2283/One Amazon Kabob, To Stay

One Amazon Kabob, To Stay
Date of Scene:	01 September 2017
Location:	Unknown
Synopsis:	Summary needed
Cast of Characters:	Wonder Girl, Raven

---

Wonder Girl has posed:
By most measures, the rescue staged by the Titans for their youngest recruit went well. Damian is back home being a broody and overly serious mini-ninja, one villain is presumed dead and another in custody, and various dangerous weapons and technology are destroyed or recovered, safe from the hands of those who would put them to sinister use. The exception is a single casualty, and a surprising one: to see one of the most physically potent Titans in mortal peril is likely a reminder to all of the danger of their work.

The group returns via some strange sequence of magical contrivances and normal means that are easier left without further detailed explanation, and Cassie carried into the medical bay by the returning heroes, perhaps Colette, being the strongest still standing (Damian certainly isn't going to do it!) By now, the exotic metal of the partly broken sword that impaled her has been removed, leaving a hole right through her midsection, althoug blessedly no more than that, her attacker stopped before he could do any more damage withdrawing, twisting, or otherwise leveraging the blade.

It seems some basic aid - both mortal and magical was applied on the scene to at least stem her bleeding, all of which raises a question in all of this: what exactly does it take to kill a demigoddess? It's clear that her own body's ability to heal is far stronger than a mortal's, but piercing attacks have always been the weakness of the Amazons and she seems no exception. At this point, she's recovered enough to be vaguely awake and aware, but her skin is pale and clamy, and overall, she seems weak in a quite unfamiliar way.

Raven has posed:
Raven was left at the tower not of her own volition. Protocol stated that someone needed to be left behind, and the members that went had been decided the usual way. Sometimes by coin toss, sometimes by who had the last piece of pizza. Today, it'd just been a matter of luck. Still, there is a role in the Titans that Raven fills almost exclusively- that of de facto healer. The others have some level of first aid, making her not entirely turbo-crucial for every mission ever, but at the same time, none of the current roster can actually do for a wound what Raven can.

It's just not pleasant.

That won't stop her from at least offering. Her entrance into the room is as ghostly and otherworldly as it usually is. There's a level of emergency to an injured Titan that overrides Raven's desire to seem normal- which means that the door doesn't open. From Cassie's perspective, the happening is simple. Raven is not there one moment, and then she is. If the woman isn't especially languid, she'd probably catch Raven emerging from the roof and floating down, boots landing silently and the feet within carrying her weight, hands in her hoodie-pockets, as always.

"Hello, Cassie." It begins- the monotonous, emotion deprived speech that just makes all of her snark all the more potent is now the only non-mechanical noise in the room. "I can help you heal, if you want." As if the response to that was going to be 'nah, I'm good yo, stabs ain't nothin',' Raven waits. Nobody's ever told her no before, but there's always a first time, and admittedly, any time she's ever had to provide healing to Damian, he's been unconscious.

"I warn you," she interjects, before Cassie can actually answer, "It isn't a pleasant experience. Not for something this intense." She has a talent for waiting for an answer just long enough to practically interrupt said answer with some ominous phrase or snarky quip. It's practically a super-power.

Wonder Girl has posed:
As groggy and disoriented by it all as she is, for once, Raven's arrival may not seem unusual. Not that it's normal by any stretch, but her somewhat surreal... well, entire manner of being and doing things meshes in quite well with the feverish quality of her barely-there awareness. She might well mistake the whole thing for a dream, as people floating around is the sort of thing that happens in dreams, were it not also a normal day-to-day happening in Titans tower.

Still, it takes a moment for Cassie to catch and focus in on Raven's presence, glancing toward her as she descends. "I- I really don't know if I can heal it myself," she admits, once the other young woman has joined her more closely and she can converse without raising her voice. "I've never had to try." There's a weak smile at that. "Sure I've gotten knocked around before, but that really doesn't do much in the long-run." She lets her head fall back onto the bed and gives a quiet 'argh.' "Of all the sort of creeps that could have been behind it, it has to be a drugged-out maniac swordsman and a guy who can take the zap right out of my lasso." That gives at least some idea of how she ended up this bad.

