CH1

This is not going well.

Raven

*BOOOOOOM*

This is not going well. That was the seventeenth vehicle that this guy had blown up, and after a quick look around, there were no more vehicles to blow up. Beastboy was knocked out and stuck in some sort of super adhesive gel and most of Cyborg's circuits were overloaded and it was all he could do to repair himself and survive. Starfire was trying to corral the beast, but it was pretty large, over four stories tall and Robin, well my attacks could harm both adversaries but Robin, he had performance issues. This hunk of flying metal had almost as many gadgets as Robin did, just as many tricks and a mean sense of humor to go with it.

I heard a cry to the left of me and turn just in time to see Starfire get knocked by the giant beast's tail straight into a building that partially falls on top of her, knocking her out. I'm not sure what it is but I know it needs to go. The creature roars and, somehow, rears up, I say somehow because it had, one eye, razor sharp teeth the size of broadswords, a tail, scaly skin, and only two legs, both of them in the front.

"Sic 'em boy!" the creature falls back to its legs and starts to waddle-charge Robin, who jumps out of the way, right as the worthless hunk of scrap metal throws a disk under him, electrifying and knocking him out.

Let's do a roll call shall we? Beastboy? Trapped. Starfire? Out cold. Cyborg? In the shop for maintenance. Robin? Just knocked out. Me? I'm conscious, but I'm tired from stopping property damage and preventing loss of life and trying to bring down that freakish iguana, that wasn't exactly restful. I say again, this is not going well.

I need to rest. I need a plan. I need…I need help. He's not going to like this. I levitate myself to street level and take a calming breath.

"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos." He sneers at me, watching as I open an open ended portal.

"Whatever you plan on doing demoness, it will not work." I take another calming breath, I need to concentrate, on where he is, on where I am, on where I need him to be. This is old magic. Earth's magic. Soul magic. My magic.

"Venite ad me servum tuum et observa domini iussu vocatus."

"What is that, Latin?"

"Dicam animae meae mihi vinctum fero."

"Are you praying?"

"Venies ad me."

"Are you hoping for someone to save you?"

"Venies ad me." He's laughing now, but I'm not paying attention, I'm putting all of my power into this, I need him.

"VENI!" My soul self jets from my body and into the portal, and not even a second later it's back, in a column of black that explodes outward with waves of green. The summoning had worked. He was here. He would deal with them while I…I…I need to sleep.

"Aw heck, now where am I?"

The last thing I see as my magic seeps into the ground are his eyes as he turns to me. His eyes, they are glowing green with power, bright green. The world was starting to go dark when I felt strong arms surrounding me, I felt…safe. I opened my eyes to see his blazing green and said to him

"Save them Famulus. Protect them." That green light was the last thing I saw before I passed out.

Danny

"Yes it does!" she screamed

"No it doesn't!" he screamed right back, with just as much conviction.

"Tucker! How can you say that? The evidence is all around you!"

I was in History class after having watched the movie 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' on HBO to eat up time after our exams, through which Tucker could not stop going on about how magic didn't exist. The entire class was watching their debate. Why were they screaming about it? Well-

"Because my dear Samantha," Woah boy, he's in for it now "all of your evidence can be easily explained with science!" I'm just glad they haven't brought me into this mess. "C'mon Danny," he slapped my shoulder "back me up!" Me and my big, er, mind-mouth. Sam glared at me.

"Yeah, Danny, back him up." She was growling at me, and glaring, oh good lord, her glare could scare Satan.

"Uh, um, well-" I needed to find a way to get out of the middle here, and fast.

"C'mon Danny!" Tucker urged "Tell her! Magic doesn't exist!" Sam I-believe-in-the-surreal-and-will-later-rub-your-nose-in-it Manson was still giving me the evil eye while Tucker Technology-will-never-fail-me Foley was counting on our bro-hood to back him up. But the thing is-

"Neither of you are really right, but you're not exactly wrong either."

"WHAT!?" they screamed in tandem

"Well, magic, real magic, is everywhere." Sam lit up and pointed at Tucker overjoyed while the rest of the class rolled their eyes.

"HA!"

"Danny!" I held up my hands trying to placate them both

"Now hold on guys!" gulp "Magic is usually just some being calling on a natural talent of theirs to manipulate the ambient extra dimensional energies and shaping them to do what they want. The dimension and the type of energy called from the dimension determines what that energy can do."

"See!" Tucker crowed "Perfectly explainable with higher and lower dimensional maths."

"Danny!" Sam was indignant with me for taking his side, but I wasn't, really.

"Now hold on Sam, I didn't say that he was right."

"HA!"

"But he's not entirely wrong either."

"HA!" Tucker shot back

"Everything in the universe is cause and effect. Everything, but in order to have an effect to cause another effect, there needs to be a previous cause, and a previous cause, and one before that, and one before that, and so on until you get to the beginning of the universe and the first uncaused cause. But you can't have an uncaused cause. So what was before that?"

"Another universe. It was in science class Fentonio!" The charming Dash immediately spouted, but Sam had a thoughtful look on her face

"Oh yeah, and before that?"

"Another universe."

"And before that?"

