The Great Escapes

[run_barry]

Since Yamato offered to come to Central City and help with the epidemic crisis, things have been crazy, but handling them has been a whole lot easier now that Barry isn't operating alone.

He even got some rest in, on Yamato's orders, and they've got a bit of down time as far as emergencies in the city go so they're using it to work on other problems.

While Yamato recalibrates the S.T.A.R. Labs satellite to track the new meta they suspect is behind a whole bunch of the crime, and a death-trap or two set for Barry, Barry is getting his science nerd-amateur virologist on, trying to find a cure to the bug that has so much of the City down; including his team.

Sitting at a desk in the Cortex, Barry works away with a microscope taking notes on a tablet. Beside him are several boxes of chicken nuggets which he's working through, with a few empty ones already in the waste bin nearby.

In the middle of the space on the floor GP the porg is munching on shrimp treats while bopping around an inflatable S.T.A.R. Labs beach ball.

Comments

[run_barry]

"I never doubted you," he replies.

"You know he's going to declare he can't leave either of us alone again," Barry notes, because if Cisco doesn't know from Caitlin already Barry still has his own confession to make as well.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato turns a little pink at that first part, ducking his head.

He does chuckle after that, though, running a hand through his hair. "Yeah, he is. You're not going to live down the whole glucose-crash thing for a while."

[run_barry]

"Don't I know it," he sighs. "The first time I did it everyone was hitting me with a welfare check all the time. Even people who don't know about my metabolism because I managed to faint in public."

That was all sorts of not fun.

"But hey, at least with your thing your future isn't going to be full of needles." Because Caitlin was definitely going to be doing a lot of tests in the near future to prove to herself that Barry was recovering from all of this okay.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

"Just shows that a lot of people care about you. There are worse things," Yamato says, a little fondly. "And besides, you already know that I think you should be jabbed with even more needles. For your own good."

[run_barry]

"Yeah, I guess that's true," he admits, shaking his head at Yamato in bemusement. "Lucky for me you aren't the guy with the needles."

[angry_friendship_wolf]

"I bet Bar would give me some if I told her I wanted to stab you with them."

She definitely wouldn't. She wouldn't even give him one (1) delicious fugu fish.

Yamato's distracted from that particular chain of thought by an alert coming up on his console, and he turns towards it. "Looks like our duty officers have checked in. It's nearly go time."

[run_barry]

"Bar happens to really like me, so I doubt it," he returns with a chuckle.

He's on his feet and standing beside Yamato a moment after the alert sounds, looking at the screen.

"Hm. They swapped out Doyle on the detail for Thawne. That... that's Eddie." That wasn't necessarily bad it was just... "Huh."

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato's eyes flick over to Barry, then back to the console. "Is that going to be a problem?"

Barry did mention, after all, that the Flash wasn't exactly Eddie's favourite person right now.

[run_barry]

Barry shakes his head.

"No, it's fine," he says, smothering apprehension by denying it.

"I mean, he's not going to be thrilled that we're basically setting it up for the guys in his custody to escape, but as long as we get them all back it'll be alright."

[angry_friendship_wolf]

"Sorry about that," Yamato says. "But we will get them all back, and we'll take another dangerous meta-criminal off the streets at the same time. Whether Eddie gets over it or not is up to him."

[run_barry]

Yamato was right, and if it were possible to tell Eddie the plan Barry liked to think that the man would agree.

"Yeah, we will," he says nodding firm. "Let's do this."

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato gives Barry a quick grin, and starts bringing up camera feeds from across the city: Ones of the presumed ambush site, and also ones to follow the transport with.

"Barely any traffic on the roads at this time, we're not going to have long before they reach the ambush," he says. "And I don't have any good sightlines into the alleyways around it, so I can't say what kind of numbers we're dealing with."

[run_barry]

Barry watches, scanning over everything as Yamato brings it up.

"Alright," he says. "I guess the good news about that is whoever we're up against won't have any visuals either."

[angry_friendship_wolf]

"Yeah, if you need to hide or flank someone, you can just duck into the alleyways and use those. Just be aware that there's cameras on both the road that the transport should be attacked on, and the roads on the other sides of those alleyways. It's a bunch of little blind spots, not one big one."

He flicks his gaze over to one end of the console, bringing up a map of the city and quickly running a scan for radio signals. Nothing shows up, at least not yet.

"We've got a few minutes yet. You ready?"

[run_barry]

Listening to Yamato while studying the maps, Barry files all of the information away.

Straightening up, he reaches back to pull on the mask and then nods.

"Yeah, I'm ready."

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato follows the transport on the cameras until it starts heading down that narrow road. "Be ready to move," he says to Barry.

He runs the scan again. Still no detectable signal. Yamato's sure the Camera Commander is watching, but if they are, the signal they're creating isn't strong enough to be seen through the background noise yet.

His eyes narrow a little as the transport starts approaching the junction. Then, all of a sudden, a lorry rushes in to block the road off, and several shapes start emerging from the alleyways.

"Go."

[run_barry]

Barry moves into a ready position, one foot planted in front of the other. He leaves watching the monitors to Yamato and instead braces, waiting for the signal.

Yamato has hardly finished the word 'go' when Barry's gone, racing off and leaving a gusting blow back behind him.

"Let me know when they open the doors so I can get the cops out."

