Lightning Girl vs. The Blur
2029 Esther
"Hey," Esther addressed the newly psycho'd-up Rani Chandra (courtesy of Dr Klein and his Project Crystal formula) in the hangar of the Valiant Mk.2, "Betcha can't beat me in a race, Fastest Woman Alive." And then, for added measure, she winked, and blasted away in a haze of blue colour, in a form that was neither purely electric nor purely human. Normally, Esther and water didn't mix, but at this velocity she tore across it, hardly touching the surface. Immediately, though, Rani was on her. Good. That was her plan. Rani had to be exhausted, and exhausting a speedster was something only Esther (perhaps out of everyone on the planet) was capable of doing in that moment. Because she was faster than Rani, she was more powerful; she had a bigger arsenal of abilities under her belt than Rani could ever dream of.
Esther tore across the Irish Sea at thousands of miles per hour, Rani right behind her the whole time. Esther was slowing down, for her sake. She underestimated her though. Esther's speed didn't rely on the surface she was on, she was hardly on a surface at all, she was more spectral than solid – but Rani's did. As soon as they hit the Scottish coast Rani was propelled even faster, and she hit Esther sideways-on like a pelt from a slingshot. Esther veered off course towards the Highlands, tripped on something inconsequential in one of the brief moments part of her form reassembled itself from the static cloud she had had become, and practically flew off the edge of a mountain and out of the sky. Electricity building around her as she tumbled, launched from the top of some anonymous fell, she looked like something Zeus himself had flung out of the heavens. When she hit the ground it was pulverised beneath her, and she felt the shockwave rush through her body. She groaned and rolled over as Rani appeared almost from nowhere and delivered a kick to her gut that sent her flying again, spinning in the air until she landed and rolled. The air was chilly and foggy around her.
"Is that all you've got, Lightning Girl?" Rani mocked. Esther staggered to her feet and tried to 'go into hyperspace' again, half-shimmering as she attempted to rush off. She was dazed, though, and Rani was quicker again, and ended up standing in front of her with a fist held out to catch her in her middle and knock her back to the ground. "Oh, come on. I wanted a fight! You're pathetic, Esther – and to think everyone is so impressed with you!" Rani whooshed away in one direction and a moment later was back, speeding towards her. A normal human wouldn't be able to perceive what Rani was going to do, but Esther wasn't normal, she saw Rani's balled-up fist ready to strike at a thousand miles an hour. It would take her head off if it hit her.
Esther held up her hand and emitted from her palm a fuzzy blurry-looking thing, sparky around the edges and curving around her protectively. Oswin called it a polarity field, Sally Sparrow called it a 'shock bubble.' The fact remained that it absorbed impacts, and Rani had never seen it before as it rippled in front of Esther, distorting everything it passed over like a pane of glass in a rainstorm. Rani's fist came for the shock bubble. Esther was knocked back by the force of it, but she didn't get hit directly. Instead, Rani's momentum flung her over the top of Esther and the now-dissolving forcefield, and she rocketed through the air right into the side of another mountain. Now Esther had enough time to get back to her feet properly and reaffirm herself.
It didn't take much longer for Rani to do the same thing, though, and in an instant the blur came straight for her, coming down the mountain even faster than she had moved so far. Esther, woozy from her crash-landing after being thrown from the sea, barely managed to flit out of the way. Rani stopped dead when she did and turned to find her again.
"What did you do?" she asked. 'Flitting' – another nickname Sally had given to her abilities. It was Sally who named all of them, really; flitting, hyperspeed, shock bubble, cable-jumping. It was very nearly teleportation – turning into living electricity and zipping at light-speed from one point to the next – but she couldn't go very far with it. Just a few metres, enough to get out of danger. Rani ran back at her and she flitted away again and staggered when she came out of it, just a blue flash in the air for a split-second.
"Told you I was faster," Esther said, catching her breath again. Rani narrowed her eyes, glowing bright silver and full of unjust fury, and paid attention to Esther's struggle to regain herself. She wasn't used to fighting – she wasn't actually a superhero, despite all the dumb nicknames Sally Sparrow gave to everything she did. She didn't so much as have a costume, or a MySpace profile (it really was a miracle that MySpace had made a comeback as the biggest social media in 2020.)
"You won't be much faster than me if you can't breathe," Rani said, smirking evilly, holding up a hand towards Esther, who frowned.
"What are you-" her words were caught in throat and she found herself unable to speak, and what ensued was probably the grossest few minutes of her entire life – even more than when she had been a decomposing corpse freshly dug out of the ground and all her fingernails had fallen off, her skin pulling apart like wet paper. She didn't really like to remember the sensation of nearly choking to death on her own rapidly-producing mucus, but she found herself gasping for air and coughing up streams of the stuff onto the grass.
