Pyrrhic
Bork Lazer
Lexisheeps
Izurich
Hound55
Sotiras
Enarr
Simple Unicycle
Pilatus
Alby47
Mercury Square, Upper West Side
Central City, Kansas, USA
KRA-KOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!!!
Thunder roars over the steel and glass canyons of Central City's financial district, the handful of bank headquarters and corporate office towers the only real concentration of actual high-rises in the city. Above the offices of the old Central City Citizen, the sky is black, and a hard heavy rain pulverizes the grass in Mercury Square to a muddy mess. The rain is so hard, in fact, that it's almost impossible to see more than a few feet into it.
Not twenty yards away, it's bright and sunny out, the air maybe just a bit parched from a long late summer afternoon.
Lines of squad cars have cordoned off the area, a small army of officers with weapons at the ready for whatever is going on inside that storm. Behind them, armored cars with SWAT team officers idle, ready to roll in and engage directly.
Beams of cerulean and flares of red-orange dance with bolts of cloud-to-ground lightning, matched with another ear-splitting crack of thunder. The men and women of the CCPD each swore an oath to serve and protect the people of this city, but every one of them knows that if they get the order to advance, they're walking into a massacre.
Lucky for them, that order's not gonna come today.
The run from the CCPD forensics lab to downtown is a bit of an annoying one, since the city was never really planned to grow to its current size. So instead of lots of nice neat rows like you'd get in a New York or a Metropolis, it's a knot of ramps and cloverleafs on and off the highways, streets and avenues intersecting at ungodly angles, and no real main through-line to connect one end of the city to the other. Moving at my fastest "city speeds"-- that is, as fast as I can move without worrying about shattering glass and ripping up pavement everywhere I go-- it takes me a whole four and a half seconds to cover the distance.
If I ever remember to attend a city council meeting, I'll make sure to lodge a complaint about how long it takes to get around town.
KRA-KOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!!!
As lightning crashes, I arrive on the scene, making my presence known by sprinting right through the CCPD barricade, slowing down just enough that they can see me break through the police line tape like the finish line of a marathon.
I really wish someone could have gotten a picture of that; I just know it looked awesome.
"Sorry I'm late," I say as I turn with a shrug, the sonic boom that accompanies my arrival honestly kind of pathetic after the massive thundercracks coming from the heart of the storm. "You know how traffic is this time of day."
The officers vary between giving me an annoyed stink-eye and sighing with relief, before I charge in to the wall of rain. The ground is muddy enough that I accidentally skid a good twenty feet before coming to a stop in the middle of Mercury Square.
"Heya fellas!" I call out over the continuous roar of the heavy rain. "Y'know, I'm normally not a fan of surprise parties, but if you went through all the effort to break out of prison and stage this get-together for little old me, then what the heck, let's do this! The six of you, against the one and only, the FLLLLLLLASH!!!!"
I puff my chest out, hands on my hips in the same sort of heroic pose I've seen Superman do a hundred times, before I deliver the follow-up.
"And if you think I drew out the name too much, don't worry," I continue, "it's just so I can hand each one of you an L today!"
The rain continues to pour.
A stoplight creaks in the wind.
Other than that....nothing.
"Oh come on, that was a good one!" I protest, all the while trying to see through the thick sheets of rain to where they might be. "I mean, if you're not going to play along and banter back with me, then this isn't going to be any fun for anyo--"
FRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!!!!
"Bingo," I smirk to myself as a pencil-thin ray of cerulean lances through the air towards me, and time slows to a crawl. Those all-too-familiar arcs of yellow dance across my body as I skim just a tad into the Speed Force, a barely-known facet of extradimensional reality that warps space and time, among any number of other screwy things. And it's a good thing I tap into it when I do, because that thin ray of blue is millimeters from hitting me square between the eyes.
Leonard Snart, alias Captain Cold, and the de facto leader of the Rogues. He's the only one of them who resembles a "professional" criminal, a former bounty hunter before deciding there was more money on the other side of the law. His gimmick is built around his Cold Gun, which is some kind of "anti-laser," in that it somehow slows down the particles of anything it hits to Absolute Zero, freezing them cold instead of heating them up. He's a hell of a shot with it, too, and usually comes up with all sorts of creative ways to angle his beams or freeze the area around me to negate my speed advantage.
