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Zatanna’s door opened without preamble, which wouldn’t be that unusual, except that Zatanna had been lounging in bed, not opening her bedroom door.
Artemis walked in backwards, hair ruffled and looking thouroughly freaked out. The door closed behind her.
“Cave’s haunted,” Artemis said. As if to echo her word, the cave’s lights flickered twice.
“Wh—” Zatanna was struggling to catch up.
“Cave’s haunted,” Artemis said again, producing a bow from what seemed to be nowhere. Had she been taking lessons from Robin? “Ghosts! We’ve dealt with this once, right? We can do it again.”
That was when the lights fully went out.
Raquel had warned all of them. When Robin and Artemis had decided to do a horror movie marathon in the cave, on Hallowe’en, she had told them it was a terrible idea. Between the alien with psychic powers, th magic user, and the weirdness magnet the team seemed to carry everywhere with them, there was no way this wouldn’t backfire.
So, when she got the alert at midnight that the base was compromised, she ignored it and went back to bed. Those assholes could clean up their own mess.
Conner and M’gann had started out watching the horror marathon, but M’gann had quickly gotten bored with it. Conner had actually been enjoying the movies—there was one about a werewolf hunter which Robin told him had been adapted into a series. He was surprised M’gann wasn’t enjoying them, but apparently her love of television didn’t extend to movies.
Ever the gallant knight, Conner indulged his girlfriend oh–so–selflessly by making a terrible excuse and heading to the training arena, where he was joined by M’gann a few minutes later. After that, the evening had passed very quickly and enjoyably, and had heavily involved the cardinal sin of living in a horror movie.
Of course, it being Hallowe’en, the inevitable happened. And when the undead killer that had once been buried in the mountain the Cave was hollowed out of awoke, summoned by an incantation from one of the movies Robin was still watching, it went straight after the two young lovers.
It could have been a tragedy—surely, with any of the human teammates, it would have been. Thankfully, invulnerability and density shifting respectively made stabbing Conner and M’gann less than an easy task. In fact, Megan could almost certainly have dealt with the spectre then and there, had she taken notice of it. Unfortunately for the rest of the team, though, she and Conner were rather too... preoccupied to bother.
Oracle—Batgirl, back then, or no, not even. Barbara Gordon was not yet a member of the team. Not that she would have helped at all. Years after the fact, she got ahold of the footage from that night, and edited it into a cohesive narative. In doing so, she concluded, she provided the only contribution that could make the evening any more perfect.
Nobody was sure how the 14–year–old Robin had managed to watch quite as many R-Rated horror movies as he had, but his knowledge of the genre rivaled Randy Meeks’. Once the team had realised what was going on, he was able to call the spectre’s next move without fail. After a while, Kaldur had to tell him to shut up, because the effect was uncanny enough that no one was sure who they were even meant to be fighting any more.
Not that Kaldur didn’t cause his own set off issues. For all that their leader seemed unflappable, he seemed to have a weakness for horror movies. He’d wanted to enjoy spending time with his friends, but it had turned out that he really did not like ghosts. After the third accidental flood he caused, Robin hacked into the Cave’s systems and disabled all the non–manual intruder alerts Kaldur kept setting off. One was eventually activated by the spectre attempting to enter the main common room, but the team had far less warning than they might otherwise have had.
In the end, it all turned out to be Wally’s fault. During a recent expansion of the Cave to accomodate a rapidly–approaching influx of members (“it’s not even a real mission, Kid Dork!”), he’d bought back a cool looking rock as a souvenir.
Unfortunately, the rock had turned out to be the spectre’s petrified heart (“Eww, gross.” “I think you mean awesome!”) When, by sheer coincidence, the incantation to awake him had been spoken on a night of the full moon, his emergence was inevitable.
Even three members short, though, the Young Justice team was nothing if not skilled, and made short work of their would–be attacker.