Chapter 28: In a Flash (Out of Time – Part 1)
Disclaimer: All things Supergirl/Superman and Flash belong to DC. No infringement is intended.
Kara was engaging in one of her favorite pastimes, simply floating above the endless fields of Kansas. It always took her back to those first few years here on Earth, where everything had been strange and foreign. For someone who had grown up under a red sun, everything on Earth had seemed slightly off in color. The sky, the ground, the plants, everything lacked that certain reddish tint she had been accustomed to for so long. The air had a different smell, the gravity was lower, everything was just a tiny bit off. Not entirely different, but noticeably different. It had taken her quite some time to get used to it.
One thing that she had quickly fallen in love with, though, were the endless plains of her new home. Krypton had been a much older world, tectonically active for quite some time, and with a different fauna. Nothing similar had existed on Krypton. And once she finally got her flying powers under control, she had spent hours just floating with the yellow sun above her and the endless fields below. It calmed her.
Life seemed to become ever more stressful. Clark was growing into his role as a superhero, but was still a teenager who needed guidance and supervision. Finding the right balance between letting him run loose and stifling him was not an easy feat and had led to more than one blowup between them. Her plans for the future of Earth were also progressing nicely, which meant more work for her still. She felt better about it since she had started to bring the rest of the League into it, but that, too, meant more work, as discussing things always took longer than simply deciding them unilaterally.
And, of course, there was that never-ceasing deluge of catastrophes, super villains, armed conflicts, and run-of-the-mill crime. All of which combined meant that she had to actively force herself to take time off now and then, because passively waiting for a time where there was nothing going on was an exercise in futility.
She remembered telling Perry White that, if one could fly, one flew as often as possible. Which was entirely true. There were few things in life better than flying. But while a lot of her work involved flying, it was usually just a matter of getting from A to B in the shortest amount of time possible. She seldom got to just enjoy it. Then her com crackled in her ear.
"Kara, can you hear me?"
Oh well, she thought. All of eight minutes of relaxation time. Almost a record these days.
"I hear you, J'Onn," she said, activating her com. "What's up?"
"I am not certain, to be honest," he replied. "The Watch Tower's sensor array picked up some strange readings in your general vicinity."
Kara stopped in mid-air, her gaze sweeping around, looking for any sign of trouble. "What kind of readings?"
"Apparently there are some fluctuations in the gravitational field. Somewhat similar to the pulse just before a space ship emerges from hyperspace, but on an entirely different wavelength. The computer cannot determine a cause."
Kara's eyes were still roaming, but so far she was coming up empty. "How close am I to these disturbances?"
"It's difficult to say," J'Onn told her. "They..."
His voice suddenly cut off. No static, nothing, just gone. "J'Onn? J'Onn, can you hear me?"
"... are some fluctuations in the gravitational field," J'Onn's voice suddenly returned. "Somewhat similar to the pulse just before a space ship emerges from hyperspace, but..."
"... on an entirely different wavelength," she interrupted him. "J'Onn, you already told me that!"
There was confused silence on the other end, though she could still hear the background hum of the Watch Tower. "I am quite certain that I did not, Kara," J'Onn said. "You interrupted me mid-sentence."
Kara frowned. "Your voice suddenly cut off and after a few seconds you began telling me the same thing you had told me a few seconds earlier."
Suddenly the entire world around her seemed to ripple for a moment, as if the sky was a pond into which someone had thrown a pebble. Kara almost became dizzy, her senses went haywire, but a moment later everything was back to normal.
"What the...?" she began.
"Kara, can you hear me?" J'Onn asked.
"Yes, did you get that, too?"
"Get what? I was just calling you to tell you about some strange readings the Watch Tower's sensors picked up in your general vicinity."
Okay, this was getting freaky. "J'Onn, we already had this conversation. You were about to tell me about some fluctuations in the gravitational field, right?"
The Martian paused, then sounded quite troubled. "Indeed. If you are correct, than we might be experiencing some kind of temporal dilation effect."
"Possible," Kara agreed. "Strong gravity pulses can warp time. A few seconds ago everything around me seemed to ripple and it apparently set the clock of our conversation back about twenty seconds or so."
