The queen of hearts

Raven’s hand lifted the covers of her bed. Her body sat up. It was covered in pajamas which were in turn covered with depictions of ravens (the animal, not the person) flying through a starry night. Her gray-skinned body then stopped for a moment, as if contemplating something deeply important, perhaps doing its best to remember a fleeting dream. Then it tossed the covers aside entirely and draped its legs over the edge of the bed. The moonlight streaming through the wide window to her side gave her already pale body an almost silvery sheen.

With a heave, her legs dropped to the floor. They started walking towards a very particular corner of the room. Her arms swung blithely at her side as her body made its way over. One and two, one and two, almost mechanically they walked over to the meeting place of a dresser and a desk and probably some small amount of dust.

Her hands slipped down. When they were almost near the ground, they began clawing at the space with a wild, abandoned frenzy. At first the efforts seemed fruitless, but then, like a scratch-off ticket, the space began to reveal a navy substrate. The revealed inner space glowed with its own light, an eerie purple and blue and some other color that had no name. Floating there, lazily spinning in on itself in a small pocket of air, was a safe. Its normal construction at odds with the ethereal realm.

Raven’s hands reached inside and popped the bubble, which caused the safe to falter in its defiance of gravity and fall straight to the floor with a very loud thunk.

Her eyes almost fluttered open at that point, but blessedly, they remained closed. Her hands shivered in fear for a moment, but they eventually firmed their resolve and reached for the safe.

Her hands wrapped lovingly around it before settling on the lock. Normally this would just be opened with a simple application of magic, but well, that was out of the question right now. With a twist this way, and a twist that way, and then back again, the lock clicked open. Her hands pulled on the handle and the small door swung open as well, revealing a stick with a few crystal shards of varying size and color attached.

Shaking, her hands reached out towards the object like it was a snake coiled up and ready to strike. Careful now. Don’t mind me. Let me… just… grab you! Her hands snaked themselves around the object.

The room lit up in a violet glow.

—

The Titan’s common room looked much the same as it did the day before. If a cushion was displaced or a bowl rested on a counter instead of in a cupboard, well, best not to sweat the details.

The personages inside however were quite different. Namely in the exclusion of a certain blue-skinned member/non-member. Mumbo was safely locked up in the jail down in the basement, and Robin knew each and every one of them was breathing easier for that fact.

The team members were gathered around the table, eating breakfast. A normal activity for a distinctly abnormal set of circumstances. Perhaps that was what they needed. Fuck if he knew. There wasn’t exactly a manual on dealing with a violation of this magnitude. Super-powered situations like these were in the grand scope of things, rare. Granted, he and his team dealt with them on the regular, but the literature on psychotherapy Raven and Starfire probably needed was more tailored to the mundane side of things. Which he’d do his best to incorporate of course, but there was an undeniably supernatural element that complicated things.

Not just the girls either. All of them had been violated, if to lesser degrees. Having one’s mind twisted to suit another’s desires was one of the gravest sins one could commit against another. This was not the first time he’d had his will taken away. Unfortunately, mind-control powers weren’t as uncommon as he wished. But still the thought of being unable to even recognize what was happening to his dearest friends, to Star of all people, he shuddered at the reminder.

And if his body felt a twinge of desire play through it when his mind returned to Star’s modified state, that made him feel all the more guilty.

He spooned up another helping of rice flakes. He felt like perhaps he should say something as team leader to break up the not-so-companionable silence that pervaded this morning, but instead he just continued his mastication.

It was Beast Boy who first breathed a word into being, “So… are we just going to not talk about it? Because that’s cool too I guess, but we prob should? Idk.”

“That’s something for the girls to decide.” Cyborg, mid bite of bacon, chided gently.

“It’s alright Cyborg-friend.” Star admonished gently back, and Robin could see the effort it was taking her to do so. “I’m… not alright. But I’m still here, am I not? And that no good rotten Zarbnarf is not.”

“Good.” Terra pounded the table to accentuate her point. “Not that it happened, but that you’re still with us I mean. It’s not the same, but I know what it’s like to get your mind messed with. Takes a while to start trusting that what you see is real again, but it’ll happen. Can’t **** it either. Just takes time.”

