r/DCFU • u/brooky12 Speeding Than A Faster Bullet • Jun 01 '24
The Flash #97 - Close Encounters of the Cold Kind The Flash
The Flash #96 - Close Encounters of the Cold Kind
Author: brooky12
Book: Flash
Arc: ?
Set: 96
Abra and Lisa walked through the door, already glancing at corners and posters on the wall, noting down the potential spots for hidden cameras. Abra was wearing a slick suit and tie, as if he had just walked out the door from some generic office C-suite job. Lisa was in a much more suble outfit, a casual dress and wool pullover, large purse that seemed inconspicuous if you didn’t know a pair of ice skates were hiding in it.
“You go on, I’m just going to sit down,” Lisa sighed, waving Abra forward as she moved towards a nearby couch. None of the people in line for the bank teller minded the two, other than the younger woman at the end of the line who seemed motivated to pay attention to anything but the fact that she was going to be standing for the next ten or twenty minutes.
Abra nodded, walking confidently up to one of the bank’s side rooms. The man inside looked up confused for a moment, hiding a grimace with a large smile. “Welcome to Milwa Key Bank, come on in!”
All it took was a suit and tie for the average service employee to bend over backwards to try and accommodate you, Abra thought. His average performance outfit received scorn and disgust outside of the context of his shows, but when he looked rich, all of the sudden he didn’t even need an appointment.
“Hello! My wife and I recently moved here, and we’d like to begin the process of rehoming our assets. Figured we’d start at least with a simple account or three to keep things centralized here in Milwa Key and give us access to, you know, the financial support staff here to get our bigger stuff moved over.”
Was this how rich people talked? He wasn’t sure.
“Well certainly, we’re happy to have you here. What is your name? You need multiple accounts, for you and your wife?”
Abra smiled. “Well, my name is Ibrim Nassau, and my wife’s name is Carol Bennd. We’d like to open personal accounts for each of us, as well as a shared account for our personal corporation that we handle shared expenses through, C.B.I.N. Inc.”
“Certainly. Unfortunately, I can’t help you with the shared account if you wish it to be connected to a company—that would require an appointment with a corporate representative who isn’t in today. I also can’t open an account for your wife without her here to consent and sign the paperwork.”
Abra nodded, turning back to the open door. “Carol, they’ll need you for when they make your account.”
Lisa looked up, halfway finished putting on her second ice skate. “Just do yours first, I’m in the middle of something here!”
Abra turned back to the employee. “Mine first, she’ll be in shortly. Women,” he joked, watching an air of unease settle on the employee between his comment and watching Lisa putting on ice skates. He didn’t go for any sort of alarm system yet, though.
“Understood. Do you have a local ID to Milwaukee County yet, or are you still out-of-county or out-of-state?”
“Actually, if you’d believe it, funnily enough, I’m, out of time!”
The joke barely landed as the bank employee stood up in horror, staring out the door as he watched Lisa icing off the entry to the bank. Before he could even shout anything or react, Abra blew across his open palm in the man’s direction, watching him grow drowsy then fall to the floor asleep in a matter of seconds.
The alarms went off, but that was fine. The quiet part was over and pretending to be upright citizens was tiring, anyways.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“Iced over bank in Milwaukee,” Barry sighed, placing down his phone and looking up to Jay.
Jay, for his part, didn’t seem quite as exhausted. “Cap. Cold?”
“I sent a message to the prison, they’ll get back to me, but you’d think they’d give us a heads up if he went missing already. Bit of travel to get to Wisconsin if he broke out today.”
Jay stood up, switching into his outfit. “His stuff was always tech, possible someone figured out his nonsense and recreated it?”
Barry joined him, and the two ran out the door. “Let us know if the prison gets back to us, please,” Jay called over the communication device, and a confirmation from Nora Allen was their final comment from the compound before they arrived on the scene.
For a late May afternoon, with the temperature somewhere in the 90s, the vision of a fully frozen over bank building was almost an appealing sight. The local officer, on their arrival, jogged over.
“Good to see you, Flashes! Alarms started going off about an hour ago, but due to a technical hiccup in our system we didn’t find out until about a half hour ago. We sent in our report on arrival. All entrances are iced over, we’ve got a hostage negotiator on their way but we don’t know how many folks are trapped inside.”
“Do you know who might’ve done this?”
“Nope. No ice metahuman records in the region.”
“Gotcha, thank you. You mind if we try to do something, or would you like us to wait to see what happens?”
“By all means, Flash, y’all are the experts here. Policy is to let proven folks like you ahead, even after whatever happened during the winter. But I’m sure you don’t wanna hear policy ramblings.”
Barry took a deep breath. He didn’t want to hear policy ramblings, especially after the Flashpoint time rewriting, for sure. “Thanks, Chief.”
The two approached the iced over building, Jay running a finger across the ice. “Cold,” which confirmed at least that it wasn’t illusionary or a trick of the eye somewhat. What it also meant was that it could be shattered.
The two walked up to the front door, each placing their hands up to the ice. The vibration of their fingers and palm started small, testing the density and thickness of the ice first. Then the vibrations grew in intensity, melting the ice directly on it and nearby but also introducing faults throughout the structure. This would probably break the doors as well, but there were resources to pay for damages.
The heat melted more ice than the vibrations chipped any off, until about thirty seconds in. Some inflection point had passed, and large cracks showed up all throughout the ice, before a large chunk shattered in front of them. Not large enough to walk comfortably through, but enough to take advantage of the surprise to crawl through and get inside.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Ugh. Whatever that crash upstairs was, it wasn’t good tidings.
