Non BS ways of dealing with speedsters

[Dr Roberts]

We have all seen speedsters like the flash and quicksilver who can perceive the world and react in such a way that the worked goes slow mo or even appears to stop. Yet they seem to get tripped up all the time by non super powered being so, what are good ways to stop a speedster without undermining the power without using other speedsters?

[Skgoa]

The first thing that comes to mind would be "trick them" - like entraping them in criss-crossing LASER beams. The can't be faster than the speed of light, so their speed will not be of any help in this case. For a less high-tech approach, lock him in a hallway without him realizing that it's happening. Then fill with epoxy.
Or if you want to be boring, set of a nuke right next to him.

e/ In essence: you have to make it so that at the moment when he realizes what is going on, it is already to late, even if he could stop time.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Depends. Are you asking from within a comic book universe, or RL?
From within comics - Psionics/Telepathy. All you need to do to deal with a speedster is get the first strike in before they can react (the trick is their ability to react to the process of the first strike itself).

[CaptainChewbacca]

If you can telekinetically lift a speedster off the ground, they can't do anything to you. Similarly some sort of magnetic field should do the trick.

The key is to prevent them from building up momentum.

[Skgoa]

If you can telekinetically lift a speedster off the ground, they can't do anything to you. Similarly some sort of magnetic field should do the trick.

The key is to prevent them from building up momentum.

That depends. If their power is "slowing down time relative to them", then they could concievably generate enough thrust waving their arms to break your telekinetic hold on them.

[Solauren]

In real life, realistically, a tripwire should be fatal to a speedster. I mean, think about it, you're going at what, Mach 15 and then suddenly trip and hit the ground? Splatter.
Now, you just need a wire that's as thin as piano wire, and stronger then cable steel.

Failing that, there are some poisons that are faster acting then nerve conduction. Get them to run through a corridor of that in gaseous form, and hope that it sticking to their skin works.

Within the realms of Comics -
Telekinesis (as been mentioned). comes to mind.

Some kind of local gravity distortion would also work. Imagine the effect on Flash if his left foot stepped down into a small area with gravity 100xs normal. He might rip his own leg off.

[Dr Roberts]

@Solauren good ideas but surely a "real" speedster would have to be extremely durable to handle those speeds in the first place.

[Eleas]

In real life, realistically, a tripwire should be fatal to a speedster. I mean, think about it, you're going at what, Mach 15 and then suddenly trip and hit the ground? Splatter.
Now, you just need a wire that's as thin as piano wire, and stronger then cable steel.

IIRC that's how one speedster (Silver Sabre) almost buys it in X-Men. He manages to stop himself just short of getting throat-cut, though it's unclear how.

[Shroom Man 777]

@Solauren good ideas but surely a "real" speedster would have to be extremely durable to handle those speeds in the first place.

With that logic, a Ferrari would be extremely durable too to handle its kind of speeds. And supersonic jets would be totally invincible to squishy birds, if they can fly faster than sound.

I like the idea of a metabolic-triggered neurotoxin, aerosol form, tasteless, colorless, odorless. Everyone, speedsters or no, will be huffing it in. Heck, if the speedsters are anyway remotely realistic, they'll be huffing it in more by virtue of moving faster. Now, make that neurotoxin or bioweapon metabolically triggered, so they'll only act and start fucking up the central nervous system or digesting the person from inside out if that person has a superfast metabolism.

Heck, you could like bio-engineer some kind of super-fast virus or bacteria. Use Speed Force bullshit, so this speedus fastus bacillus can only replicate in cells that are vibrating at superfast speeds, that can only inhabit bodies resonant with Speed Force or whatever bullshit comic books peddle nowadays. The faster the speedster moves, the more the virus spreads. If he goes at mach 5, then the virus grows super fast and the Flash will end up having Speed Force Tumors growing out of his prostates. His lymph nodes will be as big as cats! The only way he won't die if he doesn't move! Like, a reverse version of that Jason Statham movie, Crank.

Yeah, it's a stupid idea involving BS and comic book biology and shit, but fuck it. Speedsters are already bullshit. And this is much cleverer and meaner than Batman throwing a batamarang at the Flash and Flash getting hit by it.

Fuck. For the Speed Virus, you can use samples of the Flash's sperm - themselves superfast - and bioengineer it and splice it with ebola. So the virus will look like sperm, superfast sperm wriggling at ridiculous speed, yet at the head of the sperm its nucleus will be composed of horrible bubonic plague shit just waiting to spread when they come into contact with superfast tissues.

[Lord of the Abyss]

One idea I like from Fred Sabrehagen's Berserker series: Guns that automatically target and fire upon anything moving at superhuman velocity.