“Yeah, and we’ll be there for you. Both of you.” Beast Boy stood up courageously, miming a heroic pose. His intended recipients, Starfire and Raven, looked on with slightly bemused expressions. Leave it to the beast to cheer them up, even just a little bit. Robin quelled the brief flare of jealousy at his friend’s comic ease. It was hard for the masked man to simply let go like that. He had gotten better in recent years, but still, the habit of leadership, of cold and aloof authority gripped him still.

The silence that gripped them after that exchange was much less oppressive. The air was filled now with the feeling that just maybe everything was going to be alright.

He finished his bowl peaceably and got up to wash it out in the sink. While he was getting up, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye. There was a stick with a couple of crystals embedded in it on the table next to Raven’s half-eaten banana.

“What’s that?” He asked her plainly.

“Oh this?” She pointed to the offending implement. “Found it during my morning walk. Figured I could use it to play fetch with Beast Boy.”

Beast Boy morphed into a Bernard dog and started slobbering all over his section of the table.

“Down boy. I was just joking, geeze.” Raven huffed. “No, this isn’t a throwing stick. It’s an artifact of vast magical power. I got it from… I got it from… hmm. Where I got it from isn’t important. What is important is what it can or can not do. I was thinking about performing some tests to get my mind off of recent events.”

“Oh! I’ll be your test subject!” Beast Boy reverted to his human form so he could speak again.

“You will, will you?” Raven eyed him.

“On my name as Beasticus Boyus, I’m your man!”

Terra scoffed. “Are you ever going to change to Beast Man?”

“What, and mess with the classic? No way.”

Raven picked up the crystal-infused stick. She gave it a flick and pointed it at the chair Beast Boy was sitting on. A beam of purple light flew out of the stick and enveloped the seat. It whirled and swirled around it in an ever-shifting eddy before settling in and disappearing within the wooden surface.

“Teeheehee.” Raven heard a soft tinkling laughter. Or she thought she did. As for the chair, nothing seemed to have happened. Hmm. Did she use it wrong? Audio and visual components manifesting usually indicated a successful application of magic.

“You missed.” Beast boy stated.

“What are you, an idiot? I wouldn’t cast unknown magic on a person without first testing it thoroughly. Though it seems like it's impotent given its lack of an effect on your chair.”

“Maybe it only affects living things?” Robin tried to help.

“Perhaps.” Raven pointed it at the remaining portion of her banana. She mentally directed it to fire again, and it did so, infusing the banana with the same purple glow. The light laughter came and went as well. No visual changes, at least not immediately. She looked back to Beast Boy’s usual seat again to check if anything had changed.

It looked the same as it had a minute ago. It was still the same replica of her body that it always was. This version of her dusky body was made out of a soft, plush material that molded to the user’s form. Sort of like a beanbag. It bent like Raven herself was sitting. Beast Boy was currently sitting comfortably in her replica’s lap, and his head leaned back against the gel-filled mock-ups of her boobs that provided a sort of headrest like the kind one got in airports.

“Does it feel any different?” She asked, just to test a theory.

He leaned back further, really squishing those fake gray mounds. He nestled himself in there and then on an idle whim, stuck a snake’s tongue out to taste them. His forked tongue darted out and wrapped around a nipple and flicked back.

Beast Boy turned and offered her a consolidatory smile. “Nope, same as ever. Which sig good. Or bad in this case I guess, but good in general.” He gave her a thumbs up, and she sighed.

So that was a bust. She looked back at her banana. It looked the same as well. Still green and shaped like Beast Boy’s cock. She brought it up to her mouth and took a bite. Jade fluids oozed out to dribble out from her mouth.

She swallowed, and then reported her findings. “Nothing different there either.”

Robin put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t push yourself.”

“I’m not.” Her voice rose, and then fell back down as she realized that it wouldn’t help to get mad at her friends. “I… I’ll be back for lunch. I’m going to do some self-study.” She rose from the table and Robin watched her leave without saying anything. Best to let her sort things out herself. If she needed help, she’d ask. If she didn’t ask and after a day or two she still looked out of it, he’d offer then.

