5645/TITANS: The Tower Struck by Lightning.

TITANS: The Tower Struck by Lightning.
Date of Scene:	25 October 2018
Location:	Unknown
Synopsis:	A voice from the sky says crytpic things. Raven freaks out, Vorpal gets hungry, Stardust blames Robin.
Cast of Characters:	Stardust, Raven, 87

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Stardust has posed:
    The last few hours has seen as storm of apocalyptic proportions, the kind of weather that just makes you want to stay in and watch TV, with the volume turned up to mask the hammering of rainfall on those huge windows, and the regular cracks of thunder. Nobody sensible would be out in weather like this.

    Colette is out in weather like this. Flying through it, even. It's possible she may even at one point have been struck by lightning, but she's not going to admit that. Thus it is a rather wet Stardust who arrives on the roof of the Tower just about the time the weather finally breaks, the rain stops, and the clouds roll back to let the earth remind itself there's such a thing as daylight.

    About a minute and a half after landing, Stardust's voice comes out over the general channel of the Titans coms. "Hey Titans! Have any of you guys lost a big glowing greeny-purply swirly thing? 'Cos there's one floating over the Tower. I'd say it was the northern lights, but unless someone turned the Tower into the north pole while I wasn't looking, probably not."

Raven has posed:
    Raven is, as always happens when Colette's voice erupts over the comms, meditating. There is nothing quite as capable at ripping Raven right out of her trance. She falls to the ground rather abruptly, and seems to quietly seethe for the requisite few moments in the solace of her room before regaining her composure. It's something important. She has to remember that.

    All the same, after a moment or two, the black shape of a bird bursts forth from the windows of the tower, without all the ceremony of shattering glass that one might expect. Instead, the shadow merely flies into the air, before its shape coalesces into that of Raven herself.

    She has nothing to add, no new information aside from the presence of the rift itself. It will do something- and she's ready for it.

Vorpal (87) has posed:
Vorpal appears on the roof by way of elevator- since he has been very wary of using the Rabbit Hole after his mind became the unwilling host of... something else. He appears without much ceremony, and his usual apparel with the addition of a trench coat and an umbrella. Because of rain.

"Didn't do it," he quickly launches a disclaimer, looking up into the sky as he joins the group. "Maybe Brick put it there and forgot to pick up after his toys?"

Stardust has posed:
    The aurora - Colette's description is pretty apt - drifts around thirty feet above the tower, and is small enough, overlapping the tower by perhaps fifty feet in either direction, to seem really quite personal. The air tastes of metal and smells of electricity, and a static charge can be felt - most noticably by Vorpal, of course. There's something about it that tickles the senses of the sensitive ones, as if it is something not quite magic in itself, but something that has been associating with magic. It's alien, out of place, eerie - and yet faintly familiar.

    Colette turns her face from aurora watching to see the arrival of her teammates, looking from one to the other with a puzzled expression that looks somehow more worrying to see, bathed in the faint, sickly green glow of the aurora. "Rae, Vorp. Neither of you know anything about this? 'Cos if it's not a magic thing, Brick is a good guess. Is he around? He should science it. Which reminds me, why isn't he a full member yet? Because as far as I'm concerned he is, but he doesn't seem to think so. We should fix that." Her eyes turn back up to the glow, wet hair plastering her face. "Shall I go and poke it? I didn't before because I thought it might be something one of you guys were messing with and I thought I'd ask before poking."

Raven has posed:
    Raven floats over to Colette at that point, looking up at the portal. She has a frown- when does she not?- even as she lands amongst the rain. The sweater will protect her, but admittedly, the tights probably aren't inclement-weather-ready.

    "I don't know any more about it than I did when the other one opened up in the living room. This one is larger. This should be alarming. You should be more alarmed."

Vorpal (87) has posed:
"We seem to have a bad case of portals. Maybe we should find an exterminator," the Cheshire muses and raises an eyebrow. "I am not sure you should poke it. But then again... maybe the unwise course of action is the wise one? Let's go ahead and poke it, I say."

Vorpal closes the umbrella and holds out a hand. It has died down enough that he doesn't need the umbrella. That much. "So. Plan of action?"

Stardust has posed:
    Fortunately for Raven's tights, the rain has slowed to barely a drizzle by now. Assuming Colette doesn't start shaking her hair dry like a dog, Raven's unlikely to make like the wicked witch of the west.

