While You Were Out

[wannabeflashlantern]

A loud screeching noise can be heard coming from the landing bay. That could only mean one thing. He had finally got the Baby Box to work again, and Gold Sentinel was in the hangar of the Watchtower.

"Sir! We've arrived! Finally"
"Scooter, I'm surprised it got enough energy for this jump. We finally got half those riots under control. Thank God for the Titans, JSA, the GG and Big Science Action."
"Riot control is hard, sir. I'm just happy Shazam and Green Lantern were available to help manage the eastern seabord."

Alas, the skies turning green can cause panic. And while the YJLA was dealing with the problem, the other teams and their two teammates, Gold Sentinel and Scooter, were stranded on Earth trying to keep people calm. GS had settled for setting his Centrifuge Beam to "super dizzy" and making people be too concerned they were going to ralph to keep stealing televisions, canned food and water.

Why were they stealing televisions? Did they expect MTV and The Office to outlive the Earth? These questions and others baffled Gold Sentinel, but not all was lost. Or at least, he hoped.

"Hey! YJLA! Anybody home?"

Comments

[crazy_fast]

All that noise was hard to miss, and in a flash (no pun intended) she was down in the hanger bay. Yellow shades slipped down on the tip of her nose.

"Looks like I wasn't the only one to miss all the action. Just hopped the transport up myself."

Not that most of these people would know her, mom and dad weren't exactly the sort who hung out at team events or anything.

"Swift." She fanned her fingers in a wave to him.

[wannabeflashlantern]

He took off his visor dramatically, as if he had just found the cure for something. "Gold Sentinel, Hero of the 26th Century."

He walks over to her with that same swagger that heroes are known for, specifically the over confident type.

"Did you have any trouble with riots planetside as well?" he asked.

[crazy_fast]

Well...look at that. It's all she can do not to laugh, but she does crack a wide grin.

"Uhh yeah, more or less did a lot of running supplies and making sure things didn't get too out of hand. Super speed comes in handy for that sort of thing."

[wannabeflashlantern]

Scott tries his hardest not to grumble at the super-speed thing. Not that it matters, he's working on the Vandegraf Project for just that reason.

"I mostly made every guy busting open a store front dizzy or froze their feet down."

"So how long have you been here, and why couldn't we find you sooner?"

[crazy_fast]

"There were some fires along the coast. Seems like every time there is some sort of catastrophe people take advantage of it. Looting, riots, fires...worse things."

She had no patience for it, Chaos might be her mothers milk but that did not mean crime.

"Oh I'm easy to find, if you know were to look." She winked and vanished, not truly vanished but moved faster than the human eye could follow for more than a blur. She wound up behind him, tapping on his shoulder.

"Hello again."

[wannabeflashlantern]

Scott again cursed that his senses couldn't keep up. His body never could. He was trained to think fast though and turned around quickly. "Hello yourself."

"It makes me sick sometimes. Nothing wrong with being greedy, invisible hand and all that, but just outright looting places? That's messed up."

He looked around. "Hey, maybe later, after they do the whole 'debreifing' jazz... maybe you and I compare some notes?"

[crazy_fast]

"I'm not a fan of hurting others or taking their stuff personally, I believe in working for things." Maybe it was weird but her parents had instilled it in her. Who would have thought that Holly Granger and Thad Thawne could have been good parents?

"Compare notes? Ok, but it's gotta be over some food. I haven't eaten for like thirty-five minutes and I am starving. I could eat a dozen mega-burgers right about now."

[wannabeflashlantern]

Scott looked to Scooter. The little bot zipped away, and Scott smiled. "How easy are you with Secret IDs? Strict or more relaxed?" He knew some heroes were big on hiding their IDs, typically Bats. "Scott Rayner-West. Well, that's the short version."

[crazy_fast]

She shrugged, the whole secret ID thing wasn't a really big deal to her. Mom and Dad never let her use her powers in public so it wasn't like she was known or anything. She did look amused when he gave his name though, she extended her hand out for a shake, Daddy would have been proud.

