Chapter 03 - A Child in Need

Rachel Roth, or as she currently went by, Raven, was a young girl who was unfortunate enough, or cursed as she describes herself, to be saddled with the cost of great destruction at a very young age.

A young girl with her loving mother and a community who, while wary of what she embodied, accepted her into their home and made her into one of them. A home for the child who never knew she needed one.

Alas, her birth as the herald of apocalypse was no mere prophecy as she, out of childish curiosity, invited with open arms a demon so vile that his name was synonymous with evil into her home, and in return he zealously brought with him gifts like any father who was meeting their grown-up child for the first time. He dotingly showered her with gifts only someone as strong and as absolute as him could give.

He turned her life into a hellish nightmare, except this was one she would never wake up from.

And like any father who would lovingly call his daughter his dear princess, he made her a princess of his kingdom and gifted her his home. He cherished her so much that he blessed her with a boon: his home will always follow her, all through the years of her life, and his kingdom will be with her every time she laid her head.

The name of his home was Hell.

The name of his kingdom was Nightmare.

Such a loving act was something only a father could do. So loved he her that of all his children, she was the only one he crowned with the key to his heart.

The key to his heart has a name. Its name is Despair.

So yes, while Rachel Roth hated her father with every core of her being, it wasn't anything surprising because she was human. And like every human teenage girl, she was in her rebellion phase where she hated anything that had to do with her old, stinky, and cringe father.

But it would pass, and she should be certain that her father was waiting just around the corner for the fateful day where she will once again open her heart to him so that he could shower her and all her friends with his heartfelt blessings and blessings to the best gifts of his kingdom.

A father's love was not to be underestimated.

A daughter's ire was not something to be overlooked.

So yes, depending on who was asked, Rachel Roth was caught in a bit of a family drama. A divorced father came to take back his daughter after his wife ran away with her without his consent during their divorce. While it was not an extremely common occurrence amongst human families, it was a typical one.

And like every typical father with the smallest loving bone in his body, he wouldn't sit still until he was reunited with his daughter. How could he not be worried when she ran away from home?

And if she was still angry at him, well rebellious teenage girls were weak to gifts. And gifts were the one thing he never ran out of.

.

....

.

Raven was still having a hard time adjusting to her new life which all but started two days ago. Okay, maybe it was a stretch to call a two day experience a new life but the thought still holds.

When she thought of the person majorly responsible, the first image that came to mind wasn't that of an elderly man killing three demons in the blink of an eye, but of a fat slob that spent hours lazing in front of the TV at night with cans of beverage at arms length. Either that or it was the picture of an obese store manager slaving his days away at his business with dead passion.

All that just to say that the man she simply knew as Taro, because it was weird to ask a middle-aged man for his last name, was an extremely complicated person.

Despite his physically unfit body, Raven had a hard time keeping him in her senses. He was fast, not superhuman fast but way too fast for a normal human especially with such a body. And while she didn't have a measuring pole to know where she stood, she knew her empathic abilities was pretty strong, and yet it meant nothing to his mind.

But that was alright because he was going to teach her. She knew because he no longer waved it off with an absurd excuse.

She was more interested in his mental blocks training and how he meditated to raise it to such a high level.

So hey, maybe things were finally looking up for Raven?.... As if. She could almost smell the disaster coming.

"So what are you?" She asked, getting a feeling of confusion from him which made her elaborate.

"A warrior– um, I mean some type of fighter. You know, ninja, mercenary, military, something like that."

She got the feeling he found her guesses funny. She had found it mildly funny and annoying how he would sometimes remain silent and let her read his impressions, something that started after he found out she was an empath.

"Nothing important." He said but she didn't believe him one bit. She let him know with her customized deadpan.

"Right…" she drawled, "so what are we doing today?"

The two of them stared at each other silently. She was good at this game. She didn't project her thoughts into his mind so why did he think he could become the silent one?

"Clothes." Wow! That one word seemed to drain a good chunk of life out of him.

"Oh." She hadn't realized. Her sleepwear were the baggy clothes he gave her and the others were two extra pair of clothes change she carried with her. "Are you sure? I have no problem with these."

And she did. She wasn't one for materialistic possessions.

