Lightning

I stared up at the black hole, and I felt a moment of panic.

None of my powers could help with this. Even my tinker skills weren't good enough yet.

Black holes were horribly difficult to deal with. Any mass you tried to shoot them with was simply added to their mass, making them stronger.

Hitting them with energy wasn't any better. Within the event horizon matter and energy were the same thing, and the black hole could convert energy into mass.

Using antimatter would just create a huge explosion and add to its mass.

Time could destroy black holes; they would eventually dissipate on their own. If I had Bakuda's full knowledge, I'd be able to use a bomb to contain the Black Hole in an area where time went by faster, maybe a trillion years in a second. But I didn't have that kind of knowledge yet, and even if I did, there was no time to build it.

You could change its angular momentum to get rid of the event horizon, revealing the true black hole underneath. However, that would only help if it was a steady state; this black hole was constantly adding mass, though, even if it was only the air itself.

The longer I waited, the stronger the black hole would get.

Given the exponential nature of the black hole, the city itself only had minutes. The world would be gone in an hour.

After that I'd never be able to come back, unless I wanted to end up in the middle of a black hole.

Nothing could survive the interior of that thing. Eventually it would eat the sun and all of the planets.

I might be able to use this place to dispose of enemies, but I'd have to appear in interstellar space, and if I made a mistake, I'd be drawn into the black hole too.

Too close to the surface and time itself would come to a standstill.

I could feel the terror of the running people around me. They all suspected that they were going to die.

Should I try to save the few I could while leaving six or seven other billion people to die? Would they thank me when I left their father's, their mothers, their siblings and children to die while they went on alone?

It wasn't as though they'd have a guaranteed future in any of the other worlds I had access to. All of those were either destroyed ruins of facing future apocalypses.

An overwhelming feeling of helplessness hit me; there was nothing I could do here. This wasn't some powerful foe that I could run away from and then come back when I was strong enough.

If I ran, everyone would die and there would be no point in coming back. If I didn't run, a few people would survive, but I'd only be able to save a few dozen at most.

I hadn't felt helpless in along time, and I hated that feeling. I'd always hated that feeling. I felt myself getting agitated, and then a cool, clean feeling washed over my mind.

If you couldn't save all the starfish, just save one. You saved those you could save, and that was all you could do.

I turned and scanned the area for busses. That would be my best bet for saving a lot of people at the same time. I would cram them in like college students in a telephone booth back during the 1960s, and I'd drop them off wherever I could.

Why had I overreacted like that?

Sometimes there were forces you just couldn't fight.

There was an empty bus down the street, and I blinked to it. The bus was empty and abandoned.

I began blinking around the area, touching people and blinking them back into the bus. I'd collected twenty people when I felt something change at the edge of my empathic range.

Terror was all I'd felt from people this whole time, but now I felt something that made my head snap up; hope. People were responding to something that I didn't see yet.

A man in a red suit was racing toward me; he had a lightning bolt insignia, and as he ran, I saw small sparks of lightning coming from him. His costume was expertly done; at least as good as those of the Protectorate if not more so.

My mind was running at full speed, the world almost still around me, and despite that he still seemed fast as he raced by me. He saw me; I felt him added to my network as Mama Mathers power included him.

He hit the side of a building, and he ran straight up the wall.

What kind of power did he have?

A glance in his mind showed that he only had a single power, speed, and despite that, he was still going to face the singularity.

I couldn't help but admire him. I had potentially all the powers in the world, but he'd been creative with his one power. He'd twisted and manipulated that power, finding dozens of uses for it, things I wasn't sure I'd have ever thought of.

He wasn't thinking of his own name, but the spectators knew his cape name.

The Flash was a good man; he practically glowed with it. He wasn't as good as a few of the people I'd met, but he was close. He was a hero.

If the heroes of my world were all this good, my world wouldn't have given up. People had faith in this man; he gave them hope that things were going to get better. Heroes like this would never have discounted normal people, thinking that they didn't matter.

They wouldn't have stood by and let my father be murdered, and if it had happened on their watch, they'd have tried to at least get justice.

The Flash's plan was insane. He knew that this likely meant his death, but he was going to try anyway, because this was the kind of person that he was.

I'd once described my full dexterity as dancing between raindrops, but what he was doing was even more impressive. He leaped up from the top of the wall, and he should have fallen, but instead, he somehow found a foothold in midair.

