Barry Allen felt as though he had been stuffed into a giant centrifuge for hours, then roughly flung out. The world abruptly solidified from a dizzying blur of colored light, returning to its familiar yet slightly coarse physical form. He failed to control his landing perfectly and staggered a few steps, his soles scraping two faint wisps of smoke off the asphalt before he finally steadied himself.
"Whoa..."
He braced his hands on his knees and panted softly, his heart hammering in his chest-not from exhaustion, but from the jolt of fear and exhilaration that came with every trip into that dimension. Looking around, he found himself in a quiet back alley in Midway City. Not far away stood the all-too-familiar S.T.A.R. Labs building where the accident had happened.
Everything had changed that night.
Lightning had torn through the air, and a deafening groan of buckling structures had come from the area housing the particle accelerator's core components. Bottles and jars had rained down from the reagent shelves. A mixed solution in one of them, struck by lightning, had drenched him from head to toe.
It had been more than a simple electric shock. It had felt... as though every cell in his body had been forcibly dismantled, injected with an inexhaustible, wild energy, then instantly reassembled.
After the bone-shattering agony had come unprecedented clarity and speed. In his eyes, the world had slowed to a stagnant pool. He could actually see bullets tracing their way slowly through the air.
From that day on, he had become lightning. He possessed speed that seemed miraculous to ordinary people. He could read every book in a library in an instant, catch a falling drop of water a hundred times before it hit the ground, and... run into the dimension known as the