Mental Domination - Chaos in Central City

Nothing quite beats the fresh open breezy air on a hot summer day, securely hidden under the protective shade from a birch tree. Iris let one of those classic stress-relieving sighs, the kind that can only ease out through a purely mellow mood. One spurred on by three secured days away from the grueling grind of a reporter's work and a perfectly planned date in a park on the outskirts of Central City.

I need to demand this more often...

Iris allowed her shoulders to relax, her mind wandering to thoughts that didn't involve any of the usual anxiety-inducing ticks. It was just her, the summer breeze, one picnic basket, and...

No sign of my man in red. Where-

ZZWOOOOSH

Iris' dark hair buffeted against her face in a manner that didn't cause her to so much as flinch, though her face did scrunch a bit as she spat out her hair, "P-leh~ PPlaaa-h.." She blinked, her hands rose to brush aside her locks neatly behind an ear.

"Sorry!" The ever so charismatic voice of her hot-headed husband

"What was that? Th...Three minutes late, is it?" With fluttering eyes, Iris spoke in a teasing manner while raising the watch tied to her wrist.

Barry flashed his teeth and pointed a knowing finger, "Actually, it's four minutes exactly. There was this massive car accident on the highway, drunk driver, you know how it is. Anyway, and I wish you there, cause- well not in the accident, of course, but there were five people flying out their windows and I had to wrap all the way around..."

"Mhm… Mhm… Oh wow… Hmmm… Uh-Huh..."

Iris leaned in; her eyes seemed to twinkle faintly with each passing moment as her husband went on in great detail of his recent endeavor. "Oh, that is very interesting." She tilted her head when Barry had finished describing the events. "But did you get the champagne?" With one hand resting on her cheek, Iris raised a finger to gesture towards his empty palms.

Barry glanced at his hands, "Oh!"

One blink later, and Iris could sense the air pick up around her. In his right hand appeared a good ol' bottle of champagne.

"What are you talking about?" He cracked a smile towards the incredulous eye roll Iris performed.

"Excuse me, stud," She gave him a chuckle when he took a seat on the grass beside her, "My eyes must be failing me,"

"Ahh, I think I can forgive you this time," Barry said, leaning in to share a gradual kiss with Iris, one she reciprocated with a pleasing and faint moan. "After all," their lips separated, and he leaned back to brush a thumb against her cheek, "If you can forgive me for being three minutes late, well then it's only fair-"

"No, no..." Iris whispered, bringing her index finger to shush him by tapping it against her lips. "It was four minutes," She smirked, "Remember?"

Barry took a moment to chuckle, "Heheh, your eyes, my memory. Seems like it's only a matter of time before we become two senile peas in a pod, huh?"

"Barry Allen," Iris put her hand atop his, her eyes blinked towards his own, "That was the least romantic thing you've said all week."

"Damn..." Barry leaned back and clenched his fists, "I practiced that one in front of the mirror."

Iris laughed, "It was alright, I guess... well, not really. But you definitely scored some pity points."

"Pity points? I can live with that!" Barry gave Iris a peck on the cheek then... ZZZWOOSH appeared kneeling beside the picnic basket, "Thought you would've set this up in the five minutes I was gone."

"So now It's five minutes, huh?" Iris smirked and raised an eyebrow towards her husband, "Before you go all zoom mode on me," She said upon noticing the miniature sparks of electricity that always spawn before his bursts of speed. "I actually wanted to turn the speed off for the next hour."

Barry blinked and made eye contact with Iris for a second. "O-Of course!" He blurted, "Yeah...yeah, let's just enjoy the moment... just us.."

Iris licked her lips, letting out a small hum, "Mmmmnnnmmmm..." With a slow crawl on her hands and knees, she slid up close to Barry and let her hand inch down to massage his thigh. "Now you're turning me on," Her warm breath danced against his ear as she whispered against him. "There's nothing sexier than you being a charming romantic... turns me on more than you'd believe."

"Oh shit," Barry's voice seemed to hitch, "If that's the case, be prepared to be treated like a queen, my lady."

