Plotting and Planning

"Only Aarti would adopt a man-eating three-headed dog," Dawnie said, leaning back against a tower of stacked dining room tables.

"Only Aarti would consider a three-headed dog normal," her brother, Don replied.

He pulled a honey coconut IWA bar out of his pocket and examined its nutritional label. He frowned and offered it to Dawnie who shook her head.

"There are some flavors I'm just never going to eat," Dawnie told him. She frowned. "Who comes up with these flavors anyway? Most of these bars are done in batches, very small batches."

Don paused, the bar dangling from his fingers.

"You know? I never stopped to think about that. I didn't mind the chocolate cherry or chocolate strawberry, but the delivery after that one only had strawberry crème and crème brule." Don stood up, starting to frown himself. "Where exactly do these things come from?"

"You don't know? I thought you were getting them from Mom." Dawnie pulled a coconut crème bar out of her pocket.

"I thought you were getting them from Mom. The box was just sitting in the living room last time I checked in," Don explained.

"That's where it was when I got them last time." Dawnie felt a chill start to crawl up her spine.

"It can't be too dangerous, or we wouldn't still be running around out here," Don said. He stripped the wrapper from the honey coconut bar and turned it inside out.

Dawnie appeared beside him. They both stared at the small strip of electronics, delicate and lacy, plastered against the inside of the wrapper.

"They're probably tracking where we dump the wrappers?" Dawnie ventured.

"I usually dump them in the Central City landfill." Don's hand clenched but stopped just shy of crumpling the wrapper.

"I usually dump mine in Star City. Accumulate thirty or so and dump." Dawnie gently pried the wrapper out of his hand and reversed the wrapper back. "If they're trying to figure out a location, then they might be a little confused."

"They know where we live," Don snarled.

"A lot of people know where we live. Mom's one of the spearheads of the Liberation Day movement. Of course, people know where she is." Dawnie pulled out the five IWA bars she'd stuffed into her pockets. "Do you have any?"

Don grunted and pulled another eight out of various pockets on his jacket. Most of them were coconut crème or honey coconut.

"So, we only have the last batch of whatever these are." Dawnie turned one of the unopened bars over in her hands. "I don't understand what the purpose of this is? Speedsters are a dime a dozen depending on the multiverse."

"Maybe what they're looking for is an 'improved' speedster." Don said, using air quotes. "We're a failed product, but we're still faster than pretty much anything out there."

"Not faster than the Speedforce," Dawnie teased.

"But at least it's not trying to obliterate us like those lab-made copies." Don shivered. He scooped up the bars in his hand. "I'm going to go dump these in the middle of the Atlantic. Back in a few."

Dawnie watched him go, her expression serious. Then she smoothed down her hair and straightened up her clothes.

"I wonder what Lucy's going to do with that information?" She murmured to herself before zipping back to the center of the hideout.

***

Lucy paced. She'd found that there was a modicum of peace to be found in simple exercise. No one was talking. No one was demanding answers or plans. It was soothing in the extreme.

She ignored Court's worried expression. He kept glancing at her from time to time. Aarti was ensconced on a sofa, bewitched by television. Clearly, proper Amazons were supposed to be ignorant of world events or some such. It made Lucy want to roll her eyes.

Dawnie and Don had disappeared somewhere, probably off to secure more food for those yawning pits they called stomachs. Lucy felt just a little bit envious. Dawnie ate just about everything and never gained a pound, but the tradeoff was a bit too heart wrenching to take.

Giving it some thought, whoever had done the tinkering had exchanged age for metabolism somehow. Instead of aging prematurely, the twins were literally eating themselves up in an accelerated state. Lucy was sure that someone would love to give out an award of some sort for the work if it became widely known.

She didn't trust those Star Labs or WayneCorp as far as she could throw them. Clearly, someone had realized that the twins' acceleration and metabolism was tweaked. Now, under the guise of research, they were trying to reverse engineer it. Lucy couldn't figure out why, but people were people after all.

She paused at that thought. People were people. Everyone had habits, even overlords. Lucy felt as if her heart was going to beat out of her chest. She glanced over at San who was eating potato chips again.

"The ones we saw. They were Overlords Pleja and Ahplex, right?" She asked the room in general.

"That's who it was. Made both you and Court start to froth at the mouth and not in good ways," San said, popping another chip into his mouth.

"Then maybe we can find them," Lucy said. She felt around her mind for the edges of the plan. "I think we can find them, especially if they use that hat again."

Aarti looked up at that. Despite not saying it, Lucy could tell that Aarti felt responsible for that stupid Amazon being kidnapped. Lucy privately thought that it was the girl's own fault for being an idiot and playing with things she didn't understand. What kind of Amazon lacked situational awareness? Even she had situational awareness as evidenced by the fact that she was still walking and talking and not six feet deep in a cemetery somewhere.

"And how are we going to find them? Even the guy who owned the hat couldn't track it." Court stood up, dusting imaginary dust off of his pants.

Lucy let a wide smile spread as she examined Court. Examining Court always made her happy.

"We do it by remembering just what made them happy, besides us," Lucy said.

"Then we need to find Jebediah and Marnie," Aarti said after a moment. Both were also 'special experiments' that the overlords had been obsessed with.

"And we do it before the overlords get to them," Lucy finished.