By shooting straight at me, though, all he's done is give away his position.
Casually side-stepping the tip of the Cold Gun's ray, I start to follow the beam through the rain, weaving around the raindrops that had been frozen into spear-point in its wake, working my way to its point of origin.
"Lenny, Lenny, Lenny," I shake my head with a tsk, "you just couldn't--"
I cut my banter short when I realize that Cold isn't going to be annoyed by it.
Because Cold isn't there.
There's just a....a ripple in the air. And the Cold Gun ray is leaping out of that ripple, like a pencil pushed through a sheet of paper.
"....huh....." I say as the beam collides with a tree, freezing the entire thing solid in an instant.
"Is something wrong, Flash?" I hear the voice of Dr. Wells, the director of Central City's branch of S.T.A.R. Labs, in the earpiece built into my cowl. On top of being the guy kind enough to design my suits, Wells and his team are usually in my ear providing vital intel.
"Don't know if it's wrong," I answer as I watch the ripple fade away, "But it's definitely weird. Captain Cold just took a shot at me, but uhhh, he's not here. There's some kind of--"
FWWOOOOOOOOOSSSSSHHHH!!!!!
The ground beneath my feet ripples, then erupts into a geyser of superheated plasma. I throw myself a safe distance from the blast, and as I tuck into a roll and come up, I find myself bobbing and juking around a resulting shower of fireballs.
"And it's getting better," I tell the S.T.A.R. Labs team as an orb of plasma detonates to my right, scattering shrapnel hotter than the surface of the sun in my direction. I put a safe distance between myself and the debris, then have to do it again to avoid another molten geyser. "This has gotta be Heat Wave's schtick...."
That would be Mick Rory, a pyromaniac who wields an arsenal of incredibly nasty plasma projectors, and likes to make me play "the floor is lava" for real.
Well, like I said, it would be Mick Rory.....but apparently he's not here. Again, as another molten fissure in the ground vomits up orange liquid death, I see that same ripple in the air.
"Okay, forget 'weird.' Something's definitely wrong here," I remark, more to myself than to Wells and his team. "No Heat Wave, no Cold, and despite this lovely weather being pretty obviously the work of our friend Mark, I'll bet we're not gonna find Weather Wizard here either."
"We're trying to scan the area," Dr. Wells assures me. "We've got one of our satellites over the area, and --zzzshhhhh--ew sensor drones en route. If there's --zzzzttt-- trace of spatial distortion from, say, a wormhole, or trace radiation from Zeta Beams or Bo--zzzttt-- or other teleportation technology, we'll be able to hone in on it and find its location."
"Well, ah, emphasis on the word trying" Cisco chimes in. "We're --zzzsshhh--ting a lot of electromagnetic interference from the storm, and --zzzzttshhh--- thing's filling the area with chaff."
"You're starting to break up," I tell them, tapping my earpiece. "What kind of chaff are we--"
K-PAFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!
Right in front of my face, the air ripples, and what looks like an old-timey cartoon bomb floats in the air for a split-second before bursting. Tucking into a tight roll to avoid the explosive debris, I'm surprised to see the area filled not with gunpowder and shards of iron, but with clouds of shiny metallic glitter.
"Of course," I grumble. "Glitter bombs from the Trickster. I'll bet good money that it's getting spread on the wind thanks to Weather Wizard, and making a makeshift Faraday cage around the site. We might lose comms before too much longer. Means it's going to be just them and me in--"
ZZZZZZNNNNNNNGGGG!
A trio of glowing disks emerge from more ripples in the air, one in front of me, and one on either side. With a deadly singing hum, they quite literally slice through the air, the blades so impossibly thin they can actually carve electrons off of atoms.
I say "disks," but they only look like that to someone who perceives the world at normal speed. I, on the other hand, can see them for exactly what they are, the spinning blades in their distinct bent shape a dead giveaway.
"Aaaand there he is," I say as they curve and whirl around me, "can't have the Rogues without good old Captain Boomerang."
George "Digger" Harkness, a smash-and-grab bank robber with a ridiculous gimmick, who somehow managed to make himself properly dangerous. Once he figured out that he'd fare better by stealing exotic tech instead of jewelry and cash, Boomer made a pretty useful arsenal for himself. Hypersonic boomerangs, explosive boomerangs, sensor boomerangs, invisible boomerangs, big boomerangs that shoot out dozens of smaller boomerangs. He even made a giant rocket-powered boomerang and, uh, strapped me to it to try and launch me into space once.