—

“Stupid thing. Do something.” She waved the stick at her bed. Raven knew it was potent, that it should be having some effect. She could feel it deep in her bones that it was true. Her long years as a mage had trained in her a sense for the arcane, and this stick was as powerful as they came. Yet for all her efforts, it seemed to be doing nothing. Perhaps there was some sort of activation condition that she wasn’t grasping.

She put the wand on her nightstand and flopped onto her water-bed. Or milk-bed as the case was. It deformed and sloshed under her weight. She turned her head to the side and looked at its inner contents as the transparent surface showed the fish swimming happily inside the thin white murk.

Raven was being a bit childish, she knew. Magic wasn’t beholden to her just because she was practiced in it. If it wasn’t coming easily, then that means she just had to keep trying with different variables and hope to see if different results eventually emerged. Still, she had a right to be childish every now and then.

She reached out and picked up the stick again. This time she pointed it at herself. She fired it off and felt the warm glow enshroud her form. It tickled at first before it settled inside her.

“Teehee.” There was that voice again. Or was it just a whistling in the air as a byproduct of the magic’s ****? Who knew? She hopped out of bed and stood in front of her mirror. All she knew was that she looked exactly the same. Disappointing.

She wasn’t vain. Exactly the opposite in fact. She generally had no care for her appearance outside of function. She kept it clean and tidy just as a matter of practice and enforcement of her own will upon herself. A mage must at all times maintain control. Over oneself and over the mystical forces which comprised the universe. Which did have the side-effect of looking good she supposed, but that was more of a side-factor than any real motivation.

As such, when she looked upon herself, she had a good frame of reference to compare when looking for any aberrations. Her cloak, still its violet shade as normal, hung back from her head, revealing equally violet locks of hair. Her gray skin remained gray. Her facial features remained as equally distant as they had before. The curve of her jaw, the same. Her nose structure, no different.

Wait! Her lips! They were gray? That was strange. Oh wait no, what was she thinking? She reached down and picked up a stick of purple lipstick and started applying it. There, all back to normal.

Her eyes traveled downwards. Her bust was still ridiculously huge for her frame. Easily three times the size of her head. They jiggled and bounced with her every movement and were a general pain in the back, but they were hers, same as they ever were. She wondered for a moment if they were smaller if she would have been less of a target for Mumbo but dismissed the thought. She wasn’t going to get a breast reduction surgery or look up a spell to change them just because of a villain; that would be letting them win. Her leotard hugged those boobs tight, and her nipples could be seen poking out at all times, perpetually aroused.

She continued her body check. Down below her waist jutted out to the sides. Her butt rivaled her boobs in size, and definitely competed in terms of jiggliness. Her leotard did little to conceal the mass of flesh moving this way and that. It looked more like a thong than anything else as it disappeared into her ass. In other words, normal as ever.

Part of having succubus heritage. Her dad, damn him, must have devoured a succubus or two before having her. Not that she was angry about that. She liked her sexy bod. But still, she wouldn’t have minded some more brute strength or maybe a bit more height from a lamia. But what was, was, and what wasn’t, wasn’t. No use fretting over it now.

Her eyes continued down, tracing her thick thighs (they better be, to support such a massive ass) down her shapely legs to her heel-clad feet. It had been a pain to learn to walk in them, but once she had, she could never go back. She loved the way they **** her to walk in a sashay (when she didn’t float). The way they added a bit to her height. She had been called shortstack too many times to count!

“Love.” That voice again. Was the stick a sentient artifact? That would explain some of its peculiarity. “Lust.” It spoke again.

Well, actual words were better than formless laughter, but not much without any explanation. She held the stick steady as she finished reviewing her body. No changes as far as she could tell. The lipstick was her just being forgetful. The rest was the same as ever. Maybe she should take a break and try to relax for a change.

She turned around. When her back was turned, her reflection winked at her. “Teehee.” A purple shade that hadn’t been there before gleamed in her mirrored eyes.