Kid Flash warily approached the three sided full length mirror in his and Jinx's room. He stepped so close that his nose was almost touching the glass. He tried to look deep into his own eyes.

What the hell are you doing, Zippy?

"I'm looking for you," he muttered, then sighed at the ridiculousness of the situation. He shook his head before resuming staring into his own irises, tilting his head slightly to one side then the other. Nothing. This is crazy. What's next, I ask for an exoricsm?

Yo mama sews socks that smell!

"What?!?!?! What'd you say?" pleaded Kid Flash to the voice in his head. Now it was sounding demonic. Oh god.

Calm down Zippy. I was just fuckin' with ya. Haven't you seen that old SNL clip on youtube?

Just as Kid Flash was about to stop looking, he thought, for an instant, that he saw a face, a different face in his own iris. A young guy, handsome, with dark hair and light brown eyes. What the hell's happening? Is there really someone else inside my . . my head?

Sure looks that way, doesn't it?

"How-how do you know what I'm thinking?!" Kid Flash demanded of the empty room, glancing upward left and right.

Where do you think I am, in the plaster of the ceiling or something? You'd be better off going back to looking in the mirror. I'm not interested in looking at the ceiling.

"Look, I don't know what kind of spirit you are but, please, just . . get out of me. Leave me. Be-Begone!" he said with a theatrical wave of his arm.

Believe me, I'd love to, Zippy. I'm not in control of this ride. I was thinking of spending the evening on the Champs Elysee with a certain ballerina, not stuck inside some dude's head.

"You sound familiar," said Kid Flash speaking aloud again to an empty room.

There's a good reason for that. But before we go into that, I've gotta say, this suit feels ridiculously tight. What are you, the last survivor of disco or something?

Kid Flash looked self-consciously down at his skin tight red and yellow uniform and at his reflection in the mirror. "What? I'm a Flash. We have to wear tight uniforms. It's to eliminate friction," he explained then sighed. "What am I doing? Wait, did you say 'feels'? Did you say, my Kid Flash suit feels ridiculously tight?"

That's right, Zippy.

"How would you know?"

Uh . . because whatever you did to me's left me feeling everything you feel, seeing everything you see cetera cetera, except I CAN'T CONTROL ANYTHING!

"Well, why should you be able to control my body?" asked Kid Flash aloud and running red gloved hands down his sides, reinforcing the words "my body".

Well, just what the flying fuck happened to MY body?!

"How should I know? I was just being the guinea pig used to test our new transporter system, the League's old one. Then, after the Paris test I start hearing you in my head."

Well, which Spiff Spandex was running the damn machine?

"Beast Boy."

Oh.

Oh. Yeah.

Kid Flash sighed and tried to suppress a scowl. Beast Boy. He sighed again. Don't act like Dick about this, he reminded himself. Don't act like Dick.

And with that, he sprinted off, vibrating through the door of his own room, fifty feet down the hall to Beast Boy's room and then through the door of Beast Boy's room. The green teen was lying on his bed reading one of the Twilight books.

"Oh god, Gar. Really?" said Kid Flash suddenly materializing in front of his teammate.

Pathetic, seconded the voice in his head.

Beast first tried to hide the book then barked, "You're supposed to knock, speedster!"

"Twilight, Gar? Those books are total shit, total steaming donkey dumps, Gar."

"Chicks dig 'em, Wally!"

Wally?! Hahaha! Wally!?

Beast Boy saw Kid Flash make an odd face. "They're incredibly poorly written Gar. You're so much smarter than that. I thought you were gonna try those Elmore Leonard books and those old Len Deighton spy things Jinx recommended."

"I am!" protested the green teen now sitting up on the edge of his bed. "I just . . . well, all these girls outside the last fashion show where I modeled had these t-shirts and things about this Twilight thing. I thought I should check it out. It . . it is kind of dumb. The chick just goes on and on about how hot this guy is and I'm like, okay, I got that. Move on. And she's like so, I don't know . . "

Passive

"Passive?" suggested Kid Flash echoing the voice in his head.

"Yeah! Exactly. It's so weird, to read about a girl being like that with, you know, Raven and Jinx and Starfire and Wonder Girl and Pantha around us."

"Just," Kid Flash sighed. "Just . . find yourself a smarter girl than one caught up in that Twilight shit, Gar. Even the girls who like that are gonna look back in a year or two and think of it as this childish phase they went through."

You're just saying that cuz you don't sparkle . . Wally!

Again, Beast Boy saw Kid Flash make an odd face, out of nowhere. Beast Boy frowned back. What?

"Gar, the reason I came here is that something went wrong with the last transport, the one from Paris."

"What? You look like the same old Wally to me."

Hahaha . . . Wally.

Another odd face. "Gar, my body's fine. But there's . . there's someone else in my head."

"What?"

"Did you zap someone through with me?"

Someone really cool?

Odd face.

"Why do you keep doing that?"

"Doing what?"

"Making faces like that."

"Because the guy you zapped into my head keeps saying things to me!"

Beast Boy's eyes went big. "Oh my god. Are you sure it's a guy? Maybe it's a fly! Maybe there was a fly in the transporter tube, just like in that movie, The Fly, and it spliced your genes with fly genes and you're gonna turn into a fly! You're gonna turn into a fly, Wally!"

The changeling leaped to his feat and then turned into a fly, buzzing around Kid Flash before finally turning back into his human self, frantically shaking his head back and forth. "I hate that morph!"

"I'm not turning into a fly, Gar!" Kid Flash shouted, giving his teammate a slap on the shoulder. "But I've got someone else's consciousness in my head along with mine," he said tapping the decorative wing on one side of his head. You-you messed up the transport somehow."

