(no subject)

[backinakidflash]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Marie
AGE: 3x
JOURNAL: backinakidflash
IM / EMAIL: Seemarierun AT gmail DOT com
PLURK: Seemarierun
RETURNING: Yes, but with a different character.

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Bart Allen
CHARACTER AGE: Without the benefit of a round table discussion of real time vs. relative time, time travel, the Speed Force, and alternate pocket universes, I'm going to say that he is mentally and physically about 16 or 17. He's been behind the wheel of the Batmobile and a Batplane, and, even though those were phenomenally bad decisions to begin with, I don't think Robin would have let it happen if they were are still 12. In real time, he is about 10, if you count the four years he spent in a pocket dimension, which he remembers despite being resurrected as his younger self [2 years of rapid aging to 12, about 4 years in the Impulse/Young Justice/Teen Titans books, 4 years in the pocket dimension/time spent as the Flash, and some time post-resurrection]. In relative time, it's felt so long that his life is Groundhog Day.
SERIES: DC Comics (New Earth)
CHRONOLOGY: Teen Titans 100, Volume 3
CLASS: Hero
HOUSING: Opting in. Bart shouldn't be left unsupervised with appliances toilets life.

BACKGROUND:

Ah, the DCU. It's just like our own Earth, except for a few 'minor' details. For instance, industrial accidents don't kill you, they just make you into an insane chalk-white villain - or in the case of Bart's grandfather, Barry Allen, they grant you superpowers that are then genetically passed down your family line. Also, in the DCU, time-travel is completely possible. Everyone and their brother does it. In fact, Barry Allen goes all the way to the 30th century, but we'll get to that in a moment. Aliens exist - some are friendlies, some not-so-much, and some are here on Earth masquerading as humans.

What do the superpowered, the alien, and the time-tossed do in the DCU? They all seem to wind up as superheroes or villains, in brightly colored spandex, usually with weird headgear. While some of the heroes get branded as vigilantes and sometimes maligned, that issn't the case with Barry Allen. Barry's superpower is a connection to the Speed Force, an almost boundless energy field that seeps through the universe and lets him move at the speed of light [Note: I'll get into more depth on the Speed Force in the abilities section. It's complicated and would derail the bio for several paragraphs]. He called himself the Flash and was so beloved by his hometown of Keystone City that, when he died, they built a museum in his honor.

In the DCU, most of the big heroes have a hometown that is their turf. Keystone City has always had the Flash, be it Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West, or Bart Allen. The latest canon is that it's in Kansas. Keystone is a middle-class, heavily industrial city that, over the years, has struggled to maintain its employment rate as technology weeded out jobs and corporations sent still more overseas. It's neither the safest nor the most dangerous city in United States, although they have the occasional union riot or Mafia hit. For a time, Bart had Manchester, Alabama (a small rural town with a real-world counterpart), as his own stomping grounds.

But we were talking about Barry Allen, in hopes of introducing Bart into this world. Anyway, Barry travels to the future with his wife Iris, and they're able to spend one last month together before he's forced to go back to his own time (and die). Iris Allen gives birth to twins - the Tornado Twins, in fact - Don and Dawn Allen, who she raises in the 31st century. Both are speedsters, and, when Don Allen reaches adulthood, he marries Meloni Thawne, who is herself a descendant of speedsters. They soon have a son, who they name Bartholomew Henry, after his grandfather.

Yep, that's Bart, and that's pretty much what seals his fate: being born. He isn't one of the lucky Earth-born heroes who trigger their metagene (or mutant gene) at puberty, develop powers after some bizarre accident, or spend years training to put on tights as an 'average' human. No, Bart got hit with a double dose of speedster genes, and his abilities were apparent from the start. He ages at an incredible rate, growing to the size of a twelve-year-old in his first two years. So quickly, that his maternal grandfather has him placed in a virtual reality system to prevent his body from getting ahead of his brain. The world couldn't keep up with him, and, without stimulation and interaction, there's a fear that he wouldn't learn enough, both about life in general and in an educational sense, and would be so starved for interaction that he would go insane.

