"Oh, so to keep these people from messing up your timeline, you just rounded them all up and stashed them at the Time Masters Council?" Thea let out a short laugh. "I always thought something was off about that organization—a few hundred bureaucrats doing absolutely nothing while ten or so people were doing all the real work. Now it finally makes sense."
With her confusion cleared up, Thea finally understood the full picture. Booster Gold hadn't been exaggerating when he said he could help her. The whole causal chain was a tangled mess, but she was happy enough to accept the outcome.
A divine domain over time. Just thinking about it sent a thrill through her. Time, wealth, souls—they all overlapped in just the right ways. Nothing was set in stone yet, but that never stopped Thea Queen from getting to work.
"So I founded this organization specifically to repair the time ruptures Batman caused—that's right, isn't it?" Asking someone else about her own intentions felt strange, but Thea's sheer shamelessness rendered her completely immune to the puzzled look Booster Gold was giving her.
"...Probably," he answered, with the tone of a man who genuinely had no idea what went on inside her head.
"Once the organization is up and running, I won't be stationed here permanently. So you'd be the one leading it going forward? And the information about the fifty-two universes—I told you that at some point in the future?"
That question Booster Gold could answer with certainty. He nodded.
"Alright, I think I've got the picture. Go round up the recruits. I need to redecorate."
She waved him off and got to work.
The aesthetic the dark sorcerers had left behind bore absolutely no resemblance to anything worthy of the name "Time Masters" — not that ninety-nine percent of these so-called Time Masters were anything other than deadweight. They were people young Booster Gold had pulled from disaster, only to be quietly dumped here by his older self to live out their retirement in obscurity. Still, this was Thea's territory now, and she intended to do something with it.
She had noticed during the earlier battle that elemental magic suffered significant attenuation at the edge of time, while soul magic was dramatically amplified. Rather than fuss over the details, she simply channeled soul-based magic to wash over the entire island—and the transformation was immediate.
White and grey. The same palette she had seen the very first time she set foot on the Vanishing Point. She distinctly remembered mocking whoever had designed this place for their terrible taste. The irony of being that person was not lost on her.
She worked fast. Booster Gold worked faster. Less than half an hour later, he had ferried over a hundred people to the newly renovated plaza in successive bursts of white light.
The grey-white courtyard filled with thoroughly disoriented individuals. Those who knew each other huddled together trading whispers; those who didn't kept their distance and their guard up.
In a crowd that was roughly ninety percent middle-aged and older, a handful of young people stood out—scanning the environment with wide eyes, whispering rapidly among themselves. Young minds adapted quickly, and with imaginations shaped by years of serialized fiction, they had already landed on a theory: this was the opening scene of an infinite-flow survival story.
Thea nearly choked, trying not to laugh out loud.
She had no interest in showing herself to this crowd of social elites—several of whom she actually recognized. She cast an invisibility spell to avoid the inevitable headaches.
Once Booster Gold finished the initial recruitment run—a process that would continue indefinitely, since his younger self would keep rescuing people well into the future—Thea handed all organizational duties over to him. Booster Gold took to it with surprising energy, already rallying the assembled crowd with a motivational speech.
Meanwhile, Thea shut herself away and got down to the real work: figuring out how to turn the sea beast into a time machine.
"Tough luck." She raised her control staff. A surge of magic flowed through the mental imprints etched into the wood and forged a connection with the creature.
The sea beast's already-dim consciousness was wiped clean. Its body still breathed, its heart still beat—but the mind was gone. What remained was a shell of tremendous energy, and the control staff crumbled to dust the moment the link was severed.
What followed was surgery on a massive scale. The beast's body was dissected, rebuilt, and fused entirely into the island—the two becoming inseparable. Its blood, long saturated with temporal energy, had transformed into a unique fluid: pure, flowing time. Within it, the finest fluctuations along the timeline were visible to the trained eye.
The brain was carefully extracted and installed inside a supercomputer—one that Deathstroke had appropriated from a highly advanced civilization on a distant planet and whose operating principles remained entirely beyond Thea's comprehension.
The supercomputer would read all the information stored within the brain and display it on external monitors. Power was the final problem, and it gave Thea a headache until she remembered the blue energy rod she had taken from the Daemonites. That would do nicely.
Her avatar and her true self shared thoughts and intentions seamlessly—whenever she needed something, she simply asked Booster Gold to retrieve it from the real world.
After a solid two weeks of work, the device she named the Aurocore Eye—part technology, part magic—was finally operational.
Thirty minutes into the test run, a critical flaw emerged: even the most advanced computer in this universe couldn't keep up with the volume and complexity of timeline data.
"It needs to go faster," the avatar Thea concluded.
To accelerate the brain's processing speed, the only thing she could think of was the Speed Force.
She still had a small reserve left over from what she had absorbed from Reverse-Flash during an earlier encounter—something her true self had considered mostly useless and had been storing in a magically sealed box from Hades' vault. She had Booster Gold deliver it to the Vanishing Point.
"So where is it?" the avatar asked, noting the sour expression on Booster Gold's face when he arrived empty-handed.
"Someone took it..."
"...What?"
"A speedster. It happened so fast I couldn't see who."
A speedster? Thea stared at him, genuinely baffled. The amount of Speed Force in that box wasn't enough to fuel a sprint across a parking lot—what could anyone possibly want with it?
She pulled up the Aurocore Eye 1.0 and began sifting through the timeline. The system couldn't handle massive data loads yet, but isolating a specific window was manageable. She found the thief: a figure in massive silver armor, wreathed in silvery light.
The answer was obvious. That was Savitar—the one currently imprisoned in the Speed Force. He hadn't been after the Speed Force itself. He had been after the box that contained it.
The plan was elegant in a twisted way: to swap the Speed Force inside the box for his own, then use the Speed Force's fundamental resonance to trick Team Flash into releasing him. Whether this Savitar was the original or the one who had replaced him—Barry Allen's time remnant—Thea wasn't particularly interested in finding out.
"You're going to have to make another trip," she told Booster Gold. "The computer still needs that Speed Force."
"What if he takes it again?" He scratched the back of his head.
The question genuinely stumped her. Her gut said no—Savitar was only interested in escaping the Speed Force. He'd hardly go around stealing enchanted boxes for fun. Was he planning to make a living off them?