"Cute," Iris breathed and gave him a peck on the lips, "But don't push it."

*Beep-Beep* *Beep-Beep* *Beep-Beep* *Beep-Beep*

Iris frowned. Her attention shifted away from the escapism taking place to notice the blue flashing notification on her watch.

"Really?"

"Yeah..." Barry said in a similar tone, having retrieved the phone from his pocket, which revealed the same crime alert. "A sudden explosion in Central City's east power plant." He sighed, "Think it's a meta? I-"

"I think," Iris exhaled her own sigh and tapped the flashing screen on her watch. "You should sit yourself down and enjoy one hour with your wife."

"Iris..."

"Baby, I know you more than anyone, kay?" She noticed her husband's tense uncertainty and huffed, "And...." Her hand reached around to his side, and she gently grabbed the phone from him. "I took the liberty to ask Jesse for a quick little favor, alright?"

Barry was taken aback, "Jesse's in Central City? But.."

"But what?" Iris tilted her head, she stroked his shoulder with one absent hand, "Her college is on break for the summer, and frankly, she owes me for helping her score it with the university in the first place... if I were keeping track of that stuff."

"So..." Barry's voice was hesitant, "Jesse's in the city, and she knows, er... She understands what's going on?"

"Barry. Barry. Barry." Iris repeated until his gaze shifted away from the city and back onto her. "Jesse is going to be The Flash of Central City until the 'The Flash' is done with his date, okay? Seriously, I'm doing this for you, for us. It's just... I'm trying to make this work, and she's just as fast as you. It's like you never left. Just put away that hero junk for an hour, and let's enjoy some us time." After a pause, she added, "Please?"

"I..." Barry's gaze trailed back towards the city for a few long moments before he eventually returned back to Iris' gaze. "I..." He blinked and cracked a smile, "Well, I can't say no to my beautiful, forward-thinking wife. But we do need to talk about that whole, 'she's just as fast as you' thing. Cause arguably... ahh no, I'd say factually, I'm faster. I mean, I've been doing this for longer, but it's not a competition."

"Oh," Iris leaned against him with her own warm smile, "I am sooo sorry, 'Fastest Man Alive,' did I offend you?"

Barry chuckled, "You know, I'll let it slide. And I guess 'The Fastest Woman Alive' should be able to hold up the city for an hour or two."

"Watch yourself, Barry Allen," Iris inched herself closer to him, her breasts pressed against either side of her arm as her lips closed the distance between his. "You're talking to a woman right now,"

"I think that's pretty clear," Barry said, placing his hand on her hip before inching it down to her ass.

Letting out a moan and a giggle, Iris let herself completely lean against him until they both fell back onto the grass in each other's arms. The ringing from Iris' watch and Barry's phone went ignored as they switched their devices to mute and began to enjoy their time together.

---

FLASH

"Are you okay?"

The yellow vest-clad construction worker responded by collapsing to his knees; his lunch followed suit in that he began to vomit onto the parking lot.

"Uh..." Jesse wasn't the most well-versed when it came to this form of wordless reactions. Her gut response was to give the man a reassuring pat on the back, though at the same time, maybe some personal space was more appropriate. "You're... okay?" Her palm suspended a few feet away from his shoulder, "Yeah, you're okay." She said more to herself than the guy barfing on the floor.

GRRRRBOOOOOOOOM

The earth around them trembled as another explosion went off in the building.

Her yellow lens-covered eyes scanned over to the rest of the workers. The digital display in her lense identified each civilian totaling the sixteen registered employees of the plant.

She breathed out a sigh, tapping the side of her lens to shoo away the digital clutter; her hands rested on the exposed portion of her hips.

FLASH

The wind caught up around one of the workers.

"Was there anyone else in the building with you guys?"

Jesse, despite being the sole person to have evacuated everyone, was promptly ignored.

"H-Holy shit..." One guy panted.

"Am I alive? Is- Is t-this a dream?"

"Ohhhhh my godddd. We almost died at-at-at some stupid-underappreciated job no one cares about."