    "You guys sure this is another portal?" Colette asks. "It looks kinda wispier than the other one. Also, it's in the air. Not on a wall. The other portals were on walls. I don't mind poking it, but Rae seems to object to the poking of portals." She drifts upwards, hovering a few feet short of the shimmering energy. Her hair floats out in a slight crown as she approaches, but it's too wet to do anything spectacular.

    Colette raises a hand, finger pointing, and looks down at the other two. "Poke? No poke? I'm game. I'll promise to be alarmed if it says 'ouch', fair enough?"

Raven has posed:
    Raven spends another moment in silence, before she offers this small shrug. "I think it's something portal-adjacent." she notes, looking over to Colette, and sparing her this impassive look, before rising off of the roof.

    "We covered why you interacting these things was a dumber idea than usual, so I'm not going to dignify that statement with a response. Give me a moment, I'll... Take a look at it, and see what I can sense." That is, pretty firmly, in the No Poke court- at the same time, Raven seems to be flying towards the portal.

Vorpal (87) has posed:
"Well, I'll trust your judgement, Rae." Vorpal says, mostly because he's been caught up on what happened during his absence, and he seems very reticent to contradic Raven. He isn't sure if he has those proverbial nine lives of only just the one, and he is not interested in finding out in a hurry. "Stardust, no poky. Just be a good superhero and wait here with me..."

Stardust has posed:
Colette is just about to object to Raven's comment when Vorpal backs her up. She glares down at the chaos cat, then breaks into a grin and shrugs her shoulders. "No pokey. Yet."

    It's unusual for Colette to be so co-operative, so it would be unrealistic to expect her to go as far as waiting with Vorpal. Instead she paces Raven, staying close but letting her team-mate take the lead for now. "I think we covered the whole not-exactly-fragile thing too, Rae. Just in general, if someone's gonna be zapped, it probably is best it's me." She looks thoughtful for a moment before adding, "That's not an invitation though. No zapping."

    As the two Titans approach the glowing cloud, the lazy swirling of the auroral patterns seems to pick up speed, and ripples of light spread out from the core, where something dense appears to be coagulating. Raven can pick up traces of emotion from the core; scattered, untuned and indistinct, but definitely sentient.

Raven has posed:
    As Raven approaches, and Colette continues to speak, Raven's silence is broken as she approaches the seeming-rift. "For once, in our careers together as Titans, and as what I cannot yet verify isn't a human being, could you just -shut-up-?"

    She does indeed approach the thing to inspect it- using her knowledge of the arcane and eldritch to confirm her suspicions- or to prove herself wrong, for that matter. She is suspicious that it is less a rift in space, but more a rift in -time-... Some sort of gate to a possible future wherein something has gone wrong.

    It's just a theory, though.

Vorpal (87) has posed:
"Geez," Vorpal mutters, looking up at his two flying team-mates, "You'd think that with all that meditating she does, she'd have a longer fuse." And then he pauses. He quickly goes silent, just in case he was overheard. Since his return, his mental filters have not been the best...

Stardust has posed:
    "FINE." That's the sound of Colette shutting up. She even shuts up noisily. She crosses her arms sulkily and stops at a hover, watching as Raven gets closer and extends her supernatural senses to probe the aurora. When she's sure Raven's attention is on the glowing cloud, she looks down to Vorpal with another grin and a wink. Whether she overheard the feline meandering or not? Who can say.

    Raven's senses open to the cloud, probing gently with sorcerous tendrils, trying to discover some clue that might confirm or deny her theory. It's a bit of a puzzle. How do you tell what's on the other side of a portal? What would a portal from a possible future actually look like, how would it interact with the arcane matrices of the universe? Would one from a possible future where something has gone wrong seem different from a possible future which...

    There it is. A passing feeling, like a broken snatch of conversation, too little to quite make sense of, but enough to know there's sense behind it. A scent on the wind, a featherlight touch on the skin. It's there, it's familiar. Light as the touch is, it feels to her more like a hammer blow. It's the last thing she'd ever want to sense.

    The glowing core expands suddenly in a brilliant glow, solidifying into a humanoid shape, and Colette darts forwards, putting herself between Raven and the figure. "Hey! Nobody ordered a glowy thing. We don't want it!" she challenges.

    That's the sound of Colette failing to shut up for any useful length of time.

Raven has posed:
    Raven's response is to, contrary to anything she's ever done before, shrink. Colette is the worst person to respond to the glow, and yet, Raven just lets it happen. To say that she seems... Bothered... Would be an understatement. She is, in fact, actively -fleeing-.

