Second Chances: Impulse

Chapter 26

After Carver was securely locked up at Argus, along with his lackeys, Impulse brought Lyla to their base, where Lisa Snart was still recovering from her lightning strike.

"She's secured?" Lyla asked.

"We have her in meta dampening cuffs and the bed is surrounded by a prototype forcefield Cyborg's been developing." Impulse assured her.

"So she can't get out." Lyla asked.

"I can't even phase in or out of it. It's a prototype of McCulloch Tech that will be on the open market once it's perfected." Impulse said, since he knew Lyla would be interested in that tech.

"Let me know when they've got the tech perfected." Lyla said, since this forcefield would be a game changer once it worked.

"You know I can hear every word you're saying right." Lisa said as she opened her eyes.

"Ms. Snart, my name is Lyla Michaels, director of Argus." Lyla said.

"Are you here to cart me off like the others?" Lisa asked.

"No, because like Impulse here, I can tell that you didn't actually want to do anything you did." Lyla said.

"I didn't have a choice. Literally. My powers were used against me." Lisa said.

"How so?" Lyla asked.

"Under my skin, my body is literally laced with gold, it makes me vulnerable to other metahumans who have similar powers. Which is how I wound up in this mess." Lisa said.

"You weren't in control of your body. Someone was pulling your strings. Do you know who?" Lyla asked.

"Yeah and I think that Argus should have a file on him. He calls himself Goldface. He was one of Black Hole's outside arm's dealers." Lisa said.

"Yeah, we've got a file on him alright. But we've never been able to track him down." Lyla said, remembering what Barry had told her about him in the old reality.

"So, what now?" Lisa asked.

"Now, we cut a deal. If you agree to help our investigation into Goldface and help us bring him down, we'll drop your charges, as long as you agree to remain in Keystone where we can monitor you." Lyla said

"Why would I believe that?" Lisa asked skeptically, since things like this didn't happen to Snarts.

"Because I believe that you're a good person who was forced to make do with a bad lot in life. I'm offering you a chance to finally have control of your life. Besides, it sounds like you won't truly be free until Goldface is behind bars." Lyla pointed out.

"If I give you the location of his blackmarket, you wipe my record clean so I can actually find a job. I mean I could live off my powers, since I can create as much gold as I want, but I don't want to let people know I can do that." Lisa said.

"Smart move. And you have a deal." Lyla said as Impulse lowered the shield and moved to undo Lisa's restraints.

"You can keep one of these cuffs on her, as an added precaution." Lyla said, since only one cuff was really needed to keep Lisa's powers dampened and to Impulse's surprise, Lisa just nodded, since honestly, keeping her powers dampened was probably the only way to keep Goldface from controlling her.

With the help of Lisa's intel and assistance from Team Impulse, Argus was able to capture Goldface and his associates, along with confiscating all their stolen products and shutting down his black market for good, which meant that Lisa was finally free and they'd dealt another blow to Black Hole by removing one of their biggest allies, especially since Jesse had cut off their access to McCulloch Technologies and without Goldface's black market, that made it even harder for Black Hole to get their hands on tech to keep them ahead. Needless to say, Jesse was very proud of how much work they'd gotten done to take down Carver, since after that bomb he'd dropped on her, she now refused to acknowledge him as her father, since he wasn't and she was very relieved about that.

However, that still left her another problem to solve. In addition to catching her uncle and saving her mother, now Jesse had to figure out who her birth father was, since her mom wasn't exactly able to give her that information since she hadn't appeared since that first time.

Anyways, after Goldface was taken down, Lyla honored her deal with Lisa and let her go with a clean slate, as long as she agreed to stay in Keystone unless it was for an Argus approved reason for right now and Dinah had given Lisa a job at her bar as a bartender and Lisa was more than happy for the work and Team Impulse was happy about it because it gave them a way to keep a close eye on her to make sure she didn't fall back into bad habits.

Speaking of Dinah, she had to admit, she'd found running a bar to be more enjoyable than being a cop, since being Silver Wolf gave her more than enough excitement and she didn't miss the future as much as she thought she would, though that might be because of her new relationship with Police Detective Eddie Thawne, though she still hadn't told him she was from the future or that once Vigilante, who was one of the only Black Hole threats unaccounted for, was caught, she'd likely have to go back, if only because that's where he needs to be imprisoned, though after that, she did plan on returning to this time period to stay for good.

Also, Kira had begun to discover that her cybernetics were doing more than just keeping her alive. As she and Jesse ran more scans on them, they realized the amount of her body that was robotic was slowly decreasing and they realized that her implants were actually healing her from the damage that box had done. Her head had already been fully healed, though Kira could still feel her cybernetics in her skull, but now her face looked like a normal face without her cloaking tech, which had been reprogrammed to only operate below her neck, though Kira had also learned to bring her cybernetics back to the outside of her body when she needed to.

And thanks to the fact that her organic body was actually growing back around cybernetics, Kira was able to start getting back out there romantically. In fact, the rest of her team had already noticed the way she looked at Lisa whenever she went to Dinah's bar.

Finally, both Wally and Jesse had gotten settled into their new careers, along with the new loft Jesse had bought after she'd taken control of McCulloch, since this one was even nicer than the one she'd had before Carver had booted her from the company in the first place and she'd taken McCulloch in a direction, trying to focus them away from weapons development, since while it would still be a division of her company, just because they made too much money from it right now to shut it down entirely, Jesse wanted to pursue other avenues in the tech field.

Meanwhile, with McCulloch's funding, Wally had opened up a community center in Keystone for at-risk teens like he'd been in the old reality and it was already making a difference.