At the Central City Police Department, a young man with short blond hair raised his head from a mountain of case files, looking dazed.
His name was Barry Allen, and he was a forensic evidence specialist at the Central City Police Department. His everyday work mainly involved testing and analyzing evidence left at crime scenes. Unless there was a particularly serious case, he generally had little to do.
Yet Barry always looked half-asleep. Today, for instance, he had arrived at work barely in time, then hauled a pile of old case files out of the archives. He called it studying cases, but he was really just hiding behind the files to sleep.
Just now, however, while Barry was dreaming, a strange, inexplicable stirring had suddenly welled up inside him.
He rose hesitantly from his desk, his sleepy eyes gradually sharpening.
"A new guest has entered the Speed Force."
Ever since that day years ago when lightning struck Barry in his office, he had been connected to a higher-dimensional energy field. That wondrous field had granted him a series of powerful superhuman abilities centered around speed.
Barry Allen was no ordinary man. He had a strong taste for adventure and exploration. Much like his choice of profession suggested, he loved getting to the bottom of the unknown, so he had begun racking his brains to study the energy field that had given him his powers.
The Speed Force did not possess the properties of space and time as understood by conventional physics. Thus, ever since the first person discovered it-or perhaps brought it into existence-it had connected to every instant of spacetime in the known universe.
In other words, ever since Barry had emerged as someone who wielded the Speed Force, he could sense any speedster connecting to or using it,