"Another universe."

"So the previous universe expands then contracts into a big crunch causing a new universe? Kinda like a cause and effect chain?"

"Yeah! Like that!"

"But what about that first uncaused universe? How did that get there?"

"Uhhhh-"

"Exactly." They were both paying attention now "There is a school of thinking where people believe that our beliefs are not shaped by reality, but reality by our beliefs, if enough people believe in something, it will happen."

"Then why isn't everything how everyone wants it smart guy?" he asked

"Because you were brought up to believe otherwise, both by your parents and by watching the already shaped world around us, and even if you changed your belief now, the force of everyone else's opposing belief, no matter how strong you believed, would cancel yours out. Fear isn't enough, fear is not belief, it's fear, that's why people fearing the end of the world won't make it so, they have to believe it."

"How is this important to the cause and effect thing? Or magic being real or not?" Tucker asked

"Because," It was Sam who spoke "Before life and sentient belief, there was chaos." She spoke with realization "Then, something was observed, and when repeated, there was a small spark of belief to make it happen again, and that first sentient being's belief set down the laws of the universe, making others beings, the laws of physics, matter, everything. It all became cemented in that one being's belief." I smiled

"Exactly, they repeated an action on purpose and using magic set down the laws of the universe."

"Wait a second," Tucker started "you just said-" I cut him off

"The three accepted basic elements of magic are willpower, intent, and ability. They wanted it to happen, they intended it to happen, they made it happen because they were capable of making it happen. Magic set forth cause and effect, the basic foundation of science, science, that can explain magic, eventually."

"But what about new experiments that have no belief behind them, only curiosity?" Tucker challenged

"You believe that everything fits into a constrained set of rules, and so it does. So you believe it, so it shall be."

"Alright," Sam said with an evil gleam in her eye "how do you explain Desiree the wishing ghost then? How does she work?"

"I've actually thought about that." I said, surprising everyone. "I think she takes belief and reverses it. She takes the force of absolute certainty of our knowing something isn't real but hoping it could be when we wish for something that we believe with certainty will never happen, and she reverses the certainty of not happening into the certainty of it happening."

"Like," Tucker paused then started up again "our un-belief is so strong that when she reverses it there's no way it couldn't happen?"

"Exactly, and she re-enforces it with ecto-energy, that's why she can never repeat a wish, because once it has happened, it weakens our unbelief and when she switches it around it's not strong enough to make it happen, unless it's phrased in another way so our mind recognizes a different possibility." I paused for a second "Of course there's the possibility that previous universes each had different laws of physics and didn't need cause and effect and our belief affects nothing, in which case the current universe with absolute laws of physics were a complete fluke and none of this matters at all." Tucker and Sam looked at each other, then back to Danny.

"And when did you get so smart?" Sam asked

"Hey!" I cried indignantly "I'm plenty smart!" Sam raised an eyebrow in my direction. "And I spent some time talking to Jazz, but the Desiree thing was all me, I actually thought that one out."

"Uh-huh." Said Tucker

"No really!" Sam patted my head

"Sure, Danny, whatever you say."

"Guys!" Tucker looked at Sam

"Okay, I'll admit, magic might exist, but only if you admit it can still be explained by science, even if we don't know how just yet." Sam crossed her arms and gave him an appraising look.

"Alright, I can admit that." Then the gleam in her eye came back "I have some spell books back at my house, wanna try some out when we go home?" I paled, uh-oh

"Sure," Tucker shrugged "might as well."

"Uh, guys, that might not be such a good idea." Tucker looked at me

"Why? You afraid I might curse you? I still owe you for eating my Nasty-Burger."

"Uh, no, it's just that-"

" 'Cause I got the willpower, I got the intent-"

"Tucker hold on a second, Danny doesn't look so-" Sam started but was cut off once more.

"and I'm probably awesome enough to have the ability too!" he jumped up on his desk and cleared his throat. "Observe! DANNY-O DISSAPPEAR-O!"

Just then a black specter edged in white with two great phosphorescent white eyes set where the head should be sprang up from the ground, spread what could be conceived as limbs, wrapped them around Danny and disappeared back into the ground, taking him with it. There was a beat of silence as everyone stared on in awe, then- *SMACK* -Sam hit Tucker on the back of the head.

"Now look what you did!"

Linebreak

It was cold, dark, familiar, it called to the power inside of me, my core. I had felt this before. She was calling me. This was so not good. The blackness stopped, fragile and still, and with the slightest pulse of energy, the eggshell thin barrier broke. I looked around, there was smoke and destruction all around me.

"Aw heck, now where am I?"

A green boy, Beastboy, the Titan, was in…was that ecto-goo? Cyborg! He was shut down. Starfire? She was stuck half under a pile of rubble and out like a light. Robin? He never loses, right? Where was he? Oh…he was the one on the ground…twitching when the disc under him sparked with electricity. Raven would only ever call me in an emergency and- Raven. Where was she?

I looked around and met her gaze for a single moment before she started to collapse.

"Raven!" I ran to her and caught her before she hit the ground. She looked into my eyes one last time and whispered to me.