With all that said, she grits her teeth a little and then goes on to give a firmer answer, "So you probably ought to give it a try. Don't want to risk it and even, even if I can soldier through this, who knows, knows when you, when all the others might need me next, right?" Another wince.

"I'm a big girl, I can take my medicine."

Raven has posed:
There is a stare that betrays nothing, coming from Raven. Part of this involves the darker woman steeling herself. There is no smile, and no frown- she is centered, as she needs to be- and even that centering is going to be disrupted by the process she and Cassie are about to endure. "You will need to keep stable. You will have to stay within yourself." That's... As cryptic as anything else regarding Raven's powers, admittedly. However, it is easily understood. Raven does a lot with the brain-meats and even this will likely involve some sort of psychic component.

Casually, Raven brings her hands out of her pockets, and sets down the only two things she'd brought with her. Two little twelve-ounce bottles of chocolate milk. "For later." she notes, before reaching over to the wound proper. Casually, and with no protection of any kind, her delicate, slender hands pull apart the dressing and expose the seeping wound proper. In the moments that follow, looking into her eyes is like looking at a solar eclipse. There is a corona of light, yet at their core, her eyes are black. What she's saying is difficult to discern. Mostly because it comes out in several different languages at once, though some of the words are common enough among anyone who has been around Raven for a while. Three, specifically.

Azarath, Metrion, and Zinthos.

She had mentioned enough that Cassie would understand -what- to do, but not that it would be so damned -difficult.- Perhaps it was just the nature of the power she's invoking, or perhaps it's just because of the depth of the wound, but while Cassie feels less- or, rather, -no- pain, the blonde is likely to bleed in other ways.

Mental bleed is a tricky thing to quantify, and even the strongest minds can let slip a drop or two of psychic "blood," images, thoughts, places, concepts and memories... That sort of thing. If Cassie isn't at her utmost, there will be quite a bit of bleed from this... And, as well, for such a wound, Raven is "bleeding" too. The nature of her healing is empathic, though she actually hasn't told anyone that. Right now, not only is she dealing with the empathic and psychic connection between minds the power calls for...

She's also dealing with the actual, literal pain of being stabbed in the stomach, because she's sapping that out of Cassie -as- the wound is healing. Sure, it's almost miraculous... But there's a cost. A lot is riding on Cassie's self-control right now, and if the blonde isn't on her A-game, there's going to be a few less secrets, or just a few less stories that need to be told. It all depends.

Wonder Girl has posed:
Of course those instructions aren't exactly the most... instructive, and Cassie's experience in such things is, at least in some ways, limited. She's not unfamiliar with the strange or the mystical, though it's of a very particular sort, the 'Gods stand around holding bizarre conversations in audience halls that don't conform to mortal geometry' kind. She's sat through that a few times, and even made ventures into some of the less friendly realms claimed by some of her extended family. But her own mind is something else.

Fortunately, in many ways, she's hardly the tortured, brooding sort that many heroes are, her life lacking for major traumas. If anything, the most overwhelming feeling to radiate from Cassie is one of loneliness, abandonment, a feeling of wanting but not having, for a father she didn't know in her formative years, and a mother far too wrapped up in her work to notice how much she needed that. Of being alone at different schools, acting out because of it just to be transfered to another. Petty theft as a cry for attention.

Cassie tries to keep it all contained, or at least subdued, focusing on the better moments, the happier part of her life that, basically as a rule, begin on the day she met Diana. Yet there is plenty there of the more typical heroic fodder, the terrible fear of some of her first encounters with villainous power, hulking monsters, lifestealing aberations threatening to drain away her very being, brushes with things unsuitable for a girl who was barely even a teenager at the time. Fear, doubt. And the other side as well, the rush of power, anger, the thrill of using it, letting it go. Her brother bestowing placing the lasso in her hand, a promise of their father's power yet very much linked to his own.