He was running on thin air, his feet finding purchase on the molecules in the air itself. It boggled my mind; he didn't have a native ability to fly, but somehow, he'd managed to make one up.

Even more impressively, he was somehow running in a tight circle, surrounding the event horizon without falling in despite the effects of gravity. It had to be putting a terrible strain on his body, but he ignored that, and he just ran.

He was trying to change the angular momentum of the black hole, but he could only run three thousand miles an hour. It didn't make sense that this would be enough to change things.

Despite that, I could see the event horizon starting to dissipate.

How?

It took me a moment to realize.

His powers had to ignore physics. Maybe he was shifted into a different state like Velocity; whatever it was let him break what should have been immutable laws.

Should I try to help him in a futile effort? Despite his heroic stand, all he was doing was delaying the inevitable. Or should I try to save those who could be saved, to give his sacrifice meaning?

My mind worked fast enough that I could see him up there. I could see the determination in his eyes as he ran, the utter certainty that what he was doing was the right thing.

I turned, looking for more people to blink into the bus. I'd been so quick that the people I'd blinked inside were still confused about what had happened.

I felt other minds come into my radius.

They had a plan; it involved a parahuman with esoteric mastery over physics, a gestalt being. The two men who were part of the gestalt knew it was risky, that they might die, but they were as determined as the man running around in the sky.

The math was simple; if you were going to die either way, and there was a chance that your death could save the lives of the people you loved, why wouldn't you take that chance, no matter how slim?

Should I admit defeat and continue collecting survivors, or should I help buy them some time?

I hesitated for a millisecond. Saving a few people was a certainty; saving everyone was a long shot.

What would I have wanted if I was one of the people collected in the bus? Would I have left a living Mom and Dad to survive on my own, or would I have wanted a hero to take a chance?

I'd been a loner, and I'd had few connections with the world. Most people had a lot more, and they'd have wanted to bring their families with them.

By saving the few and letting the rest die, I'd be subjecting people to dead fathers and mothers just like I'd had to deal with.

The decision was made.

If there was a chance that I could save everyone, I had to take it. It wasn't necessarily the logical course, but it was the only thing I could see myself doing.

I could only fly at twenty-five hundred miles an hour, but that was in a straight line. I wasn't sure I'd be able to fly in a tight of a circle at that speed. It was possible that I could, but without the Flash's physics defying ability, I didn't think it would make a difference.

However, as a man flew by me, his hair on fire, I made sure he looked at me. I added his to Mama Mather's network, and then I activated danger sense.

His eyes were already white, but now they glowed.

I followed him into the sky. He was able to warp matter and energy around himself in a way that he would be able to survive inside the black hole itself, at least for a little while.

Once they were separated, they'd be helpless, and it was likely that they'd die instantly unless they were ejected someone how the warping of physics.

Danger sense would give them a better chance of survival. If there was a way that both of them could survive, even if it was almost infinitesimal, I wanted to give them that chance.

They were good men too, after all.

I didn't have those physics warping powers, and there was still little I could do to help. It was frustrating to me to have to leave this to other people.

The Flash was this world's preeminent hero, at least as far as the people of this city were concerned, and yet he wasn't nearly as strong as me. I should have been able to take care of this on my own, but all I could do was stand by and twiddle my thumbs.

I flew up as close as I dared, watching the people up above me. They were real heroes; I'd never even pretended to be one.

I could see the flaming man enter the black hole. I couldn't see him after that, but I could sense through his eyes.

They were about to separate when danger sense flared. The position they were in would have dissipated the black hole entirely, sending its mass into an extradimensional space, but it would have flung one of them downward, and the other into the black hole to die.

A small adjustment was all it took, and a moment later there was a flash of light.

With Blindness immunity, I could see what happened just fine. I saw the two men separate. One was young, and one was older. The older one was thrown close to Barry Allen, and he grabbed him and leaped for the wall of the building below.

The other one had chosen to sacrifice himself for his friend. He was thrown closer to the retreating black hole, and the forces within tore at his body.

I blinked next to him and inventoried him.

The Flash was already on the ground, and I blinked next to him, releasing the young man.

I put a hand on him, but healing didn't work. He'd been killed instantly.

"Ronnie!" I heard a woman behind me shout. She pushed past me and kneeled next to where I'd propped him against the wall. She was crying.

I stood by uncomfortably.

