Earth 1
Ivy Town:
Barry Allen, Katar Hol, Ronnie Raymond and Martin Stein arrived at Terrance Hufflestodt’s lab in their civvies and knocked at the door, waiting patiently for a reply. “It’s a rare opportunity for me to be out of the Matrix and actually doing some leg work, eh Ronnie?”
“Sure thing, Professor.”
“Let’s keep this short, people,” stated Barry. “We need this guy back in New York right now, before the trail goes cold.”
“I know what’s at stake here, Mr. Allen.”
Katar loomed over the professor, and smiled a wicked smile. “Then please, Professor, if there is fighting, do run and hide.”
“Ignore him, Professor Stein, he has a strange sense of humour. And please, call me Barry.”
“Only if you call me Martin.” The moment of casual levity was curious for these four men, considering the circumstances. The world was in danger. Kid Flash was missing in the multiverse, and yet they were exchanging pleasantries.
Stein was about to knock on the door again when it wheezed open. A strange looking man glanced up at them, then back down. His phone was lodged between his head and shoulder, and he looked the four men up and down before replying to the baritone on the other line.
"Ehh. John Henry. I'm going to have to call you back. I think."
He hung up and looked confused. He was hunched over and malnourished, pieces of paper littering the floor filled to every corner with equations. On the desk was an empty bottle of Jack Daniels, and his white lab coat was dirty. It looked liked he hadn’t left his lab in months.
“Professor Hufflestodt!” Martin Stein was all smiles, as he took the Professor’s hand and shook it. “It’s a pleasure to meet you!”
“Do I know you?”
“Ah, uh, I’m Professor Martin Stein, I read your thesis on vibrational frequencies and their effect on mass…”
“
The Martin Stein?” The dishevelled scientist rearranged his glasses, and scratched his mucky beard, and then grinned. “Please, gentlemen, open the curtains, let the light in. My name is Terrance Hufflestodt, as you might know. May I ask your names?”
“This is Barry Allen, he’s a police scientist and friend of mine, and this is one of my many students, Ronald Raymond.”
“And the rather imposing chap behind you?”
Stein turned and looked at Katar, “Ah, this is my assistant.”
Katar grunted.
“And… why are you here?” asked Hufflestodt. He rubbed the bridge of his nose as the curtains were pulled open by Ronnie and Barry. Katar loomed by the doorway. “Is something the matter?”
“We’re investigating a crime,” blurted out Barry. “A super-powered teenager went missing in New York and the hero Firestorm, who was on hand to assist us at the scene, detected strange energy traces.”
“Strange as in?”
“Chronots*”
*(Editors Note: Golly, Chronots? Action Comics #6!) “You’re not serious.” Snapped Hufflestodt. “That’s purely theoretical science. There are no recorded instances of real chronots existing, only… the idea of them. My idea of them actually. The way…” Hufflestodt’s mind sparked to life, and he took a piece of chalk off the gutter of his chalkboard, and began writing equations. He paused, and turned back to the other men organised behind him. “Do you three know what chronots are?”
“No idea, chief,” replied Raymond.
“Time stabilizing energy. If you travel from one time frame to another, your body has evolved, hasn’t it? The overall process of evolution takes millions of years, but it’s going on constantly. Your body is adapting to the urban landscapes you live in, for instance. Alveoli have to shift to control the amount of environmental debris that gets into your lungs.”
“Like smoke?”
“Smoke, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, car exhausts, everything! Anyway, if you were to travel from one time frame to another, you’d have a different frequency of chronots… or so my thesis goes. But I’ve been laughed at for too long, I… I no longer research that type of fanciful science.”
“What if you stepped between worlds?” an idea sparked inside Barry Allen’s head. He remembered his daughter from another reality. He remembered Earth-2.
“What? Like going from Earth to Mars?”
“No, no, what if there were other worlds, separated by a vibrational frequency? Worlds exactly the same as ours but with different histories causing changes in events? All existing within their own reality?”
“That…” gawped Hufflestodt. “…Would be insane.”
Martin Stein smiled slightly. “You’re not telling us something, Terry.”
“Ah, well,” spluttered Hufflestodt, “the thing is… that’s what I’ve been working on.”
“What?”
“I built something that could detect vibrational frequencies. I focused it on a precise moment in reality, and it… it detected another world. Something hidden by some kind of veil, but if I had a device. I don’t know. Some kind of sphere. With a core of highly powerful radioactive matter, a device that could plot pathways through the vibrationally divided worlds… I could traverse the pathways of time and space and all of reality!”
“That sounds familiar,” noted Barry. “Can you come with us, Professor?”
“Of course I can!” Hufflestodt removed his white lab jacket, and hurried into one of the back rooms. “You can wait outside; I need to get some instruments.”
“Alright, we’ll be right outside,” nodded Stein. The foursome left the lab, and then looked at each other. “Ok, he’s an eccentric. They don’t breed them otherwise in Ivy Town. Don’t judge us.”
“We're friends with a vigilante dressed as a bat, and a princess originally made out of clay, Professor…” smiled Raymond. “I’m not going to judge anything about the lives we lead.” As he finished, a sound filled the air like a gun shot going off, and a flash of light left the windows of the lab. “Trouble!”
