Wallace "Ace" West (then-referred to as simply "Wally") first appears in
The Flash (vol. 4) Annual #3 (June 2014) in a story set twenty years in the future, when a jaded, older Flash (Barry Allen) reads about the character's funeral and vows to change history. Tying in with the ongoing story
The New 52: Futures End, the story
The Flash: Futures End #1 depicts an encounter between Barry of five years in the future (when Wallace is supposed to die) and the Barry of 20 years in the future, who is out to prevent it. In the course of the story, Wallace ends up learning that Barry is the Flash and absorbs part of the
Speed Force — the source of the Flash's abilities — during the battle between Barry and his future counterpart. He becomes a speedster but his hero career is short-lived; he sacrifices himself to fix a wound in the speed force. Due to the effects of time travel, however, this has implications for Wallace earlier in his history. Around the same time, in the present-day narrative of
The Flash, Barry meets Wallace for the first time through Iris. He is struck by lightning and acquires super-speed abilities; an apparition of his future explains that, as a consequence of how his future-self had died repairing the Speed Force, all the power within him was able to travel back in time and use Wallace's lightning accident as a catalyst. Wallace's first act as a speedster is to use his powers to protect a classmate from a bully, using the same artistic elements as
Professor Zoom's powers.
DC Rebirth #1, part of a company-wide event of the same name, marked DC's attempts to restore much of what it lost in the New 52 reboot, both in tone and in the stories of its characters. It features
Wally West watching his younger cousin, Wallace, from outside of time, proud and amazed that he too has become a speedster, and reflecting on how they are both named for the same grandfather. Wally is brought back to reality by Barry, who remembers him for the first time since the events of
Flashpoint.
Teen Titans Rebirth #1, shows Wallace joining the
Teen Titans superhero team as
Kid Flash. Wallace, as Kid Flash, meets Wally West, as the Flash, when assisting Barry in dealing with a bridge accident, although Wally does not explicitly introduce himself to his cousin, simply identifying himself as an ally of Barry, although Wallace accepts him after they work together to save Barry from a temporary infusion of Speed Force energy. On meeting the Flash of China
Avery Ho, Ace and Avery fall in love, and the two form the superhero speedster duo/team Speed Force. ==Powers and abilities==