Speed Force



"Listen to me, Barry. Breathe. Breathe. Feel the air. Feel that wind on your face. Feel the ground, your feet lifting you up, pushing you forward. And the lightning, Barry, feel the lightning. Feel its power. Its electricity pumping through your veins, crackling through you, traveling to every nerve in your body, like a shock. You're no longer you now. You're part of something greater. You're part of a speed force. It's yours. Now do it."

- Eobard Thawne

The Speed Force is the extra-dimensional source of Barry Allen and all speedsters' powers and the key to honing in on their ability to affect the fabric of reality. It allows them to enhances their movement based abilities, as well as giving them others, such as vibrating their bodies at varying frequencies and phasing through matter, affecting the state of their molecular bonds.

History
"Barry, what you're seeing is the Speed Force: your past, you present, your future all at once. So you need to focus on where you want to go. So think about that night. Think about your mother."

- Eobard Thawne directing Barry on how to use the Speed Force to time travel.

After travelling back to the year 2000, Eobard Thawne lost his connection to the Speed Force due to copious amounts of time travel. Fifteen years later, while masquerading as Harrison Wells, Eobard was able to use a tachyon prototype to access the Speed Force, absorbing some of it and allowing him to run at high speeds, and vibrate his body and voice.

Sometime later, needing to remove a bomb from the Flash's wrist without it exploding, Eobard motivated the Flash to become one with his speed, thus becoming one with the Speed Force, allowing him to better hone his ability to vibrate and phase through a tanker, leaving the band on the other side.

When trying to travel back in time to rescue his mother from being murdered, Barry Allen was able to physically see the Speed Force after passing Mach 2, viewing events from his past, present and future all at once. To travel where he wanted to go, Barry had to think about a specific time and place, before transporting into his childhood home and into his bed room, just as his younger self was walking down the stairs to see his mother trapped in the tornado of light, that was actually Reverse-Flash and the future Flash fighting over the younger Barry's fate at super speed.

Powers and abilities
The Speed Force enhances all movement capabilities of its user, down to a microscopic level, as well as giving the user conscious control over it. This enhances overall acceleration, agility, reflexes, coordination, balance, and reaction time to inhuman levels. Furthermore, the user could perceive time in slow motion and be able to act and move in what they perceive is normal speed, while actually moving at inhuman speed, faster than normal humans can percieve. The users speed usually caused them to appear to be mere vibrating blurs or streaks of motion. This ability allows the users overall speed to rival the fastest vehicles at low levels, while advanced levels allow the user to break the sound barrier, moving at super sonic speeds. Some users can even exceed the speed of light at their peak speed. Skilled users have been fast enough to distort light and create a holographic, mirage like projection of themselves and appear to be in two or more places at once by moving from one location to the other fast enough and therefore create an after image of themselves. These projections become less realistic looking when the user is creating more than one. Augmented movement, motion and momentum results in the user, especially one using super speed, being able to resist extreme pressure, friction, vectors, tension, spring, inertia, gravity, and kinetic energy. This further enhances a users resilience and durability Lastly, super speed at its peak, the user can create a hole in the fabric of space time and travel through time, with the users immediate thoughts cause them to end up at a certain time and place. This last ability is also the most dangerous, as altering the events of the past in the slightest could distort the users present and future, usually with devastating results. If the user travels to a time where they existed recently, their younger or previous self will vanish from existence, causing the the user to replace themselves in that time.

Also, chemical processes, as well as cellular, neural, and brain activity occurs in a user far faster than normal, which enhanced the speed and efficiency of physical healing and metabolism to inhuman levels. The increase in speed and activity within bodily systems can enhance the users physical performance to great extent, as well as increasing these systems overall reaction speed, resulting in adrenaline, dopamin and other endorphins to be produced quicker and the user being able to think, read, scan and comprehend concepts and ideas all in seconds while their powers are in use. Therefore, the users mental speed and efficiency as well as physical is also enhanced to inhuman levels. This caused a user to be able to be completely healed a from severe injuries in a matter of hours, as well as be able to not be stunned, dazed, staggered, tripped or knocked off balance by great forces, especially as they move at super speed. It also caused enhanced physical conditioning, resulting in the user being having peak human physical capabilities and health with little to no physical maintaining. Their naturally healthy bodies also are naturally conditioned and adapted to the extreme pressure, air deprivation and kinetic impact the user is exposed to while moving at super speed.

Use of the Speed Force causes Speedsters' bodies to generate electricity. As they are running, the electricity is usually the only part of the speedster that is perceived by non-speedsters. This Speed-Force lightning has been show to vary in colour between the differing speedsters seen so far. Those with a pure and natural connection to the Speed Force generate yellow lightning like Barry Allen and Jay Garrick. Speedsters with a broken or artificial/temporary connection like Eobard Thawne generate red lightning. As of Season 2, the new Speedster villain known only as Zoom is shown to generate blue lightning, indicating a currently unknown form of Speed-Force connection which is likely sustained by draining the speed from other Speedsters.

Since these enhanced movement and acceleration capabilities affected the user microscopically, it allowed the user to manipulate the movement and acceleration of their cells, and even their molecules, allowing them to shake and vibrate their bodies or parts of it by willing their cells to do so. These vibrations can allow a user to become intangible, enhance physical force produced by physical contact, and distort the users image to the point where the user becomes a vibrating blur of motion, even when they are not using their speed. A user can disguise their appearance with this, as well as their voice by vibrating their vocal cords, which can produce an electronic, distorted voice or a garbled, deep growl. Skilled users have been fast enough to distort light and create a holographic, mirage like projection of themselves and appear to be in two place at once by moving from one location to the other fast enough and therefore create an after image of themselves at one of these points.

The enhanced movement and physical force abilities allow a user to be able to increase the power of physical impacts, collisions, and concussive forces, as well as allowing a user to be able to resist greater forces, such as kinetic energy, pressure, friction and gravity, while moving at super speed. A user can generate extreme kinetic energy, friction, inertia, vectors, spring and other applied and contact forces. The user can generate the force to propel a target through the air with ease while user their enhanced motion and momentum. They can also propel themselves off a surface and through the air, as well as move on vertical surfaces and across bodies of water with their speed. In addition, a user using super speed while moving their entire body, or part of it in a repetitive motion, such as back and forth, spinning, or otherwise circular motions, can manipulate air flows and currents and therefore generate powerful winds and manipulating them with there repeated motions. These motions can also be achieved by the user moving or running back and forth or in a circle. The user can therefore create intense whirlwinds, cyclones, tornados, vortexes and vacuums of air with these motions. This can allow the user to disperse the physical force from oncoming targets or propel them away.

Known users

 * Barry Allen/The Flash
 * Jay Garrick/The Flash (formerly)
 * Eobard Thawne/Reverse-Flash (unborn; erased from existence)
 * Zoom

Behind the scenes

 * In the DC comics, the Speed Force is an extra-dimensional energy that allows the various Flashes, as well as most other speedsters, to be able to move through time and reality, as well as enhancing their speed and giving them other powers of movement.