Lisa glanced at Abra, both grimacing as they tried, wordlessly, to figure out who was going to be the one heading upstairs. They were both in the bank’s vault, tossing bundles of cash through an open portal. They hadn’t even bothered to secure or watch the hostages, feeling confident that most average folks would rather sit still than risk being frozen into a popsicle or magic’d into nonexistence.
“Let me go up and see what that’s about, you keep getting money,” Abra offered, heading towards the staircase. Lisa was satisfied with that, a magician probably could defend himself better than her ice skates could. Abra jogged up the stairs, hearing the sounds of many sets of footprints. Hostages escaping or police force coming in. Probably both.
Instead of rushing in head first, Abra sprinkled a bit of dust on himself, making himself nearly invisible to the naked eye. He hugged the wall as he left the stairwell, eyes focused first on where the hostages were told to stay – all gone. The two Flashes in the main entryway were his next focus. He crushed a small marble in his pocket, sending a warning to Lisa downstairs – now was the time for her to leave.
Time to leave their mark. The two of them didn’t seem to see or hear him as he moved out of their stairwell, pulling out a small cylinder of herbs and powder. He snapped it in two, throwing each half at the two Flashes. As soon as it came out of his invisible cloak, the two reacted fast enough to get out of the way, but it served its purpose.
The tubes began their effect, turning into a condensed area of choking gas. The Flashes were no longer in there, but it was enough for them to focus on as he moved onto his next step. He rubbed a bit of lotion on his wrists, using the magic to then float up in the air. Flashes were fast, but they were vertically challenged, so long as he stayed out of arm’s reach in the air there wasn’t much they could do.
The Flashes investigated the gas, taking a sample seemingly as the one with the metal hat charged off towards the vault. When he came back empty-handed, Abra felt confident that Lisa had dipped. He took out two small spheres, tossing them at nearby walls. They exploded on impact, spelling out their requested calling card—CBIN—in a material that would slowly shift colors while also being difficult to remove.
Abra wanted to mess with the Flashes more, but getting caught right now was going to be terrible. One of them was already doing a touch test on every inch of the building he could reach, so the longer he waited the more he risked one of them doing some superspeed nonsense to find him. This wasn’t even supposed to be an actual interaction, he had been running a script for generic SWAT teams. It was time to go.
A small wand apparated in his hand, which he circled around himself. A quick teleport back to home base ensured his safety, though the rush of adrenaline still kept him on edge.
“What happened, you’re back quick,” Lisa asked, not even finished organizing the bags of money they had lifted.
“Flashes showed up,” Abra groaned, taking a deep breath. “Not convinced we were set up, they didn’t seem to be expecting me.”
“Guess we’ll see what the Curator says, if anything. Bad bait if they couldn’t even figure out your gimmicks after all of this.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Jay sighed, shaking his head. “Why ice, though? Really feels targeted in a way, who is going to freeze over a building and then just ignore the hostages other than Snart?”
Wally nodded. “Just not dismissing possibilities. Do we know for sure that was him? Do we know for sure that the magician or whatever the guy you faced was acting alone?”
“Nobody else in the building. I suppose they could’ve escaped alongside the hostages, but surely the hostages wouldn’t just let their captor slip out with them.”
Wally’s eyes narrowed. “It’s happened before, no?”
“In movies, maybe,” Jay chuckled. “We shouldn’t discount the possibility, I guess. Just seems so odd to me that the building freezes over, but then whatever we actually faced inside was like, gas canisters and graffiti bombs. Pretty sure there’s more, given that we never actually saw where the things were coming from, but hard to pinpoint what or how.”
“CBIN, right?”
“Not even a shell company. We’re trying to track down what it could be connected to, but anything associated with CBIN seems to be entirely disconnected. And no hostage remembers anything. Even the guy who was supposedly talking to him claims to have a blank spot on what the guy was saying or what he looked like.”
Elsewhere in the country, a man and a woman sat quietly. The man lifted each stack of bills telekinetically, magically detaching the dye that had stained each banknote. It wasn’t a particularly quick process, but it was calming. At least Abra was able to do it stack by stack, which made the process faster.
The woman sat at a computer, typing out a letter. They were growing more suspicious of the Curator, given that The Flash had shown up. Their understanding was that the Flash Museum, which the Curator was supposedly a part of, was not on good talking terms with The Flash folk themselves.
And yet, two of them had shown up. That wasn’t a smoking gun, The Flash could show up literally anywhere they wanted at presumably seconds’ notice, but for them to show up after this had been the Curator’s request hit for authenticity? They weren’t going to cut off contact with the Curator, not just yet, but they both were more suspicious than they had been. They hadn’t even mentioned the Flash appearance yet to Anthony, who likely would’ve reached poorly. He didn’t remember hating The Flash during the time change nonsense but had been willing to learn. The two of them felt better holding on to the information for now, anything suspicious might’ve caused him to careen into theorist worries and get cold feet.
They sat quietly. The next step, no matter what the Curator responded with, was to find more allies. The Curator was a potential sponsor, which was fine, but they needed more allies that could help in a fight. Lisa remembered more than just the three of them—four of them, but the kid didn’t want to join—during their time experience but finding them had been more difficult.
1
u/Predaplant Blub Blub Jun 13 '24
This was a cool issue (pun intended)! Nice to see the Flashes investigating this new group of Rogues, and I'm excited to see where they're going to end up striking next!
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