"Genna Granger-Thawne." If that rang a bell...well she'd deal with it as it came.

[wannabeflashlantern]

As they turned the corner, he grabbed the door for her again and paid the nice blonde woman at the counter. "Thanks, Mrs. Cho," he said when they were done. "Here we are, the best Chinese food within walking distance for the velocity impaired." He hands her a plate, with the simple warning of "hot" and goes to browse.

Mr. Cho was going to be angry with him, but he did still have that flat screen to fix for him... so maybe they'd call it even.

[crazy_fast]

The smell was what she noticed first, it was like walking headlong into a wall of pure delicious. How had she never heard of this little hole int he wall before?

"Yeah, you're hot too." She snickered knowing full well he'd meant the plate, but hey, she knew she was cute. She was also a horrible flirt, blame her mother.

Genna kept it only slightly faster than normal human speed, but her plate was piled full shortly. A huge pile of assorted food that would terrify most women let alone figure conscious teen girls. But Genna had no problem eating all she wanted, in fact not eating tended to be the issue for her. She had to have fuel in the tank to keep her going after all. Swift as her name implied she found herself a seat in a booth and waited for him to join her before she started eating. Except for a snap pea, but that wasn't really eating right? Just munching.

[wannabeflashlantern]

He grinned at her comment. Scott, old boy, you still got it.

He's just slightly slower, and eating about as much. A side effect of a speedy genius brain is it likes to absorb calories.

He brought her a frosty beverage along with his own, and grinned at her.

"Yeah. That's a speedster's plate."

[crazy_fast]

Genna gladly accepted the drink and sipped it. She was ravenous but there were social conventions to observe, Mother had made her very much aware of that. It was why she tended to eat at home so much, she could do so at her own speed. In public things were different, she had to keep the speed, if not the portions, fairly normal.

"Occupational hazard, what's your excuse?" She gestured with the blunt end of her fork to his plate. It was actually kind of impressive to her though.

[wannabeflashlantern]

"Dad had a theory about that. When you're the only member of the family that is forced to obey the sound barrier, much less the light barrier, you have to think faster to make up for it. So while I'm not a speedster, my brain is." He smiles at her. "Plus I tend to do calisthenics and aerobics when I am working on a new experiment during the calibration for the nanites."

He takes a few bigger bites then goes back to talking after he swallows.

"So in an average day, despite my size, I can burn about 2500 without even moving around. It's a nice side effect... when I don't forget to eat."

[crazy_fast]

"So 'think fast' is a literal thing for you." She liked that, that meant he could understand what it was like in her head half the time. He went on but her mind was still buzzing and she leaned in between bites to ask him a question quietly.

"Does the rest of the world seem to creep by for you? Like you have to wait an eternity for it to catch up with what you already know?"

[wannabeflashlantern]

"Not just the world. My own body when I'm out of my suit. It's... infuriating sometimes."

"The whole world can't figure it out. We're on problem 99 by the time they get to 2, and that's with showing our work." He grins at her.

And somebody else finally gets it.

[crazy_fast]

"I know! I hate it, I feel," And she blushed, because she often felt guilty for even thinking this way. "It's like I'm the only normal person in a room full of mentally challenged people and I con only finish when they do. I mean I know some bright people but they take forever to figure things out."

She leaned back, never having talked with anyone but her dad about this before. "It's like this story my Dad had me read, it was called...I think Harrison Bergeron or something. Anyway it was about this one guy who was exceptional, but the world wanted everyone to be equal so they made him wear a mask and wear these weights to slow him down so he was as slow as everyone else to be 'fair.'"

She stabbed a piece of chicken and looked up at him, a little guiltily. "Somedays I really don't want to be fair. I want to just run out the door and not stop, and go as fast as I can until I can't run anymore."

[wannabeflashlantern]

After two plates of dessert (or at least that's what he had, he lost count on hers) they returned to his lab and used the microgenerator to power a Shriek Tube to a nice stretch of salt flats he was fond of for testing. He was in his current suit, though he had the old one balled up in Scooter.