"Ha! And they say nasalkinesis is a useless power! Well, we'll see about that, won't we? How would you like to drown in your own snot?" Well, Esther thought, I definitely wouldn't like to drown in my own snot, not one bit. One death was enough for her, and if she was going to ultimately perish, she'd rather have it be on her own terms. Not like this. The thought of the horrid jokes Sally would make in her eulogy (because who else would give it?) were enough of a motivator for Esther to fight against this and use another of her powers. One that Sally called a 'thunderbolt' – even if Esther did tell her that thunderbolt was technically incorrect.
When she fell to her knees, her head beginning to throb from her inability to breathe, her desperation summoned a bolt of lightning down from the sky. And in all its wrath it struck Rani Chandra dead-on and she was blasted from where she stood, losing her nasalkinetic hold on Esther. Esther sucked in a whole lungful of air and spat (she hated spitting, it was disgusting) the leftover phlegm onto the grass. That was the thing about electrocuting a speedster, though. It wasn't a good idea. With a bolt of lightning coursing through her Rani was just as fast as Esther ordinarily, and she left a trail of dark red sparks in the air for Esther to follow. And follow – though she was still very much struggling to breathe – Esther did.
She tracked the red trail at such a high speed the sparks hardly went to dissipate into the air at all, rushing through them and through Scotland and down roads and up hills, heading east. It was when Rani, forgetting herself, located the nearest set of train tracks, that Esther was able to catch her back up. Cable-jumping was how she generally got from point A to point B, syphoning herself through the wires and the conductive agents of the central grid, causing blips of blackouts on her journey nobody gave a second thought to. When Esther was in the train lines she was almost as fast as light, and she exploded out of the other end when the red sparks reached a train station.
Fizzing into corporeality Esther stared around, nobody noticing her appear like this because they were all too focused on what else was going on. And what was going on was Rani zipping through the huge room, across all the stations, people falling to the ground in her wake. Not that they knew it was Rani, all any of them saw was a glowing-red shape of horror taking them all down. Esther had to do something; Rani was taking the tiled floor to pieces through the sheer speed of her movement, let alone the damage she could do to these people going so fast.
Hating herself for adding to the carnage, but knowing that if she was going to have any chance of stopping Rani, she ran for her (hyperspeed style again) and leapt, crashing into Rani and taking her down, both of them rolling through the room as Esther shocked Rani with as much electricity as she could gather. Again, it didn't have the same effect on a speedster that it would have on anybody else, but Esther needed her to go faster, needed her muscles to be worn down quicker. It was a quick fix for an age of withdrawal afterwards. And then they hit terminal velocity – which didn't make any scientific sense in the slightest but was, yet again, one of Sally Sparrow's stupid nicknames Esther had just got used to using after so many years.
"You don't want to do this," Esther said. To Rani, any above-average speed was imperceptible. To both of them, in fact. She had to bring Rani up to her level, so that she could talk to her properly. Around them people stood, their images shifting and flickering in timespace, all of them frozen. Clearly, Rani had never moved quite this fast before. Esther was already having to drain energy out of every light fixture and mobile phone and power line nearby to maintain this state. Around Rani, bright red slivers of lightning crackled.
"You'll never win if you keep making me go faster," Rani jeered, silver eyes ablaze.
"This is as fast as you'll ever move," Esther assured her. In the atmosphere of Earth, they were both moving now just a smidgen under the speed of light, everybody around them probably only seeing flashes of colour where they stood in stasis. "I don't want to win – I want you to stop." She was getting tired already, but she couldn't do a whole lot of anything while exerting this much energy to keep them both stopped. The charge would run down inside Rani in a matter of seconds, anyway, and she'd go haring off again.
"And what if I don't want to? I feel more alive than I've ever felt!"
"Yeah, because you're high," Esther pointed out, "That's all that stuff is – just another narcotic." And maybe it was also a little because she was running on almost as much power at that moment as Esther was the rest of the time. Which was about two billion joules of electricity, in fact. Or so she was told by Oswin, but it was sort of impossible to get an accurate reading because, understandably so, electroencephalograms didn't react well with Esther Drummond. "Your brain isn't right – it's going to wear off."
"I don't want it to wear off!" Rani shouted at her, "I've never felt this powerful! I could kill everyone in this room in the blink of an eye."
"Why would you do that!? You've dedicated decades of your life to helping people! Helping everyone you could!"
"And maybe I'm sick of people persecuting Manifests! Sick of the government hunting us all as fugitives! Sick of that lot from the TARDIS thinking they're so high and mighty because they live in a spaceship! They can come and go, they haven't had to live in their mess for sixteen years!" she yelled.
"This drug was designed to make people hate Manifests even more! Don't prove Klein right, don't give him what he wants!" Esther argued.
"Klein's a Manifest too! He's working on the inside, he supports us. He wants to build a utopia – that was the real aim of Silverstorm," Rani said.
"What? Where do you get that idea? He's a lunatic who hates his own kind!"
Rani screamed in frustration and then marched right over to the nearest person, Esther almost getting woozy. The people around them had not moved one jot. Rani held up her hand and pointed her finger at his head.
"What would happen if I touched him at this speed? It would be like a sniper rifle, a fifty-calibre bullet," Rani said.