Blocked in, the officers couldn't just sit and wait to be taken out, they'd have to fight back.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato gives a brief noise of acknowledgement, watching the cameras. He sees four men with guns emerge from the alleyways, then two more, as the doors on either side of the transport are thrown open from the inside.

"Doors are open. Your route to get them and evacuate them is clear for now, but it won't be for long."

Five seconds maximum, Yamato's pretty sure.

[run_barry]

Barry pours out more speed, tearing down roads and alleyways until he's on scene.

Zipping past the armed bad guys, Barry grabs up each officer one by one, whisking them away and back down the alley the transport had come down.

Depositing the first man against the safe cover of a wall at the mouth of the alley, Barry goes back for the next and then the last which is Eddie who he yanks out just as the first bullets start hitting the cab of the transport.

Vibrating to blur his features and his voice, Barry instructs the stunned Eddie, "Stay here, I've got this."

Eddie shouts something at him, but Barry isn't there to hear it. He's back in the alley, trying to tackle the four armed men on one side of the transport.

"Cops are safe," he calls back to Yamato."

[angry_friendship_wolf]

"Good."

He runs the scan again and, this time, he actually gets a match, the faintest trace of the strange radio signal accompanied by a tiny flicker of dark matter energy.

"You've got Camera Commander's attention, too."

At the moment, all the scan can tell Yamato is that the signal is coming from somewhere in the city, but as it keeps running, it starts to slowly narrow down the areas it could be coming from.

His gaze flicks back over to the cameras, in time to see three of the men go down, and one of them careen backwards into one of the alleyways that Yamato can't see.

"You've got two guys circling around the back of the transport to free the prisoners," he says. "And two more guys have exited the truck they used to block off the road and are heading your way."

[run_barry]

"Great," Barry says, taking a moment to disassemble the weapons he pulled off of the men he just took care of.

He's only stopped in place for a moment before he has to duck out of the way of a volley of bullets.

He knocks the two going for the rear of the transport backwards, then zips around to duck behind the front, asking Yamato, "How long until you have his location?"

Barry can't mop up the rest of the guys here until they have Camera Commander pegged.

Of course, bullets ripping through the air again are a good reminder that taking these guys down isn't quite as simple as all that.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

"Not long, but it's not an exact science," Yamato says, glancing at the scan, which is currently narrowing the search to about four different areas in the city. "Let me worry about his location. You can worry about all of the heavily armed men trying to kill you."

One of the two going for the rear appears very much to be down for the count from the impact of a speedster knocking into them at high velocity -- Yamato can see him roll onto his side, and can practically hear the pained groan the man must be making. The other one struggles to his feet and starts going for the back door of the transport again.

Worse, Yamato can see that the two coming from the front are practically spraying the entire area in bullets.

"Two at your twelve, one at your six trying to open the transport again, and one -- I don't know, somewhere on your right, but he's in my blindspots," he says.

[run_barry]

Ducking behind the passenger side tire, Barry crouches as low as he can without laying down to stay clear of the gun fire.

"Twelve and six, eye out for the other guy, got it," Barry replies, trying to work out just how he's going to handle the situation.

Keeping everyone in the transport is still top-priority, but with the gun fire Barry can't get up to deal with the guy moving on the backdoor again.

"Can you tell me when the two up front are going to need to reload?"

On Yamato's screen the search area narrows down to three parts of the city, and then two, just before it goes down to one it winks out. A moment later and the screen comes back on, only now the image is Yamato looking back at himself.

The comm-link connection between Yamato and Barry breaks, and over the earpiece in Barry's cowl and the speaker in the Cortex a synthesized voice speaks up.

"Trying to find me?"

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato scowls, less out of anger (although there's plenty of that) and more because that bubbling, unpleasant feeling of terror that another friend of his might die without him being able to help is starting to rise up in him again.

"Well, look who finally decided to chat. I was starting to think you were giving us the cold shoulder," he growls, opening up the display on his wrist computer and starting up Koushiro's cracking program, typing away at it as he works to get back into the Cortex's systems. "Still not brave enough to put in a personal appearance, though."

[run_barry]

"Yamato? YAMATO?" Barry calls back, panic welling a moment when the strange voice cuts in on the comm-link.

"It did take me awhile to locate and get into your system," the voice admits. "But now that I have-- "

On Barry's end the line goes dead.

"Yamato?" Frantically Barry tries again and again to connect and gets no response from Yamato or the other person. "Dammit!"

With no outside help, and knowing there's a strong chance that Yamato and the others in S.T.A.R. Labs could be in danger, Barry starts frantically looking around, trying to figure out what to do.

His gaze falls on the door to the cab of the transport, and an idea forms.

"I think he can handle things on his own for awhile, don't you?" the voice says to Yamato. "As for personal appearances, why do that when I can send someone instead?"

From outside the room GP comes squawking and shrieking, flying in a wild panic into the Cortex and straight to Yamato.

The feed on the monitor switches from the frontal view of Yamato to one coming from the outside corridor. It draws closer and closer and then it shows the open doorway to the Cortex.

The video is coming from the robot Girder that Cisco built to help Barry train, and the big bot now stands in the same room with Yamato.

Imposing to start, the robot has been upgraded since. In addition to being bigger and faster than the previous version, this robot is also mobile and seems to be carrying what looks like Cisco's prototype lightsaber in one hand.