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Their footsteps were dusty and hollow on the fine-sand ground. Cyborg walked out ahead, shoulder light sending a white beam forward, arm lifted and on scanning mode. Starfire trailed a few paces behind, her own source of light glowing around her fist in the form of a bright starbolt.
The cavern opened wide, unfathomably high stone rafters above their heads. Their meager light didn't even reach a quarter of the way to the ceiling. They trekked through a remarkably well-preserved ancient city, moving methodically down bridges and crumbling pathways. Carved statues depicted venerable alien faces, everything was still and quiet like a museum.
"What did you say we were looking for again?" Cyborg asked, whispering because he felt like he ought to.
"A spike in the isotope Trillraphoxine," Starfire explained. She lifted her starbolt higher as she warily studied a fallen statue head. "It is native to this world and has a chemical composition similar to lead or copper."
"Got it." Cyborg adjusted a few settings on his arms and the high-tech scanners readjusted. They began to pick up little pings here and there, as the two Titans continued onward into the gloom.
About fifty yards further in Cyborg's arm display lit up, alerting him to the data streaming in from one of his scanners.
"There it is," he announced. At a loud blip, he reached up to swipe through different functions. "And there's Robin's T-pod distress beacon, just like you said."
Starfire shuddered from both relief and unease. "Let us retrieve him quickly and be out of here." She cast pinched, fearful eyes around the area, as if looking for something in the dark. "I do not wish to be here longer than necessary."
Siding a look of concern her direction, Cyborg continued to lead the way, now following the steady ping from the distress beacon. "What's got you all worked up today?" he asked her.
She smiled with chagrin. "Oh, it is nothing. I am sure it is just a silly superstition that knorfkas tell to naughty bumgorfs to scare them. It is just..."
She ducked her head a bit, skittering around a pile of rocks that looked uncomfortably like they might have had bones in them.
"My people have always claimed that this place is..." She swallowed. "Haunted."
Cyborg raised eyebrows at that. "Okay," he just acknowledged. "Setting the scanners to also check for rapid temperature dips and EM activity."
"You do not think I am being foolish?" Starfire asked.
The half-robot shook his head. "I've seen a lot of weird stuff in this line of work. Now if you ask me if I believe the souls of the dead come back to hang around specific places, no, I don't believe that." He shrugged. "But something freaky happens in so-called 'haunted' locations. There's way too much evidence to discount it all as nothing. So I get why you're freaked out."
Starfire gave him a rueful smile. "That is... very understanding of you." Her eyes dropped again, shame-faced. "I will try not to let it interfere with our task."
He paid her an encouraging smile, briefly letting his hand fall on her shoulder. "Hey. It's okay to be scared of things we don't understand," he told her. "You let me know if you need me to hold your hand all right? We'll find the pod, find Robin, and then we'll get out of here," he promised. "In and out, no hassle."
She exhaled shakily in gratitude. "Thank you, Cyborg," she breathed. "I... will let you know."
He couldn't help but notice how she walked a bit closer to him as they made their way through the ruin.
-TT-
Crumbling architecture and eerie statues he could handle, but the veritable minefield of broken ship parts, shattered hulls and rot-eaten starships... that was unsettling.
His own tech started responding to him more sluggishly, and more than once he had to smack his arm to clear out interference.
Starfire had grown increasingly whiter in the face, and now clung with tight fingers to his other arm, head and eyes darting around frantically as if she expected an attack to come at any moment, from any direction.
Her fear made him nervous, but someone had to be the clear head, and as he was the only one with tachyon scanners and Geiger counters built into his hardware it had to be him.
Still, he was relieved when the ping off the distress beacon grew louder than before.
He hurried his pace, and Starfire let go of his arm in order to float, starbolts appearing around both stiff fists.
They found the missing section of the T-ship shortly.
It was nose first in the ground, engine standing up awkwardly. With some dismay, they noted that the cockpit seemed to have been popped open; empty crash straps hung loose from the seat, their occupant missing.
"He is not here!" Starfire cried.
"Calm down," Cyborg told her, keeping his arm up and scanning but opening up a line on his built-in T-comm. "Robin, you hear us? We found your pod, where did you get at?"
Static crackled on the line for a moment, then his voice answered, broken up by pops and audio debris.
"C—borg? I'm—kay, got out of—Repeat th—"
"You're breaking up real bad, Rob," Cyborg told him, lifting his eyes to survey the area. There was an opening in the roof high above, too high for the light of Tamaran's moons to penetrate all the way down but plenty cracked enough that it was obvious where most of the ship remains had come through.
"S—rry. Some kind of—tromangetic—interfer—" Robin's voice stuttered and sputtered on the line. "Where—you?"
"Like I said, by your crashed pod," Cyborg repeated. "Kind of thought you would be with it but hey," he joked, trying to lighten the mood.
Robin's broken voice was suddenly agitated on the line.
"Get out—there! Lea—he pod! Jus—" The static buzz couldn't hide how frantically he was yelling. "—omthing down there!"
"What do you mean there's something down here?" Cyborg asked with some alarm. He was almost too distracted by the sudden floods of data his sensors were sending the electronic parts of his brain. Trillraphoxine levels were kicking up, the temperature was plummeting, and all sorts of odd readings were being detected.
