Gorilla Grodd

Deep in the African jungle, where the trees grow so tall and close that even the noon sun only reaches the forest floor as narrow, shifting beams of gold, there is a city that no ordinary map will ever show.

Gorilla City.

Its towers rise between the great trunks — not carved from wood, but assembled from a technology so advanced that the most brilliant human engineers would spend a lifetime studying it. Its streets are clean and quiet and organized according to a logic that has nothing to do with cars or pedestrians, because its citizens move on four limbs and think at speeds that would challenge most universities. It is lit by bioluminescent panels that have never needed replacing. Its medical facilities could cure things that human medicine considers incurable.

And at its center, on a throne carved from a single piece of obsidian, sits Gorilla Grodd.

He is large in the way that suggests the idea of large had him in mind when it was invented. His arms are longer than some people are tall. His grip has bent steel bars without effort. But what makes Grodd dangerous — truly, existentially dangerous — is not his body. It is his mind.

Grodd's telepathy is unparalleled. He can reach into the thoughts of a thousand people simultaneously, sorting them the way you might sort cards, finding the useful ones, reshaping the memories that get in the way of his plans. He can project pain — not physical pain, but the kind that goes deeper, the vivid, overwhelming pain of a mind turned against itself. He can make people believe things that are not true with such clarity and detail that the belief persists even after he releases them.

He wanted the Speed Force.

Not because he needed it exactly, but because the Speed Force was the one thing in the world that Barry Allen had and Grodd didn't, and Grodd did not enjoy the category of things he didn't have. He had come to believe that the Speed Force was something that could be extracted, transferred, possessed — that it was a resource rather than a relationship. This was, in a sense, his central error, but it was not one that could be corrected from the outside.

Barry Allen felt the first touch of Grodd's telepathy the way you feel a cold draft from a window you thought was closed — a slight wrongness at the edge of perception, a sense that a thought had come from somewhere it shouldn't have.

He ran faster.

Speed was his defense against telepathy in a way that nothing else quite was — at high enough velocity, his thoughts were moving too quickly for even Grodd's extraordinary mind to get a hold on. The sense impressions came and went faster than they could be sorted and manipulated. It was not comfortable, exactly, running at that speed through the push of Grodd's mental pressure, but it was survivable.

They met in the jungle outside Gorilla City's perimeter — Grodd having anticipated the Flash's path with a precision that was uncomfortable, having had days to model the Flash's behavior and calculate his approach. He was waiting in a clearing, sitting back on his haunches, large and patient and entirely unimpressed.

"Allen," Grodd said. He always used the civilian name as a subtle form of pressure. "You understand that you cannot simply punch your way out of this situation."

"I'm aware," Barry said, staying at the edge of the clearing, on his feet, moving slightly. Always moving.

What followed was not what Grodd expected. He expected the Flash to run, to vibrate, to attempt to use speed in ways that Grodd had already calculated defenses for. What the Flash did instead was talk. He kept Grodd's attention fully engaged — genuinely engaged, asking about Gorilla City, about the research Grodd had done on the Speed Force, about the technology in those towers — and while he talked, he moved in slow, casual increments around the clearing, reaching positions he needed without announcing that he was reaching them.

By the time Grodd recognized what was happening, Barry had already activated the dampener he'd planted — a small device that disrupted telepathic broadcast frequencies, designed in Cisco Ramon's lab at STAR Labs and tested specifically for this situation.

Grodd's reach went dark.

He blinked. He looked at the Flash with something that was not quite surprise and not quite anger — something slower, more considered.

"Interesting tactic," he said.

"Thank you," Barry said. "I had help designing it."

Grodd was, in the end, returned to Gorilla City under terms that his own citizens negotiated — they did not all share his ambitions, and many of them were quite tired of the Flash showing up to deal with their ruler's geopolitical hobby projects. Barry shook hands with the Gorilla City council in good faith and ran home.

He arrived at STAR Labs with mud on his boots and a story that Cisco Ramon interrupted seventeen times with questions.

"You talked to him?" Cisco said. "You just talked to him while planting the dampener?"

"He wanted to be underestimated," Barry said. "I let him."

Cisco stared at him. "You are so much scarier than people realize."

Barry poured himself a coffee and considered this. "I prefer 'thoughtful,'" he said.