Another possibility is filling your facility with poison gas that you and your people have the antidote to, in some time release form. The speedster won't be warned of the gas by the presence of gas masks that way.

Pressure sensitive electrified floor panels, if the speedster isn't literally faster than lightning (ie, Quicksilver, not the Flash).

Invisible glass walls that the speedster will smash into at full speed. Genuinely invisible glass is possible I understand*, just very expensive; some Lex Luthor-ish comic book mastermind type could certainly afford some I'm sure.

Corridor-filling turnstiles or revolving doors that mechanically cannot rotate faster than a normal walking speed, forcing the speedster to slow down enough to be seen & identified. And can be remotely locked trapping the speedster partway through.

* IIRC, it involves a coating that gives it the refraction of air, and polishing it to about the same degree as telescope mirrors.

[Batman]

Since we're talking comic book speedsters, yes, they absolutely can move faster than light depending on iteration.

Simply locking them in, at least for the Flash gang, has the problem that they can vibrate through solid matter (if sometimes with spectacular side effects). Which is why I like the invisible glass idea-you won't bother to vibrate through something you don't know is there.
One of the problems with speedsters is that a lot of the time, they can not only move ludicrously fast, they also think and react ludicrously fast. Used to be Wally was able to dodge bullets that already technically hit him. Which is why a lot of this depends on the speedster in question as anything that gives them any time to react may not work.
I think your best bet is to attack them in ways they won't notice-colourless odourless gases, bioweapons, lethal radiation poisoning, something like that. Stuff they can't react to because they don't know about it.

[Forgothrax]

Modify the ground beneath their feet? i.e. make a surface super-slick or similar to trip them up?

[Ahriman238]

The first thing that comes to mind would be "trick them" - like entraping them in criss-crossing LASER beams. The can't be faster than the speed of light, so their speed will not be of any help in this case. For a less high-tech approach, lock him in a hallway without him realizing that it's happening. Then fill with epoxy.
Or if you want to be boring, set of a nuke right next to him.

e/ In essence: you have to make it so that at the moment when he realizes what is going on, it is already to late, even if he could stop time.

Actually, I remember something like the laser approach being done in a silver age Superman comic, with lasers overpowered enough to hurt even him.

Except in this case it was a laser 'maze' that activated with man sized holes (albeit with redundant layers that had the holes in different places) and swung around to close them up/ julienne the victim. And it took Supes roughly 0.000003 seconds to figure his way out, dash across the room and grab Luthor (who somehow managed to get in a 3-paragraph gloat in that same fraction-of-a-second window. Those old Superman comics took talking is a free action to absurd extremes.)

[Lord of the Abyss]

Floor panels that are by default electrified; they turn off when a human is about to step on them (by infrared sensors in the walls, perhaps). The speedster doesn't give them the time to turn off.

I think your best bet is to attack them in ways they won't notice-colourless odourless gases, bioweapons, lethal radiation poisoning, something like that. Stuff they can't react to because they don't know about it.

A gridwork of infrared or ultraviolet lasers, perhaps? Or if you have something like Known Space Sinclair molecule chain wire, you string it through doorways and the speedster comes out the other end in chunks.

[Batman]

Floor panels that are by default electrified; they turn off when a human is about to step on them (by infrared sensors in the walls, perhaps). The speedster doesn't give them the time to turn off.

But may also not be on them long enough for it to matter.

I think your best bet is to attack them in ways they won't notice-colourless odourless gases, bioweapons, lethal radiation poisoning, something like that. Stuff they can't react to because they don't know about it.

A gridwork of infrared or ultraviolet lasers, perhaps? Or if you have something like Known Space Sinclair molecule chain wire, you string it through doorways and the speedster comes out the other end in chunks.

Again, that's something that gives them time to react because lasers will be something that does damage immediately and quite noticeably. And sorry, but visible light lasers are just as invisible under virtually all circumstances.
We're back to the 'giving them time to react' aspect again. The laser grid (or your wires) will immediately register as 'Ouch' (if not faster, see the Wally example earlier WRT doing hits that already happened) and allow the speedster to stop in time before any serious damage occurs.
Gas/bioweapon/radiation attacks need not register until long after the actual attack is long over. Hard to dodge a gas you inhaled 20 minutes ago. A virus you caught last week. A leathal dose of radiation you were exposed to a month ago (though on hindsight I'd disrecommend that last one, from all you). know that'll enable the speedster in question to turn into a a giant green monster with near infinite strength on top of the superspeed )

[Lord of the Abyss]

The laser grid (or your wires) will immediately register as 'Ouch' (if not faster, see the Wally example earlier WRT doing hits that already happened) and allow the speedster to stop in time before any serious damage occurs.

Will it? I've always heard that extremely sharp blades can cut without hurting immediately, as can lasers because they cauterize the nerve before it can send a damage signal.

