Lost and Found

03. The Beast of San Fran

PART ONE: FAMILY VALUES

CHAPTER THREE: THE BEAST OF SAN FRAN

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FELICITY, STARLING CITY, USA

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Felicity sat on her couch, unable to shake the feeling that something big was going down. Oliver and Diggle had escorted her home and made sure she was locked safely inside before leaving. Despite that, she couldn't shake the image of her dismantled car sitting in the secure garage beneath Queen Consolidated. If this someone, or something had got in there unnoticed, who was to say they couldn't get into the actual building and to her? She bit her lip and then gave in to the one thing she told herself she wouldn't do ever when it came to these meta-humans. She Googled.

Her fingers hovered over her keyboard, the insertion line on her screen blinking away, waiting for her keystrokes. 'Large animals', she typed quickly hitting enter before realizing that had been the worst possible thing she could have entered. The search yielded a variety of elephant pictures, giraffes and rhinos and multiple sites claiming to list 'the top 10 largest animals in the world'. She quickly went back to the top of the screen and amended her search. 'Large pawed animals' which rendered more unsatisfactory results of lions and tigers and various other wildcats with paws not nearly large enough.

She sat and stared at the screen for a while, scraping her mind for a better description of what she had seen. 'Large claw marks', she typed in and then reread it, wondering if she was just wasting her time. She moved her mouse to hover over the pinned bookmark at the top of her browser that read 'cat videos' and then retracted it to the search bar. This would be her last attempt, she thought to herself. If this search didn't yield the results she was looking for she'd put it to rest and leave it to Dig and Oliver.

She clicked the search button and the page populated instantly. Her face sunk closer to the screen, the blue light reflecting off of her glasses as she did so. She clicked on the first picture, enlarging it on the screen and she let out a gasp. It looked nearly identical to the marks that graced the side of her own car. She immediately clicked the 'visit page' button looking for the name of whatever created the marks.

The page took her to a photographer's website that had labelled the picture with only one line. 'The beast of San Fransisco'. So immediately Felicity did the only rational thing one could do in search of an unnamed thing- she copied and pasted that statement into the search bar in hopes it would give her something else. 

As it turned out, the 'beast of San Fransisco' was a sort of underground legend within the city itself a few years back. According to various blog entries these marks had shown up all around the city until one day they just suddenly stopped and no new marks were ever recorded. Bloggers that had committed their entire online existence to chasing after this creature had fallen silent with no new sightings.

Felicity's interest was piqued as she felt she was on the very brink of something important. She continued to sift through blogs and webpages, immediately discrediting the ones with titles like 'da beast of san fran- these fools ain't kiddin'. She made special note of a few more reliable looking ones and started a new favourites folder, fully committing to the rabbit hole she was about to jump into.

One title in particular caught her attention. '2007 Murder Linked to the end of the San Fransisco beast', her blood ran cold as the word 'murder' jumped out at her, taunting her from her own computer screen. She clicked it and was immediately rewarded with a professional looking article including images.

She intently looked at the screen, staring at the picture that graced the very top of the article - the same picture as was on the photographer's website. She clicked to enlarge it, searching intently for some kind of clue in its depths. The picture was of a brick wall, covered in graffiti and probably located in a back alley somewhere. The only thing that set it apart from any other wall she had ever seen was the giant set of claw marks engraved into the brickwork.