He nodded.

"And you're finally teaching me how when we get back?" She asked and he nodded, although a half bit slower.

It was almost strange how she fell into a sedated pace with him after just knowing him for two days. She still held a healthy dose of suspicion but it was mostly surface level.

She looked out of the window as he drove her around. Gotham City – her thoughts on this place wasn't positive in any way but thankfully his part of town was relatively safe.

They stopped at a neighborhood thrift store and both of them just stood at the door, waiting for the other to step in.

"Are we just going to stand here?" She asked.

"It's your shopping spree." He replied.

"I doubt I have that much of a fashion sense." She remarked.

"Fashion doesn't matter. Just pick something you'll like to wear." Was his immediate rebuttal before quickly adding. "Exercise restraint. The shop is almost tipping the red."

They spent less than twenty minutes there as Raven picked the only things she was familiar with. Dark clothes. It also reaffirmed that Gotham was a hell pit of a city when she sensed malice and smelled blood from a couple of shirts neatly folded on a shelf.

They went back home after that where Taro gave her one of his old flip phones. At least they made it back in one piece.

She had been worried that the acolytes would sniff her out when they went out but thankfully it remained a worry.

THWACK!

A pebble hit her on the head.

"Hmm. You are already good at this." He commented as he watched her meditate while he actively tried disrupting her focus every now and then.

She shook her head. She knew that already. She knew how good her meditation had come along, which was why she knew that she was still lacking.

"But you feel it's not enough." Taro said as he squatted to her line of sight.

She sighed. "I know it's not enough."

"Hmm."

She saw him pensive and but her lips. He wouldn't understand her impatience because he didn't know the full story.

"I hear him sometimes. In my mind." She confessed. "The jeers. The taunts… the nightmares. He does it constantly to make me lose control of my emotions. And bad things, like really bad things will happen if I do."

Taro let out a deep breath. Gently he grabbed her shoulders.

"The best way to master your emotions is to confront them."

She didn't hesitate in shaking her head strongly. "That is the one thing I can't do. He won't let a chance like that pass him by."

And therein lay the problem. She couldn't lose control again. Not now. Not ever. There was no way through or around it.

"Are you sure?" Taro's voice sounded soft.

She looked down with clouded eyes and clenched fists but her voice was of steely resolve. "Absolutely."

"Alright then." And like that he accepted her answer. She had somewhat hoped he would.

"Unfortunately I can't teach you anything about magic." He shrugged. "But I can teach you how to temper your calm."

"Not mental blocks?" She looked up with raised brows. He flicked her head for that. It hurt.

"Calm first. Mind later."

What Taro didn't tell her was that tempering a calm mind and tempering calm were two entirely different things and the latter took years to master.

She went into meditation which he would interrupt at points, the goal being her maintaining the same state of mind through the distractions. He smiled to himself knowing her exact thoughts.

She thought this would be easy due to the fact that she wasn't in any modicum of danger and her empathic abilities would quickly ignore the pokes. How innocently naïve. The fact that she was an empath only made it that much harder for her.

He picked a rubber pebble and flicked it towards her and watched with amusement when her eyes shot open in panic, magic coming alive in her hands, as she hurriedly flew to the side to dodge the harmless pebble.

Sweat matted her brows as she looked at him in horror and elevated wariness.

"A bit of an overreaction, don't you think?" He said casually while she narrowed her eyes at him with repressed anger.

"You… you tried to kill me!" She hid it but there was a crack in her voice. It made him feel immensely bad for a moment.

Despite being faced with the threat of her magic, he remained calm and shook his head. "It was just a pebble." He pointed at the pebble.

"W…wha… how?" She was gobsmacked, stuck between wariness and disbelief.

"Projecting intent." He simply said and didn't bother to explain more as he was sure she understood.

"Normal people will get goosebumps. You're an empath. You'll see and almost feel it." He flicked a toothpick towards her.

She froze for a moment, momentarily stuck in indecision, before veering to the side and using her magic to blast the poor toothpick to obliteration.

She took a second to convince herself that, yes, he didn't just lob a super fast spear at her at the speed of sound.

He looked pleased with himself when she came to herself.

