was always dry and clinical, without history or context. The implications and metaphors and subtleties remained as impenetrable to her as a warship's airlock. "Titan", she knew vaguely, meant something vast, something of immense size and power, and possibly age, or a legendary figure in some field of competition, but the religious nuances utterly eluded her. It was like trying to reach the top shelf without flying.
Somebody was calling her name.
Scath was a god. He was known by many names across the material plane: Krop Tor, Deceiver of Fools, Apothis, Nylarthotep, Bitter Unrelenting Truth, Utgard-Loki, Mephisto, Aku, the Infinite Lever, and many more. Humans believed a lot of strange and foolish things, of course. They were a backwater planet in the ass-end of the outer spiral arm. They hadn't even heard about the voidslip principle or Bisonomy or Nth Metal. Their Martian neighbors were the cultured ones, and their civilization was largely a has-been culture, wittled away by in-fighting and natural disasters.
Of course, the Daxomites didn't even have a planet anymore. What did that say for them?
Then again, Scath hadn't been popular on Daxom. Did he even have any following there, before the end?
Would it have been enough, though? How many loyal souls would be worth saving the entire planet for?
"Starfire, are you okay?"
Starfire blinked. Robin was squeezing her shoulder. The video program had stopped and the DVD-logo screen saver was bouncing around the screen.
"I am sorry, friend Robin. I was lost in thought."
"You looked more, like, comatose," Beast Boy said. He and Cyborg were both looking at her with an expression she could recognize as deep concern. Raven was trying not to betray any emotion, but there was an intensity in the focus of her gaze, a tightness around the eyes, an excessive flatness of the mouth.
"I apologize for distressing you all," she said, meekly. She was still retrieving consciousness nodes from the distant horizons of theological crisis. "This film has, given me much to consider."
"Yeah?" Cyborg said nervously.
"Excuse me for a moment. I wish to retreat to my room and organize my funguses."
She needed to learn everything she could about these "titans", and more, she needed her friends to help give her context.
"Call no man happy who is not dead!"
Starfire had focused to the point where the gap between sequential images visible to her compound eyes didn't even bother her. She was, as the humans would say, Elmered to the Screen.
This was the kind of divine behavior that had drawn her to Scath in the first place. Zeus saved the woman he copulated with from the cruelty of her father. He twisted and tormented the wicked Calibos. He provided magical weapons and aid to his son. (She did wonder if live birth, especially coming from the female instead of the male, was a trope specific to Greek Mythology, or if it was a broader idea in human religious texts. Perhaps it signified the elemental connection to the mammalian livestock that early humans depended on?)
"That quote is out of context," Raven muttered.
Beast Boy "shooshed" Raven, but Starfire registered in her lower nerve branch to ask Raven about the origins of the Greek saying later. Raven took a handful of popcorn.
That was odd. She rarely saw Raven eating, well, anything. She sometimes had a slice when they got pizza, and she would eat Beast Boy's coconut oil shortbread or Cyborg's filet mignon when offered, but she did not actively seek food out. The fact that she was eating popcorn now, not when it was still hot from the microwave oven, suggested she was ingesting it as a means to mask body language or lack thereof. Normally, Raven was extremely comfortable with silence. Perhaps she felt embarrassed about interrupting the film when Beast Boy and Starfire had been silent and riveted throughout the film?
She spared two nodes of consciousness to monitor her friend Raven's behavior. She sighed and rolled her eyes far more frequently than usual, but her pupils were wide, and her eyebrows shivered at tense moments of the film. Raven would sit in on movie night with everyone else, but she rarely entertained the idea of watching a film that Beast Boy chose without the company of Cyborg and Robin. Raven was not just disinterested or bored; she was trying to appear disinterested and bored, trying a little bit too hard.
Beast Boy and Raven had both apparently seen this film before, but Starfire neglected her popcorn and her mustard soda (Robin had discovered a specialty store that sold unorthodox carbonated beverages during one of his patrols and bought her an entire case as an anniversary-of-hatching gift). Her nerves pulsed furiously over the riddle proposed by the princess Andromeda. Earth only had one moon, a pale grey thing with no methane seas or green ice, but the light from the sun reflecting off it almost looked white. Hollow spheres could be nut shells, or rotten fruit, but that seemed unlikely given the irregularity, and while the roots penetrated the soil, they did not reach deep, deep underground. Most things, in ocean or land, would be deep because they were heavy, because they sunk there, like heavy metal elements.
That was when Starfire remembered the heavy metal that humans valued above all else, that was irrationally prioritized over other superconductors, that was soft, pliable, and relatively rare. That was also when she remembered the allegory of the Oyster.
"It is a golden ring set with two pearls!" She squealed out.
Beast Boy and Raven were staring at her.
"Oh, friends, I apologize for interrupting the film," she whispered.
"The Ring of Calibos, cut from the hand of Calibos!" the half-god hero declared, throwing down the severed limb before the shocked assembly.
"Have you seen this one before?"
She shook her head. The motion picture continued.
They got as far as the woman boasting that her daughter was more beautiful than the sea goddess before the alert sounded.
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