I'll say this for the guy: he's committed to his act.
These, though, are his standard-issue razor boomerangs: incredibly lethal, but only if he manages to hit you with them. And without some major trickery up his sleeve, those things don't have a chance of hitting me.
"Okay, guys," I call out, casually sidestepping boomerangs any time one gets close, and hoping they can hear me from whatever control center they're doing this from, "I'll admit, using your powers to attack me remotely is pretty cute. Downright impressive, even. I didn't think you had enough brain cells between you to come up with something like this. But, of course, there's a pretty big fundamental flaw in this little thunder-dome of yours."
Another boomerang whizzes towards me, right at neck level. I bend down to mock tying my shoe as it passes harmlessly overhead.
"In order for me to fall for this trap," I continue as I stretch my legs, once again just barely avoiding a razor-sharp projectile, "I have to stay in the trap. So if you don't mind, I'm gonna go ahead and bust out of here, figure out this deal from the outside, then track you down and send you back to Iron Heights."
I put on a burst of speed, leaving Digger's boomerangs in the dust before--
KSSHHHHHH!!!!
I run headlong into myself, the kinetic energy from speeding forward now hurling me backward just as fast, and I go tumbling into the dirt.
"Flash, l--*tzzzt*--out for--"
"Mirror Master, right," I groan as I start to pick myself up. "Should've figured. He's walled off the area, so I can't get out without getting bounced back in."
"Hang on, Fl--*zzzzttt*--getting a hold of K--*ZZZZZZZSSSSHHHH*--ee if we can g--*ZSHHHHHHTTTTTT*"
The comms go completely to static as Weather Wizard's storm intensifies.
"Oh man," I mutter to myself and get ready to run, "This is really gonna suck."
More ripples in the air.
Another Cold Beam in front of me.
Another heat geyser behind me.
More boomerangs zooming around me.
Poison-tipped jacks from Trickster suddenly litter across the ground.
Each time one goes wide, they bounce off of an instant Mirror to redirect it right towards me.
FRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!!!!
FWWOOOOOOOOOSSSSSHHHH!!!!!
ZZZZZZNNNNNNNGGGG!
K-PAFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!
KSSHHHHHH!!!!
KRA-KOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!!!
It's all I can do to stay ahead of the combined assault, tapping deeper and deeper into the Speed Force to duck and weave my way through the Gauntlet. Even with time at a near standstill, they fill the air and the ground with so much deadly crap that I'm having to twist and turn, duck and jump, squeeze through tight gaps and stop dead short to avoid running into something that will take my face off.
Eventually, though, they start to funnel me in, start closing off my options. Fire on one side, ice on the other, lightning ripping up the ground behind me, and boomerangs nipping at my heels like a pack of wolves running down a deer.
"Oh crap, oh crap, ohcrapohcrapohcrapoh--wait, nuhh--" is what I manage to sputter as another ripple of air appears directly in front of me, and I have no choice but to run right into it. And I don't get burned, or frozen, or sliced to bits.
Instead, I hear....flute music?
As the soothing tunes fill my ears, my senses start to dull. Everything gets....heavy, slow. Comfortable, even.
Like I could just lie down and take a nap. That actually sounds....pretty great.
"Whuh--hang on..." my rational, alarmed brain protests as waves of comfort and sleepiness wash over me. "Is...izzat...Pied Piper? Since when wuzee partuvv....of...th..."
I let out a loud yawn, and the Speed Force starts to drain from my body.
Beams of Cold bounce back and forth between Mirrors, creating a cage around me that's starting to grow tighter and tighter.
The ground is starting to warm up again, meaning that it's about to erupt into another geyser of lava.
Stink bombs filled with nerve gas scatter all around me.
A dozen atom-sharp boomerangs all whizz towards their target.
And in the clouds above, a charge is gathering for a bolt of lightning that will fry me to a crisp.
But right now....all I want to do....is sleep it all off.
"..if...anyunn hearsszis..." I blearily slur over the Justice League communicator as the last bits of my consciousness start to fade to black. "...stay....outta the storm....issaa....issa trap...."
Then sleep takes me.
