Vera Pyra (The Flash) (Book One)

Chapter 22__Grodd Lives

Wells/The Reverse-Flash had taken Eddie last night.

And now we had to find him.

Cisco was in STAR Labs, working on the cameras when I walked in. "Hey."

"Hey," I told him. "You planning on keeping all those cameras Wells used to spy on us? Kind of creepy, don't you think?"

"First rule of mechanical engineering, Vera," Cisco told me. "Never waste good tech." I chuckled. The computer beeped. Cisco rolled his chair over to see what was wrong. "Central City Gold Reserve's under attack."

"Gold?" I repeated. "I'll be right back."

~

As Pyra, I used fire to fly to the Gold Reserve, seeing a man in a black suit and mask firing an automatic gun at the watchmen, landing on the ground in front of them. "You picked a bad day for this, pal." My head felt like as if my brain burst into flames, wincing in pain, groaning, seeing flashes that I could barely tell apart, falling to my knees, holding my head in pain. I felt nothing but fear, unable to move. The man in the suit and mask fell to his knees, holding his head. I couldn't tell if he was afraid or not. We both recovered after a moment of the searing pain. He stood, running away, leaving. I looked up painfully. "What the hell was that?"

~

I sat in STAR Labs, still in my Pyra suit.

Caitlin was checking my vitals. "Your eye movement is normal. No signs of neurological damage."

"You think the thief might have been a metahuman who put the whammy on you or something?" Barry asked.

"I don't know," I told them. "When Rainbow Raider got in my head, all I felt was anger, but this was not that. This was... just overwhelming fear."

Cisco hacked into the security footage. "Looks like when you went down, the thief got disoriented, too."

"Maybe you both got whammied," Barry told me.

Iris walked in. "Then you know how it feels." We looked at her in shock, busted. Iris walked closer, looking at me. "Hi, Vera." She looked over my suit. "Or should I say Pyra?" She looked at Barry. "And I know you're the Flash, Barry."

I looked down.

Barry didn't know how to react.

~

Barry and Iris went to talk alone in the training room.

Caitlin, Cisco and I were in the Cortex, looking at the footage of the training room.

"This is one of the few times I would not wanna be Barry Allen," Cisco told us. 

"I wonder what he's gonna say," Caitlin told us. 

"I wonder what she's gonna say," I told them. "But we should absolutely not listen in."

"It's none of our business," Caitlin told us.

"But the Flash and Pyra is our business, and Iris did just find out Barry's the Flash, and that you're Pyra," Cisco told me. "So by transitive property, this is our business."

Cisco hit the button to allow us to hear Barry and Iris in the training room.

Caitlin sighed, shaking her head. "Cisco..."