The Flash was one of my favorite comic books, mostly because it was vaguely scientific. Like all things vaguely scientific, it was inevitable that I find the edges. If you think too hard about it, you realize that someone who could even move double normal speed would be unstoppable in a fist fight. Someone who could move at the speed of sound could throw a rock through a tank.

Also, I never really bought into the idea of a speedster who didn’t have time for things outside of crime fighting. Barry Allen’s issues were cute, but not realistic.

My inspirations for Serpentine include one of Larry Niven’s Gil Hamilton short stories, where the scientist was looking for a way to reduce momentum, but wound up with a way to speed up time. The math doesn’t quite work out right, but it made for a decent mechanism. When she speeds up, her mass decreases, not quite proportionally. She’s still OP, but not so badly that she can’t be around people.

Another thing that speedster fiction does poorly is portraying how a speedster would effect the air. Take the trope where the hero zips back and forth to make it look like there were two people. If someone tried this, they would create a near-vacuum between the two locations. Leaving a room in the blink of an eye would result in a vacuum trail that collapsed with a deafening boom, shattering windows.

Water is around 800x as dense as air. At 250x normal speed, a brisk walk would break the sound barrier. As you approached the sound barrier, air would compress in front of you, making it harder to push against. You wouldn’t quite have the walking underwater experience because the air wouldn’t be able to get out of your way fast enough. I always wondered at what point the air resistance would exceed a person’s shoes’ grip on the ground. It would be natural to reach your hand forward, knifing through the air to push the air out of the way. At some point it would be indistinguishable from swimming.

Dealing with electromagnetic radiation was a fun math problem. If you sped up your frame of reference, how would it effect light? Certainly your eyes would receive proportionally less light. How would light behave if it had the same wavelength, but lower frequency? That one stumped me, so I decided that wavelength was a function of frequency, and the frequency was preserved, adjusting for time skew. When she got faster, the corresponding frequencies of light decreased.

This had a few surprising effects. Our vision only covers a single doubling of wavelength. Compare this to sound, for which we can perceive twelve or thirteen doublings. Just outside of the optical range, normal air is increasingly opaque. I interpret this like wandering around in a fog. At the fun extreme, the limit of Serpentine’s ability, normal light interacts with her like radio waves, passing through her.

Something I had to basically ignore was body heat. Really, this convinced me that I couldn’t be 100% physics based, even with my exception. A human body gives off about 350 btu. At a measly 20x normal speed, a body gives off as much radiation as your typical home furnace. Even worse, the light is in the part of the ultraviolet spectrum that causes cell damage. I do reference this aspect, but didn’t want people dropping dead from radiation poisoning any time she wandered by, so I limited the emissions to non-blinding levels. That’s where the rainbow flashes come from when she’s popping in and out of slowtime.

A second issue that made 100% accuracy untenable is oxygen. Humans need a shocking fifteen cubic feet of air per minute for normal ventilation. At speed, any room she was in would quickly be depleted of oxygen. This would provide an interesting limitation that I might explore in future fiction, but it’s not what I wanted from Serpentine.

A final influence that I’d like to credit is the movie, Over the Hedge. It was released in the same year as Hoodwinked!, and I particularly appreciated the difference in how they portrayed over-caffeinated squirrels.