"I will inform the rest of the team," J'Onn said, "hopefully before..." His voice cut off again.
"Great, here we go again!" Kara muttered.
The world seemed to ripple once again, only this time it was strong enough to shatter her concentration and she dropped to the ground, unceremoniously landing on her butt. Everything flickered, for a moment it seemed as if she was looking at a photo negative of the world, before everything returned to normal once again.
"Kara, can you hear me?"
"J'Onn, I don't have a lot of time," she yelled, briefly frowning at the choice of words. "I'm experiencing some kind of time distortion. You told me about gravity fluctuations three times already before everything rewound. The effect seems to get stronger. Call the rest of the team, quickly!"
"On it, Superwoman," J'Onn replied.
Kara shot into the air, looking to gain some height. She was hoping to move out of the range of whatever phenomenon was apparently looping time around her or at least spot its source if she couldn't. Her super senses swept the world around her, but there was nothing to be found. A moment later, though, there was yet another ripple and it took all her strength not to plummet again.
"Kara, can you hear me?"
"J'Onn, I..."
"Kara, can you hear me?"
"Kara, can you hear…"
"Kara, can you …"
"Kara, can …"
"Kara, …"
Her com ceased working and Kara found herself once again floating just a few feet above the corn fields, back where she had been a minute or so ago. The world around her was still. Entirely still. There was no wind, no sound, no buzzing insects, nothing. Everything seemed frozen. Everything but her.
"What in Rao's name is going on here?" she muttered. Even her own voice sounded flat, as if the sound refused to travel more than a few inches past her mouth.
Suddenly there was a loud crack and a huge flash of white light, bright enough to hurt. Kara flinched back, her enhanced senses almost overloading. The light seemed to penetrate right past her lids and stab into her brain. It only lasted a second or so, but for some reason it felt much longer.
When she managed to open her eyes again, she was no longer alone. Someone else was standing in the frozen field with her. She tried to focus on him, but it was almost impossible. It seemed to be a man, but his shape blurred, as if he was moving at incredible speed despite standing still. He was wearing a form fitting red suit, best she could tell, and a mask that covered the upper half of his head. There was a symbol emblazoned on his chest, but she couldn't really make it out due to the blurring. It might have been a lightning bolt.
"Kara?" the blur asked, the voice seeming to echo all around her, as if spoken by a dozen different voices that were almost but not quite synchronized. "Did I make it? Did it work?"
"Who are you?" she asked, trying to keep her eyes on the figure despite it causing her almost physical pain to look at him. "How do you know my name?"
"Ah, right", the shape replied. "Too early for that, sorry. This gets terribly confusing!"
He held out a hand, even as his image seemed to gain sharpness. He was still indistinct, almost painfully so, but whatever effect made him near-impossible to look at seemed to be slowing down somewhat.
"I'm the Flash," he introduced himself. "We haven't met... well, yet. Or we have, actually, but only from my perspective, not yours. Like I said, confusing. It's really complicated. Hurts to think about it."
She gazed wearily at his outstretched hand, not sure it was a good idea to take it. "You are not making sense," she said instead.
"Yeah, I guess not," he said, looking chagrined and withdrawing his hand. "Wish we had more time to chat and all, but I need to time this just right or, you know, really bad stuff happening to the space/time continuum and all."
"No, I don't know," she said, getting rather annoyed by now. "What are you talking about? When did we supposedly meet and space/time continuum? Are you to blame for this weird time dilation effect?"
Flash, if that was his name, started to say something, but then something resembling a futuristic-looking watch on his wrist started beeping.
"Okay, I thought I'd have more time to explain things, but we're out of time. Because it's time! Sorry, I really do know other words than 'time', I promise. Anyway, hold on tight!"
She started to say something, but never had the chance. The Flash moved, faster than she had ever seen anything but herself move, and she was suddenly caught like a butterfly in a hurricane. He ran, little more than a red blur with lightning crackling around his form, and created so powerful a wake that she was simply pulled along. No, it was more than that, she realized a second later. She could almost feel the energy he generated, a kind of field that formed around him and pulled her along as if she were caught in a net.