The older man was damaged too, so I leaned down.

A red glove stopped me.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"A healer," I said. "If I may?"

He hesitated for a moment, but allowed me to kneel down beside the older man.

I touched Martin Stein, healing him. I took a deeper dive into his mind as I did, learning not just his name, but the names of the people around me.

I saw him stiffen, and I helped him rise to his feet.

"Thank you, young lady," he said. He looked down at the young man on the ground. "Ronald…"

The nature of their gestalt meant that the death of one would lead to the eventual decline and death of the other. There was nothing I could do about that, at least yet. It was possible that Panacea might be able to do something, but that was uncertain.

"I can bring him back," I said. "Maybe."

"What?" several people said simultaneously.

I could feel the shock in everybody around me. Disbelief, hope, doubt; everyone reacted differently to my words.

The woman was looking up at me hopefully. Martin Stein had affection for this woman; bleed over from the dead man in front of me when they'd been joined.

She'd been his fiancé.

"I'm an interdimensional traveler, and I've picked up some technology here and there. One sort of tech is supposed to bring people back if they've been dead less than seventy-two hours and aren't too damaged."

They all stared at me like I was crazy.

"Why don't we take this discussion somewhere else?" I said. I reached down and inventoried the woman and her dead fiancé.

The Flash grabbed my arm, and I inventoried him too. I touched Dr. Stein and a Latino guy who was with them, and a moment later were in the middle of their headquarters.

I released them all, and the Flash grabbed me.

"What did you do to us?"

"Teleportation." I said. "And I've got an extradimensional storage space. I've got a lot of powers."

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"Taylor Hebert," I said. "I'm a parahuman from another world. My dimension travel power misfires sometimes, and I end up in random places, usually when things are going to hell. Usually I'm a little more useful."

I looked at them ruefully.

"You said you could save Ronnie?" the woman beside be said urgently.

Stein's memory said she was Caitlin Snow, a medical doctor.

"Yeah," I said. "I picked up some regenerative nanites from a cybernetic hive mind. I haven't used them yet, but I know how to."

"There's a time limit?" the Latino guy asked.

Cisco Ramon, apparently. He was a mechanical engineer. I was surrounded by incredibly smart people.

"Seventy-two hours is the absolute maximum. I'm assuming that earlier is better. It almost always is."

"Can we get started?" the woman asked anxiously.

"Sure," I said. I touched the man, and then I de-inventoried him on a stretcher thirty feet away."

"Could you stop that?" the Flash…Barry Allen asked.

"The body is in stasis, while I've got it stored," I said. "Which extends its lifespan, and besides, this way I avoid damaging the body any further. Also, teleporting things is cool."

Walking over to the body, I pulled a Borg arm from my inventory.

"What's that?" Cisco asked. "That looks like of sketchy."

"The nanites are designed to be delivered by a cyborg arm, and I haven't bothered to build a new delivery system."

A slight telekinetic manipulation, and the arm lashed out with a small tube, piercing his arm. I let it pump nanites into him for ten seconds, and then I released it.

Blackness was already filling his veins, moving up his arm despite the lack of blood flow.

It took almost two minutes before he took a deep breathe. Everyone was staring at the body.

"It's going to take ten hours for it to be finished," I said. "We need to monitor his progress."

"Didn't you say you could heal him?" Barry asked. "Once he's alive I mean?"

"I'm not sure I can heal any memory loss from brain damage," I said. "The Borg promised me that this would do the trick. Besides, I plan to use this to resurrect heroes in my own world, so I need to document the effects."

Dr. Snow looked up at me anxiously.

"I can always heal him if there are any problems," I said. "But this will help a lot of people."

It would also let me know what to expect from my own father once I chose to resurrect him.

They quickly began to put monitoring equipment on him; I was impressed. They seemed to have a lot of experience in working together.

They were a team; not because they were all paid by the government to barely tolerate each other. It was because they wanted to work together for a greater goal.

Was this what made Barry Allen his world's foremost hero? He actually had a team and he was willing to work with people?

"I'm sorry," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. "We've been betrayed recently, and it's a little hard to trust people."

"You guys are going to keep records of this, right?" I called out to the team.

At their affirmative nods, I turned to Barry.

"I'm sure there were a lot of people injured with all of this; I've got healing powers. I can help you get things cleaned up."

He looked almost relieved as he nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "That would be good."