Barry was immediately in costume, and Ronnie and Stein immediately combined into Firestorm. Katar, meanwhile, tore off his shirt to reveal his Nth metal harness, and his wings folded out from his back and expanded outward.
They burst into the room, and were met by the sight of a group of men surrounding the smouldering body of Terrance. “We’ve got company!” shouted one of them, as they became aware of the heroes that had just arrived on the scene. Hawkman was upon them quickly, but swatted aside with ease. Major Force grinned. “I friggin’
hate Hawks.”
Hawkman grunted, leapt up, and shot directly at Major Force, who grabbed him by the arms and screamed an atomic storm straight at his masked face. Katar collapsed, leaving the team a man down.
“A Flash. Woop! Easily fixed.” Weather Wizard grinned, and his weather altering want sparked. The Flash was suddenly wracked with pain as a localised storm of ball lightning formed inside his body. As he screamed, and dropped to the floor, he suddenly found himself frozen to the spot. Weather Wizard turned to his comrade. “Chronos, it’s a Firestorm.”
“Easy.” Chronos pressed a button on his own gauntlet, and vanished for a moment, and then reappeared ready and armed with a shoulder mounted cannon. He fired a weapon as Firestorm, and the hero merely put up his hand to transform the energy into flower petals, but instead the blast hit him full on, the energy some how eluding his matter changing abilities. “Shifting energy particle canon. Like I said, easy.” Firestorm fell to the ground, his chest smoking.
“Ah, ah, ah…”
“And to finish,” Chronos threw a strange spider-like item at the hero, that attached itself to the nuclear powered hero’s chest.
The Flash watched as Ronnie Raymond and Martin Stein were viciously torn apart at the atomic seams. Both their bodies occuppied the same space for a fraction of a second before they were forcibly thrown apart, unconscious. In front of him Hufflestodt lay dead, his head a smouldering mess. A purple skinned man with a yellow ring that was still smoking stood over his body. The murderer, Barry surmised. The Flash tried to run, or vibrate his molecules, but his body wouldn’t react. He was frozen in time.
“Stand down, Sinestro, let me handle this.” Chronos called out.
Sinestro stepped back and approached the other villains. “This isn’t personal, Flash! We’ve been doing this for months now, and I always have to tell you all, it’s never personal. We’re just doing our job.
And if we didn’t we’d all be dead!” shrieked Chronos, as he appeared from nowhere, his costume buzzing with time-travel circuitry.
“What…” The Flash struggled to talk, his entire body frozen, his lips and teeth refusing to move. “Hrgh. What do you mean? Who are you?”
“We’re working for someone bigger than this entire world. This entire universe. Hey, he’s bigger than even that. And who are we? Oh, Flash, baby, we don’t have a
name. But we should, shouldn’t we? It’s only
right. Well you can call us the Time Rogues*. It’s fitting, after all. Rogues gathered from the multiverse, all brought together to hurt
you and your
like.”
“Time… Rogues?” Barry took a long hard breath, his lungs aching. “Stop… Talking in riddles…”
*Editor’s Note: See Countdown to Zero Hour and Booster Gold for the gathering of the Time Rogues!“He promised us universes. An entire universe to rule. Omnipotent power over an entire galaxy, can you imagine it?”
“Don’t tell him anything, Chronos.” another one of the group walked forward, clad in green and black. “You know what it’s like. You always do this. You always do it, and sometimes they get away, and we have to face their Justice League, their Judicial Squadron, or whatever stupid little group they have… and that’s always harder to do when you tell them the name of our employer.”
The figure approached the Flash, and punched him hard in the gut, causing the Flash to spit out of frozen gums. “Unlike what Chronos just told you, for me it
is personal. I hate you.”
“I… assure you… The feeling is… mutual… stranger.” Barry managed to gasp.
“Ha, wit.” The figure punched him again, then took something from his belt. “I always enjoy doing this to every Barry Allen. I enjoy it even more doing it to his family.”
“How… do you… know me…?”
“Because six dimensions that-a-way,” he motioned to his right, “You’re my dad.”
“Bart?”
“Thad. Thad Allen. But you can call me Inertia.” He punched Barry again and went to attach the collar to his neck.
Out of nowhere, a massive roar of engines filled the air and Chronos’ strange mechanical wrist band sparked as he flickered out of reality, only to reappear again bloodied, his face battered and bruised. “ARrrrgh!”
“What’s happening?” Inertia too vanished and reappeared, the engines still getting louder and louder, until it was like they were powering up right inside this room. The Flash was still frozen to the spot where he stood, but his eyes jerked from one corner of the room too another.
“Hrrrnnnt!”
Thad wiped blood from his mouth, and span around when his face suddenly came into contact with a massive golden surface that knocked him off his feet. “AH!” A hatch sprang open, and a man leapt out, blasting a ray of light that hit Chronos in the chest, causing him to explode out of the reality.
“Crap!” another blast of light, and Inertia burst out of reality too, his reflexes slowed by whatever had just happened to him when he vanished, allowing his attacker to get his shot in. Within seconds, surprise against them, Sinestro, Weather Wizard and Major Force were attacked, flickering in and out of reality. The rest of the team of villains blinked out, some returning more injured than when they left, and the Flash’s mysterious rescuer dispatched them too.
The Flash was suddenly able to move, and he glanced up as a man holstered his weapon and put out his hand. “My name is Rip Hunter. Come with me if you want to live.”
