December 11th 2013 - Central City
It was still early yet, but I managed to get here a bit earlier, so I could get to S.T.A.R. Labs first and keep an eye out for DeVoe. I just missed them after I'd done some digging in star city and was planning to visit their house first, but the train was late, and I didn't have a car, man I missed my jeep. As I waited at S.T.A.R. Labs for the ceremony to start, I felt a tap on my shoulder causing me to turn around only to see Barry standing there, the last place he should be.
"Mr Allen, don't you need to be in your lab?"
"I know, but I wanted to thank you and Felicity mentioned you were going to be here, something about a secret mission? Plus I wanted to thank you, I couldn't really tell iris how I felt, but I managed to write it down, I'm hoping to give it to her later."
I sighed because I wasn't sure if this would prevent Eddie Thawn from becoming romantically involved with Iris or not, but I had to make sure she got it later. After a brief goodbye, Barry headed back to his lab at the precinct, and a crowd was starting to form at the accelerator. It was then I noticed a black van pull off to a nearby parking lot and decided to go check it out. Two people, an older man and a woman, were tinkering with something inside. So I sat back and let them finish whatever they were working on.
Finally, the pair left, so I quickly picked the lock to the back and found what I was looking for, a weird metallic helmet with electrodes all along the inside. Let's put on our thinking caps folks, I absentmindedly thought to myself, bemused as I quickly got out of there, thinking cap in hand. Time passed, and I sat back watching the ceremony play out, Eobard wearing Harrison Well's face clearly knowing exactly what was going to happen, though he stopped glancing around the crowd as our eyes met. frak! I thought as I quickly looked away, praying I wasn't going to get a visit from the reverse flash later. I'd managed to slip out of there before things were over with when I was suddenly grabbed from behind.
"You!, You took my life's work!" I was in shock because Clifford DeVoe was actually pretty strong for an older academic, and I tried to break the hold using a judo technique before the thinking cap slipped out of the inside of my coat. I just managed to keep it away from him as he desperately tried to take it away.
"Mister DeVoe, you need to stop. It's not worth the cost to learn the secrets of everything, trust me on this!" he wouldn't listen, I continued to plead with him to stop fighting me, suddenly there was an intense pressure as a wall of energy was moving towards us, it nearly knocked me over before a bolt of lightning struck the helmet throwing me back away from it, the force as I hit the wall shattered something sharp in my left breast pocket. It was agonizing, like getting stabbed by dozens of tiny razors before suddenly everything felt like it was on fire, burning me from the inside out.
I screamed as the agonizing pain ripped through me in waves radiating out from where I'd been cut, quickly realizing that I'd forgotten to stash the Mirakuru vial, and I'd just been stabbed by it breaking. Even worse, I was tasting copper and was clearly bleeding, as I felt warm blood both on my chest and in my mouth coming up from my lungs as I coughed. I managed to see Mr DeVoe's Wife giving him chest compressions before everything began to grow dark.
I briefly woke up in what looked to be an ambulance, a breathing mask on my face. The Paramedic noted I was awake and mentioned my pulse was incredibly rapid at 180bpm before everything went dark again. The next time I woke up I was in an operating room, the doctors were panicking as they were removing the glass shards, but that feeling of drowning had stopped at least, though my mouth still tasted coppery. That was when another pulse of fire began flowing over me, rippling outward from deep inside my body, I screamed as the burning became agony again, and suddenly I felt all the hair on my body stand up like it was covered in static electricity before suddenly the operating room went dark and the machines went silent. Feeling exhausted again, I blacked out, not knowing what had just happened.
I finally woke up in what had to be a non-urgent care room, a curtain drawn for my privacy. I tried to get up, noting that I didn't feel any stiffness, cuts, or bruises anywhere, before sitting up fully and performing a self test. Fingers, toes, hands, arms, check, deep breath, count the first ten digits of pie, ok I was all here. No memory issues that I noticed, the semi-eidetic memory I'd trained while learning various skills was intact as I could recall details of what was going on. I quickly facepalmed as I realized that in my haste to stop DeVoe I'd forgotten to stash the vial of Mirakuru and gotten jabbed with it when the accelerator exploded, and we got zapped by that lightning bolt. Just what I needed, I'd been turned into an uber and who knows what else by the explosion, though it might have saved my life too given the healing factor. Gently reaching over and standing up I pulled the sensors off me and noted that my knee didn't hurt like it usually does either since that car hit my bike a decade ago, furthermore everything felt lighter too.
"Sir! You shouldn't be up and about?!" A nurse quickly came in after that, I guess I'd triggered some sort of alarm but was more in shock than anything as I was looking out the window rather than lying unconscious in bed. I turned to her voice and grinned, since I was in better shape than I had been in a long time.
"I'm not dead" I said softly, my throat pretty raw before I tried to clear it "water, need water" my raspy voice sounding and feeling like sandpaper. She quickly returned with a paper cup of water that I drank, remembering to drink it slowly, so my body didn't just reject it. I could tell just how dehydrated I was from the thick layer of mucus in the back of my throat, but it slowly cleared up as she got me a second then third cup. I stretched testing the limits of my body's movement before I decided to walk around, the room dark since it was clearly night outside stretching my legs as well before doing a few quick lunges. "I'm sorry for my abrupt movement but could you tell me where I am?"
She seemed to snap out of her shock at seeing a patient move from a presumed coma and quickly told me that I was in central city general hospital and had been taken there along with several other patients after the particle accelerator accident. "Two things then, first, I need my coat, second, could you tell me what room a mister Barry Allen is in?"