But the solution isn't without a price. Bart spends his formative years in a video game. No consequence is permanent, and no danger is real. He could act on blink-and-you-miss-it instinct without penalty, and, when you're a speedster, blinks happen in slow motion. Worse, outside of the VR chamber, his mother didn't even know that Bart was alive. She had been told that the same alien invasion that killed his father and aunt took the life of her infant son as well. It's his grandmother, Iris Allen, that frees him from the virtual reality world and sends him back in time, in the hopes that he'll be safe there and that her nephew, Wally West, can somehow help him with the rapid aging.

Only no one really asks Wally if he's up for this particular gig. He fixes Bart's aging, which is really that he's got too much of the Speed-Force inside of him and it's accelerating his life as well as his body, by challenging him to a footrace around the world to get him to burn some of it off. He also helps set up a life for the kid in the modern time - birth certificate, Social Security card, and a home - just not his home. Bart becomes the ward of Max Mercury, an older speedster who is probably the most informed about the workings of Speed Force, but isn't immediately the best call for raising a hyperactive teenager.

Regardless of this, Mercury takes on the responsibility of Bart, moving him down to Manchester, Alabama. It's obvious that no one's going to be able to keep Bart out of trouble, so they try to give him structure, patience, and enough training that he'll be able to handle himself in the fights that he's so eager to rush into. At this point, Bart is thrilled with being a superhero, running around in his red and white tights and big red boots and calling himself Impulse. He lives up to the codename, too, and Max has him grounded on a consistent, if not constant, basis. It chafes at first, but Bart, who never had an experience with real, flesh and blood family, eventually comes to see Max as a father. He gets to be a regular kid, which he sometimes finds almost as exciting - he's popular at school, even has something of a girlfriend.

While he's living with Max, Bart is allowed to join a little superhero club, for lack of a better word. In his adventures as Impulse, Bart meets both Robin (Tim Drake) and Superboy. The word "shenanigans" doesn't even begin to cover the early days of their friendship. The first team-up ends with each boy being grilled by members of the Justice League and glossing over the truth of what really happened. They're allowed to keep hanging out - presumably, it's hoped that the much more controlled Robin will rub off on the rebellious Superboy and borderline batshit Impulse. Unfortunately, it's more like Bart and Kon drag Tim kicking and screaming into all kinds of trouble.

They're given use of one of the JLA's old headquarters, Mount Justice, where things like 'having sleepovers in costumes' quickly escalate into finding an alien vehicle (the Super-cycle, blame Superboy), turning into a team and getting christened Young Justice (that one's Bart's fault), picking up strays as teammates. It's complete chaos - one of them's a ghost, one has a crazy stage mother, Red Tornado volunteers to look after them because they annoy him so much they make him feel human, at one point a teenaged version of Lobo (called Slo-Bo) is allowed to join the team and no one bats an eyelash.

But in the center of the chaos is Bart, who finds himself surrounded by living, breathing friends. It's still hard to get him to sit still, to listen, but with Max giving his life boundaries and teaching him about love and respect and his friends planting seeds of selflessness and loyalty, Bart starts to make his first steps away from being 'just' Impulse.

Unfortunately, there's a pattern in Bart's life of things getting good just to go to complete crap in a heartbeat. Bart prevents Jay Garrick from killing a Flash Rogue, Rival, only to discover that Rival has taken over Max Mercury's body - trapping Max's spirit within the Speed Force. Rival escapes, taking Max's body with him - thus making it effectively a death, but it doesn't immediately sink in with Bart, as he is soothed by Jay Garrick's assurances that they'll figure out a way to free Max from the Speed Force.

But life goes on. The Garricks take Bart in, moving him to Keystone City again, and Bart's family fleshes out a little more, with "Uncle Jay" and "Aunt" Joan. He grows closer to Wally as well, who slowly starts to trust him as a sidekick. Young Justice splits up in a way - half the team retires. The remaining four members - Bart, Tim Drake, Kon-El, and Cassie Sandsmark (Wonder Girl) are invited to join the Teen Titans, both to continue their training and to bolster the depleted ranks. Bart really comes into his own as a Teen Titan, but not without misfortune. That lesson that everyone has been trying to impress on him - the one about not being so damn impulsive and rushing in without any foresight - finally hits home when Deathstroke puts a shotgun to his knee and blows it apart. The surgery to repair it is awful - Bart's enhanced metabolism fights everything that the doctors do, and he has to simply endure the pain as they continually cut into his leg to complete a knee replacement.

The knee is as good as ever, but Bart's changed. He doesn't want to be the young, idiot member of the team anymore. As soon as he can run after the surgery is completely healed (less than a half hour later), Bart takes off for the San Francisco library and reads every book in it in under five minutes. He's not only more informed, but more inclined to listen to strategies - sometimes even ask for them. Bart is less of a wildcard, and he's showing the occasional glimpse of maturity.

Again, nothing stays good in his life for long. Circumstances arise in the DCU that free a recurring "Big Bad", Superboy-Prime. Bart, Wally West, and Jay Garrick grab him, trying to run fast enough to force him into the Speed Force itself, but Jay can't keep up. Wally is absorbed into the Speed Force early, but Bart is still running and arguing with Superboy-P that he is not stupid and weak. Bart manages to drag him into the Speed Force, with the help of the still deceased/absorbed by the Speed Force Barry Allen and Max Mercury, who grab onto Superboy-Prime and tell Bart not to be afraid. Bart gives him one final push and all disappear in a burst of yellow light. The Speed Force itself seemingly blinks out of existence, as Jay Garrick is unable to tap into it.

But it hasn't really disappeared, the power is just being used up elsewhere. It's being used to fuel a tiny alternate version of Keystone City, populated by Bart, Wally, and the ghosts of dead speedsters who try and fail to contain Superboy-Prime. To get out and warn the others that Superboy-Prime was coming back, Bart volunteers to risk trying to back to their earth (no one is sure what might happen), and in the process, he absorbed the entirety of the Speed Force into himself without realizing it. Bart emerges from the Speed Force alone, wearing the Flash costume for the first time, but he was too late to save his friend Kon from dying in the fight.

Remember what happened when he was young and had too much of the Speed Force's energy? His accelerated aging has been kicked back on, and Bart is now an adult. For a short while, he's de-powered and tries to have a normal life in Los Angeles, following in his grandfather's footsteps and applying to be a police officer, but he realizes how to unlock the Speed Force inside him and winds up donning the mantle of the Flash anyway. It scares the crap out of him, because he's having crazy nightmares due to the essence of several speedsters being trapped inside of him and because he can feel how it's almost burning him up.

After a device sucks the Speed Force out of him, Bart fights half a dozen of the Flash Rogues gallery, unpowered, to buy time for the energy to be released from the machine safely - the device was on the verge of exploding, and that much energy would have wiped out half the country if it went off. Bart had been warned in advance that he was going to die, but he turned down the offer of time traveling to safety. He's killed in the fight, but the Speed Force is restored.

However, this part of his life, the way he felt and thought as an adult, was excised from him for reasons that will be explained shortly. While Bart remembers what happened when he was an adult, it doesn't quite fit in his head the way it should. You see, speedsters in the DCU... they don't really die. They're too tied up in the energy of the Speed Force, which exists in all time and space at once. And someone like Bart, who had encompassed the entire force... he's everywhere and every when.

Several years later, Superboy-Prime escapes, yet again. In the distant future - in the 31st century, Bart's natural time period, Superboy-Prime takes on the Legion of Super-heroes. To combat this, Brainiac sets about bringing back two superheroes who had some of the most single-handed success against Superboy-Prime. That is, Bart Allen and Kon-El (normal New Earth Superboy - I'm sorry this is convoluted). Bart is resurrected by ripping him out of the Speed Force with some 31st century tech. Only Brainiac is, well, a brainiac. He recognizes that he needs to find the imprint of Bart from before he aged up, right when he first went into the Speed Force and before his accelerated aging kicked back on. When Brainiac does something, he does it right. Thus due to the magic of COMIC BOOK SCIENCE, Bart is brought back as his teenaged self, teams up with Kon and the Legion to kick Superboy-Prime's tail all over the cosmos. Oh, and at some point Superman turns up and they totally make his year by being alive again.

Bart (and Kon and Superman, obviously) returns to the modern era. Bart comes back, really, because it's in this time period that he is at home - this is when his friends are alive. This is when he has family.

He doesn't waste time either, re-uniting with Wally and the Teen Titans. Bart and Kon also destroy their memorial statues rather gleefully, although they don't immediately re-join the Teen Titans. Bart wanted time to settle back into the world, but it's not long before most of the Teen Titans wind up in a jam. Bart pitches in to save them and rejoins the team. From the friends side of his life, almost everything is great - even Tim, who has been avoiding everyone like they have the plague because he's too busy going "I am the night", has finally started talking to people again and, bonus, let Bart meet Selina Kyle.

Meanwhile, there's his grandfather, Barry Allen, who manages to free himself from the Speed Force that had absorbed him when he died. Bart has never met him before (outside of the VR program), and their reunion is strained. Barry sees him as family, and Bart knows that Barry is family. He can't help it though - he's so bitter and hurt that someone came back to life, and it wasn't Max. Everyone else is so very excited that Barry's back, but Bart's reaction is so what? He doesn't get Max back, and now he's questioning his role. Wally is the Flash, and Bart is Kid Flash, and he's happy with that. Then Barry comes waltzing in with his parades and museum, and where will that leave Bart?

Luckily, the situation resolves itself. Barry and Wally manage to free Max Mercury from the Speed Force as well, needing all speedster hands on deck to defeat one of the Flash's greatest foes, Zoom - Bart's ancestor on his mother's side. Time's funny like that. Zoom is about to kill Bart, calling him a disgrace to the Thawne name, when Max returns and saves him. The entire Flash family teams up to capture Zoom.

So. There is largely happiness in his life at the moment. For awhile, Bart was shown privately struggling with the whole resurrected-from-the-dead thing. He was using a VR chamber to murder his murderers over and over again and was hiding it from his friends when asked what he was doing. In the final issue of Teen Titans, Bart nearly kills the, er... clone of his clone (I AM SO SORRY FOR EVERYTHING FLASHCOMICS BEING THE MOST COMPLICATED EVER).

PERSONALITY:

To start, Bart's turned into one of most dedicated good guys in the DCU. At this pull point, he has sacrificed himself twice, once expecting to die and once knowing that he would, because he believes in the greater good and doesn't walk away from the fight even if the cost of winning is you. He actually does it a third time later. There's never any regret or bitterness over it. It's what a hero has to do, but it's what he needs to do. He wouldn't want to live knowing that he chickened out and let thousands die in his place.

It's a little naive and innocent, but, well, that's what Bart is. The VR childhood made him guileless, and he's had to learn what precious subtleties he can manage. He's only managed to upgrade from open book to easily opened book. This isn't so much about lying to villains, and he can lie to allies (that lingering Impulse reputation of being scatter-brained and silly works in his favor). It's how his face and eyes betray every emotion - his heart is constantly on the proverbial sleeve.

The VR program combines with his power set to form another part of his personality: his impatience. Unlike some speedsters, Bart can't turn off his power. The relative time to actual time ratio ebbs and flows, but he lives through two hours to everyone else's fifteen minutes when he's trying to be slow. When he's pushing himself? 18 months in 5 minutes. He actually isn't impatient or ADHD, if you think about how hard he has to focus to stay in a conversation, but he seems that way because - unlike the rest of the speedsters, who learned since birth how to put up with a world that won't keep up with them - Bart grew up in that VR world where the computer running the simulated Keystone City and Allen family had everything keep pace with him. Being around so many "slow" friends has really helped with this - he's so much more grounded in normal time now.

This isn't to say that he doesn't occasionally still live up to what Wally called his "Single Synapse Syndrome" (because Bart would go from thought to action in the time that it took for one synapse to fire). He still spaces out because he honestly can't help it, and, sometimes, he dives into a problem before anyone else has a chance to think. He's overcome that whole "no concept of danger" thing, and he knows that actions can have severe consequences. He has a healthy respect for the risks and dangers he's inviting every time he pulls on the red-and-yellow.

He's still very much a teenager. The resurrection process excised the adult parts of him "like a cancer." He's very friendly and welcoming, playful, and likes to show off a little. He has a good sense of humor, and he likes banter, bad jokes, puns, and sarcasm. A lot of times, his quips fall flat because, by the time everyone else wades through the 80 words in 15 seconds that surrounded the humor, the moment has passed.

It may not needed to be pointed out, but Bart will do anything for the people that he considers family (and really, he's folded his close friends into that term as well). He might not agree with they're doing - he might even be mad at them - but, if they're in trouble, he's got their backs. Bart gives more consideration to them than he does to himself. Like, when Bart escaped the pocket dimension after pulling Superboy-Prime in? Really, it could have and should have been Wally, but Bart volunteered because Wally had kids to get home to and they didn't know if the escape was survivable.

POWER:

In an absolute nutshell, Bart is a speedster who, as almost all DC speedsters do, utilizes the Speed Force to give himself an array of powers. DC isn't terribly exact about the Speed Force itself - even Barry Allen says that "the science behind the Speed Force is still an unknown" - and its state is fairly fluid.

It primarily exists as their excuse for letting the Flash Family break the laws of physics, but, for those that don't read the comics, it's best described as an energy field that speedsters can tap into, go into (not without risk), and will become one with when they die. In some ways, it's what kills them - if Bart were to push himself too hard, too long, he runs the risk of becoming one with the Speed Force (with it being the winner).

Speedsters are like conductors - the energy of the Speed Force is often shown crackling around them like yellow lightning. Some do it willingly, by reciting the Speed Formula, but most of them, including Bart, have no on/off switch for it. It's constantly flowing in and around them, and, when something goes wrong with Speed Force, they pay the price. Bart has had seizures due to the Speed Force growing unstable.

A breakdown of Bart's powers goes like this:

Speed (and the ability to survive it): The obvious one. Bart can move his body at ludicrous speed. At this age, he can't break the speed of light, but he can get close. He isn't particularly invulnerable, but the Speed Force grants him a sort of protective bubble so he's able to withstand running around at hundreds of thousands of mph and not even getting windburnt (or ripping his clothes to shreds). In addition to this, his senses are able to take in his surroundings while he's running, and his brain is able to process it as normal. He also has a sped-up metabolism, and Bart heals at an extremely enhanced rate, That's a problem when it comes to major injuries (when healing the damage won't be enough without corrective action) - when he was shot in the knee, doctors weren't able to keep him under anesthesia due to his body throwing off the effects and had to continually re-cut into his leg to replace the joint.

Intangibility(ish): Technically, it's a subset of being a Speedforce speedster. He can vibrate his molecules at a frequency that allows him to pass through walls and other solid objects. As far as using this himself, Bart's great with it. He's been occasionally shown to do this with others, but it takes focus and concentration (never his strong suits) and has a huge risk. If he screws it up, they could get stuck in a wall or explode, and everyone winds up feeling nauseous anyway. Bart doesn't use this power with others very often as a result.

Vortexes/Whirlwinds/Vacuums: Basically, by running around in circles at top speeds, Bart can create cyclones of varying strengths, to the point of being able to make vacuums that suck out all the air fueling a fire or drill all the way down to the earth's core. Smaller whirlwinds can be created by spinning his arms really fast (not kidding).

He has another trick, the "time scouts", but I'm fine with leaving them out of his powerset if the vortex thing takes up the third power slot. In a nutshell, Bart was able to create glowy clones of himself out of Speedforce energy that could time-hop via traveling through the force itself to find out what was going on and report back. However, the death of one the scouts put Bart into a coma, and he hasn't used the ability since.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:

[Bart hates secrets - he's the worst at avoiding topics properly. That should be the end of this Network post before it begins, but he needs to teal deer. He's found out that Trickster is here, basically chilling out maxing relaxing all cool. The Heropa shine is definitely gone like the cheap, shiny (lead-filled) paint on a kids meal toy.]

You know what is one of THE most annoying short story I've ever read? Hills Like White Elephants. Cause like. The Lottery was a trainwreck of stupid and gross, the one where that girl got shot out of the airlock was tragic, Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, All in a Summer Day - they're all about the worst of humanity. Bummer, but I get it. Happy endings don't twist.

Or they do, but people seem to hate them because they're too convenient or something.

[It's strange how he has a hard time coming up with a short story that wasn't a huge downer, but, since he's venting, he doesn't pause the fast-paced, near breathless delivery to muse on it for long.]

But Hills Like White Elephants, man. It's four pages of doing nothing but waiting for this couple to stop dancing around the topic and complaining that everything tastes like licorice. Like that's a bad thing. I'd cut off my arm for a real Twizzler. All right not the whole arm, but me and my pinkie have never been on the best of terms. Twizzlers are nature's straws. And that's how they go. On and on. For pages of nothing that dance around everything and you just want to shout at them to freaking say it already because the rampant silence is killing her and the incessant chatter is putting him off. But on the other hand, who cares about him? He's a scumbag, and I hope that - in the fiction of Hemingway's - she grew a spine and dumped his fatass and ran off to run a tourist bar in Borneo. Because he was freaking selfish.

[He shrugs at this terrible understatement. 'Shithead' would be better, or reprehensible dickwad, but this isn't actually a symposium on the works of Ernest Hemingway. It just seemed like the best way to bring up how there were so many things, including his own death, that no one talked about directly. Talk about white elephants by bringing up the story where they talk about white elephants to ignore the white elephants.]

So, yeah. Most annoying four pages I've ever read, and that's not counting all the essays analyzing it. Half of them were longer than the story! That is what happens when you hafta keep avoiding a topic. The coding and decoding detour takes way longer than flat out talking about it ever could, and. Let's be real. Not talking about things is halfway to lying, and oh-what-a-tangled-web hasn't stuck around for two centuries because Marmion is such a gripping read. Ohgoditreallyisn't. Why am I talking about Walter Scott?

[He actually stops here, scratching behind his ear for a moment until the tangent becomes a parabola and re-intersects with the original topic.]

Ugh, right. Hemingway. Things snowball. Before you know it, you're in an entire room full of white elephants, crowding out all the oxygen, and you can't turn around without face planting in saggy gray butt. Names that you shouldn't say, that you can't say, things you don't want to say cause you'll upset someone else or you, or piss them off and. It's turning every conversation into "Oh. We're talking about that now? OK. Cuz I've had planets of things to say about that one."

ALL of it could be avoided if people just said what was on their mind because decades of watching what I say is getting old. I can't take it. I'm not wired for patient and subtle. I'm gonna be the first Allen in four generations to get gray hair. Because all I can do is sit here like -

[He jumps to his feet dramatically, pointing off in the distance.] "What in the world could that be?"

[And sits back firmly, as if it's possible to sit down resolutely with enough speed and force. Bart slaps a hand on the desk for good measure.] IT'S A WHITE ELEPHANT. It sucks.

And so does Hemingway.

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:

As the moments built before he got a response, Bart's eyes started darting around, taking in the still surroundings. A sparrow was swooping down towards an abandoned crust of bread, beak open so close to its prize.

Flight was such a cool ability - real flight, not that helicopter sort of liftoff that Wally did, but the free form that Kon and Cassie and Starfire and lots of Teen Titans got. Bart never said anything, but he was a little jealous.

He'd never trade being a speedster for it - he'd cut off, well, not a limb, but definitely a few fingers before ever going without the Speed Force again. It had been a nice dream, having the chance at a normal life. It didn't fulfill him the way helping people did, and he can help so much more as Kid Flash. But flying - he knew from getting toted around every now again that it was awesome in its own right. Liberating.

Maybe not here. Maybe they all felt as confined as he did. Trapped. He hated it. One city wasn't big enough, and he felt like he couldn't breathe. There wasn't any room to run, he hit the limits of the city so fast that he'd fallen when he slammed on the brakes to avoid getting knocked out. More than once.

Still. Flight was on the superpower wish list, right after night vision. Bart still wanted night vision the most. Being able to see in the dark would make his life so much easier.

The sparrow snagged the bread in its gaping maw, as it subtly changed its trajectory. Birds were really beautiful in motion. He could get why so many people loved Audubon's work - thank God, they were finally answering Bart's question. Forgetting the bird, he turned back to the other guy and zeroed back in on the conversation.


FINAL NOTES: I'm aware that Flash: Fastest Man Alive retconned a few aspects of Bart's history, but I'm going with the original, more common canon for them (Namely, that Bart's father was already dead when he got put in the VR chamber and that his mother didn't know that that's where he was.) I hope that's OK.