As she grips it in hand, there is a flood of- well, this she DOES recognize and tries to hold back, as it gushes from her core. Mostly, maybe, she succeeds, though there is still plenty of that bleed. Foes held in the grip of her signature weapon, crackling with lighting. Her sitting beside her brother amidst a different, altered pantheon...

And then, as she tries to hold it all back, she simply lets out an angry, terrifying scream.

Raven has posed:
Raven's bleed is more focused. Like a psychic wound, when the healing is initiated, it pierces a single portion of her psyche- a single point that, in layman's terms, is all about Cassie. The emotions present are simple, identifiable, and somewhat surprising- if not... Completely unexpected. Raven doesn't present herself as someone who has anything like these feelings. On the surface, they're the sort of attachments one would expect out of the rest of the Titans. Friendship, admiration, kinship. Below the surface there is... More there. Those bleed too. Along with them come the memories. Things she's seen Cassie do. Times she's watched her work and fight and play and talk. The basic sort of memories you'd have of a person you know, except they're a little rose-tinted. It's hard to really quantify how -feelings- interact with -memories- but it's happening and thankfully as the connection is psychic, it's almost impossible -not- to understand.

The whole of it is pointed by a single memory. On a small easel, set off to the side of Raven's bed, there is a blank page. Time is immaterial. Hours pass, perhaps even days- she keeps the curtains drawn, and the shutters down. When you can teleport, you don't need your balcony. Raven's room is almost always pitch black. Over the course of time, Raven's slender hand can be seen etching curves in charcoal, that slowly take a familiar shape. It's all from memory- but it makes some level of sense. Azarath is a very expressive, emotional, artistic place. Raven, it seems, is a sketch artist.

She is very, very good.

The resulting image of Cassie's face is almost photographic. Save that it seems just a little bit touched up. Raven draws beautiful things.

On the outside, the pale woman reciting magic incantations cannot afford to scream or express or force Cassie out. What Cassie sees is what Cassie sees, and the connection is only so brief. It may only last a few seconds, perhaps a minute or more. When it's over, Raven's left leg cannot carry her weight anymore, and she has to supplant it with the one thing that can- her willpower. It's always strange to see someone who can fly stumble, because they enter into a pose where they're most assuredly falling, and then like Raven does now, she just sort of floats, moving towards the other bed...

And then she's on her knees next to it, and the familiar sound of someone literally emptying the contents of their stomach into the trash can present there can be heard. Cassie probably doesn't have that problem, because she'll be feeling right as rain... Physically speaking... When Raven starts to hurl.

Without looking up from the can, Raven's hand can be seen coming up onto the table, to grab at one of the bottles of chocolate milk. Clearly, she heard Cassie's primal scream. She definitely saw what was in the blonde's mind. She just considers that all private. She isn't commenting on it.

What Cassie saw in Raven's mind, however, is probably harder not to comment on. Probably.

Wonder Girl has posed:
Maybe sympathetically, those gentler, more positive, caring feelings draw a bit of the same from Cassie. Or perhaps its the fact that she's starting to feel not-so-impaled, and that her mind is a very different place when not wracked with such a gut-wrenching (in the very literal sense), previously unimaginable kind of agony. There are fading flickers. Cassie, her mother, and Diana all together in what must be some part of a museum. Some sandy arena filled with other women who, despite the fact they seem engaged in battle, seem (at least in that recollected perspective) the most wonderful and wonderfully happy group. And from that image of friendship she arrives at newer ones, with newer friends, the various Titans in moments around the tower. Kori with her inedible pizzas, both Robins looking like they're trying very hard not to enjoy themselves, a basketball game with Kaldur and some others, Vorpal and Gar goofing around, and in the last, Raven sitting apart from them but looking... well, somehow, at least in that memory, she looks content in their group, or at least not actively disdainful of them all.

