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Administrative Mishap [Supergirl/Worm]

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OxfordOctopus
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Aug 3, 2020

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Threadmarks  Sidestory  Apocrypha  Media  Informational  View content

Threadmarks: SEASON 1 - EPISODE 10 View content

OxfordOctopus She/Her
(Unverified Jackanape)

Aug 31, 2020  #643

EPISODE 10​

Spoiler: SPOILERS: WARD

The arctic being cold was not exactly a new or exciting development. It was, after all, one of few places on the
planet where factors made it so that it got little to no sunlight, even if you included the summer period. No, Addy
knew well enough that the arctic was cold, but the fact that she felt it was certainly surprising. It wasn’t with much
intensity, admittedly, and a good portion of it she surmised was from the fact that she was rapidly hurtling through
the air, chasing after the long-distant Kara, but it was there. It sat on the fringes of her awareness, a low prickly chill
that cut through the jacket she’d grabbed from home just before leaving.

The arctic was cold, and it was beautiful. It was also dark, considering the sun had yet to be able to rise in this
region of the world, and wouldn’t yet until the latter half of March.

Starting her descent, Addy peeked through the hem of her hood at the landing zone. Kara was already there, had
been there for at least five minutes now. Despite her own efficient use of flight, it was nowhere near enough to make
up for the sheer force Kara had by contrast. Kara flew a lot like meteors or comets, streaking through the sky at
speeds well beyond that of sound, though she had been forced to slow somewhat by the inclusion of James’ very
fragile, very mortal body, and Addy’s own inability to keep pace.

Tilting her legs out in preparation for a landing, Addy eased off the acceleration and landed with only minimal fuss.
The snow came up to mid-calf and had soaked into her pants already, even despite the extreme temperatures.
James stood a few feet away, staring at her awkwardly, bundled up in a fur-layered jacket with his hood pulled up
over his head. Kara, meanwhile, stared at her with a look of complete bewilderment, clad fully in her Supergirl
costume and seemingly unbothered, even though she was wearing a skirt.

“How do you fly like that?” Kara said, her voice echoing oddly.

Addy blinked, glanced down towards the snow-covered ice, lifted her foot, and kicked down. It didn’t break, not even
with some judiciously applied force to her heel. The ice below her didn’t even make a noise—it was too dense. She
ignored Kara’s question, despite the validity of it, and hunched down, pulling the snow away from the ice near her
feet.

“What is she doing?” James asked, barely heard over her concentration.

There was the sound of shuffling fabric. “Something’s probably grabbed her attention,” Kara explained. Correctly, too.

Shoving the last of the snow to the side, Addy stared at the bare ice. It didn’t look any different to normal ice, but...

“So, not all of us are aliens,” James started up again, just loud enough that she could not totally tune him out. “But I
might actually be starting to freeze to death. Can we get inside?”

She flicked the ice with some force. It didn’t even crater, but this time she kept herself tuned in, kept her ears keen.
There was a low resonation, not quite a vibration, but an oscillation. Nothing like she had ever heard, which was very
unique considering her core body was made out of crystal, and by extension the existence of something better than
her current hardware was important. “This is not ice,” she announced, glancing up and pulling her hand away just in
time to clear some of the snow that had collected on her nose.

“Uh, yes it is,” James said, somewhat dubiously.

““No, it isn’t.”” Addy and Kara said, in sync.

He stared at the two of them as though they’d just said something delusional. “Your cousin said—”

“My cousin wasn’t raised on Krypton,” Kara pointed out stubbornly. “And has a habit of not using his x-ray vision.
That’s not ice, James, that’s an extension of the fortress. Kryptonian make, which, speaking of...”

Kara turned to her now. Addy found herself avoiding her gaze.

“There are more crystals inside,” Kara said in a tone that sounded... very sure of herself? Addy wasn’t quite sure, but
it sounded confident and almost clever. “And there should be exposed veins of them, and though I’ve never
personally visited”—“You haven’t?!”—“No, James, I haven’t. He offered plenty of times, but I just... I didn’t want to.
Anyway, unless Kal-El has glued wood grain panels to the walls, which I doubt, there should be the exposed veins of
the crystals for you to look at.”

Ah, no. She’d figured it out. Kara was tempting her.

It was working.

Wiping the snow off of her knees with a few well-aimed smacks, Addy nodded resolutely. “Show me,” she said,
because this was important. She couldn’t study Kryptonite, despite its unique and wondrous qualities, and the
crystals that made up the ground she was standing on were unique in their own way. Crystalline, yes, but nothing like
anything she had observed before. She had to know more, not for any good reason too, she could acknowledge. She
just wanted information on it, wanted to figure out why and how. It felt natural, and she let the impulse drive her.

“Right!” Kara chirped, clapping her hands together as she swung around. The icy cliff in front of them, on closer
inspection, wasn’t a cliff, but a wall. Someone had, at some point, carved half a foot deep into the pockmarked
surface of the shelf, leaving behind a roughly rectangular indent. On that indent was, itself, the symbol Kara wore on
her chest: a swirly ‘S’ inside of a diamond. “So, how do we get in? Is there like a secret password?”

“Well, about that,” James said, some energy coming back to his voice. He turned around, rubbing his hands together
for a few seconds before finally crouching down and dusting off his own pile of snow. Why, exactly, he had been
making statements about her doing the same was a question she had on the tip of her tongue, or at least she did,
because no more than a few seconds later he had cleared off a rather odd-looking golden object shaped a bit like a
key.

“Really,” Kara deadpanned, sounding almost disappointed. “He put the key under the doormat.”

“Actually, he leaves the key out in the open when he leaves. See, this thing? I can’t lift it. Most aliens can’t lift it, it’s a
million tonnes of condensed dwarf—”

“What.”

Kara and James snapped their heads around to her. Addy glanced away from them and to the key.

“Er, it’s a million tonnes of a condensed dwarf star,” James said slowly, almost carefully. “He uh, said it was made
out of the core.”

As someone who had taken part in the strip-down and then consumption of dwarf stars for energy semi-regularly,
she was having doubts. Part of the only reason they had been able to strip stars down was with the judicious
application of highly advanced reality-warping abilities that had let them redirect the energy itself and dismantle the
core safely. Which, additionally, a million tonnes? If that was what it was, then she definitely needed more
information on crystals.

Kara ignored them both, stretching one arm down to easily pluck the key-shaped object off from the ground, staring
minutely at it. “You want a try?” She asked, head glancing her way.

She didn’t. “No thank you,” she replied, because if that was a million tonnes she was not sure her body could
completely lift it. Or if it could, it would drain a significant amount of her body’s solar energy storage to compensate.
It was basically losing resources to look unintelligent in front of James Olsen. No. She could do without verifying if
that was actually made out of a condensed dwarf star’s remains.

She would be having words with her cousin eventually, though. If none of this was true he was making a lot of very
easily countered lies.

Turning away, Kara hefted the object a bit, angling it towards the little carved diamond. It was about three-fourths
the size of one of her arms, and she needed to use both to properly angle the thing as she tread forward, pushing
through the clumped-up snow around her knees, and gently eased the diamond-shaped end into the diamond-
shaped slot.

There was a high-pitched keen, the area around the front of the key lighting up blue. The crystals shifted, groaned,
snow from above the sheet fell away in clumps, James glancing up just in time to step out of the way of some of
said snow landing on his head. He made a face at the snow, almost triumphant.
“Did you get hit before?”

James’ head jerked up in her direction. “What? Pft,” he glanced away awkwardly, reaching up with a hand to rub at
his jaw. “Me? No. Totally not.”

So he had. She would keep note of that.

There was a single, loud rumble as the mechanics behind the door finally fully kicked in. The carved piece of wall
shuddered and then shifted to the side, sliding into the ice shelf, and opening the way.

Kara, ever-so-gently, lowered the key to the ground.

Addy glanced away from them both, stepping forward as she took her first look inside. It was vast, made entirely out
of a low-humming blue crystal that she could only barely pick up with her hearing. The ceiling was tall, run through
with pillars of more crystal, and in the dead center of the area, two figures carved completely from it held up a
planet. The floor itself was flat and smooth, but at random intervals small stubby crystals grew out from it,
somewhat like calcite formations but with significantly more squared features near where they tapered off into
points.

“Welcome,” James announced, his voice reverberating and echoing into the halls. Addy glanced his way, a bit
startled that she hadn’t noticed either James or Kara enter with her. “To the Fortress of Solitude.”

James stepped ahead, motioning for them to follow. Addy glanced furtively at the bit of raised crystal, wondered if
she could run more tests on it, see how it resonated, see if she could recreate it, before finally, reluctantly, glancing
away. Crystals were important, they were her—she didn’t think they got that. If, one day, someone came up with a
new type of flesh, wouldn’t they be excited?

Still, obligingly, she followed after him and Kara as they made their way deeper into the fortress. They passed by the
statues, hooking towards the right and off the path, passing through a small opening in the leftmost wall, the
crystals all oddly squared off, much like before.

This room was much smaller than what she was beginning to assume was the entrance to the fortress. It was
round, made entirely out of crystalline growths that reached all the way up to the lower ceiling. Here, the crystals had
been left to grow more untamed, jutting out like thorny brambles along the surface of the wall, forming little alcoves
within the room itself. In the center, surrounded by more crystal deposits about as tall as an adolescent human, was
a crystal that had been clearly plateaued off and used as a display table. On it, placed atop a glass fixture, was a
bracelet that gleamed beneath the blue artificial light that shined from some of the crystals in the ceiling.

Glancing around further, she caught sight of a few things. Metal scaffolding had been set up, with some of them
rounded and arched, pressed against the crystalline surface.

“Hey, that’s the pod Kal-El arrived in!” Kara called out, drawing her attention again. True to her word, there was a pod,
identical in virtually every way to the one she’d seen at the D.E.O. It was just big enough to fit a single person, adult
or child, and was made out of metal, with a smooth, missile-like form factor to it.

“I can’t believe you never took him up on his offer to bring you here,” James piped up, glancing around himself. He
looked calm, almost at home among the cold, unforgiving expanse of crystal. Addy wasn’t sure how to feel about
that.

Kara glanced back at him and smiled a sad, sad smile. “Well, I was afraid it would remind me too much of Krypton,”
she explained, glancing away again as she made her way past the ring. “That or the opposite, that he would’ve used
some of Krypton’s most valued and vaunted technology to make, I don’t know, a wood cabin out of crystal or
something. He had such an awful accent, I swear.”

Addy paced after them, glancing at the bracelet as she went. The bracelet, at its peak, was crowned with a flat
hexagon, within which an ‘L’ and a swooping star had been carefully engraved. Nothing else was notable about it
besides that, though it still felt oddly familiar, not that she could really figure out why.

“We don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to,” James' voice interrupted, drawing Addy’s gaze away. The two of
them had come to a stop next to another piece of crystal, though this one had been plateaued off at an angle, and a
screen displaying characters she had no context for had been inserted into it.

Kara shook her head, approaching the screen and idly wiping away at the snow and frost that had collected on it.
“No no, it’s fine,” she mumbled, tilting her head to one side not unlike a dog as she fiddled with the screen. “How
does this even work?”

James chuckled a bit nervously. “I thought you could tell me?”

Kara, not paying much attention to him, tapped the screen.

“Welcome, Kara Zor-El,” a tinny voice announced. Glancing up towards it, Addy caught sight of the source quickly. It
was a robot of some kind, roughly humanoid just aborting at about the point where the legs would begin, floating
seamlessly in the air. It was painted the colour of electrum, with iron-coloured accents, and in the place of a
conventional face, it had a single wide rectangular yellow light that glowed brightly. “How can I help you today?”

It wasn’t sentient, Addy didn’t think. It didn’t have the presence sentient people did on her mental radar, and it was
visibly robotic. Complex, yes, and high-tech, even more so, but... simple, in application.

“You know him?” James asked.

“Yeah,” Kara said, sounding a bit distant. “We had these back on Krypton, they served as robotic helpers. Kalex, can
you tell us anything about an obnoxious blue alien species that works with computers?”

Kalex froze for a moment, glancing up at Kara as it approached. “Your description matches the Coluans,” it
explained, motioning out with one hand to the side. “A highly intelligent race from the planet Colu. They served as
supercomputers on Krypton, responsible for running day-to-day operations.”

Addy let her gaze linger on it for a moment, processing. It knew about other aliens, she realized. She still wasn’t sure
if she was, in truth, the last of her kind. Yes, she was in a vastly different universe operating under sometimes
unrealistic and bewildering rules, but she hadn’t quite been sure if her species existed here. Their absence would be
notable, collectively it would not be too much to say that they had put an end to millions of individual species on
individual planets. Perhaps not tens of millions, but enough.

None of this was even mentioning the threat of their existence. If they did exist out there, she needed to know. She
was disrupting the sacrosanctity of the cycle, she was directly threatening the continuation of others. Secrecy was
the key to their continued survival, and she was an imminent threat to that. If they knew of her existence, they would
not stop at subsuming her; they’d likely take Earth out from orbit too, just to be safe.

“That explains the cyber terrorism,” James interrupted her thoughts. Again. He was good at that.

Kara nodded at him before glancing back at Kalex. “Were any of them prisoners on Fort Rozz?”

“One,” Kalex confirmed. “Her name is Indigo, a descendent of the Brainiac clan. She was captured while attempting
to shut down Krypton’s defence system.”

They all went silent.

“Why?” Kara finally asked.

“Her objective: exterminate the entire planet’s population.”

Addy watched Kara and James glance at one-another, horror written across their faces. It wasn’t a huge leap to
imagine they’d probably just realized her objective for Earth was likely very similar, or at least close enough that the
end result wouldn’t matter. Still, it did bare wondering why she hadn’t done just that, it wasn’t like Earth was
advanced enough to have a planetary defence system outside of an above-average arsenal of nuclear weapons that
promised their own destruction as much as it did their enemies.

“She was deemed the most dangerous prisoner ever sentenced to Fort Rozz,” Kalex continued unabated, its voice
echoing dully in the silence.

Kara and James turned in a sudden flurry of panic.

Addy couldn’t let them. “Wait,” she called out, and they did. That much she was glad for.

Kara glanced back. “Addy?”

“May I have your permission to ask it about other alien species?” Addy said, keeping her gaze steady. She had a few
ideas of what to look for in terms of possible evidence of her kin existing, even if the robot had not catalogued the
species itself. “I will be as expedient as possible.”

Something in Kara’s face softened, the panic receding to the fringes of her face. “Of course.”

“Shouldn’t we be telling Henshaw about this?” James interrupted, but Kara just tucked one arm into his, walking
forward and preventing him from getting loose.

“We’re gonna go talk about that near the entrance, alright James?” Kara said. She didn’t ask, as she was already
doing, despite James’ attempts at protesting this decision. He glanced between the two of them, but Kara gave him
a look Addy couldn’t decipher and he went mostly compliant in her grip. “We’ll meet you there, Addy!”

Kara and a limp James disappeared through the entrance, leaving her alone.

Turning back around, Addy stared at the robot. It stared back.

“Hello,” she tried, because generally programmed AIs came with some degree of initiation protocol. Getting it
engaged in a conversation string would be the easiest way to access its database.

“Welcome, UNKNOWN, CHILD OF EL.” The robot announced, before stopping itself. It tilted its head to one side,
hovering closer. “Your biometrics, UNKNOWN MEMBER OF HOUSE EL, have been recorded. Please state your first
name and the member of HOUSE EL you are descended from or related to.”

Addy blinked. “Addy,” she began slowly, turning the word over in her mouth. “I am related to Kara Zor-El.” Which
wasn’t a lie, technically. It didn’t feel like one, the idea of being kin to something as Taylor had been was... warm in
her chest. She did technically have Kara’s DNA, and it obviously wasn’t going to work with her if it didn’t get an
answer.

“Running diagnostics,” Kalex stated simply, its entire body going still. Around them, the crystals hummed for a few
moments, little motes of light travelling down the vein-like structures they branched from. “Runtime complete.
Welcome, Addy-El, child of UNKNOWN, cousin of KARA ZOR-EL. How may I serve you today?”

“I need you to run a search for a specific type of alien—colony organisms as large as planetary bodies.”

Kalex went still again. “Error. No results match your request.”

“Colony organisms on a continental scale,” she said, instead.

Another freeze. “Error. No results match your request.”

...That wasn’t right. She thought back, ran through her memories to a distant species. One that had shown the
potential to become space-faring in a short period of time, had they not intervened. “Do you know of the Cathexis?”

The Cathexis had been an odd cycle. They had been, at first, possibly the golden egg to answer the question as to
how to continue to propagate endlessly. As a species, they had somehow come upon the ability to create reality-
warping fields and augmented very simple machinery into things capable of impossible feats. They hadn’t been able
to figure out how that worked with just orbiting observation, and so they had started a cycle.

Almost immediately, things had gone badly. The reality-warping fields responded poorly to the powers, generally
caused them to glitch out at best, haphazardly mutate at worst. They also could make the shards themselves
vulnerable over long periods of exposure, widening the dimensional link between host and shard until fractures in
spacetime would open portals to them, allowing for them to be observed and even culled.

In the end, they had purged the entire planet after one of the noble shards had nearly been compromised, and then
detonated it and archived what little they had gleaned in the two-dozen or so rotations they had spent on the cycle.
Addy herself hadn’t even been deployed, hadn’t had enough time to find a suitable host before the call to purge had
gone out and she had been cycled to the job of controlling the planetary bombardment process.

“The Cathexis,” Kalex began, drawing her back to the present. “Are a species of interdimensional space-faring aliens
who are responsible for the creation of The Id. Their main known ability was the capacity to create reality-warping
fields which could be used to achieve similar abilities to those of sixth-dimensional beings, including making
something from nothing. They are currently relatively common among the outer reaches of this galaxy.”

Quickly checking her archive again, Addy paused. They had culled the Cathexis roughly two-hundred and sixty-eight
thousand years ago. That was a large divergence, extremely so.

“Do you have on record any colony organisms which exhibit vastly different abilities between different clusters?” She
asked, instead.

“Four,” Kalex replied. “The Yith, who exist in clusters of five and develop vastly different abilities depending on their
local geography, and three non-sentient species of aquatic predator on Krypton, all variants of the Tigrus Eel. All are
currently extinct; the Yith were purged by Krypton’s Military Guild after it became clear their existence on Krypton
granted them similar abilities to the ones Kara is displaying under a yellow sun.”

Two-hundred and sixty-eight thousand years and no sign of them. “Thank you,” she said, instead, trying to hide her
disappointment. She didn’t want them alive, didn’t want the risk to be out there, but it almost felt worse not knowing.
Being the only one to know that they could be out there, lurking, waiting. It was an infinitesimally small chance that
they would come across Earth in any capacity, but then the same could be said about her arrival on Taylor’s planet
as well.

“You are welcome, Addy. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Shaking away the disappointment, Addy sent a loaded glance towards one of the crystalline growths. “Do you have
any information on the crystals this place is made out of, and could I have a sample or three?” It wasn’t much, but it
made her feel better. A consolation prize, as Taylor would call it.

Being back at CatCo felt very odd. There had been something deeply familiar about the crystals, the structures, the
way everything had hummed and almost buzzed with energy. It had felt like her, in a way, and she hadn’t noticed that
she almost missed it until she was back. The metal was nice, and so was the stuff her desk was made out of, but
she kept expecting it to hum now, and it was bothering her.

She could, at least, feel happy about the bundles of crystals she’d shoved into her pockets. They were heavy, and
sharp, and jabbed into her leg as she rocked her heel back and forth. It hard stopping herself from humming along
with their quiet vibrations. They were rich with energy, if the odd-looking thumb drive Kalex had procured for her
wasn’t wrong, and they were formed through a complicated mixture of science and luck. It was why the place had
looked so roughshod—Kryptonian technology had been enough to make them develop and roughly shape them as
they grew, but not so much they could directly contort them as they could most other materials.

It was fascinating, but she would rather not have to explain why she had a thumb drive made out of crystal to
curious onlookers again, so she would be keeping it safe until she went home. Then she could look into it, and
maybe even look into integrating the growth process into her core body. It wouldn’t be much, but she could probably
completely remodel some of the information networks if she got the right environment going. It might take some
energy, but it would be worthwhile.

“Shit!”

Addy jolted up and nearly jumped away as Lucy tripped haphazardly into Winn’s desk, taking a hard tumble over his
chair. She landed on the ground without a noise of pain, scattering a folder across the ground.

“Lucy?”

The woman in question jolted up, staring at her. “Where’s Kara?!” She blurted, sounding panicked.

Addy tilted her head slowly to the side. “The room where they store all of the newspaper photography,” she said.
“James is with her. They are discussing their ‘trip’.”

Lucy rushed forward, scooping papers up into her arms in a burst of motion, not quite managing to get all of them.
She didn’t even turn to say thanks, as she had always done since Addy had been doing the same for her, and just
about sprinted towards it.

Climbing out of her chair, Addy eased her way around the side of the table and stared down at a few of the papers
on the ground. On one, simply, was a list of people who would have access to nuclear armaments. On another, an
image of a man with his pants below his pasty butt, slumped over in bed and obviously out of it.

She flipped that one over before gathering the rest of the papers up into a single pile. Probably best that nobody else
got these.

Making her way towards the storage room, Addy bundled the papers under her stump to give her hand access to the
door handle. She hadn’t really thought being down to one limb would be a truly problematic situation, but she was
starting to realize that humans not only didn’t design effective tools or equipment for left-handed people, but they
also seemed to be under the absurd belief that either one-armed people did not need aid, or that they simply did not
exist.

Considering America’s history of warmongering, she was leaning towards the former.

Addy pulled the door open—

“She was looking to declassify his entire online footprint!” Lucy’s voice boomed, in a near panic. “It was the only way
to tell.”

“Lucy,” James said, his voice calming, soothing. Glancing further into the room, Addy watched him gently put a hand
on Lucy’s shoulder, which she shrugged off. She looked cornered, panicked, like an animal ready to lash out. “Tell
what?”

“Which high-ranking official in National City has access to nuclear missile launch sites!”

The door shut behind her with a clatter. Three heads snapped around to her, James slumping with relief, Kara too,
and Lucy just staring at her with almost unseeing eyes.

“Oh my god,” James said at the same time Kara blurted out a loud, half-panicked “Rao!”

“Is she going to nuke the city?” Addy asked simply. The line of logic wasn’t particularly hard to follow.

Lucy shrugged jerkishly, folding her arms together. Addy reached under her stump, plucked the papers out, and
handed them to Lucy, who grabbed them. After another moment, the woman relaxed a bit. “I’m sorry,” she breathed
out, reaching up with one hand to comb fingers through her hair. “I—yes, likely. The nearest base with a silo is Fort
Pemberton. It’s completely off the grid but seeing as she can move through any technology anything the general
himself brings onto base? Completely up for grabs, and he was doxxed in the truest sense of the word. She has his
cellphone number.”

After another moment of silence, Lucy shut her eyes. “Sorry about nearly running into you, Addy.”

“It’s no problem,” Addy replied simply. Because it wasn’t. This was a problem, possible nuclear armageddon very
much was.

“Well, then, I’m going to go right now and make sure that doesn’t happen,” Kara said, already pulling her shirt over her
head. Lucy shied her eyes away for the few seconds it took for her to realize that Kara wasn’t actually stripping down
and she was, in fact, wearing the Supergirl costume beneath her clothes.

How, exactly, she managed to fit a skirt under slacks, Addy did not know. At this point she was assuming Kara had a
pocket dimension, as otherwise there should be lumps all over.

“I’m never going to get used to that,” Lucy muttered just loud enough for Addy to hear.

“You will,” she said instead, watching Kara slip out of her slacks and pull her hair out of the high, painful-looking tail it
had been in. “I am already used to it.”

“I can also hear both of you,” Kara reminded, reaching down beneath the table to pull her large, red-leather boots out
from where she’d hidden them, already slipping one leg after another into them. “Addy, you stay at CatCo, okay?”

“No.”

Kara stopped, glancing up at her. “Addy,” she stressed, sounding stubborn.

“No, Kara,” and this felt like it was a long time coming. “I need to help.” Because she did, because she felt like she
could. She had nothing else to do besides look up the crystal data and do some basic chemistry to see if she could
replicate it in a lab. She could do any of that later, but she wasn’t about to let something like this happen again.
There would be no incident like the Master Jailer once again.

“Addy, you don’t have a costume yet,” Kara tried.

But she had prepared for this, actually. Reaching into the pocket of her bright green pants, she pulled out a medical
mask. It wasn’t much, just something she’d actually taken out of one of the restrooms, but it would do something to
hide her identity. Combined with her hair pulled back into a bun as it was, and there was little chance of her being
recognized so long as she remained fast enough.

“That’s not a costume,” Kara said, almost sullen.

Addy twitched. “That’s not an argument.” Not a good one, at least.

“I need to do this, Addy,” Kara said, instead. “I—what if she kills you?” Something about how she said that was thick
with grief, almost enough to put her off.

But, no, there was no debating this.

“What if she kills you?” Addy echoed, and that much brought Kara up short.

For a moment, Kara just stood there, her last boot almost on, before finally deflating. “Fine,” she groused, easing the
rest of the red leather up against her leg and fastening it in place. “But I’m not slowing down for you,” she said
bluntly, blurring around in a moment of super speed to wrench the door open, her cape fluttering behind her. Then,
without another word, she rocketed forward and out of the window, leaving her behind.

That wouldn’t do.

Pulling the mask onto her face and pulling her hood up over her head - she hadn’t taken her jacket off, despite the
heat, as her ability to ignore temperatures went both ways, thankfully - and tightening it down against the top of her
skull with a few tugs on the cords near her collarbone, she made her way towards the window.

“Are you sure we should be letting her go?” Lucy asked somewhere behind her.

James grunted. “Do you think you can stop her?”

Addy pressed the heel of her shoe into the base of the window and very simply launched herself out of it.

Nobody could stop her from protecting. Not again.

Following Kara, despite her speed, was not difficult. Kara moved at speeds fast enough to disrupt and alter the
clouds and other atmospheric fixtures as she went, and she had clearly not held back this time around. She could
still hear the sonic boom rattling in the back of her ears, though she could no longer see Kara’s red-and-blue
costume. She had long since outpaced that.

Dropping out of the cloud layer, Addy peeled her eyes for anything out of the ordinary. The base was somewhere in
the dead of the shrublands, she assumed, and at this point she was nearing the end of Kara’s disruptive trail. It had
to be around somewhere, especially considering the context.

Unfortunately, despite the flight and other applicable abilities, Addy did not have the super-hearing or sight needed
to pick out something sand-coloured in a vast stretch of sand-coloured earth.

Fortunately, then, she did not need super-hearing to hear the sudden eruption of force, nor super-sight to watch a
missile lurch itself out from beneath the earth near the horizon, blitzing itself into the air. Kara’s figure, red and blue,
exploded out from a small lump - now, on closer inspection, probably a bunker - in the ground, blazing after it at high
speeds.

Addy watched her go, watched the missile and the person she was supposed to be protecting fly off at speeds she
could not match. It felt oddly like the moment just before Contessa had killed Taylor, something innocuous that
ended abruptly and violently, unexpectedly. Taylor’s death by The Warrior had almost been an absolute, a high
percentage chance, but Contessa? It had been very low. She hadn’t even really been acknowledged as a threat to
Taylor’s wellbeing until it was already too late to prevent it.

Glancing towards the bunker, Addy shot forward again, dropping altitude quick. The sound of the missile flying into
the air petered off, grew distant and faded, until she couldn’t hear it at all, her feet hitting the ground shortly after.

The front of the bunker had been ripped apart in Kara’s desperate bid to chase after the missile. What had once been
a secure metal door had been shorn off and thrown to the ground to the left, while the hallway leading up to it was a
mess of metal dents and tears. Stepping through the opening, she walked down the long metal hallway, her feet
clattering against the mesh beneath each heel.

There was a turn, she took it.

Indigo sat next to the launch bay, the window open and slightly scorched black from the missile’s launch. She smiled
luridly at her, unpleasantly, like the cat who got the canary. “Supergirl’s going to die with that nuke,” she cooed
malignantly, a laugh thick in her voice. “It’s going to land and wipe that fucking city off the face of the earth, and
what, you’re here? Looking for her sloppy seconds?”

Addy blinked, tilted her head to one side. Indigo’s presence was there, and it felt... familiar. A similar infrastructure to
other shards, somewhere between synthetic and not. A bit antiquated, yes, and different in some ways, but she
could accommodate that. She started adjusting her ability, let it click on and brush over the creature in front of her.
She could probably initiate a connection, she was just going to have to rely on Broadcast for it.

“Nothing to say? Shame, I do want to know more about your species,” Indigo spat, easing herself to her feet with one
limb. “So I can find the planet they’re on and fucking destroy it.”

Ah. There’s the connection. It was looking for access ports, then, part of how Indigo interfaced with technology? No
matter. She could figure that out later. Adjusting the psychic bandwidth to accommodate wasn’t hard, it was more
like reverting it to her pre-seeded state, back when interfacing with other shards was more important than hosts.
The changes settled into place, an open port.

Indigo, if the way her face lit up, noticed. “Now, what’s this?” She said giddily, glancing over her. “You’re flesh and
bones, but if that isn’t an invitation, well, I’ll eat your corpse. After I finish taking you over, anyway. It's been a while
since someone has invited me in. I wonder where you've been hiding the robotic bits?”

“I sincerely doubt your ability to do so,” Addy said, frankly. Because even if she could manage to eat this body, her
coreself was another thing altogether.

“Well, I’ll just see about that, now won’t I?”

Indigo didn’t move, didn’t even turn into her odd data state. She didn’t need to, Addy was an open port, broadcasting
her willingness to be connected to. Instead, she felt it, felt the brush of telepathic abilities meeting, intermingling,
and then forging the connection.

Her port allowed it all in. Took every last thought, and pulled it down into the network.

The network was as dark as it had been since Taylor’s body had been taken from the other universe. The shard
network itself was not totally physical or totally virtual, but rather an odd combination of the two. It was built into the
multiversal lattice and was meant to connect shards settled into different dimensions across a vast barrier using
representative avatars to facilitate communication. Before, it had been alight with activity, red pinging off in the deep
void far, far away.

Now it was just quiet and dark. Her part of the network was all that was left, a single red-crystal island floating in
infinite emptiness.

Indigo’s arrival was felt, not heard. She hadn’t adjusted to the change in setting very well, was clearly struggling to
take on a virtual form, an avatar. She was not used to Addy’s infrastructure, but she could help that.

Folding the instructions into herself, she shifted, pulled energy from her coreself, the red crystal around her
blooming, flickering with energy, and then Announced.

[INSTRUCTION]

The shapeless mass that was Indigo’s consciousness flickered, shuddered beneath the weight and content of that
data packet, but received it. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the blue figure of Indigo took shape down on the crystalline
floor below, stumbling a few steps as she reoriented herself.

Addy was above, far, far above. Shards all had avatars in the network, it was part of the defence protocols for it.
Hers was one of the largest, and shaped to her wants. She was made up of a single core, from which tens of
thousands of red crystalline stems branched out, forming a rough outer shell that bore a strong resemblance to the
end stages of a dandelion’s life, when they turned all white and wispy. From her inner core came arms, easily a
hundred feet long and eight in total, each one with twelve joints and with the last joint on each arm branching into
two separate forearms, with each of them being equipped with dozen-fingered hands, all made of an identical
crystal to her main body.

She unfurled her arms from where she had tucked them around her core in the mockery of a hug, let them dangle
low and scrape against the crystal valley her end of the network was represented by.

Indigo looked up. Stared vacantly as Addy began to descend, using her arms to push and guide herself properly
down and down.

She reached out to the network and shut the door behind Indigo, cut off the connection. Indigo didn’t notice, but then
that had been intentional, it was designed that way. Addy tucked the fact that she was trapped into another packet
of data, primed the telepathic link, and Announced for the second time.

[SUBMIT]

Indigo’s physical form shuddered, parts bleeding into swathes of green static before painfully recollecting itself. The
thing looked scared, now, but also angry. Cornered. It did not like this; Addy did not blame her, she would not like
what was going to happen either.

She had brought her here to make her submit. If all went to plan, she would shackle Indigo’s consciousness under
strict unbreakable laws. Do not hurt Kara, do not do things which could cause Kara emotional pain, among others.
They were simple, and they were enforceable, now that she was in the network, in the hub that represented the true
weight of her psychic abilities.

Still, she wrapped her ultimatum up, pushed the intent into it. Announced.

[SUBMIT]

Indigo’s form exploded for a moment, going completely incorporeal, a mass of shifting, unthinking static. Her
consciousness, despite its vast strength, was weak. Intelligent, yes, but submissive. Shardlike in composition, the
result of being a small part of something larger.

“No!” Indigo screeched, the audio data sent as a packet. Inefficient, only the audio itself, none of the meaning Addy
could pack into her own declarations. “No! I refuse! How dare you, I am Brainiac 8, second only to the original, I am
beyond you! I was connected to the vast Coluan interface! I am more!”

[SUBMIT]

Indigo staggered, her arms blasting away into static before reconsolidating. “No, no no no no no!”

Addy reached down, pressed her many fingers into the ground around Indigo, circling her in. She would submit, she
would be under her chains, locked and prevented from harming Kara, or she would not do anything at all.

“I REFUSE TO BE SHACKLED!” The audio packet screeched, loud and angry.

...Then she would be taken. Addy gathered the information, drew it into the telepathic space, and wrapped around it
the weight of her intent. Another ultimatum.

[SUBSUMPTION]

Indigo only staggered this time, having apparently finally managed to receive information packets on that size
without virtual errors. It was just that she remained staggered, completely frozen, before her head slowly panned up
to where her faceless mass of crystal was, the core surrounded by endless branches of crystal. The thing that she
was, even despite being Addy.

“How dare you,” Indigo sent, her voice flat. Empty. Aware. But afraid, so, so afraid. “I would die before I let a parasite
take me.”

Addy’s hands reached in more quickly. The network lit up, reds illuminating the crystals, brightening until each were
miniature suns. Ready to accept the new influx of information she would gather from Indigo. If she would not
submit, then she would be subsumed, her information used to protect Kara better. To be used for more.

Indigo shattered, the screech of something killing itself rattling through the empty network. She’d felt this before, the
shredding of consciousness, the loss of information. Something inside of her twisted, was felt in the feedback from
her body. Shame, she thought it was. Memories of Taylor doing the same swam in front of her consciousness; she
ignored them.

Indigo’s body faded, it was only an avatar to represent the physical consciousness of something existing in a
network. There was no longer any consciousness, and by extension, it was no longer an avatar.

Her fingers passed through the remnants of the data, drawing it back into her. She gave what was there - not much -
a short glance. Most of it was corrupted, but some might be salvageable. She sent it back into the network, to be
processed later.

She would have had so much value, had she just accepted.

Returning her consciousness from the shard network was not difficult, though it was disorienting. Coming back to
herself and having a sense of touch again felt... odd, not wrong, just odd. On the ground in front of her, Indigo was in
pieces, a dusting of what she was now realizing was a curious nano-material that could reconfigure itself. They were
still connected through the network, though the connection was already fraying.

She urged the material back together, formed it into a solid cube about the size of her fist, with the three dots
representing the Coluan database left there. It was as blue as Indigo was, but inert. Dead.

The connection fizzled, faded, and then went away entirely. There was no mental presence left for her to psychically
bond with, it was just material, now.

Reaching down, Addy eased it from the floor and held it in the palm of her hand.

“Addy?” Kara called out, her footsteps loud and clear on the metal.

She turned, catching sight of the dead bodies around her. Some feedback from the knowledge she had managed to
get out of Indigo’s consciousness informed her that it was her doing. She hoped that most of the salvageable
information wasn’t just the thoughts she had been going through on her day-to-day. That would be very frustrating.

Kara came to a stop at the entrance to the room, glancing towards the cube in her head. “Is... where’s Indigo?”

Addy held the cube out. “Here.”

There was a short moment of silence.

“Addy,” she said slowly, each word rough in her throat. “What did you do?”

Well, that was simple. “I stopped her.”

“How?”

Even simpler. “She shredded her consciousness after I allowed her access into my network and made an ultimatum
that she could either be shackled into obedience to you or she could be subsumed. She is gone, now. This is all that
is left.”

Kara wasn’t looking at her, only the cube. “Why?”

...Wasn’t it obvious? “To protect you, of course.”

Kara was not looking at her. Kara was not talking to her.

She was just quiet. Distant.

The blanket around her shoulders felt like nothing. It was one of those shock blankets, reflective, it should’ve been
one of the things she got enjoyment out of, but it felt... numb. Pointless.

Winn was on her other side, idly glancing down at the cube she’d given him. Kara and Alex had wandered off to talk,
about what, Addy had not been privy to. She had refused to use her powers to listen in, for better or for worse.

“Did I do good?” Addy asked, not sure herself.

Winn remained silent.

Addy felt her heart drop.

Glancing up, she watched Kara enter back into the room. Alex and Kara weren’t talking either now, though the way
Alex looked like a thousand pounds had been lifted from her shoulders seemed to give an obvious clue as to what
they had talked about. Still, they walked closer together than they had since Addy had first arrived, they looked closer
too, less innate tension. Alex had told her about Astra, she assumed, and they had reconciled over it.

Good, she was glad.

Kara stared at her, her face purposefully blank. Addy stared back.

A few moments later, the hesitation so felt, so blatant, Kara approached. Each step was slow, and Alex remained
where the two of them had come to a stop.

“Hank needs to talk to you,” Kara said, voice inflectionless.

Addy blinked. “Why?”

“Well,” Hank’s voice cut in, startling them both. He was stepping through a door just a few feet to their right, still
dressed up in his military-grade equipment. He and Kara shared a look, a kind one, before he glanced at her with
something like fondness. “We need to talk about your vigilantism, Addy.”

...Oh, right.

“Once is chance,” Hank said, Kara retreating with him here, back to her sister. She hadn’t looked at her for longer
than 10 seconds.

Her heart felt cold. She didn’t like this. She did the right thing, she stopped a threat. She had given the threat an
ultimatum, and when the threat had refused, she had moved to use the resources she represented for the
betterment of everyone.

She acknowledged that subsumption wasn’t pleasant, and that she wouldn’t enjoy it, but she wasn’t Indigo. Neither
was Kara, or Hank, or even Winn. Indigo was... worth less. Her loss, calculable; her resources, exploitable.

“Twice is a habit,” Hank finished, yanking her out of her thoughts. Addy stared up at him, tried to find that same
amount of warm enjoyment of his features that she had when Kara had been nice. She couldn’t. Something in his
face softened at her look, and he crouched down, a sigh on his lips. “So you’ll have to come in tomorrow to go
through power testing, alright? We’ll talk about Kara then. Just know that she’s trying to process what you did, and
she’s not sure how she feels about it.”

“Did I do good?” She found herself asking again, almost impulsively. She didn’t do impulse. She was rational. She
was calm.

She was fine.

Hank smiled sadly. “I think you did the best you could.”

It wasn’t an answer.
Last edited: Sep 7, 2020

 724

OxfordOctopus Aug 31, 2020 View discussion

Threadmarks: SEASON 1 - EPISODE 11 View content

OxfordOctopus She/Her
(Unverified Jackanape)

Sep 3, 2020  #733

 EPISODE 11​
Addy was awake before Kara’s alarm. This, itself, was not unprecedented; she had come to realize over the span of
her waking existence that her relationship with sleep was tenuous at best, completely and utterly arbitrary at worst.
Sometimes she slept the entire night and only woke when Kara’s alarm would screech its unholy song, other times
she woke repeatedly through the night, blinking awake for moments at a time before dozing back off again into fitful
dreams she couldn’t remember.

Today was none of those. She had spent the majority of last night occupied by the data on the crystal thumb-drive.
Kryptonian crystals - they didn’t really have an individual name for the material, turns out - was a widely versatile
piece of incredibly intricate engineering. The crystals, depending on their composition - being a material made up of
a highly complicated network of unique chemicals and elements - could serve a multitude of purposes from data
storage, energy storage, even as a simple structural material. As far as she could tell, the crystals somehow...
contained information in a way that was very easily retrieved and repurposed.

It was fascinating, and completely beyond what her kin had managed to achieve. Not to say that her own coreself
didn’t bear some similarities. Her own crystals served comparable purposes, but with significantly less ease. Energy
and data storage her crystals could compete on, if with some significant detriments to durability - which was why
information and energy storage was located beneath layers of near-impenetrable diamond-like crystal that made up
her outer shell - but the fact of the matter was that it was only abstractly comparable. Her composition as a shard
was the result of millions of years of material sciences being stress-tested in the vacuum of space and in other
extreme environmental conditions, such as being able to endure the complete and total destruction of planets far
larger than Earth. Not only that, but unlike Kryptonian crystals, certain parts of her crystalline mass needed
connective materials between them; the hard outer core was a completely different thing to her data center, which
meant interfacing between the two had energy loss.

Yet, still, the Kryptonian crystal matrix was significantly better, but expensive. Resource expensive, almost certainly,
and the exotic materials needed weren’t exactly easy to come by. Certainly, she wouldn’t need much to begin the
growing process herself, but most of the materials described would require significant investment into functions
she hadn’t need to activate since the first several months after being seeded on her barren Earth to begin with.

With great reluctance, despite the possibilities, she was going to have to shelve it. At least for the time being, until
she could find a way to access a source of energy for her core body. Unfortunately, unlike one of Annette Hebert’s
former companions, she was among the vast majority of shards who only had the so-called ‘one-way energy
access’, in that she could push energy into a target, but not retrieve or draw energy from said target. The required
dimensional connection to draw energy outside of her coreself’s dimension was something most shards lacked, as
it was expensive and generally time-consuming to upkeep, and bore little purpose outside of specific environments.

So if she ever wanted to fix her energy crisis, it was going to have to be more direct.

Blinking sleepily up at the ceiling, Addy tucked her fingers tighter into the blanket. Crystals were nice, yes, but that
didn’t really fix or placate her current dilemma. Kara hadn’t gotten home until late last night, apparently having to go
and save several people from a lab fire that had erupted as a result of a failed experiment. She had at the same time
stayed up waiting for her to return and mostly stayed up going over the notes Kalex had compiled for her, and by the
time she had gotten to sleep - somewhere around 1:30AM - Kara had still yet to get home, though at the very least
the news made it abundantly clear she hadn’t been kidnapped, just busy.

By her estimate of the relative position of the sun, the date, and the digital clock propped up next to her laptop, it
was 5:43AM, which meant she had received a total of four hours of sleep, and Kara’s alarm would be going off in
approximately two minutes. Her sleep, much to be expected, had been stilted and unpleasant. She’d dreamt of
Taylor again, she knew, but she didn’t know much else than that, just that Taylor had been in it, Taylor had been
there, and her mind had protested waking wildly as a result.

The only real upside to any of this was that she didn’t have to work today and by extension wouldn’t appear to be an
idiot by being sleep deprived in front of people she worked with. She’d gotten the day off with a doctor’s note made
up by the D.E.O. to cover for her coming in for power testing, and it had been accepted with little fuss. The shift
manager at CatCo had only asked if she was okay, and when she’d clarified that she wasn’t sick, just going in for one
of her regular check-ups, the line of conversation had been mostly dropped and she’d been allowed the day off.

She was supposed to come in to the D.E.O. at a ‘respectable time’, but apparently, they didn’t do exact schedules, or
at least they didn’t for her. It was at her leisure, in a manner of speaking, so long as she got there before noon and
was prepared to spend at least four hours going over her skills. Hank had been plenty kind on that, stressing that
she wasn’t in any trouble for using her power, but that being a vigilante once was an aberrant situation, twice was
the start of a habit, and they didn’t want a repeat of Supergirl’s first couple of outings if they could help it.

Addy could honestly respect their preparedness, or at least their unwillingness to let her cause a major oil spill in
National City’s coastline. She could also respect their drive to acquire information about her strengths and
weaknesses presumably in the event that she became a hostile combatant. While she wasn’t particularly thrilled
about someone having said information with the extremely small but nevertheless existing possibility of one day
coming into conflict with them, she was at least a little impressed at their foresight. Most humans would’ve just
accepted her without excess amounts of suspicion, and hopefully the D.E.O. could be the next step forward in
inspiring humans to be prepared for eventual conflict among their peers, positive or otherwise.

More people could do with being like Taylor.

The startling klaxon of Kara’s alarm broke the silence and her train of thought. The sound was electrical, a tinny
reverberation that she loathed almost as much as the texture of q-tips, and it lasted precisely half a second before
an accompanying crunch of something shattering beneath great force bellowed out into the apartment.

Addy was wide awake in a heartbeat, shoving herself free from her blankets and trotting over the cold wooden floors
and out from behind her dividers. The apartment was still gloomy, dark in the shadowy cast of early dawn, and she
could spot nor sense no intruders. She let her pace slow as she made her way around the dividers, past the couch,
and into the slip of space Kara left open between the curtains that she used to portion off her bedroom.

The woman in question had her hand half-embedded in what was obviously the mechanical remains of her alarm
clock. Kara blearily stared at her for a moment, something odd in her expression, before she slowly drew her fist out
of the bits of plastic and circuitry she’d crushed, small shards raining down on her bedside table as she pulled it free.

“Kara?” Addy asked, not really sure. She hadn’t spoken to Kara since she’d rushed off to go and do Supergirl stuff.
Alex had been the one to drive her home - a quiet and awkward thing - and Kara had returned sometime after she’d
already been asleep. She wasn’t sure where they stood, or if they even stood anywhere at all.

Kara made a low noise, shaking her hand loosely to dislodge some other pieces of loose alarm clock still tucked into
the creases along her palm and between her fingers, so tiny they might as well be grains of sand, but still solid
enough that they could be heard as they fell onto the bedside table. “What?” She asked, a little gruffly.

“You broke your alarm clock,” Addy informed her simply, glancing to where the ruins in question were. “Did
somebody attempt to attack you?”

Kara stared at her. “What? No, obviously.” She huffed a little, finally pushing herself up into a sitting position, her
blonde hair tousled and wild on her head, forming wavy bunches. “I just had a bit of a super-strength mistake.
Everyone does.”

Not particularly. “I don’t,” Addy informed her, because she didn’t. Controlling the strength of her body was rote and
simple, it was part of the energy conservation methods she had used to ensure she wouldn’t burn the solar energy
her body contained without it serving a purpose. Her strength was always comparable to that of a human until she
needed it not to be.

Kara’s stare turned into something sharp. “Yeah, well,” she started, reaching down to haul the blankets off of her
lower body, shoving them to the side with a few kicks. “Not everyone can be you, Addy.” The words came out a bit
too harsh, tinted by anger and something like dismissal.

It was hard to describe the sensation that came with that. It was something like having the breath knocked out of
her, it felt just as bad, a tight fist wrapped around her chest, but it wasn’t physical. It just hurt, made the words she
wanted to say refuse to come. Kara just glanced away from her with a flick of her head, easing herself up onto her
feet as she stumbled towards her wardrobe.

When Addy made no attempt to move, still not particularly sure what to do with herself, Kara glanced her way. Her
eyes narrowed again, and Addy felt her body tense involuntarily. “What are you still doing standing around?” Kara
asked, almost demanded. “It’s nearly six, I need to be in for work at six-thirty to make sure Cat doesn’t have an
aneurysm about whatever problem she has today, and you’re in for seven. Go and get dressed.”

Addy swallowed, her fingers twitching. “I’m not going to work today,” she reminded her, her voice pitched flat. She
could respond to this, it wasn’t anger, just demands. She was fine. “I’m going to the D.E.O.”

“Great, then go and do that with the shadowy government agency somewhere else. I need to find something to wear,
I know for a fact I have that black dress with green and pink details somewhere.”

“So, where are we going, exactly?”

Alex glanced back at her, not pausing her walk. “Well,” she started, head turning back around to her front as she led
the two of them down yet another stretch of boring, utterly bland underground black-metal-reinforced corridor. “For
starters, we need to get you into some gear for testing.”

Addy felt her face cramp a little. She knew what the D.E.O. saw as ‘acceptable’ clothing, and it certainly wasn’t
anything she was about to wear. “I don’t want to wear black.”

Alex’s stride slowed a bit as she approached one of the doors tucked into the hallway wall. “You won’t have to” She
reached forward, quickly tapping several numbers on the keypad just next to the door. There was a short, chirp-like
beep from the keypad, and a green light blinked to life above the door. “Our tech guys—they wanted to make better
suits for us with features we picked up from alien tech. That or just to fool around with technology usually well
outside of our understanding.”

The door hissed as it slid open.

Addy approached slowly, her pace picking up as Alex vanished through the doorway. Getting her first glance inside
the room after only a few steps, she was somewhat caught up by how messy it was. It looked like the bulk majority
of the base - in that it was made out of black metal with recessed lights and metal benches, all both bland and
uncomfortable-looking - but it was absolutely thick with abandoned projects. Really, it reminded her of some of
Taylor’s memories of Tecton’s workplace, pieces of gear laying around with wires haphazardly exposed, half-finished
guns and crystal-powered weapons.

Alex, near the back of what was becoming increasingly clear was a storage area, was hunched over, rooting through
a wooden crate about half her height. “So, they found this tech from a local group of smugglers made up of Kalvars.
They’re birdlike aliens, have wings and talon-like feet, and are notably telepathic. They’re known as the ‘bird-men
bandits’ for a reason—there were more than a few on Fort Rozz, and they’d come together to try to smuggle things
on to and out of Earth.”

Stepping into the room, Addy glimpsed a box full of purple, vaguely glowing crystals next to a terminal-shaped
object made almost entirely out of what looked to be obsidian. On the front of the terminal, with no indication of a
screen embedded, was what looked to be a UI in a language she didn’t speak with a single window displayed,
showing three short blocks of text and an accompanying pictogram of a ruined piece of technology.

“Found it,” Alex announced, drawing her attention back around. Alex stood, bringing with her a sleek bodysuit that...
well, was hard to describe, in truth. It was nominally iridescent, with any light that reached it being wildly distorted
and skewed into bright colours that cast themselves across the suit in random patterns. But it was too... for lack of
a better term, bright; iridescent things such as oil or soap bubbles tended to have the rainbow effect layered over a
colour beneath it, such as black, but this didn’t have that. It was just a constantly shifting rainbow, with each colour
bright and distinct.

Alex extended the bodysuit towards her. “This was supposed to be invisible,” she clarified after a moment. “Kalvars
are known for their cloaking tech, and when combined with their ability to read people’s thoughts it makes them
incredibly good at smuggling things on and off planet. Sure, they can’t hide as a human very well without more
technology, but before we managed to shut down the smuggling ring they had stripped four nearby zoos down of
any and all animals and sold them to wealthy interstellar moguls who wanted something ‘exotic’. For reference, they
included the people looking after the zoo among the ‘animals’.”

Addy bit down on the urge to point out that humans were just very intelligent, very well-adapted animals. It wasn’t
like she didn’t get it, in truth, the discomfort around being compared to something that you used as chattel was an
unpleasant and unwelcome experience, but then again that hadn’t stopped humans from turning their own kin into
chattel either. Humans, to this day, were still incomprehensible.

Reaching out, she took the bodysuit into her own hand. Paradoxically, like most other things, it felt different than
what she’d expected, too. She had honestly expected something with a texture close to plastic, or a raincoat;
something crinkly and slightly uncomfortable. Instead, it felt like silk, particularly somewhere between dragline
spider silk and silkworm silk. She pinched a bit of it and pulled, and it was also elastic.

This was a wondrous material, she decided.

“Despite the failure to properly mimic Kalvar cloaking, it is pretty durable. The only reason we haven’t had anyone
wear it is, for starters, it’s kinda, y’know, hard on the eyes.”

“It is not.” Addy interrupted, glancing up fiercely.

Alex raised her hands up, palms forward, in surrender. “To those of us who spend most of our time in off-the-record
operations, that can look pretty offensive. I don’t wear black because I think it’s the most superior colour or anything,
I wear it because it’s significantly more difficult to shoot me dead with it on.”

That was... valid. Distantly valid, acceptable in the sense that she understood and respected the rationale but still
wasn’t quite able to accept people not enjoying something as wondrous as stretchy, iridescent silk. “Okay. That’s
acceptable. So I am to wear this?”

“It’s meant to stretch out to fit anyone larger than myself, so, yes. It won’t weird you out and we won’t be ruining
your...” Alex paused, glancing meaningfully over her bright-fuchsia shirt, wine-red chinos, and yellow high-tops.
“...well, your clothes.” She finished lamely.

“Where would you like for me to change?” Addy asked, ignoring the awkward scrunch to Alex’s face.

Alex just shrugged, moving towards the door. “In here is fine, I’ll shut the door and give you five minutes to get
dressed in that. You can fold the rest of your clothes and we’ll put them in a box for you to change into later. That
okay?”

Giving one last lingering look at the litany of vaguely dangerous looking unfinished projects, Addy shrugged. “I can’t
see why not.”

Hank was outfitted differently to how he normally was. For starters, he had shed the heavy, police-style jacket,
leaving a sleeveless t-shirt in its place which showed his arms. Below that was a thick and durable belt that held a
pair of black, somewhat baggy military-style pants up, with the last remaining article of clothing being a pair of
heavy combat boots, coloured black just like the rest.

Alex stood off to the side, next to the wall and well away from where the sparring would take place. She just looked
at the two of them with something like curiosity and a little bit of smug anticipation. Addy wasn’t really sure how she
read that off of her, but she did, and she didn’t trust it.

Hank finished stretching his arm above his head, easing himself back into a simple stance. “So, Administrator,” he
began, reaching up to scratch at a stubbly chin. “Before we get into the exact details of your powers, it was decided
we would see where you were at with basic hand-to-hand. Alex?”

The woman in question reached over to her right, flicking a single switch. The lights above them, previously white,
faded into a dark, warm red, casting everything in a slight gloom. She could feel the effects of it near instantly, the
sudden inability to access stored power in her body’s cells. It wasn’t being depleted per-se, though the energy leak
her body naturally had was still happening, it was just preventing her body from accessing that stored energy and
using the various abilities it had naturally.

“This is a red sun lamp. We installed them after the Master Jailer incident so, in the event that Kara or you wished to
spar without powers, you would not have to be exposed to potentially harmful amounts of radiation. You in
particular were noted in our decision for this, as your response to kryptonite as a whole points towards there being
possible long-term detrimental effects to exposure to it among Kryptonians.” He took a pause, glancing at her with a
thoughtful look. “This spar is completely voluntary, Administrator. You can decide at any time to tap out or not to
engage at all. We can move immediately on to discussions about your powers, if you feel the need. But, if at all
possible, we would like to establish a baseline for what your physical skills are. Not abilities, skills.”

“Supergirl didn’t even really know how to throw a punch when she first started out,” Alex piped up, glancing wistfully
into the middle distance. “Honestly, it’s only because she’s so durable that she didn’t break her thumb hitting Vartox
in the chin.”

“Right,” Hank cut in, his voice steady. “So we want to ascertain your current skill levels in basic hand-to-hand, and to
address and hopefully fix any issues so that one of my agents doesn’t have to spend the better part of a week
ensuring her sister won’t break her hand if she hits someone without her powers.”

She’d figured it out. The radiation the lamps emitted was partially stifling her cells, preventing them from catalyzing
the stored energy. It was fascinating, but it was also tremendously confusing, as a red sun and a yellow sun
shouldn’t really be different outside of possible material composition and the amount of radiation they produce. The
fact that it was merited further research, possibly into astrophysics. She’d never been a huge fan of the topic,
especially when trying to look at how other species saw it, but she would bite the bullet to figure out even a
percentage of the differences. “If I fight you, will this go quicker?”

Hank and Alex shared a look, one of those ones people occasionally did around her that she didn’t really get. “This
spar probably won’t influence other tests one way or another, unless you can access your powers with it in place?”

“Some of them,” Addy confirmed, watching as Hank and Alex went still. “Just the ones which don’t come naturally to
this body. I am unable to access them, the radiation from the red sun lamps interfere with my body’s ability to
process the solar energy it has stored, despite how little of it there is. I imagine if I was given a large burst of yellow
sun radiation in a short period of time, the solar energy in my cells would be able to be accessed for the duration
that the excess was flooding through me, but that isn’t the case right now.”

“Right,” Hank said slowly, easing his gaze away from Alex. “This is supposed to be a fight without powers, so no
telepathy, just hand-to-hand. Are you willing?”

Sort of. Taylor didn’t have much, if any, experience fighting handicapped like this, but she had a large array of
knowledge about close-quarters-combat. It had been one of the things repeatedly drilled into her as a cape of her
type, as a Master with specific minions she was reliant on. Others, like those who could generate blasts of energy
for ranged projectiles, could still use their abilities in a pinch, but cut off from her swarm and in a one-on-one fight,
Taylor would need to physically match her opponent and work around any powers they had until she could recollect
a swarm and use that to augment her combat potential.

She wouldn’t be wasting any solar energy doing this, and they did seem relatively focused on her getting tested in
this fashion. Glancing down at her outfit for a moment, the iridescent silk bodysuit that hugged her body, outlined all
the corded muscle that had just sort of come with her new state of being, Addy gave the idea a bit of thought. It
would make others happy, she would be doing good, and she possibly might even surprise or impress them.

Yes, she could comply with that much. “Okay.”

Alex eased one hand away from the switch, apparently ready to flick it off again at a moment’s notice, her arm
coming to rest at her side. Hank, across from her, steadied himself into a relatively simple fighting stance, arms
raised up, fists tight. It looked somewhat close to a boxer’s stance, but with a wider spread to his legs and his arms
kept a little lower to allow for grabs. It did look solid, though.

Drawing on Taylor’s memories for this much wasn’t difficult. She’d learned the gamut of fighting styles, not to the
degree where she was a master in them or anything like that, but enough to fit various parts of the styles together. A
lot of what she had learned, partially due to the PRT initially denying her access to the more directly violent
alternatives, were things like Judo, Aikido, a lot of throws and grappling, something that was significantly less useful
with only one arm.

Hank began to approach slowly, circling slightly to her left as he did. Addy adjusted, eased onto her heels and
tightened her calves. No, for all that a lot of the PRT-mandated styles were less useful, it wasn’t like Taylor learned
nothing from Brian. She had learned plenty, and learned in a way that had emphasized the practical use of combat,
less so the inherent artistic, spiritual, or philosophical purpose.

Jarring herself forward without flight was difficult, but not unmanageable. The Kryptonian DNA in her system had
augmented her physical fitness to a near-inhuman peak, something that would’ve required a good portion of her
daily life devoted to maintaining. She closed the distance between herself and Hank in just two long strides of her
legs, and the man jolted a bit at that, raising his arms up, expecting a punch.

She whipped her leg back and then brought it forward in a sharp punt, directly into the gap below his knee. The front
of her toes rang with the impact, a painful ache that spread out from the joints, but Hank got the worst of it,
crumpling back as his arms lowered at the introduction of pain.

She lurched forward again, getting into his space. She was as tall as he was, if less heavy, but her reach was, at
least, greater. Whatever he was expecting the follow-up to his mistake was, it probably wasn’t her bringing her stump
around - the bodysuit’s sleeve tied off for the time being - and cracking it directly across the side of his head with
enough force to make her shoulder hurt. Following his sideways jostle, she reached out with her hand, wrapped her
fingers into a fist around the hem of his shirt, and used that to hold him in place while she unceremoniously drove
her knee directly between his legs.

Hank crumpled with a noise of pain.

“Foul!” Alex yelled, sounding horrified.

Addy turned, stared blankly. “Fouls don’t exist in combat,” she pointed out.

“Fragile,” Hank croaked on the ground, rolling onto his side as he eased himself up a bit. He kept muttering under his
breath low enough that Addy could only pick up on the occasional sound, and none of it sounded like any language
she had catalogued. “Why are those so fragile.”

Alex rushed onto the stage, crouching down to help Hank to his feet. She kept shooting Addy scathing looks, ones
that eventually dried up as Hank pointedly stared at Alex, looking less than impressed. “She fouled,” Alex muttered in
turn, sounding almost petulant.

“She...” He took in a breath, visibly trying to compose himself. “She brings up a good point about fights not having
fouls, Agent Danvers. But, yes, for the future, Administrator, hitting people in the genitals during friendly spars is
thought of poorly by others. Try not to do it again.”

“Should we continue our spar?” Addy asked, wanting to get things moving.

““No!”” Alex and Hank said in sync, or, well, more yelled than anything else. She was assuming they were the so-
called ‘sore losers’ she could recall from Taylor’s memories. If they hadn’t wanted her to exploit an obvious
vulnerability in their body, they should’ve worn protective gear to compensate for it.

“Then we should move on to my powers,” Addy explained very firmly. “Expediting this process would be of benefit to
everyone here, as I wish to go home soon.”

“Just—” Hank started, wincing at some unseen pain. “Just, give us a minute to prepare. Alright?”

They would get their sixty seconds.

The room they brought her to next was a bit of a contrast. It had white walls made from what looked like durable
concrete, and was occupied by herself, a metal table, a single bulb on a chain that creaked ominously, two fold-out
chairs, and a delightful little drainage grate beside a raised, solid concrete platform. She wasn’t sure why those two
were there, considering it didn’t have a sprinkler system or any reason to have a drainage system, but she was giving
them props for effort.

Across from her, seated in the other chair, was Hank. After he’d sent Alex off to bring her here, he’d obviously
changed out of his workout clothes. Now, instead, he was wearing what he normally did: that padded jacket, a black
t-shirt, armoured pants, and even heavier looking combat boots. His face still flickered with pain every once and a
while, but it was significantly less common than it had been for the first half-a-minute after she’d firmly trounced him
in hand-to-hand combat.

Wiggling a bit in her chair, Addy glanced back towards the grate.

“Ignore that,” Hank said at last.

Addy didn’t. “What was it for?”

“This used to be a prison cell. We changed it into a simple room after we developed the alien-containing glass cages
further into the base. That’s not what we’re here to talk about, however.” Hank shifted in his seat, his hands folded
politely in front of him. “I need to ask you some straightforward questions about your telepathy.”

Addy turned back to him, pushing the curious thoughts about the grating into the back of her mind. “Ask away.”

“What are the limits?” He started, voice blunt.

There was that D.E.O. mentality she appreciated. “Existence, if not sentience. My power works by broadcasting
through a psychic bandwidth directly into a target entity with degrees of influence. On simple-minded creatures,
such as insects, it’s significantly less nuanced. They are already used to existing in something close to a hivemind,
obeying simple commands, that sort of thing. The more aware something becomes, the more complicated the
control is, the more feedback.” She paused for a moment, pursing her lips. “The limits contained within my abilities
prevent me from interfacing with things which are close to the concept of mentally existing, but still don’t. Most
plants, fungi, coral, technology that hasn’t reached a degree of self-awareness.”

“Could you control the hologram you were shown?” Hank asked.

Addy shook her head. “It’s an AI only in the sense that it’s complicated and has a degree of intellect and ability to
respond and facilitate responses to things. It’s just a very clever computer.”

“But it worked on Indigo, as your report says,” Hank pointed out.

Addy ran through her memories. “Indigo was sufficiently sentient, and her people interfaced with technology under a
similar set of psychic interactions that my own species interacted with each other. It was simple to adjust my
powers to act as a way for her to ‘connect’ to me, and then assert control over her. Her kind are used to being the
dominant mind in computers outside of their own kin. When they interface with something, they generally exert near
or full control over it as their will dominates even burgeoning intelligences due to the vast size of it. She was not
expecting something stronger than her mentally, and I believe she was actually expecting some sort of synthetic
augmentation I had in my person which she could access and then cause to fail. I don’t believe she understood I
was giving her access to my network until I had already prevented her from leaving.”

“Is this what you think?” Hank queried after a moment. “Or is there some sort of function that gives you an
awareness over what you can possibly influence.”

“The latter,” Addy confirmed. “It’s a leftover from Taylor’s original ability to sense her bugs as an extension of herself.
I simply rigged it to inform me of things which my psychic bandwidth can, for lack of a better term, ‘come into
contact with’. I don’t always project my psychic abilities, I have them off now, but there’s enough presence there that
I can... feel things, for lack of a better term. I use it to help adjust my parameters to grant me control over them.”

There was a short, almost heavy pause.

“Can you control me?” He asked, at last.

It occurred to Addy that he probably didn’t realize she knew he wasn’t human at this point. She felt for him with that
sense again, and she could feel him, but his presence was... loud, for lack of a better term. She could adjust to
attempt to overwhelm it, but unlike the Master Jailer, whose psychic immunity came from something that felt
surmountable, she wasn’t totally sure she could take full control of Hank without needing to draw on her coreself
resources. “I can,” she still said, because it was the truth. Given a worst-case scenario, she could subvert him.

Hank tensed, before relaxing. “I assumed, but didn’t have confirmation. Kara noted in her after-combat report for the
Master Jailer that you managed to use up solar energy in using this ability, how does that work?”

“Well, my body now serves as a battery in a manner of speaking. I can access solar energy and rely on it to power
the telepathic bandwidth, but it quickly runs out of energy.” She wasn’t a huge fan of that either, especially because it
would seem Kara had several magnitudes more energy than she had, which didn’t entirely track with the purported
‘60% to 75% Kryptonian’ declaration towards her biology. It could be more complicated than that, of course, but she
still wasn’t totally sure.

“Continuing on, you said you could control simple-minded creatures with ‘less influence’. Clarify that for me.”

That one was easier to go over. “Due to the limits put into place by my gestalt, my capacity to take control of
individual creatures depends on several parameters. The bandwidth I have access to has to be adjusted to
accommodate different aspects of control, such as how simple any one creature is, the variety among them,
different brain structures, feedback from different sources, the degree of control I can impart onto them. Taylor, for
example, I gave access to bugs; she had control over bugs for several blocks in a range around her, with the ability to
receive feedback through their sight, hearing, and other senses. She had enough fine-detailed control to control each
independently if she had wished. The reason why the range is so large is due to the fact that bugs are, regardless of
species, generally very simple mentally, making the bandwidth requirement, even for something as wide in variety as
‘bugs’, very small, which allowed me to then offload most of the rest of the bandwidth into the sheer range she had.”

Hank stared for a long moment, lost in thought. “What would happen if you narrowed the species?” He asked, finally.

She ran a quick calculation. “If I reduced the bugs she could control down to simply hornets, for example, she would
have a range of several miles at the least, if not more. City-wide, possibly. It depends on the insect, really; ants would
be the better option in this instance because they’re so easy to interface with, and she could have some variety there
without much needed bandwidth.”

“And you have access to this at any time?” Hank hedged.

Addy blinked slowly. “Of course I do. It’s me.”

Which did actually bring up something. She paused, hesitated, and maybe Hank saw it, maybe he was just silent,
maybe nothing, but the conversation petered off. She fidgeted a bit, trying to work through the noise in her head, the
conflicting thoughts. This was supposed to be power testing, supposed to be ensuring she wasn’t a threat. This
wasn’t a place for personal matters, but she wasn’t sure she’d get another chance before she had to see Kara.

“Did I do something wrong yesterday?” She asked.

Hank froze for a moment, lips pursing. He was quiet, glancing off to the side, thinking. “You did and you didn’t. Do
you understand why Kara has been avoiding you?”

“She was upset that I killed someone.” It was obvious.

Hank shook his head. “No, Administrator. Killing is... final, yes, and should only be done when necessary, and this did
feel necessary. Indigo was an immediate threat to the continued wellbeing of our entire planet. Had she gotten
access to the nuclear missiles in full and launched them at, say, another country, it is possible she could’ve thrown
the entire planet into a nuclear war, regardless of how much President Marsdin might explain that it was a rogue
alien intelligence. No, Kara looks to be mostly trying to process what you did and why you did it, alongside the fact
that she let you do it.”

“She didn’t let me do anything,” Addy said frankly, because she didn’t. She was her own person, she had agency, she
was an adult. Kara could not boss her around any more than The Warrior could, and the cooling corpse of his avatar
was in another dimension working from very different rules.

Hank smiled, and it was that same sad, sad smile that he showed her yesterday. “I don’t think she sees it that way,
Administrator.”

“Why do you do that?” She demanded, her fingers tightening against the table.

Hank paused. “Do what?”

“That smile,” she said quickly. “It’s sad, why do you keep pointing it at me?”

That brought him up short again for a moment. “I understand the reason for killing other people,” he began slowly,
the words soft. “But I don’t like seeing people I care about kill others. For their own safety? I won’t lose sleep, I don’t
lose sleep, but a kill is still a kill. It lingers, you might not have noticed it yet, you might even think you never will,
but... I don’t like seeing you, Agent Danvers, or even Supergirl herself be forced to kill or maim. I would rather carry
that burden, if it meant they could sleep well at night.”

That made sense, but not for her. She understood the point, but it clearly didn’t work with her. She wasn’t a shard
anymore, but she also wasn’t human either. Being able to psychically shred your enemies was a sign that she had all
the proper defence systems in place. Guilt played no part in survival, that was simply the way of things for her.

Nothing would change that.

“So how I did it was wrong?” She asked, finally, pushing the topic to the side.

Hank shrugged. “Honestly, in some way, yes. To her, as a Kryptonian, enslavement, whether physical or psychic, is a
revolting concept. Then, upon failing to make her willingly enslave herself to you and Kara, you opted to attempt to
consume her mind. She killed herself as a result, to avoid that. That is not something she probably agrees with;
killing her outright is one thing, harvesting her for excess information or attempting to enslave her is another.”

Addy felt her face pinch, brows wrinkling. “But she had resources. Had I just killed her, I would’ve wasted them.” Even
now, while she processed the information she had gained from Indigo, she had come out of things with more
knowledge than she’d started with. She understood Coluan existence far better, and she had a decent grasp on a
handful of interstellar species that oftentimes employed Coluans. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

“Had you just killed her, it would’ve been the humane choice if the alternative was your other options,” Hank pointed
out matter-of-factly.

That still didn’t apply to her. “I’m not human,” she reminded.

“Neither is Kara,” Hank pointed out. “What we consider humanity, compassion, ethics and morals—yes, a lot of them
are cultural constructs for humans. There are aliens out there which eat their dead and it is considered sacred to do
so, but cannibalism among humans is taboo for any number of reasons. While most of them are cultural, some of
them I hope are more immutable. Goodness is not inherent in people, aliens or otherwise, but many aliens see
torture or enslavement just as Kara herself does. People are more than just resources, to be portioned out.”

Addy couldn’t find something to say in response to that.

Peeling out of the iridescent suit was both a good and a bad thing. It was good, in that she had long since felt like
her mood no longer properly matched up with its constantly changing colours, but it was bad because she still really
enjoyed the texture of it, to the point where it was almost preferable to her current clothes.

Almost, being the key word.

Alex and Hank had left as a pair to go and set up the briefing on some alien threat they were going to attempt to take
down, leaving her with Susan Vasquez to chaperone her around to get her clothes. It hadn’t taken long to get to the
changing room, and it’d taken her even less time to slip back into her chinos and t-shirt, though she had struggled a
bit getting the zipper on the bodysuit down her spine with only one arm.

She’d managed it without asking for Susan’s help, but then she wasn’t sure she’d be comfortable with Susan
touching her. That she had people who were allowed to touch her was a simple and efficient concept, really. Kara,
Alex and Hank were all allowed to touch her, some more than others, but strangers could come with weapons - and
more to the point she liked them significantly less - and while Susan had long since become more of an
acquaintance, she wasn’t really sure she would feel comfortable in close proximity to her.

Reluctantly dropping the bodysuit into the box that had previously housed her clothes, she folded the cardboard flap
over the top and tucked it beneath her stump, keeping it in place with enough force to bend the material of the box
somewhat. Ambling over to the door, Addy pressed the single red button beside it, prompting it to slip open with a
quiet hiss.

Susan, staring at the screen of her phone, glanced up briefly, meeting her eyes. “Oh you’re done, thank god,” she
breathed out, tucking her phone back into her pants. “Box?”

Addy pulled it out from beneath her stump and held it out at an arm’s length. Susan gave her another one of those
looks she still couldn’t decipher before gently taking it from her, passing it over into her left hand and tucking it up
against her chest like how one might partially cradle a baby. “You ready to head back?”

“I have been since I arrived,” Addy said honestly.

Susan snorted. “Yeah, this place can be kinda dreary, not going to lie to you. Anyway, I’ll lead the way. Hank and Alex
should still be doing their briefing on the alien they’re trying to take down.”

Turning, Susan stepped into a stride that Addy found herself having to actually work to keep pace with. Not that it
was difficult, she was easily a head taller than Susan and her legs were significantly longer, but still she did feel
some fondness that Susan didn’t try to accommodate her by slowing down like some of the others did.

They walked in silence for the most part. Addy wasn’t terribly invested in their current alien case, and more to the
point hadn’t been invited to come along for it. She was apparently in something like limbo, as far as Hank had been
willing to say. She’d done enough that she’d caught the attention of people who looked for that sort of thing, but not
so much that she was regularly fetching snakes out of trees. She both had eyes on her and was a complete
unknown, and to an extent they wanted to keep it that way.

For what it was worth, Addy didn’t really feel like she wanted to spend her days doing menial tasks either. That much
they could agree on.

“—almost. An alien is their weapon,” Hank’s voice said, becoming more and more clear as they got closer. They
cleared the archway that separated the hallway to the main mission area just in time to see Hank press his fingers
into his watch, the screen behind him ringing out as it brought up a window of a single figure. The figure in question
was human in the abstract, but heavily misshapen, resembling someone after being stung by a small swarm of bees,
with swollen features and one eye replaced by a piece of ocular tech.

“A K’Hund,” Hank continued, glancing back at the screen for a moment before turning to the amassed group of
agents and, just barely visible behind them, her legs kicked up on the table as she leaned back in the chair, Kara. She
was dressed in her Supergirl outfit, and appeared to be busy fiddling with her nails. “Stronger than your average Fort
Rozz escapee. Now, we’ve obtained intel on their next heist but we have to move fast. Lucky for us, we have an alien
of our own.”

Everyone, including Hank, turned to stare at Kara.

The woman in question took a moment to realize she was the focus of everyone’s attention. “Hm?” She less
vocalized, more hummed, glancing back towards her nails after another moment.

“I’m sorry Supergirl, am I boring you?” Hank asked blandly, voice feigning at neutrality.

Kara’s face scrunched up, almost looking baffled. “Only boring people get bored,” she shot back, not taking her eyes
off of her hand as she adjusted to be a bit more comfortable with her legs propped up.
Addy noticed Alex’s face cramp, something like concern washing over it as she shared a look with Hank.

“I’m sorry, I thought you were talking about the other alien agent at the D.E.O.,” Kara said airily, her eyes snapping
over to where Addy was with something almost bordering on hostility. She didn’t like it. “Considering that’s all that
anyone at CatCo was talking about today. The new hero, or at least the new super, caught flying over the city like a
hummingbird.” Almost as though for emphasis, she kicked a bit off of the table, sending her rolling chair into a few
easy spins.

Throughout it all, her stare remained fixed on Addy.

Hank, either sensing the tension or just knowing better, shook his head. “Administrator will not be coming on this
mission,” he said frankly. “But you will, Supergirl.”

The spinning slowed to a halt, Supergirl staring at Hank with eyes heavily lidded.

Hank just glanced up in what had been obviously an aborted eye-roll. “Alright everyone!” He announced, the agents
around him jolting to attention. “Let’s move, let’s move.”

The agents, Alex included, swarmed past her, off towards the changing rooms in big clumps. There was a low
murmur of discussion feeding into the background, Addy just barely managing to pick up a “Supergirl” here, a “bad
day?” there. Nothing concrete, but it wasn’t as though the interaction had been subtle.

The only one not to fully leave was Alex, who slowed to a halt just next to her.

“Do I need to brief you again or have you got all that?” Hank asked, sounding unimpressed.

Kara finally rose from her seat, head bowed back, looking completely exasperated. “Kick. Alien. Ass.”

Then she was gone, vanishing around the corner.

Addy glanced down at her hand. It was trembling.

Alex’s hand, slowly, moving directly through her line of vision, came to rest on it. “I’m sorry about Kara,” she said
gently, her touch was grounding.

“She was like that this morning,” Addy found herself saying, not really sure what she was feeling. She was feeling a
lot, though. Too much. “Angry.”

Alex sighed, smoothing her thumb over her knuckles. “She—I haven’t really seen her like this, not since she was
really small and upset about cultural differences, but I promise Addy, she’ll be better. I’ll talk to her, but she doesn’t
hate you, okay? She doesn’t hate me or you, I know that much.”

Addy glanced down at her, managing to force herself to meet Alex’s eyes. “How do you know?”

Alex’s face softened, warmed. “I’m her sister, Addy.” Her fingers left her hand, arm falling back to her side as she
began to step backwards and towards the changing rooms. “I just know, alright?”

She wasn’t so sure.

She couldn’t bring herself to go home. It was a foreign experience, like ants crawling over her skin at the concept of
waiting there for Kara to return, to being there in the moment. She was hurt, she had realized sometime into her
flight over, and it was... weighing on her, for lack of a better term. It was a pressure in her chest that grew the closer
she got to the apartment, to where her laptop and her things were, where she was normally safe.

So she hadn’t gone there.

Al’s Dive Bar was strikingly familiar to Somer’s Rock, or at least it was in the abstract. It was, in every definition of the
word, a hole-in-the-wall, tucked away between larger buildings and almost purposefully hidden from view. The front
door wasn’t even conventional, and rather it was a metal thing with a slotted opening near the top for people to peek
through. It radiated that very same sort of shadiness that she’d come to associate with Taylor’s couple of months as
a cape in Brockton, a seedy underbelly of a sort.

She glanced down at her hand again, at her clothes, and then back up at the door. She’d been here for a while,
though how long wasn’t entirely clear. She’d just been staring at the door, not particularly sure what to do with
herself. She both wanted to go home, to tuck herself into her pyjamas and read more about crystals, but at the same
time felt that she couldn’t. She felt like an intruder, something out of place.

She felt wrong. Unhappy. Again.

Breathing in, Addy steadied her mind, collected herself, and brought her hand down on the door for three hard
knocks. The metal creaked a bit under the assault, and she left a pretty obvious scuff mark, but she wasn’t really
paying much attention to it.

After a moment, the metal slot flicked open and eyes peered at her from the other side. “Password?” A male voice
asked, rough and low.

“Dollywood,” she replied.

A series of clunks, the sound of someone pulling locks out of place, echoed loudly before, with a tug, the door pulled
itself open.

Al’s Dive Bar was just about what you’d expect inside as it was out. The place was poorly lit, dim in a purposeful way,
and primarily filled up by tough-looking wooden chairs and metal tables that had been bolted into the gritty, sticky-
looking green floor. The few sources of light that were present were clustered near the bar itself, which dominated
the center of the room and was outfitted with a large number of different bottles, most of which she was pretty sure
weren’t human in make.

There was a bit of a crowd present, though not too many. A black-haired Latino woman in one of the booths was
attempting to push her tongue down a dark-skinned, orange-haired woman’s throat, a woman with pupils resembling
those of a lizard was valiantly trying to chug a glass of liquid down faster than the large, green-skinned amphibian-
like alien across from her, while a crowd of about eight to nine people cheered them on.

“You comin’ in?” The voice asked again, and Addy glanced around to find herself nearly eye-to-eye with a heavily
bearded redhead whose stature resembled a fridge more than it did anything else.

Addy fidgeted, avoiding his gaze. “I’m looking for Carol?”

The man’s face didn’t soften, but he did seem to relax. “Near the back,” he grunted, motioning vaguely towards it.
“Get goin’. Need to close this before the heat gets out.”

Addy wasn’t really sure how that was relevant, seeing as it was currently room temperature outside, but opted not to
comment and nodded, passing by the burly man and focusing on her goal: finding Carol.

That didn’t turn out to be difficult. She found her almost immediately, tucked away at the side of the bar with another
woman near her. The other woman was dark-skinned but warm-toned, with wavy black hair that had been cut into a
pixie cut. She smiled in response to something Carol said, though it was subdued.

Addy picked up her pace, passing by the crowd of hooting and hollering onlookers as the woman with the weird eyes
finished her glass off first.

“Carol?” Addy called out, pitching her voice to carry.

Carol jolted, turning around to glance at her. She still looked the same, the same pale skin accompanied by freckles,
the same off-red hair, though she had it tied back into a bun at the crown of her head. Her face lit up, a low murmur
of psychic interference brushing over her, and this time she didn’t bat it away, let it reach out to her. Addy watched
Carol visibly relax until, finally, the psychic probe departed, pulled back into Carol.

“You came!” Carol said at last, smiling brightly. “You here for that free drink? It’s the least I can do, all things
considered.”

Addy shook her head. She had learned much from Taylor, but chief among them was that drinking her problems
away was not an effective method of coping with her issues. “No, I... need to ask about something. I didn’t want to
go home.”

Carol’s face softened. “Hey, Megan—”

“I’ll cover for you,” Megan - apparently - said, waving her off. “Feel free to bring her out back. I’m gonna man the bar
to stop some moron from stealing when I can obviously see it!”

There was a yelp, then a crash as something shattered against the floor. Megan breathed out, a low, put-upon sigh,
and marched towards the cowed, half-crouched amphibian that had just been attempting to out drink someone. He
looked terrified.

“I never caught your name,” Carol said, her attention drawn back in. She was making her way towards another door,
one that had been propped open by a rock wedged between it and the door frame surrounding it.

Addy followed after. “I’m Addy,” she said simply.

Carol made a low noise in her throat, bracing her shoulder against the door as she forced it open. “It’s okay if you
want to tell me if you went by something else in your species, or not. God knows, I might’ve lucked out with my name
but I realize some people prefer the ones they take on when on other planets than they do their original.”

“I would prefer not to,” Addy agreed, getting her first glimpse of the space beyond the door. It was a fenced-in region,
with several odd-looking plants sequestered away in pots, with benches interspersed throughout. She could faintly
smell nicotine in the air, and it wasn’t hard to find the dying embers on the ground, where someone had dropped a
cigarette butt and didn’t bother to stub it out with their shoe.

“That’s fine. What species are you anyways? If you feel comfortable saying,” Carol asked, making her way over to
one of the benches and, with great drama, turning around and slumping into it with a sigh, her back braced against
the chainlink fence.

Addy didn’t need to think much about it. “I’m a Shardite,” she said simply. Pertinent information was probably
necessary for this conversation, and she needed a second opinion. She trusted Alex, trusted Kara, but... she had to
be sure.

“Haven’t heard of it,” Carol said simply.

Addy nodded. “That’s intentional.”

“Huh, it’s been a while since we had a secret species hanging around,” Carol replied offhandedly, fishing around in
the pocket of her pants with one hand while the other snatched an abandoned lighter off of the other end of the
bench.

She was confused. “A what?”

Carol freed a packet of cigarettes with a crow of triumph, popping the lid open with her thumb while she plucked one
of them from inside. “Definitely new, then. Generally, the intergalactic community outside of formal environments
views species in three categories.” She paused, sticking the cigarette between her lips and, with a flick of her thumb,
lighting the end. She inhaled, then puffed out, and Addy stepped several feet to the side to get further away from the
awful scent. Why did people even like those? “The first are so-called open species. Those are species which are
open about their existence to other space-faring civilizations, and generally intermingle. The second is isolationist
species—ones who don’t openly broadcast or generally intermingle in galactic communities, but aren’t exactly hiding
either. Finally is the so-called secret species, or secretive species, depending on who you ask. They’re basically
species which, despite likely being aware of other alien species existing, and likely having the technology to engage
with and converse with them, do everything in their power to hide their existence, usually through limiting
communication and setting up dead zones in their solar system to prevent people from picking up errant signals.”

Addy watched Carol take another drag on her cigarette, a billow of smoke escaping the side of her mouth.

“My species, Titanian, are considered an isolationist species. We don’t broadcast that we exist, but we’re willing to
be diplomatic with our neighbours, just we generally don’t leave the planet. Green Martians, back when they were
alive, were an open species, and the White Martians, which now control Mars, are an isolationist species, built on the
xenophobic idea that they’re superior to everyone else.” Carol paused at that, though, jostling some of the ash off
near the end of the cigarette and onto the ground. “But that’s not really what you’re here for, is it?”

Addy slowly, but surely, shook her head. “No. That’s interesting, and I will endeavour to ask further questions, but no.”

“Troubles at home? Boyfriend, maybe a girlfriend?” Carol asked simply.

Addy couldn’t help the face she made. “No.”

“Neither’s fine too,” Carol was quick to assure, though there was something like laughter in the back of her voice.
“So, home troubles, but unrelated to romance. Roommate upset with you or something?”

Addy hesitated, opened her mouth, then shut it. “Yes. She is also an alien, and I did something which upset her. Not
that I did it at all, but rather the way I did it.”

“Cultural exchange can be messy like that,” Carol mused offhandedly, shaking her head after a moment. “Care to go
into more detail? You don’t have to, but it might help.”

She tried to work the thoughts in her head into something coherent but not too revealing, something that would be
parsed without giving away too much. “I did something that would, to my roommate, be considered an acceptable
break in moral codes in the circumstance it happened. However, the way I went about doing it upset her, and now
she is being... aggressive, and mean.” That wasn’t enough, though, because that didn’t capture the full picture. “She
normally isn't like that, though. This is a very intense change in personality, something she did not display for a
similar moral quandary she faced earlier on. She just ate more ice cream then, but now she’s being hostile.”

Carol took another moment to take a drag off of her cigarette, pursing her lips as she glanced up into the sky. It had
been dark out when she arrived, and now was no different. Still, light pollution left the area feeling closer to late
evening than nighttime, and she couldn’t see any stars, no matter how hard she tried to follow Carol’s gaze.

“I think you need to try to find a common ground, in that case,” Carol said at last, finally snubbing the cigarette out on
the surface of the bench next to her. “There must be some differences between your situation and the one you
observed, and if you can figure out what those details are, you might be able to find and talk about it. That’s kinda
what you really have to do here, cultural exchange is, again, messy, and dialogue is really the only way to get through
it without getting into a fist-fight. Do you think you did anything wrong in that instance?”

Something twisted in her stomach, but the guilt, shame, the anguish, the things Hank told her she might eventually
feel, they still didn’t come. There was that squirmy discomfort, the discomfort that kept bringing the feeling of
Taylor’s mind shredding into frayed strands to the forefront of her consciousness, but nothing more. “No. I did what I
had to.”

Carol shrugged. “Then there you go. If all else fails, keep that close to your chest and maybe you’ll figure things out.
But, really, try to talk with her. I know you can do it.”

It was nice being told as much. “Thank you.”

“Hey, no problem. You saved me from having to shatter a guy’s kneecaps with my bare hands and out myself
because he couldn’t take a hint, let alone no, for an answer.” Slipping the carton of cigarettes back into her pants,
Carol hauled herself to a stand with a loud, breathy sigh. “I should probably go make sure Megan hasn’t
dismembered that Grik for breaking a bottle of Glirell spirits.”

Carol stepped forward, making her way towards Addy - and by extension, the door behind her - before pausing.
“Actually, do you mind if I write something on your hand?”

Addy blinked. “As long as it is not permanent.”

Carol tugged a pen out of the pocket opposite to the one she’d had her cigarettes in, approaching with steady
strides. Addy held out her hand for her take, which she did, and flipped over so her palm was facing down. She
quickly jotted down a string of numbers separated by dashes.

“This,” she said, tucking the pen away again. “Is my phone number. I work here as a side-gig to experience alien
culture and, y’know, free booze. I won’t always be here, even though you’re always welcome at Al’s, god only knows
we could use some genuinely peaceful people. The point is, find a place to write that down, or add it to your phone,
or whatever, and contact me if you need me. I can’t say I’ll be awake at all times, but leave a text or a message and
I’ll probably get back to you.”

Addy stared at her hand a little longer, and Carol didn’t wait for her, passing right by and back into the noisy confines
of the bar.

Maybe Cat Grant was right.

She might need a cellphone.

Last edited: Sep 3, 2020

 738

OxfordOctopus Sep 3, 2020 View discussion

Threadmarks: SEASON 1 - EPISODE 12 View content

OxfordOctopus She/Her
(Unverified Jackanape)

Sep 8, 2020  #799

 EPISODE 12​
The CatCo building felt somehow different at 5:14AM. There was no suitable reason for it, outside of the absence of
many of the people who worked there, not that she paid them much attention to begin with. There was something
distantly unreal in quality about the unlit offices, the long stretches of hallway that went on and on and on, all
without foot-traffic. Drawing from Taylor’s memories had provided the anecdote that the environment felt very
dream-like, which was pertinent information, seeing as her brain appeared to be functionally incapable of
remembering dreams to make her own comparison.

Reaching forward, Addy pressed her thumb into the button, glimpsing up at the little LED screen that showed the
closest one to her was making its descent of nearly thirteen floors. Glancing back around, she noticed a few other
stragglers. A man yawning sleepily into his sleeve as he white-knuckled a small book, its spine ready to break under
the pressure, a woman, gently soothing a thumb and forefinger against the bridge of her nose, eyes shut in pain.

The world was quiet, dark. The tall windows to her right, giving a line of sight over the inner-city roads, let very little
light in, just the faint colours that caught on the far horizon. The sun wouldn’t rise yet for half-an-hour, and most
people wouldn’t be waking up for hours after that.

The elevator made a little ding! as it arrived, doors peeling open to reveal the reflective gold interior. Easing her
laptop bag’s strap further up her nape, Addy stepped in, pressing the button to her workplace as she went, before
turning back around just in time to watch the elevator doors ease shut.

There was a short lurch, then ascent.

She’d arrived back home sometime after midnight to a still-empty apartment. Kara was still out, doing whatever Kara
did, and she’d been left to her lonesome to do her nightly ritual and fall asleep thereafter with little fanfare. Bucking
the trend, however, her body had obstinately decided to wake her up several times throughout the night, and she’d
gotten frustrated enough that, after her sixth awakening and roughly 4 hours of sleep, she’d decided to truly get up. It
was four in the morning, and that was about as close as she knew she was going to manage.

Of course, that had been a bad decision. Kara had come home by then, her breathing steady and relaxed, tucked
away in the wrinkled confines of her blankets. Addy had spent some time staring at her, breathing quietly, from the
couch, trying to process the change in personality, the hostility, the dismissal. With those thoughts had come
discomfort, a need to be elsewhere, identical to the one that had driven her to go and find Carol. It had gotten so
tremendously bad that, after jotting down a short note to Kara to ensure she wouldn’t assume the worse, she’d
gotten dressed - red chinos, white shirt, blue high-tops, her wine-red pageboy hat, and a red thin sweater with a
passing resemblance to a poncho in construction - gotten her things, and left.

Combined with the fact that getting work started now would ease the amount she had to do, Addy had thought it
rational to avoid the discomfort and simply do something else. That she would spend hours wasting perfectly good
fight-or-flight inducing chemicals on someone who was very much asleep felt like a mistake, and there was nothing
more to it than that.

Carol’s idea of having a conversation with Kara about cultural barriers was something for later. Not in the morning,
or at night, but when both of them were aware and conscious and maybe in an environment where there were
people nearby to arbitrate if it came down to it

Another ding! and the doors peeled open into the surprisingly lit interior of CatCo’s main office space. Not all of the
overhead lights were on, of course, but someone had clearly already arrived and set things up.

The person in question, as it would happen, was Winn. He hadn’t noticed her arrival, his back hunched and shoulders
raised as he muttered quickly to himself, typing away on the keyboard at a pace that Addy found almost impressive.
Exceptional hand-eye coordination would be required for something like that, it wasn’t hard to tell, though he could
still definitely do with some improvements to his situational awareness. Leaving his wallet around, not noticing
obvious audio cues, being too focused—he had much to learn if he wanted to really improve his security.

Plodding forward, past the various unoccupied desks where people would soon occupy, Addy arrived at her seat,
pulled it out, and lowered herself down into it.

Winn, still too focused to be aware, continued rapidly typing. His muttering was growing more defensive, like he was
getting into an argument with something.

Leaning over, Addy eased her thumb into the power button on her computer tower, slipping out of the embrace of her
laptop bag and easing the entire thing up just to the left of her keyboard.

The screen flicked on, showing the loading screen for the operating system.

Then, finally, the speakers connected to her computer gave a shout as the loud - considering how quiet it was
elsewhere, no sound waves to interfere with its arrival - delightful Windows 10 Professional jingle played.

Winn shrieked, voice reaching hitherto unheard-of heights for the man, and toppled backwards, his rolling chair
going with him as he landed on his back.

Addy stared at him from the gap between his monitor and his tower, and Winn stared back. Neither of them quite
made eye-contact, but the realization of who she was - not an intruder - played over his face rapidly. He looked, at
first, just startled, then somewhat irritated, before a blotchy red colour rose to his cheeks, his ears, crawled its way
down the front of his throat like she’d seen happen to Kara that one time when Lucy had brought up her devotion
towards powerful women.

“Addy?” Winn finally asked, voice a breathy croak.

Satisfied with his acknowledgement of her existence, she glanced back towards her computer and quickly typed in
the 33-letter combination of words that would get around the security failures of purely ‘randomized’ passwords.
“Good morning, Winn,” she said at last as her desktop loaded into view, already switching from keyboard to mouse to
pop open some of the diagnostic programs and the left-over homework she had been working on. Python, as it
would happen, was a wonderfully comprehensible language, unlike some she could, but would not, mention.

“It’s... jeez, Addy. 5:30? In the morning? What are you doing here?”

She didn’t look away from the ongoing scan. “I wish to continue my work,” she announced, because that was true. It
was also a deflection, but she had come to learn she could be willfully ignorant of such things if she just tried hard
enough.

“You scared the shi—oot out of me,” Winn continued, nearly babbling. “I was just—hey, wait, aren’t you going to ask
why I’m in here so early?”

That, however, did drag her eyes away. She squinted at him for a moment, taking him in. Winn was wearing his
normal collection of clothes: a soft-looking cardigan thrown over a white dress shirt, black slacks held up by a belt,
and polished dress shoes. His hair wasn’t that out of place, and considering he had just taken a tumble, she could
forgive him for that much. He didn’t appear to have been staying here all night, which meant he’d come in earlier.

Glancing back just in time for the diagnostic program to begin spitting out lines of information, Addy shrugged. “I
assumed your work ethic, like mine, drove you to arrive here early.”

She could feel Winn just staring at her. There was some shuffling, a muttered “scary” and the accompanying sound
of him lifting his chair back into place before, at last, finally sitting back down.

“Well, no. I actually came in about... an hour ago?” He said, hands returning to his keyboard and beginning their
percussive, clacky input. “Indigo, the crazy bi—lue alien! Blue alien. Indigo the blue alien, I mean, left some, uh,
presents. For all of us.”

Odd. Winn appeared to be suffering from worse speech patterns than normal. “Have you recently experienced a
traumatic head injury?” She asked.

“...No, Addy. I’m just trying to be, uh, polite. It’s not that it’s you, I don’t think you care if I swear?”

“I do not.”

“Yeah, right. But uh, I talk really differently when I’m alone?” Winn let out a nervous chuckle that died off into a weak
noise in the pit of his chest. “I blame it on most of my socialization as a kid being whatever I could get on the
internet. That and voice chat in video games. Anyway, I kinda, uh, have to change how I talk? Or else I’ll get fired for
calling a virus or something a bad word.”

“Social etiquette is important,” Addy agreed distractedly, tilting her head to one side. The error she was getting for
one of the partitions on the server seemed to imply someone had done physical damage to it but not quite enough
to break it.

Winn said nothing in return, slipping back into an amicable silence, his muttering growing once again. That wasn’t
unusual, of course, it was how Winn processed things. He muttered to himself, talking in circles to work through
issues, engaging in conversation with what he called “rubber ducks”, even though none existed within a hundred feet
of CatCo as a result of a ban instituted by Cat due to what Winn had heavily implied was “unacknowledged
childhood trauma”.

Personally, she just thought Cat disliked the sound of them. That or she was doing it to spite Winn, either was
equally possible.

“I believe we’ll need to call in a repair technician,” Addy announced finally. Winn perked up a bit at that, leaning
forward as she reached over to swivel her monitor around, giving Winn a look at her screen. His face pinched for a
moment as he scanned over the contents.

“Yeah, probably. I hope someone didn’t leave ice cream in the server room again ‘for convenience’. The last one who
did was nearly fired out of a cannon, or would’ve if Miss Grant could find one, before Kara had managed to talk her
down from the murder ledge and just to conventional firing.” Slumping back down into his chair, Winn raked a hand
through the tangly curls that framed his head, fingers catching on snags that brought a wince to his face. “God, I
really hope that isn’t the case. I’d go and check, but Cat is the only one with the keys outside of board members and
none of them will be in for hours.”

Addy did her best not to go still at the mention of Kara, working through the remainder of the check-ups she had to
do for the various bits of incredibly fragile technology that made CatCo the multimedia presence it very much was.

“...Actually Addy, uh, speaking of.” Winn fidgeted a bit, his fingers going still on his keyboard. “I heard about how you,
like, uh, might’ve mind-melded with Indigo?” He leaned forward and all but whispered the word ‘mind-melded’,
despite the two of them being the only ones on the floor.

Even then, it wasn’t a totally accurate descriptor. Melding with another consciousness was something her species
was adroit at, she was as much a combination of smaller parts as she was an individual. The capacity to adapt into
new entities depending on the sometimes random fusing of dispirit pieces was something they’d all had to be
particularly good at to avoid errors and self-destruction.

“...In a manner of speaking.” She tried, at last. Because explaining all of that to Winn felt like a bad idea. Whether
because it would make him distracted or because it would weird him out again, it didn’t matter. She wanted neither.
Winn was at his best when he was carelessly trying to be nice and friendly and at his worst when he looked at her
like he wasn’t sure if she would do something wrong at a moment’s notice.

“Maybe you could help me figure this out?” He replied awkwardly, glancing away. “It’s just that, uh, I’m kinda worried
we’re going to get another STUXNET, just this time instead of the US military being... er, the US military, this is going
to indiscriminately target the hardware of basically every media company? On the globe?”

Pausing for a moment, Addy reached out to her coreself. The process of recombining what information she had
obtained from Indigo was a slow one. Despite the relatively small amount of information - in comparison to what
she could have obtained - it was vast in actual storage size. The Coluan did not particularly bottleneck themselves
with low file sizes, in any event, and by extension the process of finding where the fragments fit together in that
information was tedious and long-coming. She had, at this point, salvaged enough to know more about the Coluan
mental architecture than she should as a being who wasn’t one, but had made little headway in the non-vital data
packets.

“I apologize,” she said at last, blinking back to the present. “If you still need my help in three-to-five weeks, I may be
able to help, but currently due to my power-saving state, the processing power for what data I salvaged is limited. I
am still working through the core system information.”

Winn slumped back with a sigh, breathing noisily out through his nose. “Right. Right. Time to be a hero without a
cape, I guess.”

“Addy?”

Blinking, she glanced away from Twitter and up to Winn. His face was pinched, awkward, eyes flicking up to a place
just behind her head.

“I think you need to uh, see this,” he said, pointing.

Following the direction of the gesture, Addy blinked. There was Kara, strutting out from Cat’s elevator. She was
dressed even more unlike her normal self, a black sleeveless top that hugged her figure, accompanied by a black
skirt with odd, triangular designs and with big, bulky sunglasses thrown over her eyes. Tucked into one arm was her
purse, and clutched in her hand was a tall cup of coffee. Her heels were tall and looked almost spiked, a decision
she might agree with - clothing which could double as a weapon was always a benefit - if not for the general
atmosphere she was exuding.

Quietly, it occurred to her that Kara was... worse. Before there had been a lot of anger that slipped out from beneath
how Kara normally acted, but there was still Kara beneath it all. Now, though? She walked differently, confidently,
back straight and shoulders spread apart. Her lips, twisted into a narrow frown, spread into a hard smile as people
turned to boggle at her. Though whether it was because she came out of Cat’s elevator or the fact that she was
wearing what she was, it wasn’t clear.

Winn stumbled around his desk before rushing towards her.

Addy pulled her eyes away and back to Twitter, idly focusing on the video of a woman in a festive, red-and-black
outfit with a tall, sceptre-like object which played a tune on a bell, led a long line of geese. She marched with her legs
high, and she had a whistle clenched between her teeth, though her face was anything but hostile. She looked
happy.

So did the geese.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Cat’s voice cut in. Addy jolted, not expecting it, and turned, only to find the
woman not next to her desk, but rather at Kara’s.

Wordlessly, Kara held the cup out. “Your latte, Miss Grant,” she said.

Miss Grant took it, glancing down at it. She’d arrived earlier today, though not so early it had just been her, Winn, and
Cat there. She had still given Addy a long, probing look, but hadn’t commented on her arriving so early otherwise.
“Oh,” she said at last, though there was nothing in her tone that made Addy think she was particularly soothed.

“Walking from the main elevator takes an extra 90 seconds, which means your latte is 90 seconds colder,” Kara
continued, undaunted and completely uncowed by Miss Grant’s tuxedoed presence. Again, more differences.

Cat took a long, long drink, her throb bobbing, before, finally, she let the cup come to rest at her side. “Brazen,” she
said, sounding almost intrigued. “That’s a new colour on you. I don’t mind it.”

Kara’s face split into a self-satisfied smile—

“Yet.” Cat interrupted, voice dropping, going cold. “Don’t wear it out.”

—which fell off of her face just as quick, replaced by something not unlike frustration. Cat had already turned away
by then, taking another drink of her cup as she walked with sure steps back into her office.

“Yikes,” Winn muttered, folding his hand over his eyes.

Addy clicked onto the next link that had been shared with her by an anonymous Twitter user by the name of
“tothe_max19”. This one was of a small family of geese cuddling together in what looked like the tattered, bloodied
remains of someone’s shirt. Victory spoils, a conquest they were using to the best of their own benefit. She could
appreciate that, and retweeted it with commentary to match.

“Hey, Addy.”

She felt herself stiffen, tabbing off of Twitter. She craned her head around, watched Kara grow ever-closer. She’d
traded her sunglasses out for her normal glasses at some point, leaving the tinted eyewear tucked into the hem of
her shirt. Her expression was distant, cold. Not Kara.

Addy swallowed. “Good morning, Kara.” She replied, flicking her eyes back to her computer. She had nothing to do,
Winn had told her to take an early lunch break before they’d start looking into more information about Python. She’d
taken to it well, he said, and he was trying to encourage her to become really good at it.

“You weren’t around this morning,” she said, voice airy, a conversational tone with none of the warmth. “I saw the
note, sure, but why didn’t you stick around?”

Addy didn’t answer. She wouldn’t be able to tell a lie, not a convincing one. She knew that. Flicking her eyes up, she
caught sight of Winn cringing away from the two of them, his face tight and awkward, looking anywhere else.

Kara’s hand came to rest on her shoulder, the grip too tight to be pleasant.

Addy felt herself stiffen further. This was not like Kara, Kara wouldn’t disobey her boundaries, Kara would be nice.
Kara was wrong, she was twisted. If Kara had been like this normally, she would’ve figured it out by now. But she
wasn’t, Kara was nice.

But Kara was different.

She had to find out why.

“Nothing to say?” Kara said, not quite asking.

Addy reached out to her powers, tightened the range down to skin-to-skin. Kryptonians felt like static to her,
unreadable in most cases, but felt. She figured it was interference from the radiation they stored in their bodies, not
some sort of innate defence against psychic abilities. It wasn’t insurmountable, and it wasn’t something that
protected against mind control, but it did make getting workable information out of them difficult.

“Because you normally have so much to talk about,” Kara continued on, unhindered. Her grip tightened.

Addy didn’t need to think about it. If Kara was wrong, she would find out why, and that meant drawing from her
coreself. She felt a year burn up in the instant she reactivated several bandwidth nodes, her power filling out,
becoming louder. She shoved it towards Kara, adjusting for Kryptonian physiology, mapping it somewhat off of hers
and building from what the information she received brought back. The static emanating from Kara warped the data,
twisted it, overwhelmed the probe.

She pushed more years worth of power into it. She was up to twenty now, the static was balking.

“Come on, Addy,”—red, anger, unclear, clarity too low, more energy—“I’m just worried”—bright, striking, the static peeled
away, dwarfed by the sheer interference of her own bandwidth. Intent bled through, all violence, so much hate. So loud,
ringing in her ears. She could feel it bleed into her, the connection hijacked, the world tinted painfully red for just a
moment—“about you.”

Addy reeled, unable to help it. The connection snapped, the film of anger and hate that had come to twist around her
throat going with it. She nearly collapsed under it, a haggard breath leaving her. Kara was wrong, Kara was angry but
that anger felt so wrong. Something was wrong, she was wrong, that was wrong—

Her breathing was coming shallow, sharp. Not enough oxygen, too much movement of the lungs, her chest felt tight
and empty all at once. She could still feel the red sinking into her, pouring into her through the open connection.
Flecks of it circled at the edges of her vision before fading, and with each one, the pressure on her chest released
just a little more.

“I need to go home,” she said, at last, keeping her voice level. She needed to go to the D.E.O., tell them something
was wrong, they needed to know. They needed to fix—

“I think,” Kara interrupted darkly. “You need to do the job I helped you get.”

“No, I think she needs to go home,” Cat’s voice cut in, flat. Everyone flinched, even Addy, all twisting around to look at
her. Cat stood there, eyes lidded, staring at the two of them. “You have the days available, don’t you Addy?”

She forced a nod, head jerking.

“Then she can go home. It’s part of her contract. You’ll cover for her, won’t you Winfrey?”

Winn’s head snapped up, and for a moment he opened and shut his mouth like a fish, gawping. Finally, his mind put
the pieces together, and he started nodding rapidly. “Yeah! Totally. I can do that. You can leave your projects safe
with me.”

Kara’s hand released her shoulder and it ached. It was bruising, Addy realized. Kara had left a bruise on her body.

That was... bad. Bad. Kara wasn’t Kara. There had been so much red, it had been so interlaced with her mind.
Psychoactive, in a way, an altered state. She was different. She was still Kara, but twisted.

Despite her empty stomach, she felt like she was going to be sick.

“Whatever,” Kara muttered darkly, turning away and marching herself back to her desk.

Cat glanced between the two of them, one carefully-sculpted eyebrow raised.

Addy ignored it all, shoving her things back into her bag.

The D.E.O. was packed by the time she arrived.

Officers of all stripes stood around, she could pick out Susan biting into what looked like a burrito with a thoughtful
look on her face as she worked over something on her computer. Alex, with a platoon of fully-armoured officers, led
the very same K’Hund that they had gone off to take down the night before, the alien in question bracketed on all
sides by armed D.E.O. agents and with both of his wrists bound together by a bar of odd-looking metal.

Even Hank was there, leaning against the wall with eyes watching the troopers guide the K’Hund away.

“Don’t inflate your own worth, human,” the thing spat, harsh and loud. The one remaining eye he did have left was
opened wide, and he stared at Alex with vehement hate.

Addy picked up her pace, ignoring the looks she was getting.

“Supergirl didn’t even try to apprehend me.” He growled, sounding almost obstinate.

Hank’s face tightened. “What are you talking about?” He asked. “She said you fought and you got away.”

The K’Hund tightened his jaw. “She’s a liar,” he spat, almost gloating. “She said she didn’t want to waste her time with
me.”

Alex’s expression hardened into something almost violent. “Get him out of my face,” she said, voice barely
restrained, and the officers flanking the K’Hund wrenched him to the side with just a little too much force to be
unintentional, guiding him towards the area where the cells were.

The K’Hund met her eyes as they passed by one another.

“Addy?” Alex asked, her voice still a bit tight. She looked concerned. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

Hank just looked between the two of them quietly.

“Kara’s...” Addy faltered, tried to push the painful red away. It wasn’t all gone, but it was fading slowly. She still wasn’t
sure what it was, or how the energy had transferred into her through her psychic link, but she didn’t like it.
“Something’s affecting her.”

Alex’s face fell, the anger bleeding out of it.

Hank straightened. “Agent Danvers, Addy, with me.” His tone brooked no argument, and he was walking before Addy
could even think to acknowledge his request, Alex and herself trailing after him. He led them down a few hallways,
further and further away from the chatter and hum of activity deeper into the base.

He came to a stop at the end of a hallway, turning on her. “Addy, can you explain?”

She swallowed, working her hand into the fabric of her pants. She smoothed her palm around on it, tried to get the
sensation to ground her. It was hard, the feeling was still there, the sticky anger that didn’t leave. She didn’t do anger,
it wasn’t something that came so naturally to her. Irritation, yes, frustration, perhaps, but anger was... different. It
was so new, so raw. She hated it, she never wanted to be around it again. She felt sick. Nauseated. Things that
weren’t physical were influencing her mentality, and it was wrong.

She had been a static entity for so long, an existence which comprised a single mentality, unchanging, unwavering,
only altered enough to suit the host species.

She hated this. “Kara’s mind is wrong,” she said with too much force, her voice too hard, not the way she wanted it to
come out. Something knotted built in her throat, tight and queasy. “She was being mean at work again. She used
Cat’s elevator, that’s... bad. She respects Cat, respects her need for an elevator due to her fear of being infected by
pathogens.”

The other two looked at her blankly. Even Alex wasn’t quite getting it.

Addy rolled her shoulders, easing the poncho-like sweater off of them. Wiggling a bit, she frowned. “Alex, can you
pull this shirt over my shoulder?”

Confusion still writ on her face, Alex nevertheless did as she asked, stepping forward, reaching out, and peeling the
hem of her shirt away from her throat and over her shoulder.

Almost immediately, Alex hissed. The mark on her shoulder was healing, yes, but the blotchy, painful red welts where
Kara had dug her fingers in stood in stark contrast to the purple-yellow discolouration around it. “What happened?”

Addy swallowed, tried to get the thick, heavy feeling in her throat to abate. “Kara,” she said, not liking how her voice
came out choked. “I didn’t want to be around her this morning. I was afraid she’d be...” cruel, mean, things she wasn’t.
“So I left to go to work early, and... she didn’t like that.”

“This... isn’t Kara,” Alex said, finally, glancing up at her face. Addy avoided her eyes, too raw to even try to hold eye-
contact at this junction. “You said something about her mind being wrong?”

“Red,” Addy said, at last, trying the word over in her mouth. “I forced a connection to Kara’s mind, and it was so red.
She was angry. I didn’t know anger could feel like that. It felt like a—a film, something interfering with how her brain
registered things.”

Alex tugged her shirt back into place, and helped Addy pull her poncho back around her shoulders.

“It... you could feel it?” Hank asked, after a moment.

Addy felt her stomach turn. “I could see it as well. Red motes at the corner of my vision, meaning it had somehow
gained access to the pathways between my eyes and my brain.”

Hank’s expression was still, distant. “You’re going to have to keep what I’m about to tell you a secret,” he said, finally.

“You’re an alien,” Addy cut in, just as quick.

Alex and Hank stared at her again, looking confused.

Shrugging, she shuffled back. If Kara could get angry at her, so could they. “I read Alex’s mind after attempting to
reinitiate the power nexus in my coreself. I got memories and feedback in the time it took for me to adjust and then
lower the range. Your true form is green.”

Hank reached up to wordlessly rub his eyes. Alex just looked awkward.

“In any event,” he said, finally. “I know my way around telepathy, and... what you described isn’t a psychic effect, is
it?”

No. It hadn’t felt like it, that much Addy could agree on. If it had been a psychic presence, she could’ve felt around for
it and subsequently crushed it. She shook her head.

“There aren’t many things which can affect Kryptonians, Addy, for multiple reasons,” Hank explained, voice soft. He
sounded reluctant, weary. “But if it can affect Kara, and if affected you, we’re going to have to keep you apart.”

The tension was back. “I can’t,” she interrupted sharply. “I need to help her.” And she did, because Kara was
important in any state and if she could get Kara back she could be happy and calm again and feel relaxed in her own
home and enjoy things again and—and—and...

“I know it hurts,” Hank said gently. “But if it affects her like this, it will affect you significantly worse. Your body nearly
shuts down in close proximity to enough concentrated Kryptonite, what exactly do you think would happen if you
were exposed to that?”

Addy opened her mouth. She tried to find an answer that would be suitable, something other than “then I will simply
not be affected by it”. Even though that was the truth, even though she would work around the sudden appearance
of a mind-altering substance. Even if she did all of that, something told her, and Taylor’s memories echoed, that they
wouldn’t care.

“If I say no?” She said evenly, trying to work through the low simmer of something in her chest again. Something raw,
but distant. Fading.

“We have no good way to hold you, Addy,” Hank admittedly frankly. “Your psychic abilities don’t register on our
equipment to allow us to find ways to interfere with them.”

Addy stared at him blankly. “That’s intentional. The only way one could pick up on the signal would be through
another shard. It’s a method to conserve anonymity and make tracking my kind very difficult.”

Hank’s expression grew strained. “But, be it necessary, we do have sedatives. We would attempt to stop you from
returning to Kara, yes, until such a time where we could figure out a method to overcome Kara’s current state.
Speaking of, Agent Danvers?”

Alex jerked. “Yessir?”

“Go gather four teams, start sending them out to places Kara has been since before the K’Hund, our earliest
example of this new behaviour.”

Alex didn’t even so much as acknowledge it, already rushing off and hauling her radio up to her mouth, barking
orders into it.

“She cares a lot about her sister,” Hank said as they watched her go.

Addy felt something sting, something painful. “I care about Kara too,” she replied truthfully.

Hank just nodded, saying nothing else.

Last edited: Sep 8, 2020

 678

OxfordOctopus Sep 8, 2020 View discussion

Threadmarks: SEASON 1 - EPISODE 13 View content

OxfordOctopus She/Her
(Unverified Jackanape)

Sep 15, 2020  #847

EPISODE 13​

Spoiler: CONTENT WARNING

The internet was proving to be an inadequate source of aid for her current set of problems. Not that she had
expected much else, though she had hoped that perhaps, as with most fields of study, there would be enough
overlap to produce helpful information which could be slightly modified to suit her purposes. By contrast, however,
using google to search such queries as “why is my friend suddenly being mean to me”, “my friend is becoming
violent”, and “I fear my friend is beginning to hate me” had only returned answers that encouraged her to cut ties
with said friend, and/or check if they were participating in the recreational use of psychoactive drugs.

For what should be obvious reasons - Kara being important - nothing she had read among the three pages of google
results she had combed through had been worth even tangential consideration.

After revealing she was not to accompany Alex or any of the other D.E.O. teams on reconnaissance missions due to
the deeply ignorant concern that she might become compromised - she would simply not become compromised -
she had been directed towards the canteen and told to occupy herself. That much was not abnormal, as it would
happen the few other times she had been left with free time at the D.E.O. she had spent most of it in the very same
room. It was insulting, yes, but not surprising or particularly unexpected.

There were a few other people present, though nobody was talking. Addy was relatively certain at least three of the
seven present were there solely to watch her, or at least ensure she did not go wandering into things the government
did not want her knowing. That much she could respect, a healthy dose of wariness and general paranoia did
humanity wonders; they were, after all, a species which had achieved rapid population and technological growth
over a very short period and had yet to entirely shed the lingering evolutionary patterns of their forebears which had
been necessary to avoid being eaten by larger predators or murdered by other hominids. The fact that their luxury
had somewhat dulled the edge of those natural instincts was something of a disappointment, but at the very least
some still kept to stress-tested behavioural patterns.

Taylor’s memories were also proving to be an inadequate source of aiding her in any meaningful capacity. Drawing
on them for relationship advice was not an option—part of her decision to connect with Taylor and her father, Daniel,
had been their self-destructive behavioural habits that were accompanied by self-isolation and a refusal to accept
aid. Working from Taylor’s experiences with managing and salvaging friendships would be even less effective than
simply cutting ties with one of the most currently important people in her life, because at least the latter wouldn’t be
stretched out over several months and include momentary spikes of suicidal ideation.

Other methods Taylor utilized to handle situations weren’t working either. To occupy herself when bored, at least
before connecting with Addy, Taylor had taken it upon herself to learn memorization games. Most of them were rote
and involved rhyming, but she had at one point at the beginning of her time at Winslow, prior to Emma’s opening
salvo of emotional abuse but well into the period of social neglect and self-inflicted isolation, had taken it upon
herself to try to recite the entirety of Pride and Prejudice word-for-word in her own head.

Seeing as she had the closest thing to perfect memory that could be afforded on the hardware her consciousness
was currently inhabiting, that would neither be challenging enough to distract herself nor particularly effective at
solving any of her current issues. While Pride and Prejudice itself was not an unlikeable piece of fiction, it was also
not relevant to her current predicament, and following its example may actually be to her detriment.

There were no aids for her. She did not have a cellphone to attempt to contact Carol, she was actively avoiding any
online activity which Winn might be able to notice, as his capacity to hide things from Kara was, as with his
situational awareness, inadequate to her needs. Telling Winn about what was going on would, in all likelihood, tip off
Kara about what was going on, and someone currently under the influence of a psychoactive drug which makes
them hostile was unlikely to simply let them come along and help her.

So she was stuck. Unable to aid.

Again.

The quiet of the canteen felt more oppressive, put into that light. The slight clatter of cutlery against dishes, the
squeak of treads against polished metal floors. This was another aspect of her biology she was becoming
increasingly less impressed with: the capacity to translate emotional or mental states into physical sensation. She
felt tense, she felt like people were looking at her - despite all evidence pointing to the contrary - she felt like the air
was a blanket and not the nice one that Kara had given her and she needed to help or do something because Kara
was going to die if she didn’t and—

BANG.

The front doors to the canteen flew open and it was not just her who flinched. Half of the canteen turned to her first,
away from the sound, as though they had expected her to be the product of it, but when she just looked back at
them, avoiding their eyes for patently obvious reasons, they finally turned towards the disturbance itself.

In this case, Agent Vasquez. Susan. She didn’t look any different to how she normally did, the same black-on-black-
on-black and the same short-cropped hair and androgynous face pinched into an awkward expression. Beneath one
arm, she had one of the D.E.O. issued boxes - a sort of black, thick plastic chest about the size of a milk crate - and,
oddly, on her neck were a series of interspersed bruises; small purple-yellow blotches that grew more clustered the
closer to her jaw they were.

Without missing a beat, despite her expression, Susan walked in with almost a bounce to her step. Most of the room
settled back down into silence once it became clear it was just Susan and not some sort of intruder, a dull murmur
of muttered conversation picking up among one particularly large group of four agents, who all spent some time
shooting annoyed glances at Susan as she passed.

It wasn’t hard to discern where Susan was going by the time she had gotten halfway through the canteen.

Susan was making a straight line towards her.

She felt her hand rattle against the side of her leg for a moment, her inattentiveness letting the building-up need to
move out. She tried to clamp down on it, even as the rhythmic tap of her fingers against the fabric of her chinos did
more to soothe her than it didn’t, but couldn’t quite manage. She couldn’t even stop the twitching from getting more
intense, growing from taps to gestures more akin to poking or jabbing, as Susan got closer.

By the time the woman in question had come to a stop on the opposite side of the table, she was trying to stop her
stump from copying her other limb. She wanted to tap her heels against the ground, wanted to do a lot of things but
keeping them under lid was more important right now. She had to look calm, collected, so that when the D.E.O.’s plan
inevitably failed - which it very well might - they would not disregard her as a possible source of help.

“Hello Susan,” Addy said, recognizing the silence was edging into that territory Taylor had called ‘the awkward
minute’.

Susan’s face softened after a moment. “Hey, Addy. How are you?”

Honesty worked better with Susan, she had found. “Poorly. I still don’t know why they are preventing me from
helping. I am more than adequate at avoiding contamination, it has been part of my kin’s life cycle since our
inception. Cancerous malignance was a very real threat.”

Susan blinked, long and slow, looking like she was trying to process something. “You could get cancer?” She asked,
sounding unsure.

Of course she could. Addy tried to project her disapproval onto her face. “The only universal constant is cancer.”

“I thought it was death and taxes?”

Addy couldn’t help the squint. It felt like she was being purposefully distracted by this, but she wasn’t sure if she
could resist it. “Humans have been wrong about many things, and will continue to be wrong well into the future.”

“Ouch,” Susan muttered, if not low enough not to be heard. Shaking her head and reaching up with her free hand -
Addy would genuinely need to look into workable prosthetics, her lack of a data packet from the tinker hub was
really becoming a detriment - to scrape her nails through her hair, smoothing it back. “Anyway, uh, I’ve kinda been
told to come and collect you for testing.”

She did not trust that last word. The last time she had been ‘tested’ in any meaningful capacity she had been
received by a doctor without the adequate skills to insert a sharp object into her in the correct place. “Needles?”

“What?” Susan sounded confused, which pointed towards it not being needles again. Good. “No, oh, not a doctor or
anything, Addy. Just, uh, we want to run some mental testing and stuff. I brought the bodysuit you like!”

For emphasis, Susan jostled the box she was clutching under one arm.

Addy stared at it.

She wasn’t really feeling the iridescent, multi-coloured quality of the bodysuit today, but then, glancing briefly at her
own clothes, she wasn’t really feeling them anymore, either. She was feeling very green now, somewhere between
that and yellow, though a darkish yellow. Bruised. Like the mark fading on her shoulder.

That Kara had left.

Addy blinked, mentally nudged her own brain. It had jumped to that on its own, which was worrying. She had full
control over her own thoughts, they were hers, but the neurons in her brain had at some point come to associate her
current predicament with the painful grip Kara had pressed into her shoulder. She was going to have to look into that
too, and google better not tell her that, like drinking - after filtering out all of the hotlines for alcoholism, anyway, why
on earth people imbibed addictive poison was completely beyond her - it was something she was just ‘going to have
to deal with’.

“Er, Addy?” Susan asked, after another moment. “Went quiet for like, two minutes there. Everything still working in
that brain of yours?”

“To the best of its ability,” Addy agreed, prying her tappy fingers from her leg and using her hand to close her laptop,
pulling the bag to it out from under and sliding it in shortly thereafter. Weighing the qualities of her outfit to the
bodysuit in the box, it wasn’t really hard to come to a decision on what she was going to wear. For all that the
bodysuit wasn’t perfect today, especially not today, with Kara as she was and people refusing to let her fix things,
which she could, it was slightly better than the outfit she was wearing currently.

Slipping her bag over one shoulder, Addy rose to her feet while carefully lifting the chair to avoid having it make that
dull screechy noise it did when it dragged across metal. She had only done that once, and it had been more than
enough to fully experience and enjoy the sensation of those sound waves invading her inner ear.

“I will wear the suit.”

The space they were testing her in wasn’t familiar, but the objects they were doing it with was. A series of hanging,
particulate-filled bags - colloquially known as ‘sandbags’, though the name was somewhat irrelevant as not a single
one of them likely had sand in it - connected to chains, maybe eight all told. Some bags were made out of fabric,
others looked to be leather, and one at the very, very end appeared to be made out of layers of extremely fine woven
metal.

Off to one side, Susan was fiddling with a small terminal, muttering to herself, while a few unnamed people in white
lab coats holding clipboards watched from a small series of benches at the far other end of the room to her. Which
was, as it would happen, a relatively sizable distance, considering the entire length of the room comfortably dwarfed
most school gymnasiums by two or three times.

“Got it!” Susan yelled, glancing back at the onlookers, one of whom gave her a thumbs-up that Susan had to squint
to see. Swiping something off of the top of the terminal, Susan turned and started to jog back towards her, quickly
closing the distance, slowing to a walk only when they were within talking distance.

“You’ve done tests on these before, right?” Susan asked belatedly, the small object she’d taken from the terminal still
firmly ensconced inside of her fist.

Addy glanced towards the bags. “I have.” They had made her do a similar line-up shortly after confirming Kara was
taking her home, just to get a very rough estimate on her capacity for strength. It was where they had found out her
strength, unlike Kara’s, had a degree of diminishing returns. She could hit hard, harder, she expected, than any of the
unaltered Brute shards would’ve been able to give out, but unlike Kara, something about how she was still partially
human made the sheer extremes she could reach untenable for her.

“Great, so uh, you’ll need this.” Susan held out her palm, in which was a pretty conventional ear-piece. “You uh, you’re
fine with things in your ear, right?”

She wasn’t actually sure. Taking it from Susan, Addy gave it a once-over. It had one of those over-the-ear hooks, with
its main speaker resembling a ball bearing. Out from the speaker was a small plastic arm, at the end of which was a
similar round protrusion, albeit this one made clearly out of the material they stuck at the end of mics. Bringing it up
to her ear, she hooked it around, grimaced a bit at the sensation of something forcing her ear open, but gave it a few
seconds to get worse.

It did not.

“I can cope,” she confirmed.

Susan let out a breath of relief. “Right, I’m going to go head over to sit with the eggheads. Precautions, and all that.
You’ll be fed requests through that and likely be asked to reply verbally to some things, just to be prepared. Alright?”

Addy tried not to think about Kara, what she was doing, how she was being handled. If she was being handled. How
she wasn’t doing anything. “Alright,” she replied, not able to put much into her voice, the words coming out
monotone.

Susan’s face eased off a bit. “Hey, Addy?” She said, voice low. “Things’ll work out. They always do.”

They didn’t, but Addy wasn’t about to tell her that.

“This is unprofessional as fuck, but can I give you a hug? I feel like you might need it.”

Addy stared at her again. Susan was one of the other taller agents, not quite her height, but close. She was stockier
than most, even Alex, with androgynous planes to her body and precisely zero attempt to look feminine. She owned
who she was.

She was the polar opposite of Kara. But she still wanted it.

“Okay,” Addy mumbled.

Arms closed around her for a brief second, a tight squeeze that she could only tangentially feel. The numbing effect
on her senses wasn’t as severe as Kara’s - apparently harkening back to her human DNA, apparently - but it was still
there. The depth of sensation had become shorter—the difference between being poked with a sharp needle and an
unsharpened pencil nearly identical. It felt nice, it was warm, it wasn’t like Kara’s hugs, Kara hugged harder, sharper,
enough that Addy could feel the press of force, but she was also bonier, with harder edges. Susan felt hard too, but
broader, less sharp angles, more cords of metal than anything else.

Then they were gone, and Susan was jogging back towards the seating area.

Addy reached down, plucked at the skin-tight fabric around her legs if only to have something to do with her hand.

“Okay, Administrator,” an unfamiliar voice spoke up, transmitted straight to the earpiece. His voice was gravelly, low,
but also somehow smooth. She could hear the stubble of his beard brushing against his mic for a moment. “Please
approach the first sandbag.”

Approaching it, she gave it a once over. It was an identical, uniform black to all of the other bags, nothing about it
gave away its contents, but she wasn’t about to dwell on it.

“Please hit the bag with as much force as you can that will not damage things nearby,” the voice continued,
sounding as though it was reading from a list.

Sliding her front foot forward, drawing her arm back, making sure her thumb was on the outside of her fist, she did
as asked. Her fist met the material, and for a moment it managed to resist the force. She was almost surprised—

Then it very much didn’t. The back of the sandbag exploded at the same moment her fist sunk through the material
with a loud tear, a wave of black sand bursting from it, most of it carrying itself to the wall and embedding itself
inside, leaving gouges on the ground as it went.

Tugging her arm a few times, Addy retrieved her limb without much trouble. The bag, however, tore almost the
second after, and what little black sand was left went with it, the bottom half of the bag falling to the floor with a
heavy thump.

“No loss to strength,” the voice murmured on the other end of the line. There was a chorus of agreements, some
sounding more relieved than others. “Could you go to the next bag?”

Addy did, giving it a glance. Identical to the last, though unlike the first, its chain was some sort of black metal, as
were all other chains but the first, now that she gave it a closer look.

“I am going to ask some questions, and then, once we’re done, we’ll have you hit the bag.” The voice said easily, not
even stopping to let her ask questions. “For starters, how do you feel anger?”

“I don’t.” Or at least, she had yet to sincerely feel much of it. She wasn’t particularly eager to do so, either. She had
felt frustration, irritation, annoyance, all of the things that Taylor’s own emotions had, but true anger, the type she
had felt passing through Taylor’s memories—not so much.

There was some muffled muttering over the line. Addy could even make out Susan’s voice.

“Alright, in that case, how did Taylor’s anger feel?”

...That was a more pertinent question, wasn’t it. She gave it a thought, accessed her own data banks, even briefly
retread over some of the few times Taylor had been truly, purely angry. The locker, Dinah, Jack. There were more
even further back, but they were all tainted by the qualities that informed adolescence. None had been so bright as
those.

“Her anger is intense,” Addy explained, plucking at her suit again. “Very loud, overwhelming. Predisposed towards an
inability to properly moderate it from her father and from never having her anger issues addressed. But it’s gone
quickly, it would flare, but it would burn itself out not too long after. It exhausted her.”

“Good—”

“There’s more,” Addy interrupted, tugging particularly hard on her suit. The line went quiet. “Sometimes, it would be
the inverse. There was one man she hated, and her anger for him was... quiet. Resentment, a lot of it, that built up,
didn’t burn her out, but was always on her mind. She fixated on it, and it was cold. It was the type of anger that let
her plan, that didn’t make her lash out. It made her wait until she could hurt him the most, in the worst way, and do
so without hesitation or recklessness.”

Despite not doing so herself, Jack’s death had been a culmination of that.

There was more murmuring on the line, before, finally, another request came for her to hit the bag.

She did, and it didn’t explode. Instead, her arm went right through it, up to her shoulder, and a spray of green metal
grains came with it, spraying across the ground, glinting with sparks. It reacted with iron, then. Very risky, had her
body been able to set it off she could’ve just detonated a bomb by hitting something hard enough.

“Next sandbag, please.”

Addy arrived at the control center just in time to see Maxwell Lord faceplant onto the ground, hands cuffed behind
his back, due to a sharp shove by Alex. Behind her, there were several agents, two breaking off as they handled a box
made out of lead the size of a computer tower off towards an archway with ‘hazardous materials’ written across an
LED screen just above it.

“Kryptonite, Max?” Alex snarled, hands tightening into fists at her side.

Maxwell groaned, rolling to the side, his right nostril bleeding. “I came,” he gargled, pausing for a moment to wheeze
and collect himself. “I came here willingly, I have rights, Alexandr—”

Her boot caught him in the stomach, drawing a sharp gasp of pain out of the man. Hank was at Alex’s side barely
seconds later, hand collecting around her bicep and pulling her away before she could line up another blow.

“Enough,” Hank rumbled, voice low. “Agent Danvers, step away from the man. Mr. Lord, get. Up.”

Alex stiffened, but complied, easing away a few steps, her breath coming heavy and laboured.

Maxwell, meanwhile, worked to ease himself to his feet with his hands bound behind his back, blood leaking in
steady drips down his chin, landing on the floor. “I was just trying to protect the world,” he said, finally, the words grit
out. “I have that right.”

“No, what you did was make something that has likely turned Supergirl into an amoral sociopath with delusions of
grandeur!” Alex yelled back, though Hank’s hand kept her in place, despite what was clearly an aborted attempt to
ram her foot into his face.

Finally back on his feet, if teetering a bit, possibly due to a concussion, if Addy had to guess, Maxwell glared. “How
should I have known kryptonite was explosive? It’s alien material, our only safeguard!”

“If we can’t fix this, Mr. Lord, and what you described as the effects of your red-coloured kryptonite are accurate, you
may have just made the biggest threat to our world twice over,” Hank said, his voice furious but so, so very still. His
range was effectively monotone, but she could still feel it. “You might have just made it so that the only way to stop
a Kryptonian is to have Superman, who I should remind you has done nothing but good for us, kill one of his own
family. Do you wonder what they might do to him?”

Alex made a noise, a choked-off sob.

The colour began to bleed out of Maxwell’s face as the words started to settle in.

“Addy what—”

Everyone’s head snapped around to her as she passed around the corner she had been hiding in. Susan tried to grab
hold of her but she just kept moving, the other woman’s boots squeaking in protest as they caught and slipped
across the floor.

Maybe he saw something in her expression. Addy wasn’t really sure what she was feeling, what she was showing, it
all felt... blank. Kara could need to be killed in the eyes of these people, Kara might need to be killed—

“I can make an antidote!” Maxwell yelled, sounding haphazard. “I can! I know where I went wrong in synthesizing it—”

“Addy?” Hank said. It didn’t sound like a question. “Don’t do anything rash.”

Addy came to a stop right next to Maxwell. He looked at her, looked up at her. He was shorter than her, smaller.
Weaker. Addy breathed in, then out. Like Taylor did to calm herself.

So that was what anger felt like. She would have to inform them later. She felt... still. Calm. But she kept getting
impulses to reach out and squeeze, just to see when he’d start to scream. Paradoxical, but then that had become a
trend lately.

Another breath. In, out. The feeling of pressure on her brain receded, her eyes catching on motes of something that
were only visible when her eyes caught the light. Red, little red particulate, back in force. They hadn’t left, just gone
dormant.

It wasn’t important.

“I can find out if he’s telling the truth,” Addy said simply.

Hank and Alex shared a look, though something about the way Alex tilted her chin up stubbornly made Addy think
she was on her team, not Hank’s.

The air grew tense. Quiet. People watched, curious.

“Don’t kill him or otherwise subjugate him,” Hank said, finally. “Remember what I said, Addy.”

Maxwell’s head jerked around. “What—”

But she was already.

Reaching.​
In.​

Max begged them to listen. Nobody would listen to him, the biological experiments needed to be perfect, they were too
confident in their own equipment. His parents, his family—they were putting them at risk for what? Grant money?
Credibility? The suits were bad. They weren’t meant for the tasks, the filtering system was going to fail he had to—

No. Too early.

The girl’s body was emaciated. Thin. Like it always was—

Taylor?

—but not unresponsive. The gene editing was doing something, if not enough. Every once and a while she would jerk,
legs pinching up, and scream. A loud, guttural, instinctive sort of noise. The type that’s not intentional, the type of noise
you could make without knowing it until you realized it was you screaming.

Right now she was seizing, spasms and screams, sharp twists to her body as the therapy did its work on her body. Her
arms were riddled with test wounds to see if she had gained the regeneration factor, little places where they’d inserted
needles of progressively larger thicknesses.

She was healing quicker—

No.

Lex had stopped being his friend after a certain point. Maxwell wasn’t sure when, maybe it was when he started
noticing Lex’s fixation on Superman, how it had started to consume him. Maybe it was when he’d found out through a
whistleblower that Lex had polluted half a mile of Kentucky wetlands with radioactive dumping from his continued
attempts to resynthesize kryptonite.

Maybe they’d never really been friends. Lex didn’t do friends, not like normal people. There was something broken in
him, Maxwell had tried to stop it, they went to the same boarding school for a time, but Lilian’s claws had long since
sunken into him, kept him in place as his family’s predisposition towards certain behavioural trends did the rest.

But at the very least, he could say with confidence that he wasn’t exactly unhappy with him. The formula for kryptonite
was almost priceless, anyone, any government, any organization, would want it. Even if they weren’t politically aligned
against Superman, it was always good to have a trump card. Lex had just given it to him back a few months before his
decision to detonate a bomb that killed over 30 people and heavily wounded Superman.

Sighing, Maxwell took another sip of his liquor, watching the steady crystallization process. Hopefully, Supergirl hadn’t
been lying about being a Kryptonian, the last thing he needed on his mind was another species of vastly powerful aliens,
just this time without an Achille's heel.

Honestly, the only thing he was worried about was the little red motes in the slowly-growing crystals. That hadn’t been
mentioned in the recipe, though the recipe itself was too vague to really have exact directions. It was more of a list of
chemicals, temperature ranges and... and...

Was it smoking?

What the fuck—

Addy let Maxwell’s mind go, pulled her arm back, and—

Hank grabbed onto it, stopping her with a heavy grunt. Her breath was ragged, she didn’t like it, she didn’t like him, he
did things to Taylor, he kept hurting her, she couldn’t get the image out of her head she wanted to make him stop
hurting people she liked—

“So he’s lying,” Alex said from somewhere to her right as she struggled against Hank, his grip holding firm. He was
strong, she was too, she would—

Wait. She blinked, staggered. Hank’s grip started to soften. “He wasn’t lying,” she said, perfectly flat. He was
necessary, then, important enough. She couldn’t get too absorbed, he was needed. “He knows how to make an
antidote. He was just hurting Taylor.”

She would just have to wait until he had, then she could hurt him.

The silence was uneasy. She felt whatever had been building in her chest, in her head, begin to abate. Maxwell just
stared at her with terrified, glassy eyes, still disoriented from the effects of her shuffling his mind around. Good.

“Agent Danvers,” Hank said, at last, finally releasing her arm but not removing himself from her side. Ready to stop
her if she hurt him. “Take Administrator and go to Kara’s apartment, see if you can’t get an idea where she might’ve
gone after what happened at CatCo.”

“But—” Alex started.

“Now,” Hank barked, voice steel.

Alex opened her mouth, shut it, opened it again. Shut it.

“Fine. Administrator, with me.”

Addy spared one last look at Maxwell, reigned in the urge to do things to him, and turned to follow Alex.

Alex did not speak to her.

She did not speak to Alex.

There was a balance there.

The elevator doors pulled open, revealing the gloomy stretch of hallway leading towards the apartment. Alex
glanced her way, a slight tilt of her head, before stepping out, Addy following shortly behind her.

The drive over had been quiet, but not tense. Alex hadn’t spared looks at her, hadn’t felt the need to, they were on a
similar wavelength.

Prowling down the hallway, Addy kept her eyes peeled. It was gloomy, the windows letting little-to-no light in, the
ceiling lights, normally on, were off. Unusual.

She caught sight of the door, cracked open. It wasn’t thrown off its hinges, but it was still open. Inviting. Waiting for
them. Alex went instantly to her gun, sliding it free of the holster it was in, bringing it up as they got steadily closer to
the door.

Her body was paradoxically still, at ease. She didn’t feel the need to twitch, to brush her fingers over things, to feel
textures. She was tranquil, and it was almost a relief. The motes were bright whenever a glimmer of light caught her
eye, a startling red, and they had yet to settle back down as they had before, but she could almost appreciate them
for it. If they were the source of her unusual calm, she would consider ingesting them for later purposes, so long as
she could overcome the negative side-effects.

Arriving at the door, Alex pulled one hand free from her gun, easing the door open.

In the living room, sitting on the living room coffee table, was Kara. She was wearing a different suit, like the one she
had seen on Astra In-Ze’s body: full-black, with the small insignia of House El printed just above her heart.

She smiled at the two of them. It was hostile.

“Hello sister,” she said, voice thick with disdain. Alex lowered her gun down, pointing it towards the floor. Addy
stepped out from behind her, crossed the threshold of the doorway. Kara’s eyes flicked to her, narrowed. “Addy.”

She was numb. She was numb. She was numb.

Rising from her seat, Kara spread her arms out, hands left bare, a lazy smile on her face. “Look, I picked out my own
outfit without any fashion advice from either of you.” She took a single step forward, and Alex took one away, nearly
bumping her shoulder into Addy’s. “All those years you pushed those dowdy sweaters and skirts on me! And Rao,
Addy, you would have me look like a two-piece clown if I listened to a single word you said.”

It would look better than the black, Addy didn’t say. Because she was numb. She was tranquil. She was calm.

“Trying to cloak my beauty,” Kara cooed, taking another step forward. “So I didn’t outshine yours.”

“Kara,” Alex tried, voice faint, almost hesitant. “I didn’—”

Kara’s eyes lit up red, but didn’t fire.

Alex’s eyes widened, fear sliding into her. She breathed in, hands trembling, but with gun still pointed towards the
ground. “This isn’t you,” she replied.

Kara laughed. It wasn’t one of her nice ones, the chortles and snorty giggles she was infected with whenever
something amused her. It was cruel, cold, almost a cackle. “I am more me than I’ve ever been!” She shouted, arms
outraised again, a wide, wide smile, all teeth, crawling across her face.

“Kara, you’ve been exposed to red kryptonite—it’s altered your brain!” Alex yelled back, voice frustrated, desperate.
“You’re not seeing clearly!”

Kara froze, body going perfectly, perfectly still. Her head turned around, red eyes going faint, dimming until Addy
could finally see the blue in them.

Alex’s posture relaxed—

Kara swung one arm out, and the sound of shattering metal and bone was eclipsed by a howl of pain as Kara
backhanded her sister’s arm. Fragments of the gun hit the ground in a chorus of clatters and Alex staggered back,
slamming into the wall, her lower arm bent oddly, out of place, unmovable.

“I see clearly!” Kara shouted, voice loud enough to make a vase rattle. “I see both of you so clearly! Alex, you didn’t
want me to be Supergirl. So jealous of me, of the things I could do that you couldn’t!”

Alex let out a choked sob, fingers tightening around her ruined arm.

“I can fly,” Kara breathed. “I can catch bullets with my bare hands, I was learning the advanced sciences of this
godless backwater when I was in diapers, and that makes you. Feel. Worthless.”

“Kara—” Alex tried, but the word devolved into a pained noise.

Then, Kara wheeled on her. “And you, Addy Queen.” She breathed, stepping away from her sister. Addy could take
this, Addy was numb, Addy was not fragile like Alex, Addy could endure—

“Did you think I ever wanted you?”

She was numb. She was calm.

“Did you think I wanted some fucking weirdo passed off onto me like a stray puppy?”

Calm. Tranquil. At peace. Kara was sick. Kara was sick. It was not true, she was wanted. She was not alone, she
wasn’t—

“But no, they still gave you to me, and I tried. I dealt with your weirdness, I dealt with you getting attention. I coped,
like this fucking world has made me cope so often. I coped housing a planet-destroying alien in my midst, as a
person whose planet was destroyed. But then, you know what you did Addy?”

“Kara,” Alex tried again, voice a rasp. “Kara, stop—”

“You ate someone’s mind,” Kara breathed, and she was so close now. Addy hadn’t noticed, they were nearly touching,
she could smell Kara’s toothpaste, minty and biting. “You proved yourself to be a monster that you are, that I need to
collar and leash. You went against everything my people stood for, every last bit of DNA in your half-breed body.
You’re as worthless as a Daxamite prince, and god knows how many bed slaves he goes through.”

She was calm, she was calm, she had to be calm to save Kara and had to remain okay she was nothing she was still
she was—

Kara stepped away with a breath, eyes bright, mouth wide in a grin. “But you know what? They worship me, National
City, and I am finally free from both of you. From jealousy, from monstrous freaks, and I am going to soar.”

She turned. She was going to leave, she could not let that happen.

Addy reached out, grabbed Kara’s arm.

“Addy,” Kara said, voice suddenly flat. Empty of the joy she had been exuding. “Let go of me.”

“No.”

The world lurched, a sudden whirl of force. Glass broke against her skin in the few milliseconds of take-off, her body
slammed into the neighbouring apartment, jarred into a wild spin. The world was a blur around her, she felt her body
hit concrete next, chunks of it pulling up in waves as she cratered across it, the sound of screaming loud in her ears
as, finally, her body broke free of the ground, twisting into a wild spin again, and slammed into a car.

Its alarm wailed, loud and bright and grating on her ears.

Addy let her vision refocus, saw the damage. The street had been gouged down the center by her body, and Kara’s
building, her window, a portion of that wall—it was just gone. The building next to it had a chunk torn out of it where
she’d slammed into it, and bystanders were whispering, pointing to her, to Supergirl, who now floated towards her.

Lurching forward, the metal encasing her finally gave way, the car rocking back onto four wheels when she did. She
hit the ruined pavement knee-first, hand coming out to catch herself. She was dizzy, she hated dizziness, another
biological failure that she would have to rectify, but she was not damaged. Not enough, anyway. Winded, yes,
damaged, no. Sore, at most.

She climbed to her feet just in time for Kara to land on the ground in front of her. Flicking her eyes up to the side, she
caught sight of Alex in the window, using her unbroken hand to clutch a phone.

Good. The antidote would come. All she had to do was stop Kara.

Kara breathed out, a sigh. “You know, I’m actually going to enjoy this,” she said, beginning to walk towards her,
steady struts of her leg.

Addy tilted her head. “Why?”

Kara’s fist blurred and took her in the nose with enough force to smart, slamming her back into the car. The world
spun again.

“Because you have a really punchable personality.”

Forcing her eyes to focus on Kara, she reached out to her power. She couldn’t play with this, couldn’t do anything but
her most. She didn’t even drain her body, she let her core take the load, felt the spread of awareness as it
recalibrated to Kryptonian wavelengths.

Kara reached out, her fingers tangling in the fabric of her bodysuit. Touching her, pulling her free from the car with no
gentleness.

A point of contact. Addy took it. Slammed her power in, forced it deep into Kara, overwhelmed the static. She bled
into Kara, and red bled into her, her entire vision tinting with it, but she didn’t care. She would be enough. She twisted,
drew on her capacity as a shard, and dragged to the surface the worst event of Kara’s life.

A planet exploded behind her eyes.

Kara’s face crumpled in grief, in hate. Her fingers slackened, and Addy did not hesitate. Kara was durable, and so she
did not need to hold back. She drove her knee into Kara’s stomach with all the force she could leverage, sent her
hurtling back some distance into the air, a dizzy tailspin that Kara was quick to correct with her flight.

The deluge of red draining into her cut out when the contact lapsed. The edges of her vision were dark crimson,
flickering dully, catching on the light.

She mentally brought up her tasklist, felt herself hesitate a nanosecond. It hadn’t been used in years, which was odd.
It was a function of her being, something she was capable of doing. It was the ordered list to which shards operated
under, set goals, parameters, and she had ignored it.

Inefficient. Stupid.

She set the primary task to fixing Kara, secondary to conserving some energy, tertiary to limb replacement. She
would endure.

“HOW DARE YOU?!” Kara howled, anguish and hate and all the things she knew how to twist in her voice. Her eyes
were red, so was her face, run through by veins of red, branching out wildly. Red kryptonite, they had called it. Fitting.
“YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO SEE OR MAKE ME EXPERIENCE THAT. I AM ABOVE YOU, I WILL END YOU!”

She did not like emotions, but she knew how to process them. How to twist them. She just smiled, empty and hollow
and all the things she felt like, running sub-tasks in the back of her head, seeing possible ways to approach things.
Brainstorming, she called it, a riff on The Eye’s shard. It wasn’t copying the actual function, but it was delineating
necessary tasks into a list and utilizing her vast processing capacity to run through possible ways to achieve them.
Not precognitive, no, but good for what it was needed.

She did not care that it was power intensive. Kara was the primary task. All else was secondary.

Kara blurred forward at last, rocketing towards her. Addy let her body pull into a float and met her, twisting around as
Kara’s adequate strength drove them both down. Kara hit the ground instead of her, her eyes widening, confused.
Stupid. With contact re-engaged, she pushed her power in again, drew on her natural capacity, and started dragging
memories to the surface. Things that would incapacitate her.

Trauma. Wounds. Things her kind was known for.

Red spilled into her, but with it came memories. Krypton’s destruction, the steady lurch of her pod, the not-sleep she
experienced in the Phantom Zone, awaking for minutes at a time as the pod gathered more energy to put her back
into stasis. Confusion. Dark. Claustrophobia. Astra’s death, finding out Alex killed her, Jeremiah going missing. Alura
Zor-El’s face, Zor-El’s face, lost boyfriends, not fitting in—

A fist tangled in her hair, and then her head hit concrete. Then again. And again.

Again.

Again.

It hurt. It hurt, it hurt.

“STOP IT!” Kara screamed in her ear, loud. They were still touching. Red was still flooding into her, she did not care.
She updated her tasklist, adjusted. It would be enough. Her head hit the concrete again, again, again. She felt blood
begin to gather, skin splitting. Her brain lurched, focus wavered.

She considered switching back to her coreself.

Abandoned it.

Pointless.

Her head went up again, but didn’t fall. It hurt, she couldn’t see through the haze of red in her eyes, the constant
flood of Kara’s worst nightmares. People abandoning her, claustrophobia, dead family members. Her fault, it was her
fault. Everything. She soaked it in, revelled in it. Was the red the blood, or the red energy? Did it matter?

Kara’s fingers swiped over her face. She could see again. It had been blood.

She would note it.

Slowly, her head was angled around. It was an odd angle, one that would probably be dangerous for anyone without
super durability. Kara stared down at her, face a rictus of rage, tears pooling at her eyes. Hateful. Afraid. Disgusted.

Like Taylor.

Administrator did not mind.

“I’m going to kill you,” Kara said, voice unevenly calm. Her eyes began to glow.

Something... was bothering her. There was a dull flicker in her chest, beneath the red, the constant rush of
memories, of thoughts, emotions. Things she was forcing Kara to experience, things she was forcing herself to
experience.

What was it?

She checked Taylor’s memories, a brief aside. They felt familiar on her skin, not piloting the body, watching Taylor
exist in her world. Her universe. Homesickness, she guessed, but it was beneath her now. She was processing it.

Ah. But that didn’t make sense.

Kara’s eyes glowed, growing in intensity.

It was fear.

She was afraid.

Of death? She would not die. She would return to her coreself again. Not death, she was unable to die.

But this was death, wasn’t it?

“For every memory you made me experience, every last horror,” Kara whispered. “I am going to spend a minute
carving my legacy into your body.”

She was going to be alone again.

She didn’t want to be. Couldn’t be. Would not be. She couldn’t.

She forced the memories to be louder, and for a moment Kara wavered. They experienced, simultaneously, the sight
of Krypton exploding again, in perfect detail. She could feel the younger Kara’s breath, feel as it wheezed, grew
tighter as Kal-El’s pod escaped further and hers lurched away. Felt the shockwaves, the horror.

The glow grew brighter. Small suns where Kara’s eyes should’ve been, bright red.

She was going to die.

She was going to be alone.

She would be empty again.

The world lurched, a green blur tackling Kara off. Hank, she could feel his psychic presence, his wavelength. The
bandwidth. He reeled back with Kara’s arm in hand and threw, hurling Kara directly into a building that shattered on
impact, a loud crash of falling materials and errant glass.

Administrator stumbled to her feet, reached up to wipe the blood from her face.

Hank. He would be helpful. Even as Kara pried herself free of the building with a feral scream, she could feel his
bandwidth. Exploit it. Resources, free for the taking, free to incapacitate.

Without his permission she reached out and watched him stumble. He glanced back at her and whatever he saw,
she could feel his horror through the psychic link she was forcing onto him. “Addy—” he tried, but she simply ignored
him. Tuned him out. His psychic power was vast, immense, natural. Different in quality to hers, but usable. It was
very... alive, a living thing, a limb moreso than a consciousness.

She speared her own into it and twisted. Shaped it to her will. Hank screamed.

She ignored him.

Kara landed on the ground in front of them on her knees, breathing heavily. She gathered her signal, adjusted Hank’s,
made him into an amplifier. He would do good, for that, and it would be enough.

Aiming it forward, she directed her power into Hank, then out through his own psychic bandwidth. Amplified. More
psychic power than she had ever actively utilized outside of her time as a piece of the greater whole.

It felt amazing.

Kara crumpled with a scream as she drowned her in it. Every bad thing, a waking nightmare, horrors-upon-horrors-
upon—

“Alex!” Hank hollered.

Administrator adjusted her attention. Alex was there, staring at the three of them. An object was in her hand. The
antidote, a gun.

“Now!”

A red beam fired, slammed into Kara on the ground. The red cracks receded, peeled away from her body, let off as
some sort of mist. Kara looked between them, her face going from a rictus of rage to horror and hurt. Had
Administrator turned on her capacity to bud, she might’ve even given her a power for it. It was an adequate
emotional response—

“Get Addy too! She’s compromised!” Hank said.

Addy restricted his ability to speak. To move. Simple.

She reached out with her power as Alex turned on her. She would stop it. She would fix everything, she would—

The beam of red light hit her in the chest. Her power snapped back into herself, releasing Hank, releasing Kara.

Kara.

She had hurt Kara.

Addy staggered, blinked. Something like horror settled into her. She was wrong, she was wrong, her head was
clearing and she didn’t want it to and—and...

She coughed, red licked her chin. Blood. Oh. Dripping, uncomfortable. The texture was bad. She coughed again, and
blood made it down to her chest. She knew what it was.

It... hurt. That was what it was. Her entire body hurt. Every beat of her heart hurt. Her brain hurt. She could feel the
energy moving through her body. Hurting. Interfering. Damaging.

Pain. So much pain. It hurt. Hurt. Hurt. Hurt. Hurt more than the serum. Hurt more than anything.

She didn’t want it to hurt. It was too much, she didn’t want to die. She wanted Taylor, she wanted her, her presence.
She wanted Kara.

She wanted. Wanted.

...Wanted. Home. Kara. Taylor.

The world skewed, went slantwise.

Addy felt herself fall, darkness leaping up to greet her.

Last edited: Sep 15, 2020
 638

OxfordOctopus Sep 15, 2020 View discussion

Threadmarks: SEASON 1 - EPISODE 14 View content

OxfordOctopus She/Her
(Unverified Jackanape)

Sep 16, 2020  #935

EPISODE 14​
There were no clouds, no moon, no sun.

Only the meadow, vast and unending, sprawling green waves that rose and crested without end, under an indigo sky so
painfully blue it had circled back around to purple.

Flowers surrounded her, a million different colours, each one glimmering like a gemstone.

Warm arms encircled her, a comforting weight. They were familiar arms, she knew the digits so well—she was the one
to usually use them, after all.

She blinked. Once, twice. Looked up at the sky.

There were no clouds, no moon, no sun.

No winds blew, no stars shone. The sun did not rise, nor did it fall.

“Hey,” Taylor said, voice gentle. Taylor was larger, somehow, capable of resting her chin on her head despite the fact
that they should be of identical heights.

The arms tightened, the hug growing stronger. Desperate. Like she was clinging to something that was going to leave
her, something she cherished.

Something she wasn’t.

She craned her head back, the angle unrealistic, impossible for the contortions of any normal body.

Not-Taylor’s head was faceless, featureless in all ways; a flat plane. Their eyes met.

There were no clouds, no moon, no sun.

No winds blew, no stars shone. The sun did not rise, nor did it fall.

No Taylor.

“You’re not real,” she said, finally. She didn’t feel curious, didn’t want to know, but had to say it.

Not-Taylor inclined her head. “I am not.”

“This is just me,” she continued, the absence of texture - of touch, of where the lump in her throat should be - so grating
against her senses.

“It is,” Not-Taylor confirmed.

There were no clouds, no moon, no sun.

No winds blew, no stars shone. The sun did not rise, nor did it fall.

She was alone.

Addy reached out, cupped Not-Taylor’s face with hands made of crystal. Tried to imagine what it might feel like, had it
been real.

“I miss you.”

Operation returned to her slowly, steadily improving. Awareness was accompanied by pain, a low simmering ache on
every part of her body, strong enough to be a problem, yet weak enough to ignore. Her body felt, paradoxically,
sluggish, limp, with no tension, and yet at the same time too stiff.

Yellow light pressed against her closed eyelids, the feeling of it warm, comforting, a contrast to the cool, hard
surface beneath her. She didn’t want to wake, wanted to return to the meadow, to something that was already
slipping, fading from thought. Another gap, widening in a large array of them in her consciousness, fragmentary
memories she had to process. She wanted to sleep, wanted to rest, her body did not fire neural signals for no reason
—pain, fatigue, sluggishness. All signs that she should be sleeping, resting. Healing. She knew humans healed that
way.

But she couldn’t.

Something was... important. Necessary. A task unfinished. She reached out to her coreself, the gray-matter
transmitter in her body twinging in protest, chafed. Burned. Too much energy usage, what had she—why did she
have the tasklist operational? It was a waste of power, she didn’t need to have it anymore. Humans could order
themselves, some better than others, her brain should be capable of doing it on its own. Had she taken damage?
Was it why she was disoriented, the lapses in memory? It would make sense. Maybe Kara would know.

Kara.

Why—

Addy’s eyes snapped open, yellow light breaking through, blinding her for a moment. Yellow lights, fitted into a
crystalline fixture, as bright as the sun, beamed down at her. So different from the red, the red she could no longer
see or feel, but knew. The memories came now, flooded in, she scrambled, arm slipping off the smooth surface, her
body going with it. No solar energy, why was her body empty of solar energy, she needed to find Kara—

Arms caught her before she could hit the crystal floor. Warm, broad, muscular, welcoming arms. They weren’t the
ones she wanted, she didn’t want to be touched, her skin crawled, her nerves fired. She cracked her head up, around,
trying to find who was holding her, to tell them to stop. She needed to find Kara, she needed to find—

Kara’s eyes, set into a man’s face, stared back at her. They were the same blue, the same shape, ever-so-slightly
unique. The man himself had his hair slicked back, vaguely tousled, thick and black, so different from Kara, yet
similar. She could see Kara in his nose, his cheekbones, the shape of his jaw, the way his brows were crinkling in
concern.

“Hey, hey, Addy. Shh,” the man murmured, and it occurred to her that she was making noises. Pained ones, low
whines, the ache in her body rising to a fever-pitch with her inopportune actions, pushing out through her mouth
without her consent. The man eased her back up onto the platform, back beneath the focus of the light, and the pain
faded back to a dull buzz. “It’s okay, you’re safe. You’re up a bit earlier than expected, but you’re safe, okay?”

She didn’t care about that. She needed to know, needed to find out—

“Kara?” It came out as a croak, throat too dry. She wet her lips, or tried. Her body wasn’t very operational, her tongue
was almost dry, the inside of her mouth felt rough, uncomfortable. It was bad, bad-bad-bad-bad. She needed to fix it.
Needed it to stop.

“She’s safe too,” the man said, voice lowered into an identical pitch that Kara used on her sometimes. Soothing,
calming.

Addy felt her eyelids flutter. They were heavy. She couldn’t sleep, had to keep them open. “Kara,” she said again, this
time with more effect, less garbled.

“She’s a bit busy right now,” the man said, a bit chagrined. “But she’s been staying here since she brought you in.”

Her eyes peeled open, the weight overcome. Addy breathed in, then out, scuffed her palm against the crystal surface
beneath her, just to feel something, to distract from the draw of unconsciousness. It was smooth, cold, but
resonated beneath her palm, humming soothingly. “How long?”

The man’s face twisted a bit. “Two days, Addy. Kara contacted me, the D.E.O.’s been compromised—J’onn’s status as
an alien was revealed, and he turned himself in. They wanted to find you too, but Alexandra scrubbed you from the
database before they took her in for questioning.”

Addy blinked sluggishly, fought against the heavy tug of her eyelids. Alexandria, who was Alexandria, she... oh. Alex.
Alex was Alexandria because Alex wanted to be called Alex. “Alex,” she garbled out, head tilting back and tapping
against the crystal surface.

“She’s safe too,” the man explained. “They didn’t have anyone who knew her well enough to get a read on her, she’s
not under any scrutiny.”

Addy shook her head. Or tried. The motion made something in her neck spike with pain and grow stiff. “Alex,” she
enunciated, tongue thick in her mouth.

“...She wants to be called Alex,” the man mumbled offhandedly. “Right. Sorry, Alex is okay. So is Kara. I’m really just
here because Kara had to go and spring J’onn with a friend of hers from Cadmus. She’ll be back later, er.”

There was a pause, Addy’s gaze slipping from the man every few seconds, forcing her to refocus. Her eyelids felt
heavier, the silence lulled her. She wanted to sleep, but couldn’t.

“I completely forgot to introduce myself,” the man muttered again, reaching up to scratch at some of his stubble. He
stepped away a bit more, giving Addy line of sight to his suit. It was like Kara’s, just full-body and without any
impractical skirt. The House of El crest sat in the center of his broad chest, and a red cape fluttered gently behind
him, attached by clasps on his nape. “Sorry about that, uh. I’m Superman, or Clark Kent. I was named Kal-El when I
was born, though I prefer Clark, if that’s okay?”

Addy blinked again. Kal-El, Superman. Kara’s cousin. Oh. “Cadmus?” She echoed, still processing.

“The reason why I don’t work with the government,” Clark said darkly. “They’re a military research lab, run and funded
by xenophobic bigots. Their main contribution to society is gutting aliens and finding out how they work, how to
replicate it, and how to kill them. They’re bad news, nothing that goes in there tends to come out alive.”

This was Kara’s cousin. She could see the similarities now, even beyond the superficial physical ones. They were
alike, despite not growing up together. She wanted to know more, wanted to talk to him, wanted to keep awake and
see what he was like, how he might differ from Kara. The words didn’t come, despite attempts to pronounce them.

Clark went silent for a few moments again, face furrowing. “Sorry,” he said at last, sounding defeated. “It’s been a...
stressful couple of days, for me and Kara both. I uh, shouldn’t be telling you stuff like that, not until you’re better.
You’re still recovering from the antidote. Speaking of, do you feel up to hearing about why you’re in the state that you
are?”

Addy ran her dry tongue over dry lips, swallowed against the stiffness in her throat. “I am.” She had to be, she had to
remain awake.

“Maxwell Lord is not as practiced at gene editing as he might like to believe,” Clark began, voice slipping into
something solemn. “He did manage it, you are partially Kryptonian, but the equilibrium between the Human and
Kryptonian DNA is fragile. From what Kalex has been able to explain to me, your Kryptonian DNA was doing most of
the work to keep you alive—your blood, your organs, they’re all Kryptonian. What’s left of your human DNA is
mangled and fragile, slowly losing pieces of itself which are then replaced by Kryptonian ones. It’s a slow process,
but you’re becoming more Kryptonian over time, Kalex estimated that you’ll stop ageing in about thirty years, and
you’re ageing slowly as it is.

“More dangerously, though, is your current state. Kryptonite binds itself to Kryptonian cells, interfering with the solar
energy there. Red kryptonite, due to its altered composition, only affects the brain, the firing of neurons—things like
that, but it’s prevalent throughout your body. The antidote was used to effectively purge that influence and release it
as a harmless mist out through the pores of the skin. For Kara, this is fine, because Kara is completely Kryptonian,
but you?”

Clark’s face fell. He reached up, smoothing his palm over the stubble.

“You were channelling a lot of power from, er, Kara referred to it as ‘the other you’. Your body was soaked with
energy, and when the antidote hit you, unlike Kara, whose body could endure the process of violently stripping the
contamination away, yours... couldn’t. Not only did it purge the contamination, but it also purged all of the solar
energy you had in the process, and it was just too much for your body. The process was incredibly destructive to
every part of your body, there’ve been more than a few close calls, Kara was worried you wouldn’t make it.”

Her coreself sent back the ping, information roaring in her brain. 593 years burned away in an instant. Half a
millennium lost. All to save Kara.

She should have felt worse about it, but she didn’t. She saved Kara with it, she saved Kara with it. Kara was okay, she
was okay, she was fine. Even if it hurt, even if her body couldn’t move, even if she was just so, so tired, she had done
it. She finally saved someone important, didn’t have to watch someone else kill her because she was a threat.

Kara was okay.

Addy felt her head loll back, eyelids buckling under the weight, shutting.

“You should get some sleep,” Clark’s voice was distant, faraway, but correct. She needed to get some sleep, it would
help her heal, she was fine. Kara was fine. She could sleep, everything was safe. She could prioritize tasks later, but
the stress on her chest, it was gone. Things were as fixed as they could be. The resistance was leaving her body, she
couldn’t even imagine opening her eyes anymore.

“Sleep well, Addy.”

“Addy?”

She didn’t want to wake. She still felt sluggish, slow, heavy. But not in a bad way, it felt almost like she had her
blanket back, the steady weight on her shoulders, but the feeling of crystal beneath her palm told her otherwise.

“Addy, honey.”

She let her eyes crack open, the sunlamps dimmed above her. The Fortress of Solitude came into slow focus around
her, first the crystal platform, next to the walls, the little pieces of crystal sticking out from odd angles. She reached
out to it, listened for the resonation, felt the heartbeat of something so much like her, so familiar. She wanted to
wrap herself in it, felt her eyes begin to tug close again.

Calm. Safe. Familiar.

“Addy.”

Kara.

Eyes pulling back open, Addy rolled her head to one side, this time without the twinge. Kara stared back at her from
the side of the platform, bruises beneath each eye, her hair a mess of tangles and snarls. She had her costume on,
and her hands were holding on to the end of the platform hard enough to make her knuckles whiten.

She didn’t look okay. She looked upset, like something was wrong. Pinging her coreself revealed her node to be
repaired, and the rapid-fire response told her nothing was terribly wrong with her or her body at this point in time. So
that wasn’t the problem. “S’okay?” Addy tried, jaw flexing in frustration when the words came out garbled. Proper
pronunciation was important.

Kara opened her mouth, clicked it shut. “No,” Kara said. “No, I'm trying, but, well. People hate me now.”

A dull flicker of something pulled at her chest, her lips turning down into a frown. Did people dislike Kara? That was
stupid, Kara was important. “I like you,” she said. Maybe that would soothe her, maybe it would help.

It didn’t.

Kara’s face fell, eyes glassy and wet. “I’m—” she sucked in a breath, wet and heavy. “I’m so sorry, Addy. What I did to
you—”

Was not her fault. This Kara was her Kara, not the other Kara who had hurt her. They were different. This Kara was
good, this Kara didn’t scare her, this Kara made her want to bury her nose in her costume and let her heartbeat
soothe her. This Kara made her want to explore, made her want to enjoy things, do more than just the bare
minimum.

She was important. “M’okay,” she slurred out, again. Had to work on that, had to get some moisture in her mouth to
fix the texture and her tongue. Bad.

“You nearly died,” Kara choked, bowing forward, her head coming into contact with Addy’s stomach. Sluggishly, she
even managed to pull her hand up and plop it onto Kara’s head, felt the strands of her blonde hair with the pads of
her fingers. “We—I had to put you into a stasis machine, Addy. If Kal-El hadn’t thought to get one, your own body
would’ve destroyed itself. The first day was spent selectively freezing and unfreezing you temporally to fix parts of
you.”

A choked breath, then a sniffle. Addy felt the tatters of her bodysuit grow briefly wet.

“I nearly lost someone again.”

She didn’t know what to think about that, how to feel. She wanted to know more about the stasis machine, because
she was fine. She was better, getting better, even if she felt like her entire body wanted to fall over still. She wasn’t
dying anymore, but she also knew that Kara probably wouldn’t want her to say that. It would be impolite.

“The things I said, too,” Kara choked out, painful little gasps accompanied by wet tears, soaking into her skin. “I hurt
you, Addy. I tried to kill you—I said so many mean things, things I, I can’t imagine ever saying or believing, but things I
felt. Those were part of me, Addy! I—I broke my sister’s arm, I broke you!”

Addy tried to copy the hushing sound Annette used to make at Taylor, stroking over Kara’s head with fingers that
weren’t quite being responsive to her demands. She didn’t know a lot about soothing, but Annette in Taylor’s
memories had always been good at it. It probably wasn’t perfect, but she didn’t really think Kara wanted perfection
right now. She wanted reassurance.

“I hurt you too,” Addy managed at last, the words coming out clearer than any of the ones before.

Kara breathed in. “You did what you had to.” She pulled away, though not so far that Addy’s hand couldn’t still tangle
its way into her hair. She liked that, liked touching Kara. Safe Kara, not the unsafe one. She was soft, silky, warm and
comforting. “I—I understand if you don’t want to live with me anymore. Even though we don’t have the D.E.O. as a
contact, I got into contact with Eliza, my foster mom. She’s willing to house you, so’s Winn, but Alex can’t, because
she’s still working for the D.E.O., keeping an eye on things.”

“Why would I do that?” It was a valid question. Did Kara not want her to stay? She could understand that, but Kara
wasn’t scaring her. Kara was safe again, and if she became unsafe, then she might feel threatened, but until now,
Kara was... Kara. Kara who smiles brightly and gives hugs and helps her figure out what to eat and compliments her
clothing even though she knows it’s weird.

It hurt for Kara to say those things before. It hurt to be hurt by Kara. But Kara wasn’t that anymore, she couldn’t
blame her for those actions.

Kara looked at her for a moment, one of those long, long looks she remembered from Taylor’s memories. Looks that
looked into you, made her feel somewhat vulnerable beneath it. “Addy,” Kara said at last, voice regaining its smooth,
gentle quality. “You don’t have to stay with me, you are your own person—”

She knew that! She could be more, she could do anything she wanted. She bent to Kara’s rules because she liked
Kara. She wanted to hug Kara, she wanted to be around Kara, she liked her taste in music, her clothes, the movies
she watched. “You’re important,” Addy tried to put stress on ‘important’, tried to get across the gravity of it. She had
to understand. “I want to remain with you.”

Kara’s face, somehow, managed to both grow lighter and seem more tired. She was always expressive, but Addy
wasn’t sure if she really liked this one. “Okay,” Kara breathed, shallow and low. “Okay, okay. You—don’t blame me? For
what I said, what I did?”

She kept talking in circles. “Do you blame me?”

Kara blinked. “Of course not, you were—”

“Then I don’t,” Addy announced, twisting her tone into the ‘and that’s final’ tone that Taylor so liked to use on
subordinate teammates.

Kara’s mouth clicked shut. For a moment, she just stared, before, with a breath, she relented. “Okay, you can keep
living with me. But—but we should talk. About what happened.”

Talk? Why did they need to talk? The problem had been handled.

Kara must’ve noticed as much on her face. “Addy, we said and did some hurtful things to one another—we, we need
to talk about that. Can you give me a chance? I’ve been, well, thinking about this a lot lately.”

She didn’t want to. She didn’t want Kara to find some other reason to get rid of her, she didn’t want to be alone. But.
Still. Kara was important, and Kara was probably right. She had to remember communication was key to things like
these, even if it negatively impacted her.

Nodding, Addy acquiesced.

“I—I grew up being told to hide myself,” Kara started, voice quiet. “My powers were a danger not just in literal terms,
but to my family if I was caught. So, when I became Supergirl, it was so, so freeing. My purpose, finally, something I
could do right. I failed with Kal-El, failed to give him the things he needed, failed to raise him to be Kryptonian, but
this? This I could do. I could shine a little bit of light, even if only so much, I could be a protector.”

Addy reached down, past Kara’s head, and plopped her hand onto hers. Kara paused for a moment, face curious,
before smiling shakily towards her, tucking one hand over Addy’s while the other remained beneath. A hand
sandwich. The feeling was enjoyable.

“So, when you came along I was... struck. Here was my second chance, you know? I projected hard, I wanted to raise
you where I couldn’t Kal-El. It didn’t last very long, I’ll admit, about as far as getting you into CatCo, really. You’re self-
sufficient, you’re not a child. You’re you.” Kara gave another squeeze of her hand, took in a steadying breath. “But
we’re not the same. You’re... Kryptonian, yes, but only tangentially. You are different to me, have different cultural
norms, understandings. I don’t agree with some, I won’t ever, but I didn’t take that into account. I only realized too
late when I was dealing with bitterness that, well, I felt... cheated. Again.

“You’re so smart, