Relocation

Waking was disorienting.

Since I'd gained my powers, waking up had always been easy, band so had falling asleep. Now, though, I felt weirdly groggy.

"Are you all right?" Barry asked me.

He and Cisco were leaning over me.

"You had a hole in your chest the size of my fist," Cisco said. "It was weird watching it just close up."

"I've got a healing factor," I said.

Checking my messages, I winced.

-300 POINTS VIBRATION DAMAGE!

SONIC RESISTANCE HAS BEEN RENAMED SONIC/VIBRATION RESISTANCE AND HAS BEEN INCREASED BY 1%!

-15% DAMAGE FROM VIBRATION/SONIC ATTACKS!

LEVEL 3!

VIBRATION ATTACKS FROM INSIDE THE BODY REDUCE PHYSICAL DAMAGE RESISTANCE BY 99.9999%.

+1 PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!

Fuck.

They'd taken me to 3 points over my maximum. I'd suspected that I wouldn't die at 0 hit points; I'd wondered whether I blacked out during the Harvester ship explosion but I still wasn't sure. I didn't know what the cutoff point was for true death; was it -10 hit points? Was it my constitution in hit points? Was it the negative of my maximum hit points?

Any of them were potentially valid, and the fact that I didn't know made it hard to plan for. The only way I'd find out was to actually die, and I wasn't looking forward to that.

Somebody had vibrated their hand into my chest. If I'd had a heart, they could have pulled it out of me.

Of course, that meant that if I could gain that skill, fighting the Endbringers would get a lot easier.

"Somebody vibrated their hand into my chest from behind," I said.

"Thawne," Cisco said, paling. "He killed me that way, in another timeline."

How did he…right.

Postcognition.

"Thawne's dead," Barry said, but he didn't sound sure.

"How long have I been out?" I asked.

"A couple of seconds before you woke up," he said. "I heard you fall."

"You didn't see anybody?"

He shook his head.

Cisco was staring at my chest. Looking down I could see the massive gaping hole regenerating quickly. I inventoried another shirt.

"You really don't have any blood, do you?" Cisco asked, oblivious to that face that he'd been staring at my chest. Of course, he hadn't seen anything other than the injury, and maybe a look at whatever was inside me.

I debated looking through his memory; I had a morbid curiosity. Was I really just a mass of undifferentiated flash, a kind of Case 53 even if I still looked human?

I decided against it.

"Maybe there's somebody else who's figured out how to use the Speed Force," I said. "Maybe when you die at the age of ninety, somebody digs your body up and figures out what makes you tick."

They both seemed to think that was a morbid assumption.

"Or maybe somebody else was what, struck by lightning on the night of the accelerator experiment?"

"What are we going to do?" Cisco asked. The thought of facing yet another speedster was daunting to him. Having a hand shoved through his chest and dying had been hugely upsetting to him, more than he'd admitted to his coworkers.

"Well, do you guys have some kind of sonic weapon?" I asked.

"Yes…" Cisco said slowly.

"I want you to hit me with it," I said. "Over and over again."

"Why?"

"When I get attacked by something, I get more resistant to it, and I somehow doubt that Barry wants to keep shoving his hand through my chest."

Barry stared at me, looking a little green at the thought.

"If I can get immune to that then I won't die, and I'll be able to help you guys a lot more."

"Sonic weapons though?" Barry asked.

"My body considers all vibration-based attacks the same," I said. "I'd like for it to be a nasty surprise the next time he decides to explore my body organs."

"All right," Barry said.

"The guy you put back into the pipeline, the one with super hearing built a pair of sonic gloves. We destroyed them, but I rebuilt them," Cisco said, sounding self-satisfied.

"Why?"

"Well, most of us can't just go buy superpowers," he said. "You never know what kind of villains you're going to meet, and what they'll be vulnerable to."

"All right," I said. "Can you get them?"

"Now?"

"If he realizes that I'm not dead, he'll be back to finish the job, and the next time he'll make sure I'm dead."

"Right," Cisco said. "We've got a testing area."

I followed them down to a largish room, and I waited for him to get the gloves.

"These things can blow up office buildings," Cisco said. "So maybe we should start at a lower level."

I frowned.

"Shouldn't we test these somewhere that we can't blow out a load bearing wall?"

"What do you have in mind?"

I blinked away to space, used my enhanced vision, and then I returned.

"Let's go," I said.

Cisco had already gotten hearing protection for him and Barry, based on Rathaway's designs.

We appeared in the middle of the Sahara Desert. It was seven or eight hours ahead here, so it was still nighttime, although it was in the early morning.

"All right," I said, "Hit me."

"Starting at the lowest setting," Cisco said, after a glance around at the area. "I've had to calibrate it to your specific frequency."

That was a flaw in the design of the instrument, not of sonic weapons in general. I could think of half a dozen ways to make the process either automatic or unnecessary.

It didn't even tickle. I gave him a gesture to raise it higher.

We were halfway up before I felt anything at all. I didn't take any damage even at maximum.

"Well, I've got to put it in my mouth I guess," I grimaced.

"What?" Cisco asked.

"Internal attacks do a lot more damage, and I doubt you could retrieve this if I swallowed it."

He turned it all the way down, and both he and Barry looked away as I switched it on.

-1 HP

VIBRATION/SONIC RESISTANCE HAS RISEN +1 LEVEL!

20% RESISTANCE!

LEVEL 4.

PHYSICAL RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED BY +1%!

I actually felt that a little.

I switched it to a higher level.

-8 HP!

VIBRATION/SONIC RESISTANCE HAS RISEN +1 LEVEL!

25% RESISTANCE!

LEVEL 5.

PHYSICAL RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED BY +1%!

The sand around me was shaking; presumably from the vibrations in the soles of my feet. I levitated a few inches and it got better.

"Doesn't it bother your hearing?" Cisco asked. "There's conduction through the bones of your skull."

I shook my head.

Using Mama Mather's power, I said "I'm immune to deafness. I went to a Metallica concert."

I grinned at them to show I was joking. I barely even knew who Metallica was. For some reason they didn't seem impressed. Maybe it was the gloves in my mouth.

I switched it higher.

-70 HIT POINTS!

VIBRATION/SONIC RESISTANCE HAS RISEN +1 LEVEL!

30% RESISTANCE!

LEVEL 5.

PHYSICAL RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED BY +1%!

I stopped switching it higher. I really needed to raise my constitution to give me more hit points for effects that bypassed my physical resistances.

"That's the sweet spot," I said mentally.

"It's close to the top of what we can do," Cisco said, looking at the monitors at the end of the gloves.

"You take more damage when it's from the inside," I said. "Trust me."

"It's worse when you aren't the tin man," he said. "I actually had a heart and saw it pulled out of my chest."

I frowned.

I didn't have a heart physically, and my emotions were stunted, so it was an appropriate comparison, but it seemed a little mean.

A check of his mind showed that he didn't mean it that way.

Let's keep doing this," I said.

After ten minutes, it was finally done.

-5 HIT POINTS!

VIBRATION/SONIC RESISTANCE HAS RISEN +1 LEVEL!

100% RESISTANCE!

LEVEL 20!

PHYSICAL RESISTANCE HAS INCREASED BY +1%!

Gaining 18% to my physical resistance was the icing on the cake; it meant that I was now 100 times as tough to things that were covered by physical resistance.

"I kind of feel sorry for all the snakes and lizards around here," Cisco said. "We've probably deafened all of them in a ten-mile radius."

"Well, we could have done it next to somebody's house," I said. "Or maybe the arctic, but I figured you guys would freeze to death."

"I'm not good with cold," Barry said.

"So maybe that's what you use against the other guy?"

"Speedsters are too fast to get hit with a cold gun," Cisco said, "Mostly."

"So, use more than one of them," I said. "Set up a trap. Law enforcement back home had nozzles that would spray containment foam to fill a room if a parahuman got rowdy."

"Containment foam?"

"It's a foam that hardens almost instantly and people can breathe through it," I said. "Standard issue on a world with six hundred thousand parahumans."

"That's… you don't have the formula for that, do you?"

"I can get it," I said. Dragon was able to mass produce it; did that mean she'd gotten rid of the tinkertech weirdness? "I'm assuming that speedsters can walk through walls if they can stick their hands through my chest."

"Most of our villains aren't speedsters," Barry said. He scowled. "There's only been one so far."

"If you've got the money, I'd start trapping your base, assuming they know where it is. Otherwise, I'd trap a warehouse of something."

"Are you related to Oliver Queen?" Barry asked.

"Green Arrow?" I asked, surprised. "He's a superhero and he doesn't even have powers?"

"I'm normally more careful with secret identities, but the mind reader doesn't know a lot about boundaries…" he said.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Usually it helps me not have things like hands through my chest happen. Let's go back."

I blinked us all back to Star Labs, where Caitlyn and Ronnie were stepping back into the room. They both looked disheveled, and they both had a weird smell about them.

I had a feeling I was going to regret getting enhanced smell at some point- and I was only able to smell things twice as well as normal. Dogs could smell forty times as well; it was hard to even imagine how they sensed the world.

"What's going on?" Caitlyn asked.

"Somebody thought it would be funny to vibrate a hand through my chest and leave me for dead," I said. "Fortunately, my heart was in the wrong place."

"What?"

"Well, I don't actually have most internal organs, and so it didn't kill me."

"He's back?" Caitlyn asked.

"Who's back?" Martin asked.

I could smell the alcohol on his breath from here.

"Thawn," she said. Her face had turned as white as a ghost.

"I didn't get a look at him," I admitted. "It could have been someone else. Either they randomly tried to murder me here in the middle of Star Labs, or they intentionally tried it. Either way, it's not good."

"Why would they want you dead?" Caitlyn asked. "How would they even know who you are? You've only been here a few hours."

"Well, wasn't Thawne a time traveler?" I asked. "Presumably I cause them trouble in the future, so they've come back to take care of me before I get stronger."

They all looked upset.

"Well, I'm immune to that kind of attack now," I said. "But no telling whatever tricks they'll come up with next. How'd you deal with it last time?"

"His ancestor killed himself so Thawne was never born, creating a paradox and a singularity that almost destroyed the city," Barry said.

I winced.

"Well, I'd work on anti-speedster measures, and I wouldn't put anything in the computers, just in case a hacker gets to it later," I said.

"If they're from the future, they may know a lot about us," Barry said. "Assuming it's not just Thawne again."

"Well, clearly they know where you live," I said.

I thought for a minute.

"If they wanted to, they could kill everybody here before Barry got back from a fast food run. They were willing to kill me; why not finish the job?"

"Why would they?"

"Imagine that you were a villain who wanted to kill someone just as strong as you, but who's a lot more successful because he has a strong support team behind him. What do you do?"

"Kill the team?" Cisco asked.

"Yeah," I said. "At the very least it would put Barry off his game. It would make him depressed, make him afraid. Tactically it's the smart move. In war, is it better to kill soldiers or the people who supply soldiers?"

"You cut the supply lines," Barry said.

"And who supplies you with tactical and emotional support?" I asked. I gestured. "Team Flash."

"So why didn't they?" Caitlyn asked.

"Well, it's one of two things. Either they want something from the rest of you, or they're a sadist who wants to drag the whole murder thing out to make Barry helpless."

They seemed uneasy at either prospect.

"It's the kind of thing that happened a lot in my world until we came to accept some basic unwritten rules.

"Rules?" Barry asked.

"No going after people's families. No rape. That kind of thing," I said.

In truth, I still wasn't sure what all the Unwritten rules were. I'd never really paid that much attention to them.

"There's always some people who break the rules, but people join together to punish them. They've got families too, and nobody wants people going after families."

"What could they want from us?" Caitlyn asked.

"Well, do either of you have a stalker?" I asked, pointing at Cisco and Caitlyn.

"No!" Caitlyn said, glancing at Ronnie. "Why would you ask that?"

"Well, maybe you have a speedster stalker. You're a lot more likely that Cisco here as the target."

"Hey!" Cisco said.

"You aren't dating anybody," I said. "If they're good looking, and being a speedster probably means they have a great figure…well, they could just talk to you at a bar or an anime convention or something."

"That's true," he admitted. He thought for a moment. "You have anime in your world?"

"No," I said. "Leviathan basically destroyed Japan, so no anime. We get imports from one other universe, though."

"What about Ronnie and Martin?" Caitlyn asked.

"Well, they've been living as a homeless person for the last few months," I said. "And it's hard to catch someone's interest like that."

"So, your guess is a speedster stalker?" Barry asked.

"Or they want them for their nerd skills," I said. "You've got a brain trust going on here, and you guys deal with metahuman things all the time. I just saved a kid who aged every time he used his superhuman strength. He had a grudge against you guys because of that."

"What?"

"I've got people who can fix stuff like that," I said. "He's back to being young now and he's fine. I told him that Star Labs is checking on people to make sure that they are all right and that they can help them."

"What? You can't speak for us without asking," Barry said.

I shrugged.

"I won't tell anyone you don't want me to, but it seemed to make him a lot more well disposed to the lot of you. He probably won't show up and try to kill you in a few months when he's eighteen and looks like Betty White's grandfather."

They all stared at me.

"Anyway, if a speedster shows up and he's got some weird problem, like his speed is aging him, or it's given him like super speed cancer or superspeed hemorrhoids or something…it's probably your guy, even if there's a guy in a different costume doing the crimes."

"What if he's really here needing help?" Barry demanded. "We can't be suspicious of everybody we meet."

"That's why I like telepathy," I said. "It cuts through a whole lot of backstabbing and betrayal."

"It's still a human rights violation," Cisco muttered.

"Well, anyway, if you guys end up needing to hide, I've got a few places I can put you… a moon base, a country rebuilding from an alien attack, a small village of people on a barren world. I don't really have anything cool, unless you want me to take you to Valhalla, and they generally don't seem to care for humans."

"We need to talk about it," Barry said. "Could you…uh…step out of the country?"

I rolled my eyes, and I blinked to the roof of Star Labs listening in to their conversation using telepathy.

They really needed to get cameras for the roof; it was clearly a place people could break in from easily.

"Can we trust her?" I heard Ronnie ask. "We just met her."

"I believe her," Barry said quietly. "She's hinted at doing some bad things in the past, and I think if she was trying to get our trust, she wouldn't have mentioned anything."

"Unless that's what she wanted us to think," Cisco said. "I like her, but I liked Wells too, and I never had an inkling he was bad until he shoved his hand through my chest."

"Let's say she's right," Martin said. "Does that mean that her conclusions are right?"

"I still think it's Thawn," Caitlyn said. "Isn't that a lot more likely than some other speedster? What are the odds of there being more than two in the world?"

"So, what do we do?"

"All we can do is wait," Barry said. "If we knew there was a direct threat to your lives, we might take her up on getting you all to safety. Maybe that was the villain's plan all along; spook you into leaving, and leaving me to deal with it by myself."

None of them had jobs outside Star Labs except Barry, so they could probably uproot themselves a little easier than he could. However, they all had families.

"Would she be insulted if we said no?" Caitlyn asked.

I blinked back into the room.

"You guys ready yet?" I asked brightly.

"Uh, were you listening in to our conversation?" Barry asked.

"Noooo…" I said slowly. "But since I can read your minds, you might as well have left me here."

They all looked irritated at this.

"It's fine if you don't want to go right now," I said. "And if you find somebody you're suspicious of, I'd be happy to take a look into their minds from another room."

I looked around at the people in the room.

"It's just as well. I don't yet have the kind of accommodations you're used to, and I haven't moved all the cannibals to Australia. I'm working on it, but they're kind of scattered out."

"What?"

"It's not important," I said.

Somehow, they didn't seem like the kind of people who would approve of a forced relocation project.

I'd decided on a more nuanced approach.

The cannibals who enjoyed themselves would go to Australia, and the people who'd been forced to cannibalism would get western Europe.

"All right," I said. "I've got to go retrieve the God of Mischief before he wears out his welcome."

With that I was gone.