    First, it's to the rooftop, where she begins to pace for several seconds, hugging her arms to herself despite the presence of the ever-warming sweater. In that moment she looks like death, like someone addicted that has been cut off from their fix for an extended period of time.

    Though the occasional "No" and "Not" are audible from her, the rest is a quiet mumble. The moment she's directly interacted with- or if given enough time on her own, Raven will flee further, to her room, predictably. Out of sight and, she hopes, out of mind.

Vorpal (87) has posed:
"Raven, what the hell is that?" Vorpal asks, clearly disturbed by the fact that Raven seems disturbed. Anything that is bad enough to spook her is clearly high on the Run Away scale. This is reinforced by the fact that Raven actually *flees*.


He can't fly, but he can do the next best thing. He extends his arm and opens the umbrella, and zaps a charge of Chaos magic into it. A second later, he is taking off into the air, like a striped Mary Poppins. "Stardust... fly back from that thing, I don't think it's friendly!"

Stardust has posed:
"Stardust. Of course." The shape in the cloud speaks with a voice that echoes like it's coming up from the bottom of a well, but there's something distinctly familiar about it. Damian? No, that's not quite right. Besides, what would Damian be doing in a cloud? "I'm afraid I'm a little too intangible to punch in the face, sorry to disappoint you." There's a slight chuckle. "This is very hard to stabilize, but I..."

    With the most perfect of timing, the form, voice, and aurora all suddenly vanish, leaving the air empty. Colette drifts backwards slightly, not quite sure what to make of this, and turns her head to look at Vorpal. "If it's that dangerous, perhaps don't try fighting it with an umbrella. Stay behind me, kitty cat."

    In a blaze of brilliance, the cloud reappears, and the voice speaks again, hurredly. "Raven, don't do what you just did. What you sensed... it does not have to happen. It is avoidable. But not if any part of your power crosses the bridge. Leave the portals alone. Tommy, I cannot just tell you what you need to know. But it is vital that you remember. A cat may look at a king, but sometimes only a king can talk to a cat. I'll be back soon. Remember."

    The figure vanishes with a reversal of the pulse with which it had arrived, the energy of the cloud seeming to collapse in on itself in a wave, leaving faint glowing whirls and curlicues of light. Colette barges forwards, whisps of green and purple trailing past her before fading into nothingness as she flies to where the figure had been. "Hey! Come back RIGHT NOW!" she demands. "God damn it, why do people keep having to be mysterious all the time? Who the hell are you?"

    She's shouting at the empty sky.

Vorpal (87) has posed:
"That is rather disappointing," Vorpal says, pretending not to be thoroughly unnerved by the fact that someone just called him by his secret identity's name, "We started with a vortex and ended up with a dime store fortune cookie."

The magic in the umbrella begins to leak out, and so the Cheshire cat makes his way to the floor. Shaking the raindrops off the umbrella, the Cheshire cat calls out "Come on, no use standing around now that Captain Cryptic took the vortex away with him. We might as well order chinese and stay up all night trying to make head or tails of what was it that just happened. And maybe coax Raven out of her room to participate with a plate of steamed vegetables. Or a signed Sisters of Mercy poster."

Stardust has posed:
Colette remains floating in the air as Vorpal speaks, poking at it. There is no more portal to be poked at. When Colette is finally convinced of that fact, she drifts down after Vorpal and lands next to him. Her eyes go to the roof door. "I'd say I've never seen Raven react like that to anything, but lately that seems to be normal for Raven. We should check she's al... no." She sighs a little. "We should knock very quietly on her door, and tell her we're here if she wants to talk, and then leave her to it. Raven has secrets and..."

    Colette stops herself, and looks to Vorpal with a raised eyebrow. "What was all that about a cat talking to a king? Mean anything to you? So, was it just me, or did that sound kinda like Damian? Because he was acting pretty odd last time the portal showed. There was a note addressed to him. He read it, pocketed it, and refused to talk about it. My theory? This is Red X part two. This will all turn out to be some Wayne Enterprises holo-projection thingy. He's finding a new way to test us. Chinese sounds good, we need a change from pizza."

Vorpal (87) has posed:
"Hmmm?" Vorpal doesn't seem to have listened very closely as he steps into the elevator and holds it, waiting for Stardust.

He heard perfectly well- hard not to, with those ears. But he is doing hi sbest not to show anything. "All of that? Gibberish, all that nonsense with kings and cats. C'mon, I am starving!"

There will be time later tonight to stay up and wonder what, exactly that message meant. Something in the back of his head is beginning to stir... but slowly.