[Shroom Man 777]

I still say superfast bacteria that reproduce and infect at superfast speeds is the way to go. Imagine the microorganisms spreading and coursing through the speedster's body at a superfast speed, spreading the infection.

Okay, fine, this is against the OP which states "what are good ways to stop a speedster without undermining the power without using other speedsters", but fuck it. Like, a superfast speedster attack dog biting the Flash in the throat and giving him super-rabies would be great.

Or some kind of non-newtonian gloop that only hardens when you're moving fast, so to be non-stickified to the gloop, you have to move slowly.

[Formless]

Landmines.

If you are too cheap for landmines, pungi sticks and caltrops.

Attack the speedster's means of locomotion and he's fucked. Bullets can be applied after his foot has been blown off, punctured, or his ankles broken.

This is assuming he isn't Superman with special emphasis on speed. For those types, nuclear landmines may be called for.

[Drooling Iguana]

Bribe 'em.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Okay, fine, this is against the OP which states "what are good ways to stop a speedster without undermining the power without using other speedsters", but fuck it. Like, a superfast speedster attack dog biting the Flash in the throat and giving him super-rabies would be great.

Supervillain: "Release the Speed Wolves!"

[Simon_Jester]

It depends hugely on the type of speedster. Someone who can run at 200 miles an hour and react to a new stimulus in a few milliseconds is hugely different from someone who can run 200 thousand miles an hour and react to a new stimulus in a few microseconds.

For speedsters of the first type, a lot of tricks would work well- a well placed banana peel could put them in traction if you're lucky. Automatic guns to shoot things moving faster-than-human are great, and so on.

For speedsters of the second type, it's harder to do and hinges more on creating situations that raw speed won't get them out of. One of the few comics I ever actually read featured a villain disabling the Flash by mining the building he was in with motion-sensitive bombs that would explode if he was seen to move even slightly faster than normal.

Bullshit techniques like vibrating through walls wouldn't help there, and he couldn't feasibly get up to speed and defuse a jillion bombs before they started to go off.


Of course, half the problem is that in a long-running comic series like the Flash, characters are routinely given arbitrary power levels to cope with the exciting Problem of the Week, and this goes on for many years, so it's hard to think of anything that some technique they used at some point wouldn't defeat. While at the same time, many of these techniques aren't used all the time, because in one comic they want the Flash to 'dodge' a bullet by waiting until it reaches his skin and then moving away faster than the bullet can catch up. While in another they want someone to knock him unconscious by hitting him over the head with a blackjack while he's looking the other way so they can snark about how the fastest man alive is as slow as everyone else when he's standing still. The bullet-dodging trick should make him immune to the blackjack tactic- but it doesn't, because comics don't work that way.

[DudeGuyMan]

We have all seen speedsters like the flash and quicksilver who can perceive the world and react in such a way that the worked goes slow mo or even appears to stop. Yet they seem to get tripped up all the time by non super powered being so, what are good ways to stop a speedster without undermining the power without using other speedsters?

Shoot him in his sleep. Poisoning him by various means was also a very good suggestion.

I find it instructive in this case to think less about how I'd kill the Flash and more about how a slow-motion world could kill me.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Landmines.

If you are too cheap for landmines, pungi sticks and caltrops.

Attack the speedster's means of locomotion and he's fucked. Bullets can be applied after his foot has been blown off, punctured, or his ankles broken.

This is assuming he isn't Superman with special emphasis on speed. For those types, nuclear landmines may be called for.

Caltrops I can see working, so long as the speedster doesn't have super-speed perception that lets them alter their path once they see the trap. Land-mines, however, would be comically ineffective simply because after stepping on one, the average speedster will simply outrun the blast-wave. Now an invisible laser tripwire that silently activates an explosive set a specific distance beyond (calibrated to that speedster's ground speed) would work.

But may also not be on them long enough for it to matter.

Unless the speedster is moving faster than electricity (somewhere in the vicinity of c), the shock's going to do its work. Since one of electricity's main interactions with the human body is to cause muscles to lock up, all you need to do to take the speedster out is ensure your panels extend far enough to still be under the speedster when their momentum gives out and their writhing body slides to a stop. Both assuming the speedster isn't shock-resistant, and that the charge is enough to incapacitate rather than merely annoy them.

[Shroom Man 777]

Okay, fine, this is against the OP which states "what are good ways to stop a speedster without undermining the power without using other speedsters", but fuck it. Like, a superfast speedster attack dog biting the Flash in the throat and giving him super-rabies would be great.

Supervillain: "Release the Speed Wolves!"

That is the best answer to anything speedsters ever.

[Simon_Jester]

Controlling a rabid speed attack dog could be pretty difficult.