Beast Boy's expression crashed into defensive embarassment. "How-how do you know it was my fault?"

"Gar. My job was just to stand there. I think I did my part."

Beast Boy's posture was getting worse by the second and his ears were sprouting up into full jackass ears. "Oh god. Dick'll never let me hear the end of this. You can't be trusted, Garfield! You can't be relied on, Garfield! You can't . . ! Oh god."

He slumped down onto his bed but Kid Flash pulled him back up to his feet.

"Come on, Gar! Pull yourself together! You're the one who led the comeback against the Brotherhood of Evil."

What were the odds?

Odd face.

"Gar. I won't tell Dick about this. But you've gotta find out what happened and how things went wrong. You were the one at the controls."

Beast Boy nodded. He stood up straighter. His ears shrank back down from full jackass size to normal length hidden under his now collar length long hair.

"There were some messages that seemed . . different," he said softly.

"Messages?"

"The transporter . . when you go through the process, it flashes all these messages at you faster than anyone could possible read, I mean, what's the point in displaying 'em. And . . "

Kid Flash stared at him.

"Fine! You could read 'em but no one else. You see, like, a hundred lines of message text go by and it's almost like you get used to a shape moving across the screen, a bunch of long lines then a few short ones, then some more long ones, than the actual text. It was . . different on that last one. The shapes were different."

"So . . something different happened."

"Yeah. Um, do you know who it is that got, um, totally accidentally zapped into your head?"

"Who are you?" demanded Kid Flash, aloud. "Who are you?"

The voice in his head snickered. I'm Red X, Zippy.

Kid Flash closed his eyes as he sighed. His face dropped into one hand. "It's Red X, Gar," he mumbled. "Red X."

Beast Boy's ears shot up out of his long hair to full jackass size. "Well, where's his body?"

"That's a good question. Right now, he's sharing mine. And I don't like it."

How do you think I feel, Zippy? I was an owner and now I rent.

Kid Flash sighed. "You have to do this, Gar. We can't let Red X learn all the secrets of transporter technology. You have to figure out what went wrong. Anything I see, Red X sees, so we don't want to let him anywhere near the operations manual or the technical specs of the transporter. It's gotta be you, Gar."

"You promise you won't tell Dick?"

"I promise. But, um, where's Cy?"

"Some kind of robotics expo and seminar in Steel City. He'll be back late tomorrow."

Kid Flash stepped forward and wrapped an arm around Beast Boy's shoulders. "You can do this, Gar. You're a smart guy. Just figure out what we have to do to fix this."

Jesus, I thought you were gonna squeeze his green ass, too. Are you guys always this homoerotic?

"Shut up! We're not . . ! I mean . . "

"Wally?" Beast Boy looked distressed.

Kid Flash shook his head. "Just . . just Red X saying shit, Gar. Please figure out what happened. I don't want Dick to have to know that I have Red X inside me. He'll throw one of his little bat fits."

Gar nodded resolutely as Kid Flash disappeared from his room, a red and yellow blur that went straight into his door and out. The changeling took a couple breaths that horrible feeling of humiliation, of being the stupid little fuckup was still somewhere there in the background. But Wally was so much easier to work with than Dick, always 'you're smarter than that, Gar' instead of 'do you ever not screw up?' or all that shit Dick always says. He didn't make you feel like a jackass because you couldn't do something just the way he would.

Gar gathered himself with a sigh and marched through the hallway and up the stairs to 14 where the transporter had been installed. There, on top of the console was the inch thick operations manual. Gar leafed through it for several minutes before finally finding a reference to "Troubleshooting". It refered him to the "Technical Manual". Gar flipped over the soft bound book. What's this? Oh. Operations Manual. Well, where's the . . ?

He looked around to the left side of the machine, the height, depth and width of three ovens in a normal kitchen. Nothing. He looked around to the right side. Nothing. Hmm. There weren't any drawers to pull out of the damn thing. There weren't any shelves above it. Where could . . oh no!

Beast Boy spun around and saw 4 immense, foot thick three ring bound books on a table in a corner of the room. He approached them with a whimper as he saw the titles on them. Technical Manual Volume 1. Technical Manual Volume 2. Technical Manual Volume 3. Technical Manual Volume 4.

His ears morphed into those of a jackass and shot up through his stylishly coiffed long hair. But as intimidated as he was, the green teen pulled up a chair and gave it his best effort. He read 400 pages that night, getting a fifth of the way through the first manual. But the terminology was incredibly dense, a combination of quantum mechanics, special relativity and advanced circuitry plus a dash of J'onn J'onnz's martian science. The more Gar read, the less he felt he knew, the more humiliated he felt. After a hundred pages, he was scratching incessantly at his lower back till finally a jackass tail grew there and slipped out the velcro between his uniform top and bottom. After 200 pages, his face started slowly stretching outward, getting more and more like the shape of a donkey's. And he stopped at 400 pages both due to mental exhaustion and because his hands had gradually morphed into cloven hoofs, making the pages hard to turn. Gar jumped at the sight of his reflection in the night time window beside the table. Green jackass face with big bristly ears and a tail from over his shoulder.

"Aaaah!"

He shook his head, like a dog shaking water off himself and he was back to his normal form. Those jackass elements happened less and less to him now, but if he was seriously embarassed, especially for an extended period of time, he found himself subconsciously changing forms bit by bit. He trudged back to his room muttering to himself. "Hope Wally's doin' okay controlling Red X."

He wasn't.