A Jinxed Christmas

Thunderous, wicked laughter echoed far above Starfire, the alien heroine flying as fast as her powers could manage. Not that it was enough. No matter her efforts, no matter how many miles she flew, she never came close to escaping the eclipsing shadow that engulfed her. A shadow that blackened the snow beneath her before its enormity made the world itself shudder from the impact.

THOO-OM!!!

Although she narrowly avoided the massive structure, a blast of displaced air threatened to send Starfire spiraling out. Her pursuer saw this, a wry laugh sounding off once again as her boot lifted and heaps of snow rained all around the reduced Titan.

"That's right. Fly away my little Tamaranian Termite! Or I’m gonna get you." Jinx mocked, her face twisted with a perverse delight. For what was meant to be simply testing a new hex, she couldn’t deny the results were immensely satisfying.

Starfire didn’t give her the dignity of a response, already blasting off once again. No matter. Jinx followed at a slow and deliberate pace, each step teasing in its approach. It no doubt felt tense and dramatic for the Titan she’d shrunken down, but from Jinx’s viewpoint it was just the world’s easiest game of Cat and Mouse.

Unfortunately for Starfire, even the best games had to come to an end.

When she tired of it, Jinx’s foot rose and positioned itself over the little alien. The ridged sole of her boot blotted out the heavens and went on for seemingly forever in all directions. “Is that the best you can do?” Jinx scoffed. “It’s almost like you wanna be-”

“CRUSHED!!!”

Her foot came down without warning, snowing no mercy as she twisted it into the ground with a satisfied grin. “Heh. Merry Christmas to me. At long last I finally-”

A shadow fell over Jinx, her eyes trailing to the heavens as her heart sank.

“-Win…?”

Far and away, in a world beyond Jinx, Raven paused. She felt a strange resistance beneath her and with it a momentary confusion. “Oh.” She remembered, peering over her shoulder. “So that’s where I left you.”

Those same words, dripping with banal indifference, carried through to the modest little snowglobe she’d accidentally sat on; and the microscopic speck of a villain she’d trapped within it. Only for Jinx, the words were anything but banal. They were powerful, echoing with a thunderous might. They pierced the veil of her glass prison and broke its illusion, rattling her very world with a humiliating reminder of how little she truly was. Raven’s words came from both everywhere and nowhere and were impossible to escape. She was all-encompassing.

Jinx’s legs quivered until they finally gave out under her, the minuscule witch falling to the snow. Any satisfaction she’d had from finally getting to crush Starfire underfoot was gone, replaced by a sudden and overwhelming inadequacy. For above her - Far, far, far, far - above her… loomed Raven. Only a mere fraction of her body was comprehensible and pressed against the glass sky of the snowglobe prison, but it was more than enough. In one fell swoop Raven became all Jinx could see. All she could feel. All she could focus on. Jinx bit into her lip as her heart began to race with a turbulent storm of rage, envy, and so much more all coalesced into one. She wanted to look away and return to mere moments ago where she was the powerful one towering over a pathetic little hero, but it was already too late.

Raven’s body, her rear end of all things, compressed around Jinx’s entire world. Miles upon miles of ashen flesh left their imprint on the glass and blanketed everything in her shadow. A slight shift of Raven’s body made the world shudder in that direction, and nearly sent Jinx sliding each and every time. Displaced snow rained from the glass dome as its surface fogged with Raven’s heat. Her plush rear more resembled the curvature of a pair of moons than a part of her; and the valley of cloth between them was a sliver of the starry night sky. The glass barricade groaned beneath Raven. If she truly wanted, it sounded as though she could destroy Jinx’s world with only a modicum of effort. It wouldn’t even be hard.

“Sorry.”

Raven’s voice rattled Jinx’s senses once more, her words apologetic even if her tone was anything but.

“It’s easy to forget about you when you’re so…”

No, not that word. Anything but that word. Don’t you dare! Jinx was already trembling with emotion. That one word would be too much. “T-That’s…”

“Small.”

With but a single word everything within Jinx came crumbling down. Her jaw fell agape in open awe and disbelief at Raven. At the sheer gulf between herself and her fellow witch. A woman she’d always thought a rival, but was now on a level beyond anything she could’ve ever imagined. “That’s just not fair!”

The world groaned with another subtle shift of Raven’s hips. Life wasn’t fair, and neither was she.

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A very big thanks to Asterisk for lending his talent to write up that nice short story to accompany the strip!
Here's their linktree if you'd like to follow them and their work.

And finally, it is done.

Sorry I took so long to complete this strip. There was a lot of ups and downs in terms of motivation when working on it and it's now way out of season for this strip to be relevant but hey, I'm just glad to have finally gotten this thing to the finish line. As fun as it is to work on these longer format strips, I do think I'd like to go back to doing some more smaller, one-shot style pics. I get a lot less burned on those!

Anyways, I hope you enjoy!