"Salvabit eos Famulus. Proteget eos." Then she passed out. I lay her gently down and started to look around when-

"Well, well, well." Aw heck, this guy? "What do we have here? The whelp." Skulker? She called me for him? "Come to save the day? This is just too good, I get to add five new heads to my collection and I get your pelt at the foot of my bed!" What the hell was he doing here? He couldn't possibly be the reason Raven called me here, I mean, right? It was Skulker…and his giant ecto-guana…okay, I can see where the others might have problems, but Raven, she could handle this. Were there any witnesses? I looked, and no, just a cloud of dust and a broken news van, equipment strewn everywhere and sparking.

"Skulker, what the hell are you doing here?"

"Oh, so close child, yet once more you fall shoit of the mahk!" I know that annoying weasel-y voice

"Technus, you're here too?" did they…did they finally?

"Again," came Skulker's Baritone "close, but still wrong." THEY DID!

"We ahr-" I interrupted hi…them.

"Skul-tech, one point oh." I grinned devilishly. "Oh this is going to be fun."

Seven minutes later

Technus gave one last scream as the dust cleared and I sucked him into my thermos, then, just to be mean, I sucked in the ecto-guana, tail first on top of him. I put away my Yari and breathed for a moment. And Raven couldn't handle these clowns? Wait a second, Raven. Raven? RAVEN!

"Raven?" I looked at the general area where I laid her down before I dealt with Skul-tech. There she was, only mildly bruised from debris "RAVEN!" I got down on my knees and checked her pulse. Well…she had one, so, that's good…but that was all I really knew, she had a pulse and she was breathing. Was she alive…uh, well, considering me, I'm not always sure of that, but I knew who would be. I looked around, people just starting to come out after the dust started to clear away "HELP! I NEED HELP! WE NEED TO GET THEM TO A HOSPITAL!"

"But…they're the Titans," someone said "they're always alright."

"Raven always heals them but she's out cold, they could have concussions, internal bleeding, broken bones or punctured organs! We need to get them looked at!" nobody moved. "These people are your heroes! They put their lives on the line to save you over and over! They just saved your lives! Can you repay the favor or not?" still nobody moved. I ran over to Robin and kicked the disc away from him and checked to make sure his heart was still beating, then I ran to Starfire and began shifting rubble off of her, grunting with effort, super strength or not, the rocks were heavy. I continued on this way for twelve seconds before a hand appeared next to mine I looked over and saw a girl, about eight moving a piece of stone a third of her size. She smiled at me and I helped her pick it up and toss it off. Then from behind me-

"I'll be damned if I'll let a lil' girl an' a punk show me up." I looked behind me to see a typical biker with a bandana, a leather jacket, blue-jeans and a scruffy beard. He got down next to us, and started to shift some stones. Tentatively, then with more confidence, more and more people started to come forward, two women rolled Robin over and after checking on him, started to pick him up. "C'mon boys!" the biker called out "We ain't gunna leave a fine lady like this unduh all this crap ah we?" Cries of 'hell no' were heard, then-

"We need help! We can't get this stuff off of him!" It was a family, trying to get Beastboy down. I turned to the biker

"I can get him down, you got this?" he inclined his head

"Go, we got this."

"Thank you." He grunted and I ran to the family "Stand back." They stopped pulling on the goo and looked at me. "Get down and get ready to catch him." I voice activated my gauntlets to 'reach' directly into my Fenton-wallet, which is sort of like the Fenton-portal, but smaller, basically a gateway to my natural all around 'hammer-space' pocket dimension, only, I call it 'Fenton-space'. The inside is as large as my bedroom back home. I spoke loudly, "Fenton space; thermos two, retrieve." Then, from seemingly nothing, a thermos was in my hand. I un-capped and aimed the thermos. "Get ready."

They moved their arms in a zipper fashion to catch him and I pressed the button. The beam shot out and they flinched before it hit him and sucked the goo off. Still clinging slightly to the goo, he fell forward, right into their arms. I spoke again-

"Fenton space; replace thermos." And it was back in my wallet. Starfire was almost out, Cyborg was..well, several very large men were trying to move him, Robin was being carried to Raven- RAVEN! I cupped my hands to my mouth.

"HAS ANYONE CALLED 911?"

"There was a building collapse on the other side of town." Someone said "All of the emergency services are over there." Just my luck. I wiped my face down.

"Did anyone's car survive?"

"My truck." I turned to see and elderly Asian man.

"Is it big enough to load him into the back?" I asked thumbing at Cyborg. The man looked, then nodded.

"He will fit."

"May we use it?" hey, we may be desperate, but we can still be courteous. He nodded again and hobbled off to his truck. I turned to the guy who was the most vocal about giving up information in the crowd. "Which way is the hospital, how far?" He turned in a circle and pivoted back, pointing east

"That way, about four miles." I nodded

"Thank you, if…get the strongest people and load Cyborg into the bed of the truck and drive there. I'm going to take Raven and head to the hospital."

"On foot?"

"If I see someone who can give me a ride, I'll take it, but for now, yes, on foot." I jogged over to Raven, picked her up bridal style and started walking. Four miles? No problem.