"You first, Miss Swift." He grinned at her again as his visors showed the diagnostics of his suit. Everything was online,a nd he had just injected himself with two doses of Elixir to keep his stamina up in case somethign went wrong.

[crazy_fast]

Genna couldn't remember being this excited for something since she was little. An all out, no holding back contest, this was gonna rock. She'd made a quick change back into her suit, it wasn't anything fancy but at the speeds she traveled she needed something that could keep up. And her yellow shades, a variant of her fathers goggles when he'd handed them down to her.

Tucked into the depths of her ear canals were tiny ear buds that worked with a little device that rested against her wrist. It sensed her heartbeat and played music from her library accordingly, more over it played it at speeds that her brain didn't have to slow down for. Inside her head was the echo chamber, she had a front row seat for one hell of a concert as she stepped onto the arid salt flats.

Swift cracked her knuckles, eyed the horizon and...was gone.

[wannabeflashlantern]

A small touch to his visor and the white nanites in Scott's system set his eyes into overtime so they could keep up with his brain. A blur. Better than what everyone else was seeing.

Where will you be, cutey... ah, that's it. She was not using patterns, which was difficult to track. So instead, he'd have to improvise. Gauntlets set to Cold, and the flats were suddenly slick with ice that was smooth, too smooth. Copied from Captain Cold's gun, the beam made the ice super slick, and then a large sheet of ice at the end of each one. A stun blast to crack the ice, and a centrifuge beam blast to make the cracked ice into snow.

Now to wait for her to start slipping for a soft landing, as he shoots up into the air, thirty meters up, and his old Magnafield up just in case.

And a small hope she'd slow down enough he could catch a glimpse of her that wasn't too out of focus, though he had to admit, her speed was pretty cool.

[crazy_fast]

she was running along well, not top speed. Not by a long shot, but no normal eyes could follow her. Yep she was doing great..until everything got suddenly very slippery. She lost all friction and with it all control of her momentum. Genna windmilled her arms as her feet slid across the ice. "CRAP!CRAP!CRAP!CRAP!CRAP!CRAP!"

She tumbled to a knee and kept rolling forward into the newly piled snow. Ohhh was that how he wanted to play? Faster than he could watch, possibly faster than he could dodge, a barrage of snowballs launched at him from all directions.

[wannabeflashlantern]

Magnetic shields do NOTHING against snowballs. He's bucking back and forth, unable to fly out fast enough, when he grins at this and kills his flight system to drop out, the reactivates it once he's near the ground. The Mach 3 system turns on for a swoop, and then he thinks.

Fast snowballs. No fire arsenal. What to do?

Both arms shot out a golden centrifuge beam. The minute it hit her, she'd start spinning in place until the effects wore off. Catch him... probably thirteen point seven four three nine four one two seconds of her spinning in place. Enough time to get a few snowballs on her... and maybe something else.

If he hit her, that was.

[crazy_fast]

Oh, spinning, not good. Not on a fully stomach anyway. it left her vulnerable for a good seven seconds, but he underestimated her. Genna turned into the spin, using it's momentum to power her own and channeling that outward to create a vortex, her arms widened to disperse that out as a cyclone headed right for him.

Sure he hit her, but she was giving that turn about as fair play.

[wannabeflashlantern]

Tornado, hell.

He swallowed. This was not going to be fun. He turned the centrifuge beam in on himself and set it to make him spin until the other tornado was counteracted.

He overshot it and a dust devil ran off for a few seconds.

And now he was disoriented. Horribly.

He fell down straight on his butt and hoped to God nothing bad happened while he was down.

[crazy_fast]

Hope all you want bright boy, it doesn't help. Scott would find himself in motion, a hand gripping the back of his suit and dragging him fast enough that he seemed to hover, faster still until he was rising like a human kite. Still faster and then they were both up, not true flight, not like some supers had, but a light sort of graceful glide that held them aloft with just the swiftly passing ground beneath them to indicate the speed at which they were really moving.