"Hey hey hey hey hey." Jesse frowned, "Don't talk like that, you guys are super important! Cause I don't know what we'd do without...uh..." She paused for a brief spell, "What do you guys do here, exactly?"

"We-"

"Actually," Jesse waved her hand dismissively, "It doesn't matter. Look, whatever you do, I appreciate you. All of you," She looked around, "Alright? So don't say no one cares. I care. About all you guys. I. Appreciate. You... Say it."

"Uh..." The workers muttered confused murmurs to themselves.

"Say it," Jesse repeated.

"I, appreciate..."

"No no no- Not, I like you, I mean like... me," She gestured to herself, "So don't say I, say you."

"Us?"

"No! Not you, you. You, me." Her eyes rolled, "I appreciate you."

"I appreciate-" They began to repeat.

"No! You! You appreciate!"

"We, appreciate, you?"

"Me! I... ommiigod, you know what. Forget it, yo-"

"My son!" A worker's frantic voice grew closer as he ran up with tired breath. "He's in the-"

Jesse's eyes widened, "You're son!? Shi-"

FLASH

Everyone staggered back as a streak of lightning followed by a blast of wind signified her departure in the blink of an eye. A red and yellow streak of lightning sped around the entire building as Jesse appeared to run in, out, through, and around the entire building. The explosions and falling rubble hadn't ceased. If anything, the opposite was true as a solid chunk of the building's structure just caved in.

The father, along with the rest of the workers, could do nothing more than watch.

"Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my-"

FLASH

Jesse's red and gold plated boots cracked into the concrete floor as she skidded back to the parking lot with a young boy draped around her shoulder.

He hung onto the speedster with dear life; his hold was the kind that only a fear-ridden child could manage as Jesse had trouble getting him to let go of her.

"Hey, you're alright, sweetie." She did her best to charm the kid into letting her go. "He's just like my little brother, hehe..." her voice trailed off, and the father staggered up. "Is what I would say...if..if I had a brother..."

"Mikey?! Oh my god!"

"Daddy!" Hearing his father's voice, the boy whipped his head around and suddenly found it in him to let go.

Jesse gave the two some time to let out their relife, though when they had more than enough, she cocked her hip with crossed arms. "Okay, 'Daddy.' Why was your kid in a place like that?" As if on cue, the building she was pointing her thumb towards erupted in one final explosion that leveled the entire structure.

"It's...uh," The man picked his son up and held him over his shoulder. "Bring your son to work day,"

"Bullshit," A worker spoke up.

"Yeah! We don't have those!" Said another, "His cheap ass just didn't want to pay a babysitter."

Jesse's eyes narrowed. "I-" A notification ring buzzed in her earpiece. She frowned and tapped her visor, "Will talk to you about this later. Don't think I'll forget; these things record everything." Her eyebrows raised as she gestured to her yellow-tinted lense. "Everything."

FLASH

The speedster bolted across town; she tapped the side of her lense. To pull up the most recent emergency report, her precise running was almost taken into a stagger when she noticed four emergency notifications.

Jesse sped towards a collapsing apartment complex and rocketed through the front door in a blast of red and yellow three seconds later she cleared everyone on the first floor and went back in to secure the rest. While relocating the building's occupants while the structure began to cave in, she maneuvered through the digital screen on her lense with a few taps to the side of her earpiece.

"Caitlin! What the heck is going on? There's-"

''Five reports, I know, they all occurred simultaneously. This is too organized to be incidental. We're looking for a potential meta that could be creating these targeted quakes.''

"I'm able to get everyone out b-brrr-but they keep popping up! And I can't stop the property damage."

''Should we contact Barry?'' Another voice said in the background.

"NO!" Jesse and Caitlin both said in unison.

''Just keep looking for that meta, Cisco. Barry and Iris need this. A happy Flash is a fast Flash. It's better in the long run for them to enjoy this one date than to have Barry be constantly stressed. Jesse, just keep running, make sure no one gets hurt.''

"Don't need to tell me," Jesse said while running after a bus that had veered off towards a gas station due to yet another sudden earthquake. Before the driver, its occupants, or the civilians at the station could even scream, she zoomed through the bus' rear windows, evacuated everyone, and did the same to the ones near the pumps. "No one's dying on my watch."

