September 26th - 2014

Things were starting to calm down a bit as I continued resting. I'd been out for a couple of days healing from the sudden strain put on my body battling my doppelgänger and was mostly just spending my off time tinkering with one thing or another keeping myself busy. When I wasn't helping Cisco narrow down the location of my home reality I was making upgrades to either my combat gear or servicing Durendal going over the various parts and ensuring everything was working smoothly. As I rolled out from under the Jeep I noticed Barry leaning against the entrance to the loading bay, seemingly bouncing between wanting to say something and trying to remain patient, an eternal struggle for a speedster I imagine.

"You know it's easier to just talk to me, I'd tell you if you were interrupting my concentration enough to be a problem."

"I uh, so I have a lot of questions, and I know you can't answer all of them because of how it'll mess up the timeline and stuff, but" I set my wrench down and began cleaning off the oil and grease from my hands and gave him my full attention.

"I actually don't think it matters at this point Barry, the timeline is completely different on earth two due to the long term effects of my doppelgänger, as well as on multiple earths, apparently. On top of that, I'm not from the future, so I'm not going to accidentally erase myself or something, and things have already changed drastically here too." I took a deep breath and stretched, getting ready to answer what could turn out to be a metric ton of questions.

"Okay, so I figured you'd know a lot about him and all since he's a version of you, but you also seemed to know way too much about being some kind of evil bad guy. I know you have all sort's of rules to be a better person, a better hero, but why would you have a list of rules to be a better villain as well?" so that was what this was about.

"Barry, I don't know if they have this on your earth, but back home there was a guy in the early to mid-nineties who created a list called the Overlord List. Effectively it looks at all of fiction, every slip up, every common mistake, every thing that allowed the hero to triumph in the end and how to avoid them just by sticking to what initially were one hundred rules every overlord should know. Mostly just good advice."

"Wait, so you weren't quoting from an actual super villain handbook?"

"I mean it's sort of like one, if it had been written by Leonard Snart or something" I got a weird look at the mention of captain cold, but he just didn't know Snart very well yet.

"Barry, Snart is a bad guy yes, but he's scarily competent, enjoys what he does, and most importantly, misunderstood, in time you may find him to be a very powerful ally because the one thing he hates most is being upstaged by idiots, and boy are most villains idiots. I was stupid enough to think I could pull a Spider-Man and distract him enough for him to slip up. He saw right through it and stayed on task instead, what does that tell you?"

"That I should focus on finding other ways to beat him?"

"Yes, but more importantly, you need to keep him on his toes, catch him off guard, use new tricks, get so fast he can't keep up no matter what he does. Snart is more than capable of being an overlord, easily conquering the world one piece at a time. Do you know why he doesn't? Because he enjoys being a thief, sees breaking into places as a challenge."

"Okay, but what does all this have to do with this overlord list thing?"

"Simple, that's the kind of person who created it. An entire community, actually. Obsessive, Nit picky, fans who spend way too much time focusing on one thing and are generally pretty smart about it. And Honestly? If I hadn't learned to become friends with people, settled down enough to find love for a while, learned to accept people who they are? I may very well have taken a similar path to my counterpart, the only difference? I realized the futility of trying to force the world to follow one path. Even if it's the perceived correct one."

"Tell you what, if I manage to make it back to my earth, I'll copy the list for you guys. Just don't go giving it to Snart or Lex Luthor or something. You don't need that kind of insanity." what I didn't realize was the list did in fact exist in this reality. It was just forgotten by time, since it'd never gained the popularity it did back home. I'd find out later after doing my usual dig through the ancient ruins of the early internet. Some things stay the same, while others change. Of course once Barry and Cisco got their hands on it, Thawn did too, and man I was praying this wouldn't bite me in the ass later.

Still, it felt weird to have them trying to be inconspicuous in watching me for a while. The idea that I might follow in my doppelgängers footsteps enough to keep them cautious when I started working on new projects in case I might suddenly go dark side. They weren't wrong, but the modified cold gun I'd come up with was to keep Thawn in check, not for use on Barry, and it had a biometric lock to prevent misuse. It was modified to steal speed force energy instead of all energy,

I knew Thawn wanted to siphon Barry's speed, so I allowed him to break in and study a fake version of the plans, just in case he was planning to use them for his own device. Things were moving rapidly now, and I needed to be ready. There was going to be a big showdown between the flash and reverse flash soon, and without zoom, I wasn't sure what was going to happen beyond that.