Sunday, August 31, 2014

Teen Titans - Daydream

"I absolutely refuse to give up on my Teen Titans stories! Especially the ones with my fan characters. I have other superhero stories that could easily use my characters, but I can't rip them from their universe of origin. They belong with the Teen Titans and I still love that series even after all these years.
Switching to prose yet again here. I still don't think this works as well as the script format, but I'm not giving up yet!
Oh, and I just realized that the window thing might actually be inaccurate, but I shall fact check that before this goes to DeviantArt." -Casey



Raven squinted against the sunlight that was pouring into her room as she woke up. She pulled the covers up over her face and sighed in annoyance. How had she forgotten to close the window like that? She didn’t even have a window in her room.
She sat up, throwing the blanket aside, and looked around the room in surprise. She wasn’t in her room back at Titans Tower. She was in an unfamiliar room that was decorated with rock posters and purple carpeting.
“Robin?” she called as she leapt out of bed. That’s when she noticed the long black nightdress she was wearing. What was going on?
“Starfire?” she called as she made her way to the only door and opened it cautiously. She walked down the hallway, past pictures of complete strangers, until it opened to a living room that looked as perfect as a picture from a magazine. There was a clanking noise from around the corner, but Raven didn’t sense anyone nearby. She slowly rounded the corner.
The woman in the kitchen turned to face her, her long purple hair falling over her lacy white blouse. She smiled wholesomely, which looked almost unnatural with her long face and narrow eyes. “Good morning, Raven,” she greeted happily.
“Arella?” the girl said breathlessly, staring in amazement at her mother.
“Who on Earth is Arella?” she asked as she turned back to the eggs she had been scrambling.
“You…you are,” Raven said hesitantly.
“Last I checked, my name was Angela,” the woman replied. “But I really prefer ‘Mom’ from my daughter.”
“You’re alive,” she muttered as she wrapped her arms around the woman, her eyes welling up with tears.
“Raven? What’s the matter?” she asked as she put aside her cooking to hug the girl back.
“I thought you had perished with Azarath,” Raven explained.
“What are you talking about?” she insisted.
“I…I…You don’t remember?”
You’re not looking too well, sunshine,” her mother observed as she put her hand to her forehead. “Maybe you should stay home from school today.”
“Sunshine?” Raven asked skeptically with a raised eyebrow.
Arella (or Angela) smiled halfhearted at the teenager and shook her head. “There she is,” she joked, as if that settled the matter. “Now go get dressed. You’ll miss the bus if you don’t hurry.”
Raven stood in the kitchen and opened her mouth to say something, but she was at a loss for words. Angela scooped the scrambled eggs onto a couple of plates and placed them on the dining table. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked as she went to the refrigerator for some orange juice.
The last thing Raven wanted to do was sit down to a bizarre breakfast when nothing was making sense. She backed away towards the living room. “I’m going to go get dressed,” she excused herself. She rushed back to what she could only assume was supposed to be her bedroom and shut the door.
She cleared her mind as she strode to the center of the room and assumed her meditation position. She noticed for the first time that the gemstone on her forehead was missing, but she didn’t let it bother her. “Azarath, Metrion, Zinthose,” she began to chant, focusing on locating the other Titans. “Azarath, Metrion, Zinthose.” There was no sign of her friends or anything else for that matter. She couldn’t even sense Angela in the other room. Her telepathy wasn’t working and she wasn’t even levitating. Her powers weren’t working.
She jumped up and started digging through the vanity for her communicator or even her cloak. She didn’t have any luck and she was beginning to panic. She thought back to the last sane thing she could remember. They had fought off a few smalltime crooks, no one capable of causing this kind of delusion. After that they had gone back to the tower. Robin and Cyborg played video games while Beast Boy wrestled for one of the controllers. Starfire and their new recruit had been cooking dinner and realizing their mutual love for snails. The new recruit…Duplicate. Could he have something to do with this?
“Raven, do you need me to give you a ride to school?” her mother called.
“No!” she called back. “I’ll be fine.”
She shook her head with the effort of concentrating on what had happened the day before, but the last thing she could remember was falling asleep like she always did. Nothing out of the ordinary came to mind.
“Are you sure? The bus will be here any minute,” Angela called again.
Raven looked down at the rumpled clothes in the vanity and spotted what looked like a school uniform. She grabbed it and called back, “I’m almost ready!”
She had to get out of the house. She needed to figure out what was going on and her mother being alive in the kitchen making eggs was a distraction.

Raven had no idea where she was supposed to go as she walked the crowded halls of the school. She’d tried to sneak away three times already, but bus drivers and teachers had deterred her at every turn.
Robin! Cyborg! she screamed telepathically. Anybody! Beast Boy!
The other Titans had to be out of range, but perhaps she was going about this the wrong way. She hadn’t been able to sense any of the people around her, like her mother or fellow students, but maybe she could search for another presence. She opened up her mind and tried to reach out beyond the students around her to find someone else, anyone else.
“Mayday!” a voice called out suddenly.
Raven looked up just in time to see a giant stack of books before she slammed into them and the boy that had been carrying them. Books and papers scattered across the hall, nearly tripping a couple of inattentive teenagers. Raven reached out as she attempted to retrieve them telekinetically, but that power didn’t seem to be working either. Instead, the boy she had knocked over took her outstretched hand and helped her to her feet.
“Sorry about that,” he apologized. “I don’t move very fast when I’m doing five things at once.”
“Its fine,” Raven replied, noting that the pain meant that she wasn’t dreaming.
The boy began clearing up the books along with a couple of folders and putting them away in his locker selectively. Raven felt a twinge of guilt and began to help gather up the papers by hand.
“Stressing over the science exam today?” he asked.
“Something like that,” she replied, still distracted by her lack of powers.
She handed the papers to the boy and he took with a grateful smile, his load of books much lighter now. “Well, while I’m here, you need an escort to class?” he asked. “I can clear the path so you don’t have worry about any other overloaded bookworms.”
“How do you know which class I’m looking for?” she asked.
“Well, we have shared English for the whole semester,” he sighed. “I’m usually in the back hiding behind my hipster glasses.” With that, he pulled a pair of thick rimmed black glasses out from his pant pockets and placed them on his face while moving his eyebrows up and down comically.
“Your glasses don’t have any lenses,” she pointed out in annoyance.
“Yeah, but glasses are like the only thing that they don’t have a dress code against,” he complained as he started walking down the hallway. “You coming?”
Raven took a good look at the boy standing before her. His long blond hair stood up fairly high before it flopped down in his bright colored eyes and he smiled with his teeth far too much. He was nearly as obnoxious as Beast Boy. However, sitting quietly in a classroom might give her the space to think things out, at least until she could sneak away at lunch. Reluctantly she followed after him.
“My name’s Remy, by the way,” he announced as they walked.
“I’m Raven,” she replied, holding onto that thought. She was Raven, a real hero, and no amount of this ridiculous reality was going to convince her that the Teen Titans didn’t exist.
As they approached the classroom where English class was to be held, the door exploded outwards and slammed into the lockers on the far wall, barely missing one of the other students. As smoke poured through the remains of the entryway, a tall thin figure stepped out of the room and into the hall with a confident strut. As the smoke began to clear, the figure stopped and spun its cane around in the air before leaning against it in a showy manner.
“Well, hello, hello, hello, my duckies” the man greeted as he finally became visible through the smoke. “Care to help me out with a little discipline problem?”
Mad Mod, Raven thought as glared at the man. I should have known that he was behind this.


Teen Titans (C) Warner Brothers and Cartoon Network
REM and Story (C) SuperheroGeek13