"Stop that immediately," she yelled, though she doubted he heard her. They were already moving way faster than sound, the words fading out far behind her. She tried to stop her forward momentum, her own power of flight pushing against the strange force the Flash generated, but it was for naught. They were moving so fast that they should have already lost contact with the ground and shot off into space, but somehow the Flash maintained his footing. She saw cities flash by, mountains, oceans, and she still couldn't break free.
"Really sorry about that, by the way," she barely heard his words, they were whizzing past her almost too quickly to comprehend. "Just one of those things that need to happen! You'll understand eventually, I promise! Oh, NOW I get it! Ha! You really do carry a grudge, don't you?"
She wanted to scream in frustration, but the air was stolen from her lungs by the acceleration. She finally had enough and activated her heat vision, looking to clip her annoying captor in the leg to make them slow down. Instead, though, she watched in amazement as the beams emerging from her eyes seemed to crawl forward in slow motion. How was that... they would have to be moving almost at the speed of light.
"Now this is going to be pretty rough," the Flash said, suddenly by her side instead of running in front of her. The world around them was lost in swirls of color and blurred shapes, she couldn't even tell whether they were still on Earth. "Again, sorry, but this is your stop!"
With those ominous words, his hand was on her back and then he PUSHED! The world shattered around her.
When she finally regained her senses, she was lying face down in a field. Slowly lifting herself up on her hands, she spit out a bit of dirt and saw that she was at the end of a trench that something, probably her, had dug deep into the earth.
"I so love crashing to Earth at insane speed," she muttered, brushing dirt off her shoulders and shaking it out of her hair. Looking around, there was no trace of the mysterious Flash. Nor did this look like Kansas.
"Not in Kansas anymore, ha!" she chuckled with gallows humor. "J'Onn? Can you hear me? Watch Tower, come in!"
She was not really surprised at the silence. Given the insane speeds she had just travelled, odds were she was very, very far away from where she had started. And that wasn't even factoring in the time disturbances and the Flash's strange talk about the space/time continuum.
"I am so going to kick this guy's ass when I next see him" she grumbled, "and I don't care from whose perspective."
Going by her surroundings, she was still somewhere on Earth. The gravity was right, the sun light had the same color, and the fauna looked sufficiently terrestrial, too. The air smelled ALMOST the same, though somewhat cleaner. Allowing her gaze to extend farther outward, she saw that she was near some coast, the ocean stretching out beyond it.
Launching herself into the air, she tried to figure out where on Earth she was. Once she had gained sufficient height, it was easy to make out the shape of the continents. She had apparently crashed in Europe, somewhere near Greece. The troubling thing was, though, that there was a distinct lack of large cities. Or highways. Or train lines. Or any other traces of modern civilization.
"That jerk did send me through time," she concluded, quite angrily, then stopped to think. "And apparently he got me talking to myself, too. I am so going to kick his ass for that as well!"
Okay, next step was to figure out WHEN she was, apparently. Going by the distinct lack of any visible technology and the rather pristine state of nature, odds were that she was at least several centuries in the past. What human dwellings she could see were rather primitive in nature, the pinnacle of technology seemed to be the wheel. She doubted anyone had a calendar she was familiar with just lying around.
"He said that this was my stop," she muttered, trying to make sense of everything. "He said that something needed to happen. That doesn't sound like he would just drop me in a completely unremarkable period of history."
She allowed her gaze to drift further and further, looking for anything unusual or out of place. Well, unusual and out of place in a time period she was not very familiar with. At the same time she was busy thinking about how she might get home again. The only method she could think of off the top of her head was flight at relativistic speed, which would be horribly imprecise at best. She could easily overshoot her target era. It was something she would only do as a last resort.
Before she could think of any other ways, though, her vision finally caught something that qualified as unusual and out of place.
"Alien invaders in ancient Greece?"
Lacking any better alternatives, she decided to investigate.
End Chapter 28
Author's Note: What better way to introduce the Flash than at the start of a time travel story, eh? As to which Flash we are talking about here, you'll just have to wait and see. Bonus points to whomever can figure out where and when our heroine ended up. Some rather vague clues were given in an earlier chapter.
Side note: Kara's lamentation about never getting to enjoy her flying power properly is a homage to the excellent Astro City comic series from Kurt Busiek and his Superman stand-in Samaritan.