KKABOOOOOOMFFF

"But we need to stop this at the source before there are no more buildings left to evacuate. "

She bolted off towards the next closest emergency.

---

Keystrokes danced across the board fast enough that any third party to S.T.A.R. Labs would rightly assume the typist in question was clicking the keys at random. Though, that would be the farthest from the case since it was Caitlin's fingers in action. One poor bottle of water was left neglected beside the keyboard while she was fully focused on logging into each dark matter satellite under S.T.A.R. Lab's jurisdiction. The top-down perspectives from the individual program take up the entire space of the six monitors.

"You know you can just push Control Copy instead of repeatedly imputing the graphical coordinates for each program." Cisco offered his two-sense as he leaned against the metallic wall behind her. A plastic bottle of soda in his hands.

Caitlin, in response, only shook her head to mutter something under her breath, fingers still moving on their own accord.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"You should be doing this!" Caitlin snapped abruptly and pointed to her side of the desk, "I should be over there updating Jesse."

"Mmmg'hey, Hey," Cisco lowered the bottle from his face, "I can't think on an empty stomach,"

She rolled her eyes, "And soda is supposed to fill you up?"

Cisco didn't respond. Instead, his brow furrowed ever so slightly, and he cocked his head. That gave Caitlin enough of an incentive to focus on doing his job in scanning the city for any high traces of dark matter activity. However, the satellite deep-scan view didn't yield much outside of the usual light imprints that could be found on a daily basis.

"Hey, Caitlin..." Cisco's hand trailed the wall. His voice was oddly quiet.

"What?"

"Who's to say our meta is an earthquake working on the surface..." His fingers continued to brush against the wall, "And not... Hold on."

Caitlin was pushed aside on the rolling chair as Cisco leaned down and began to type at a similar speed. He closed the satellite program she was using and hit a few precise keystrokes to activate the dark matter charge in the sub basement.

"What the hell are you do..." Caitlin started to say, but her voice trailed off as her mind began to wander. "Wait, you think... it's underground?"

"I mean," He shrugged and tapped a few more keys, "Whoever our meta is, he's shaking the earth, so...."

"Set the charge to a low frequency."

"Yeah yeah..." He muttered. Four precise taps later, the charge was initiated.

Both Caitlin and Cisco took a metaphorical step back; their eyes watched the screen in front of them in silence as the charge sent a light surge of dark matter from its core. It rippled like a wave through the lab, up to the surface, but more pointedly, through the ground as well.

Dark matter reacts to itself, and diminutive amounts can't cause any adverse reactions, or everyone who breathed would be considered a meta. The surge did nothing but cause any existing traces of dark matter to react in a wavy motion, something undetectable by the human eye but entirely noticeable with an in-depth molecular scan.

"Holy shit."

"See that!" Cisco stood back and clapped his hands together while giving a successful hoot. "The fuller the stomach, the bigger the brain."

"What, is this..." Caitlin breathed faintly, she rolled her chair in closer and pushed a key to enhance the image. "It's like a..."

"Bunch of underground webs," Cisco took a swig of his drink, "Like a network. Like.. like..."

"Like roots."

"Huh?"

"Or vines." Caitlin turned to look at him, "Like a bunch of vines. Or a network of roots." She gestured to the screen, "See?"

Cisco narrowed his eyes at the screen. "Oh my god,"

"They're branched out, but like roots, they're all connected."

"And moving."

"As if they're being controlled by a hivemind or..."

"A Poison Ivy."

"No." Caitlin blinked, "No way.. no way, no way. It- I mean, it could be any meta."

"We didn't notice anything on the surface," He pointed, "And she isn't technically a meta in the dark matter sense we know of. She got her powers by a poison... I think I'm not too caught up on the lore."

With a frown, Caitlin subconsciously scratched the back of her hand. "Yes, but. Look at the destruction. She wouldn't do this. Right?"