"GET OUT OF—RE! RUN!"
To his right and behind him Starfire suddenly gasped in fright.
Cyborg whipped around and then froze at what she'd seen.
Pale, ghastly green faces, wavering like mist except for their round, glowing eyes.
The figures came in all shapes and sizes, many of them humanoid, but many more of unknown species. Tall hulking aliens and squishy-looking arthropods. They crept out from inside and around the broken shipwrecks, seeming to float over the ground sometimes, seeming to stumble and shuffle, zombie-like, over the wreckage of their vessels.
The breath came to a halt in his lungs for a moment as his throat caught.
His pulse was racing. The servos inside him locked as he bristled, all scanners and instruments turned off and put away and his arm forming quickly into his sonic cannon.
"Woah!" he yelled, reeling back.
Starfire backed up next to him, her arms out stiffly with starbolts already prepared.
"S—Stay back!" she warned the figures, shaking, starbolts trembling as she crowded close to her half-metal friend.
In unison, some kind of unholy moaning sound rustled through them; their misty forms shimmered like the disturbed surface of water. Only the round spotlights of their eyes stayed steady, boring into them with apathetic malice and disdain.
Swallowing, Cyborg retreated a couple more steps closer to the pod, hoping a solid surface at their backs would prevent them from being sideswiped and attacked from behind.
But, he noted with dismay, as one tentacled figure seemed to slip straight through the jagged tailfins of a crashed freighter, that that might not actually help them.
"Okay..." Cyborg squeaked, glancing around to see yet more ghostly figures creeping out of the ruins beyond the ship graveyard. "I'm sure there's a perfectly rational explanation for this."
One of creatures in the crowd shrieked and then lunged forward, and then they were all moving in a rush like a swirling cloud.
"But this ain't the time for that!" Cyborg concluded with a yell, about-facing. "Run!"
Starfire didn't need any additional encouraging, whipping about alongside him. Her feet weren't on the ground for long and she streaked ahead, trying to not to fly faster than Cyborg could run, unwilling to lose him behind her to the horde, for which he was grateful. He shot back at their spectral pursuers, his sonic canon blasts disrupting the mist that seemed to make up their bodies, dispersing them, scattering them.
For every figure he blasted, more and more seemed to appear. Their horrible shrieking filled the air and they just kept coming out of unexpected corners, here, there, everywhere. He could only get rapid glances forward but it looked like the things were angling to cut them off.
Starfire had a better vantage point and abruptly grabbed Cyborg's wrist with both her hands.
"Woah!" he cried, as she lifted him straight up, his legs just missing the hull of a Tamaranian shuttle.
Starfire firmed her grip on him, face pinched with determination, staring up at the crack in the ceiling.
She took the shrinking distance at a rapid zoom, and the spectral mist bodies faltered, trying to clamber over each other, appendages reaching out in a futile attempt to reach them.
They burst out of the cavern and into the suddenly too-bright sunlight, and Cyborg had to squint for several seconds, stomach dizzy as he struggled to see, Starfire's hand his only lifeline and anchor.
As his eyes adjusted, he felt Starfire lowering them down.
She set them back lightly on her feet, her knees buckling as she made contact with the ground. She collapsed stiffly, breathing hard, eyes still wide from shock.
Cyborg slid to a seat to join her, panting, his pulse still racing.
Some ways away they could still hear muffled screaming from the crack.
"Apologies Cyborg..." Starfire said between pants. "I should have... elaborated further about... the exact nature of the location's haunting."
Cyborg subtly checked that all his parts were accounted for, in-between his breathless reply. "Lemme guess," he said. "Those are supposedly all the people who've died when their ships crashed?"
She nodded, swallowing thickly.
His internal sensors were calming down, thought his blood pressure still measured as elevated. Cyborg leaned back on his hands, turning his head up to the warm pink sky above them and silently thanking whatever powers might exist that he hadn't become ghost lunch.
"I do not wish to go back down there," Starfire confessed. She bit her lip. "But should we not attempt to retrieve that segment of the T-ship?"
"Nope!" Cyborg replied at once, sitting up and pulling his communicator back up in his arm. "I am writing that one off as a complete loss." He opened a channel. "So I take it you've already met the creepy green hordes?" he asked Robin, rhetorically.
The relief in the breath on the other end was palpable. "Yeah. Didn't get much of a warm welcome." The communicator blipped. "Sending you my coordinates. Should be easier to track outside the Trillraphoxine field."
"We'll be right there," he promised.
Starfire had already pushed to her feet, and offered a hand to him. He grabbed it and let her pull him up, brushing off his metal thighs.
"So like... not to pry or anything but... how did you manage to come up with a joyful thought back there?" he asked, thumbing back towards the crevasse. The screaming was silent now and the crack was empty and still. "We woulda been goners if you hadn't flown us out in the nick of time."
"Hmm? Oh!" Starfire curled a hand around her eye bashfully. "That was easy." She ducked her eyes, looking cutely shy. "I simply envisioned how wonderful it would be to escape."
He chuckled, shaking his head. "That's our girl."
They turned their backs on the crevasse and were grateful to leave it behind.