(Golden Age) One For Sorrow, Two For Joy

[The Flash]

Thirty Years Ago; Keystone City

When some people paced, they joked about wearing a hole in the floor. When Jay Garrick paced, that was a very real possibility. The space he'd selected for his pedestrian patrol was maybe four metres across - approximately 0.0025 miles, if you were one of those sensible people who tried to avoid mimicking the French and using metric wherever possible. The average human walked somewhere between two or three miles every hour; so for the fifteen minutes that Jay had been waiting, a normal human would have paced across that patch of sidewalk maybe three hundred times at most. The Flash on the other hand was capable of travelling well in excess of the speed of sound; and even while walking at a relatively sedentary pace by his standards, his boots had still crossed that exact same route a good few hundred times already.

He glanced down at his watch yet again, and grumbled something inaudible under his breath. It had been exactly seventeen seconds since the last time he'd felt compelled to check, and that felt like an eon ago.

He huffed out a sigh. Damn it, Pratt. What the hell is taking you so long?

[The Atom]

Some days it was harder to get going than others. Today was one of those difficult days where tearing himself out of his laboratory was impossible. Well. Almost impossible. He was due to meet Jay, and he knew that if he didn't make it, Garrick would coming looking for him.

Al was going to be late, no matter what route he took he realized. Shaking his head, he used a burst of his speed to get through Keystone City, keeping to alleys and darker, ill lit streets. Didn't take long to reach the appointed spot, and the discomfited look on Jay's face drew a smile to his own.

"Apologies are in order, my friend. Dare I ask how many times you checked your watch this time?" he asked lightly.

[The Flash]

"Too many," Jay shot back.

Normally Jay was a well-meaning and easy-going sort of guy; impatient yes, but always civil and often-times outright friendly, especially when it came to conversing with one of his fellow scientist-adventurers. There was something deeply reassuring about working with the likes of The Atom and Hourman: intellectuals like himself who were more than just lycra-bound muscles and gung-ho enthusiasm. Sure, some of their number had the analytical minds of detectives; but many of them actually were detectives, and that came with all sorts of attitude problems and morality baggage that frankly The Flash didn't have the time nor the inclination to deal with.

Today though, he was even more impatient and irritable than normal. For the last six days, a villain that Jay couldn't identify had been hitting targets across Keystone City. Worse, he'd been escaping so swiftly that even the fastest man alive couldn't seem to keep up with him. That in particular was the source of Jay's irritable mood: when extreme speed was your one power, an opponent who made it seem useless would have induced that in anyone.

He pulled out a device from his belt; a clunky and cobbled together contraption that looked like one of those personal walk-mans that people seemed to be wandering around with these days. They were an improvement over getoblasters to be sure, but it set an alarming precedent for the future: a world where everyone travelled around inside a tiny bubble of personal music and total ignorance was not one that Jay looked forward to living in.

The device blinked a few times; Jay jabbed a finger into a few cobbled on buttons, and eventually it spewed out a few hisses of static and snatches of police band. The tiny dictaphone cassette tape squeaked as it was played at high speed, Jay's faster-than-possible hearing filtering through the high frequency drone, listening to everything reported in the last ten minutes in under a second. Nothing. That was a relief; and also wasn't.

His eyes turned to Al. "I need your help," he admitted. "And not just as The Atom. This latest villain that is plaguing Keystone City is -" He winced. "- too fast for me. And that shouldn't even be possible. Something else is going on here; and I need Albert Pratt to help me with it."

The contraption was stashed back in his belt. "In all your years of crimefighting, have you ever encountered someone who can -" He winced, loathed to use such science fiction terminology. "- teleport?"