"What!? She's a villain!? As bad as they get! Remember when she took over the freaking world!? Cause I sure do remember going to sleep in my apartment and then waking up in the middle of New Zealand."

"Yes, but she also undid everything. Of her own accord."

"Batman is pretty persuasive."

"What I mean is.. look at this, people can and will die if this is kept up. Hundreds of innocent people. And she stopped being the type of person to do this unprovoked."

"Look, I don't know. I don't care either! Maybe she's getting **** on people who spit at their plants or something. Why don't we just trace the roots to the source, and-"

A buzz caught their attention, and they looked towards Caitlin's desk.

''Uh, guys? This is getting a little out of hand. I'm not saying we should... but we might want to at least consider calling Barry.''

Caitlin got up and rushed over to put Jesse on the speakers, "What's the matter?"

''Well there's... how do I explain it? Green..uh... puss, or gas? Coming out of the ground, like there're cracks and it's spewing s-stuff into the air.''

"I see what she's talking about..." Cisco said from his position at the opposing side of the desk. "The vines are moving up to the surface. They're shooting gas into the air; this has Ivy written all over it! She's going to try taking over the city with her spores!"

"Shit." Caitlin muttered, "Jesse, listen, you need to get as many people away from the gas as possible."

''I did but... it's happening all over the city! There's a faint green fog everywhere. I'd need to evac- evacuate everyone in Central City. That would take like... like… l.. like thirty.. maybe twenty minutes? And...'' Jesse's voice could be heard pausing to let out a brief coughing fit. "It might be getting to me. My h-head is... I'm feeling..."

"Oh my god," Cisco looked away from his screen, "If Jessie-"

"Jesse, come back to the lab now!"

There was a moment of silence on the other end, ''I n...need to get people ou..out... they're....''

"JESSE!" Both of the scientists expressed their urgency in near unison.

"Okay.. okay..." Jesse breathed distractedly, "I'm coming..."

Three seconds later, there was a FLASH of red and yellow light.

Jesse came rushing in with a stumble behind her feet as she collapsed onto her hands and knees, breathing heavily onto the floor.

"Gideon, lock down the lab," Cisco said while he and Caitlyn rushed around the desk to Jesse's side.

"Airtight!" Caitlin added.

''Of course.'' The robotic voice said in response.

Jesse's breath grew steady. She leaned back onto her thighs and ripped off her cowl and visor.

"Are you alright?" Caitlin squatted down beside her, "Let us take you to the med lab so we can run over your vitals."

"No..no... I'm fine," Jesse waved her gloved hand in a dismissive sway. Her breathing became less frantic as the seconds passed, and she leaned a hand against the back of the desk to stagger to her feet. "Coming here was probably the best idea... that gas spread way too fast, I would've been out of it..."

"Yeah... I can agree on that." Cisco said under his breath while looking down at a tablet in his hands. He tapped the screen in a few memorized motions and broadcasted his view onto the large monitor in front of them. "I think we're already too late."

The screen displayed a top down perspective from a highly placed camera near the top of a clock tower. It displayed a view of the city below, something that revealed a thick green cloud that wafted around the streets.

"Those earthquakes were just a distraction!" Jesse's right fist charged up into a speedy blur of electricity that she slammed into the ground, leaving a dark, steaming spot in its wake.

Caitlin sighed and rose to her feet, "If it's Ivy's spores, then they'll dissipate in a few minutes as if nothing ever happened."

"Well," Cisco continued to mess with his tablet. "It looks like it's centered in Central City. She hasn't spread past its borders."

"Yet," Jesse crossed her arms. "I'm assuming this is Poison Ivy, by the way. You know I'm a bit out of the loop. But we can't let her do this.. again. We need to stop this now before she expands outwards."

"Well, we're going to need masks or something. It's not like we can just walk out there. She'll probably produce more pores every few minutes to make sure she's got everyone." Cisco said.

"Before we do anything," Caitlin shook her head and sped walked back to the other side of the desk. "We need to do some recon and find out where she is."

Jesse sighed.

It didn't look good on her credibility when the one day someone relies on her to take charge and protect their city... this happens.