"Don't you dare."
"Like sinking my hand into custard. It'd go straight through his brain." Esther saw something that Rani didn't, though. As she tired from stasis, Rani did, too, but she didn't notice the effects of her speed-boost wearing off. The people around them began to twitch and tremble, slowly began to thaw out of this subspace they were in.
"Don't touch him, don't touch any of them," Esther said.
"And what are you going to do to stop me?" Rani questioned, "You who doesn't kill? Doesn't hurt? Ha! If you even tried to hurt me you'd just make me even stronger, even faster."
"Oh, you wanna go faster, then?" Esther said, "Then your wish is my command, slowpoke." Calling Rani a slowpoke bothered her more than anything else Esther had said so far, and in her anger she went to force her hand through that man's skull. Because she was right, at their speed he would be dead on impact.
It had only lasted for nanoseconds to the outside world, but the stasis ended and Rani couldn't sustain it with just herself. She was too slow now. Esther took all the electricity she could out of the train station and all the lights went out, leaving the place illuminated only by red and blue flashes of lightning in the midst of the crowd. Esther went for her, immediately going thousands and thousands of miles per hour. At those speeds she didn't need much strength at all to drag Rani Chandra along behind her, but it was only a few seconds before Rani phased free of her grip. In just moments they were already miles away from the train station, Esther trying to keep her away from built up areas.
"YOU KNOW I'M THE ONE YOU WANT!" Esther shouted, Rani hardly being able to hear her but staying close on her heels as they tore through the country, "C'MON! SHOW ME HOW FAST YOU CAN GO!" Rani might have shouted something back, but truthfully, she didn't know. She was too focused on trying to figure out where she was going, how fast she should run.
The world around them became a plane of colour, no shapes or places, just blurs of grey to green to blue to gold to white before Esther realised they were tearing across the planet, too fast to discern any landmarks at all, but she knew they were going over oceans and deserts, down rivers and highways and past villages and jungles. As long as they kept whizzing by power sources, though, Esther could leech her way through circumnavigation, she barely had to pause for breath. Rani, though? Rani didn't usually go this fast. Her limits were being pushed as Esther, in an effort to exhaust her, led her to the ends of the Earth and back again maybe a dozen times before Rani disappeared from Esther's heels when the scenery was all ivory and blue.
Esther stopped abruptly and staggered a few steps forwards from the residual force of how fast she had been travelling. She went back to her non-electrical form again for a moment, just long enough to see that Rani wasn't there, and to then shoot off back the way she had come to retrace her steps and find her, which she did. There was Rani, on her hands and knees, lying on a sheet of ice in what must be the Arctic.
"That's the thing about me," Esther said, her breath hanging in front of her. Neither of them were dressed for the cold – they would only be able to stay for minutes, at least. Maybe even less for Rani. "I'm not a speedster. My powers don't come from my ability to move."
"There's n-no elect-t-tricity out h-h-here," Rani stammered, her eyes still glowing vivid silver as Project Crystal continued to affect her.
"There's electricity everywhere – I can pull it out of the air, or down from the sky, if I have to," Esther said. Blue sparks flew around her and crackled; she used the lightning to keep her warm. Why not? If Rani was frozen, Rani couldn't run. Esther could see her flickering, sort of, trying to vibrate her molecules enough to heat up. But she was too tired. That was the trick all along, rile her up so that she would pursue Esther anywhere she led her, even to somewhere much colder than she could function in. "Project Crystal doesn't do a lot for your intelligence, obviously… See, this is why Killer Frost is such a big adversary to the Flash. Well, technically, in the comics Killer Frost's biggest rival is Firestorm, that show from years ago is kind of canonically inaccurate in that way… or, in I think the second season of Heroes where they lock the British speedster up in the freezer so that he can't kill them. He was not very fast at all though, I gotta say…" she was talking to fill up the time, for something to do as she waited.
Then it happened. Rani took a huge gasp of air like she'd been choking and when she opened her eyes they were no longer silver, they were back to brown, and she was very confused.
"Where is this?" she asked.
"Uh, the Arctic, sorry I had to bring you here," Esther said.
"What happened?"
"Okay – quick recap, but we really have to go because you're useless in this cold… we went to the Valiant, all ten of us, except Luke, and then it turned out that Dr Klein has been a Manifest this entire time! He can clone himself, I don't know what else he can do, and he used jet injectors to drug you, Adam Mitchell, Rose, Rory and Donna. I had to tire you out to make it wear off, that's what Project Crystal is. It makes Manifests frenzy, it'll create mass hysteria and will ensure the HCC are always needed and that Klein has the power to do whatever he wants, unrestricted."
"If he wiped out every Manifest except for himself, and then built an army in the process, he'd be the most powerful man in the world," Rani said, struggling to get to her feet, "We have some of the cure left. Come on. Let's go back there." She turned and tried to run off, but only blurred for a second and then collapsed again.
"I'll take us both," Esther said, "Back via the Sanctum. Hold on."