Maybe it's just a smidgen idealized, too.

But with the fading of those more pleasant recent memories, she starts to come back to the real world, in part summoned there by the interruption of the noise beside her bed. She sits up with ready vigor, a strange thing given her condition moments prior, and immediately rolls onto her side to look over at the other young woman. "Hey, are you OK?"

Raven has posed:
Raven doesn't seem to be "okay" in the truest sense of the word. I mean, who is really okay after being stabbed in the stomach? The literal wound isn't there, but part of the power is that she -felt- it. After a few moments- she's a light eater and she's a little used to this particular mindfuckery- she is moving to stand again, the muscles in her side no longer feeling like they've been torn apart. She pops open the chocolate milk, and starts drinking it somewhat slowly, leaving this little purple-black ring around the one side of it.

"Yes." The response comes, a little too late. There's no real way for Raven to gauge how much Cassie saw. She seems... Withdrawn. Perhaps even on edge, about the entire concept. "I do not know why I even eat, at this point." It's probably her weakest joke, but hey, it's a snarky comment. "I know that I am not going to take out that bag. That is for someone else. Probably Garfield." Theeeere it is.

Wonder Girl has posed:
Cassie, of course, shows concern in pretty much the way a normal person would. Ultimately she *is* a pretty normal person, when you take away the crazy God-stuff! So she reaches out to help, a hand on the shoulder, even trying to help Raven hold back her hair, as this were nothing more than a bit of overdoing it on a girl's night out. It doesn't even occur to her, at first, in her quick, natural reaction that...

"Oh wow, it's- I really don't feel it at all," she remarks with suitable surprise, amazement. If she's feeling vulnerable or awkward about the mental hoodoo and everything exchanged throughout, she seems reasonably good at not displaying that, at least not in this moment of inverted worry, where she's gone from the patient to the caregiver in mere moments.

"Hey, just- oh yeah, that's probably good," she says as she notes the milk. "It can't help that most of what we have here is junk-food and the most dubious pizzas in the greater tri-state area." She does laugh at the presumed image of Gar poking around in the trash as a dog or raccoon or something.

Raven has posed:
This isn't Raven's first rodeo. Chocolate milk is tasty and helps with acidity and is basically the perfect thing to remove the taste and sensation of bile from one's mouth and throat. After a few moments, she's finished the little bottle and let it drop into the can. She seems pensive- as if... There is something to think about. Cassie's hand had been on her shoulder, and luckily, Raven's hair was short enough that it wasn't actually in the wave of her face when she chucked before.

Now, though, it's different. She doesn't seem vulnerable, but she seems slightly lost. She doesn't have the full assuredness that she probably should. She is silent for all too long, before her attention turns to Cassie's face proper- a thing she's drawn from memory, more than once, a fact which Cassie now likely knows.

"I've tried to change the responsibility list several times, but each time, there are issues. Thankfully, everyone else has agreed that certain people are just exempt from cooking." It's small talk- just to keep the conversation going, so as not to let it devolve into an awkward silence. Clearly, Raven is very great at repressing and not addressing -anything- about how she feels.

Wonder Girl has posed:
"I tried grabbing some healthy stuff and fresh groceries the one time, but it didn't exactly take. We could really use a teamate that's also like, a gourmet chef as their civilian identity," Cassie opines. "We oughta try advertising or something!" It's mostly a joke, just meant to bring some levity to the situation and distract from any awkardness that may linger beneath the surface. After a moment, though, at least some of what lingers unsaid just has to be breeched.

"I- I'm not gonna pretend I know how any of that works or what it meant, but thank you, really," she begins. "And I, I dunno, might have overshared or whatever." She's not really aware of what Rachel was seeing either, but there's just some sense of it, in that vulnerability, that some of it was important, that some may have been things she'd rather not have offered. "But don't worry, I'm not, like, embarassed or anything. I've got a messed up real family but I've got two great adoptive ones, so really, I'm the last person in the world who should be moping or moaning about anything."

A hand now reaches to touch, curiously, over the point at sort of the top of her stomach, just beneath the ribs, where the Ravager had run her through. "It's pretty amazing that I can come through that and only be down a t-shirt. Like, that's just amazing, Rach. I didn't even realize."

Raven has posed:
Raven nods a few times, appreciating the levity but taking a moment to comment on it. There wasn't a whole lot that she could say about the matter, because she considered the matter basically closed. "That sounds like a good idea. Perhaps we can do something through the smaller Robin." Another pause follows, before Cassie starts lighting on the process.

"It is.... Empathic healing. I take the pain onto myself and, essentially, remove its potential- there's... There is a lot of metaphysical to it. Suffice to say that..." Another moment of silence. "I open a connection. There has to be a connection made, to pull from you what I'm trying to pull. But in that same sense, it is also a wound. I bleed. You bleed. And in that bleed there is... Information. You... Probably saw things. I do not know what they were. I can guess."

She seems to take a moment, looking over towards the door, as if she'd flee. But, for now, she doesn't. "You don't have to address it. It's probably best if you don't think about it. They're not your memories, so they should fade, in time, if you let them. I am sorry if any of it was... Disturbing."

Wonder Girl has posed:
"Oh, like get us some fancy bat-chef? Our own butler?" Cassie can't help herself from a grin.

She does look curious as Raven explains the process a bit. The specifics may be beyond her, but the general sense, the principle of it that she lays out, seems to be something she can grasp. "I guess, yeah, that makes sense. Sorry, that you had to, well, not just share but suffer for me getting hurt. I really do appreciate it." And her smile expresses much of the same, how touched she is to have someone do such a thing for her.

Then, 'hmmming' thoughtfully, she seems to ponder those thoughts (maybe more than she's supposed to), but the other woman's apparent concern, particularly over sharing more 'disturbing' imagery quickly causes her to offer some reassurance. "Oh no, no, it wasn't like that at all. No, I'm alright. And I won't share any of it, I'll keep it to myself, don't worry." It seemingly doesn't quite occur to her that she might have shared anything as dark as that disturbingly Olympus meets Game of Thrones scenario with her and Ares, which may reflect these being quite... subconscious thoughts on her part, darkness she's barely aware of.

Raven has posed:
Raven is the daughter of a demon. The images she saw in Cassie's mind aren't really the worst thing she's been forced to consider. "It's. I take the pain into myself. So, if you want to call it suffering, you can. But I don't. It's usually over pretty quickly." There's a quiet moment after that. Raven is very pensive, it seems.

"There's no way for me- I don't know what you saw. But it may have been... Very private. It is best if you..." Cassie cuts her off, then, with her assurances. "I do not want it to seem... Creepy. Anything you may have seen. That is why it is not something I talk about. It's better left... Forgotten."

Wonder Girl has posed:
Although it's silly to Cassie, to hear the other woman be so defensive over... a drawing habit? Of being maybe a little less gloomy than they all think she is? Well, she's not going to push it. She saw how private Raven is the night of the incident in her room, and she has no reason to do anything but reassure her. "Secret's safe with me," she declares, unhesitant and cheerful. "We're all entitled to a few."

With that said, she rather overdramatically stretches out there on the medical bed, legs forward, arms and legs out stretched, a twist left and right, before she kicks off the edge of it and does a little more standing, putting her arms back and arching her back. It's like a little warmup routine.

"Ahhhh! Man. I feel, well, actually I pretty much feel great, thanks to you. Think I'm gonna go grab something to eat, even if it's not exactly fine dining. Welcome along if you're up to it."

Raven has posed:
Raven is quiet over the course of it all, the dramatic display and the invitation and everything before that. She shakes her head after a few moments, being as frank as she can. "No, after the.... Vomiting, I think I've lost my appetite." Then, after a moment's pause, "It's better if I don't." is all she remarks. She isn't moving towards the door- instead, just letting Cassie go off on her own.