Chapter 76 Rent free
Raven awoke from her nightmare as a man she had slowly grown to not fear stabbed her in the chest causing her powers to run out of control. As she was about to attack the man who was clearly in league with her father she was pulled into a vortex and ended up somewhere else. Before her was a white void with nothing around.
It reminded her of her own mental space. It was like the one the high priest Azar taught her to make when she was a child. The one where she would store her emotions so her powers wouldn’t go out of control. The door drew to her. She felt an almost unnatural pull towards the room that she didn’t go against. As she opened the door, blaring loud music began to play while strobe lights blasted changing bright colors as the man who betrayed her ran around the room.
Shouting over the music the man spoke. “Sorry! I forgot to turn off my mental defenses! Give me a sec!” The music had an unnatural pull to it that made her want to dance. “DANCE DANCE TILL YOUR DEAD!” Slowly with her head bobbing, she began to dance to the music. What she considered dancing was her mostly flailing her arms around. The man stopped trying to deactivate the defenses and instead, it became full of different people dancing in different ways.
He began to coach her on how to do some of the moves. She very much liked the rave dancing moves and began to focus on learning those over the other ones. The thing with rave dancing is it left her hands mostly free so she began to flail them like she had when she was just dancing by feel. Moving around and flailing her arms as the man tried to match her she ended up punching him right in the mouth.
For a moment she thought the man was going to be mad at her. Since she’s entered this area her empathy control didn’t let her know what the man was thinking. Actually, she had never recalled what the man felt emotionally before. She hadn’t noticed the thing until what she assumed was a scowl from being struck turned into a bloody-toothed grin. He began dancing like a maniac like her and as her heart raced she realized how much she loved dancing.
For that single moment, she had true happiness. Then it came crashing down when she realized what emotion she just felt and tried to seal it away again. The man cut her off. “Nope, do not do that. I didn’t unseal your emotions just for you to seal them back up again.” Raven pleaded with the man now. “I need to keep my emotions under control or I’ll lose control of my powers.”
The man looked at her like she was speaking complete nonsense. “Yeah because you were controlling your powers so well before. The person who taught you made you seal your emotions so you’d be easier to control and less powerful. If you never limit yourself in the first place you’d have total control over your powers by now and there’d be no chance of them rampaging like they are.”
He gave her an almost pitying look like he knew her story fully. It took a moment for Raven to realize he most likely did as he was part of the 100. “If you can control your emotions you’ll find it much easier to control your demonic powers. Locking up your powers with your emotions is nothing short of someone trying to cripple you on purpose. Even the magics taught to you were only taught to limit you further. You, as a demon, should have innate knowledge on how to cast several spells and if you learned any other form of magic you’d be much, much stronger than you are.”
Raven managed to calm herself down as the words began to sink in. She had decided, that if this man was trying to deceive her he had already done too well of a job for her to not be tricked.
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I deactivated my mental defenses. The first few layers were easy enough to deal with but that would only lull the person into a false sense of safety before the more dangerous stuff came out. That’s if they could even get past my mental block that stopped anyone from invading my mind in the first place. A god could, that’s why I had the supposed redundant defenses in the first place.
I could feel her trepidation. Well, that and her anger at me, her lust for my attractive body, her happiness to feel emotions, sadness that her master probably betrayed her, and a dozen other emotions all fighting to be the top which isn’t how most people functioned. Her emotions needed to work together but as they had been stifled for so long each fought for control.
The easiest way to get them under control would be for that particular emotion to be the one she felt at that time. So I just needed to do things to get her to cycle through her emotions. I pull her into me and kiss her. As her hands came down on my ass I knew she had given in to her lust instead of her anger. With a herculean effort, I push her away instead of just giving in myself and continuing.
“When I stabbed you in the chest I was almost positive what happened was going to happen but there was still a not-so-significant chance that you’d have exploded.” I said the last part in almost a whisper as she soaked in the information. For a few seconds, she stood there not doing anything until her body began to grow with her skin color changing to red and growing her extra eyes.
I spoke before she attacked me. “Woah before you attack me. Remember that time Robin and Garfield went undercover as you and Starfire because the person had pheromones that could control females? You shot chocolate milk out of your nose, it was so funny.” Using knowledge of the comics was pretty much cheating but it would help me cycle through her emotions faster.
She started to shift back to gray before she let out a single laugh. “Heh.” The single laugh became a chuckle. “Hehe, hehehe.” Then it became hysterical laughing. “Hahahahaha.” With tears in her eyes, she laughed so hard she struggled to breathe. I proceeded to throw water on her laughter as I said. “The person who taught you did so in a way to cripple your potential.” Almost immediately her laughing cut off as she began to cry. Quietly crying I continue.
“To be fair she probably didn’t really mean to do it. Most people are absolutely terrible at magic and I doubt she was any different. Having a mantra-based magic system tied to belief and using lack of emotions as a power source is insanely short-sighted. You’d probably have better luck casting spells chanting 'That's so Raven.' instead of 'Azarath metrion zinthos.'”
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