"That's not how mental projection works!" She tried keeping her voice bland and even but the screeching exclamation was somewhere in there.

"I beg to differ." This insufferable old man!

She slowly floated down, taking deep breaths to prevent an apocalypse from starting. When she finally spoke, it sounded like a hiss as the words were practically forced through gritting teeth.

"Projecting intent is never that vivid. It is NOT that real."

"Says who?" He asked with the eyes of someone who knew something others didn't.

At the end of the day, an expert of magic she wasn't.

"Continue?"

She hesitated but eventually agreed. It took more than a few seconds to get over the thought that he had tried to kill her. No matter how she played it off, for a moment there she had been hurt, but then relief came soon after.

He warned her seriously as she went back into meditation. "Never think that none of those projections won't harm you. They will. Try to remain calm and react accordingly."

Her brows scrunched in focus and she fell into a meditative trance, a state that greatly limited her senses of the physical world.

She wasn't wrong in her reaction, nor in her words that they shouldn't have felt so real.

First of all, it slipped into her mind on its own, ignoring her own defenses against such mental attacks. Secondly, it overwhelmed her senses, making her think of nothing except death. It felt as if she was as good as dead, in fact she was sure she saw herself dead for a moment, which was why her reaction was so drastic.

On this day, Raven realized just how impossibly hard it was to remain calm in the face of imminent death.

.

...

.

Taro closed down his shop with a hearty hum, already thinking of his craved downtime of watching the new episodes of his favorite shows. This time instead of soda, he was going for the snack-ice-cream combo.

Raven had gone to bed early after their little exercise during the day so he had the whole bowl of ice-cream to himself.

Hmm. Maybe he should leave her some as comfort for her training today? Yeah, that sounded like a thoughtful idea.

His thoughts on accommodating an homeless and haunted child in his house were surprisingly elementary. She needed help and he was there to give it.

She was barely fifteen, all alone, and hunted by demons. He doubted she would have made it to Metropolis alive, or even survived the night.

Those were his thoughts as he came out of his room, refreshed and dappered up in lazy lounging clothes, and went straight for his promised scoops of ice-cream.

He was on his second scoop when he froze and looked in the direction of Raven's room in silent contemplation.

He sighed, temporarily terminating his scoops, and headed up to Raven's room with a small plate of ice-cream in his hands.

The joints in his fingers popped with a clear crisp. He reached the door and pushed it open, walking towards the unconscious Raven and ignoring the robed man and three demons surrounding her bed.

"Don't leave the window this wide open. She's not good with the cold." He remarked as he went to the window and closed it halfway. He turned back to the silent spectators. "Now then–"

The robed man had a snarl on his face and had been about to order the demons to attack when the first one was suddenly missing its head.

His instincts kicked in, making him subconsciously conjure up a magic barrier that suddenly sported cracks on it as it blocked a spoon.

"Wha–" In his shock, the magic he was using to suppress Raven's consciousness was disrupted, a backlash which jolted her up.

Old man Taro weaved over the arcing hands of a demon and threw his ice-cream up in the air and kicked the shin of the demon, making it scream in pain from the crunch that followed.

He caught a punch from the other demon in his palm before hastily letting go as it morphed into a fang-infested mouth. He caught the ice-cream behind his back and twisted his body to avoid a flash of magic and used three of his fingers to scoop up some ice-cream and splattered it on the face of the robed man and the two demons with pinpoint accuracy.

At this point Raven was fully awake and immediately struck the robed man from behind with a vengeful burst.

Spoon.

She flicked a finger and sent the spoon flying to Taro's hands, which he caught deftly and in a fluid motion grabbed the arms of a lunging demon and sliced through the muscles in its armpit, and in the same motion hurled it into the eyes of the last demon. Still grabbing the limping arm, he kicked it on its back and brought it to its knees and wrapped its arm over its head and with a sickening crunch, broke its spine and neck.

"Is that all of them?" Raven looked relieved when he gave her a cheeky thumbs up.

Taro radiated comfort as he gave her a few pats on the head which helped her calm down her rattled state. The radiating comfort, not the consolatory pats.

They traded a look as they looked at the groaning man on the floor. Taro picked him up with one hand and pulled back his hood to reveal a very gaunt and sickly pale old man.

"Who sent you?" Taro asked casually and swiftly broke the man's shoulders the moment a shadow of a smile flashed across his face.

"He… he… hah.. It won't change anything." The man wheezed out through the pain with a crazed light in his eyes. "His return is imminent. H… hail Trig..."

He withered away at a visible rate to Taro's surprise and Raven's disgust.

"They are fond of that. Maddened animals." The bland tone with which she said it was more scathing than any anger or hate she could have shown for them.

"It smells." Taro pointed out with a fluff of his mustache.

Raven deadpanned. "They are residents of hell, death and madness. Smelling bad is the least they can do"

"Hmm." He accepted it with a nonchalant shrug. "You okay?"

No emotion was shown on her face. "I survived for another day. That's more important than being okay."

The body, which was now only bones, was slowly dissolving into dust which exponentially made the smell worse, forcing Taro to open the windows wide and push Raven out of the room.

"It's gone." Raven heard his lament, slightly taken aback at how genuinely sad he felt, until she saw the reason for his damp mood. A small plate of half melted ice-cream.

'He is unbelievable.' She thought he was being a bit too dramatic and lost on priorities. A dark acolyte and three demons were just in his house and—

"Ice-cream?" The sudden question cut off her thoughts. 'And now he's giddy.'

'You know what? Just forget it, Raven.' She had no strength for anything other than a simple, "Yes.". Ice-cream sounded good right about now.

Raven found herself sharing a new plate of ice-cream with Taro as they watched an episode of his anticipated TV shows.

"What now?" Raven asked after the episode ended. She had spent the entire time in her head, warring and suppressing her negative thoughts.

"What do you mean?" Taro asked back.

She sighed. She felt confusion from him but she doubted that was what he was actually feeling.

"They attacked me in your house. They know I'm here, which means you're no longer safe here. They'll be after you from now on." She spelt it out all in one breath. "I'm sorry."

"These past few days have been some of the best I've had in recent years. Truly. I am really sorry for dragging you into this." Her eyes looked straight forward while her mouth opened up and said those words. They sounded apathetic and dry.

'All good things must come to an end. I shouldn't be surprised.' Raven resolved herself. It was time to get back to her mission–

"You can use my room tonight. We'll clear the other one tomorrow and you'll be using it until I fix the window and broken walls."

"Huh?"

"The other room? Well, it's a bit tight and has little ventilation so I use it to store some things. I'll have your room fixed in a few days." He explained.

"What? No, it's not that. I mean about the acolytes and the demons and my fa…" She trailed off at the end, eyes still locked on Taro's.

Taro rubbed his bloated chin in contemplation. "We'll think about it tomorrow, or maybe next tomorrow. Don't worry about it. We'll figure it out soon enough."

Her eyes widened in a rare show of emotion before she forced them to look down at her hands, not sure how to manage the deep gratitude she felt.

She sat like that even as a heavy arm wrapped around her and brought her head to rest on his shoulders.

"How was the ice-cream?"

She chuckled softly. What a ridiculous question. "It was great."

"Good." Taro nodded in satisfaction.

They remained like that in shared silence even after the clock struck past eleven, watching another of Taro's shows.

Raven forgot how long it has been since she felt something as simple as this. It was like a lifetime ago.

"His name is Trigon, the being those acolytes and demon's worship. The day I met him was the day he killed my mother and destroyed my world. My home." Her breath flowed statically as she spoke. "He killed everyone and everything. Gone. All reduced to fire and dust."

His arm around her tightened. She closed her eyes as her breathing devolved into failing gasps. His arms remained holding her close.

"He's my father." Her breath ceased as she said those words. Not knowing what to think of them or how to feel about them. But she knew how Taro felt.

It was an instant but she felt it. He froze, stunned, and then a sharp contrast flashed across his mind before dissipating. He rubbed her back soothingly. She found herself letting out the smallest, but definitely her brightest smile in years, even before he said anything.

She had thought of different reactions and replies to the revelation that the devil after her life was none other than Trigon. But this single declaration was one she never anticipated.

"Not any longer."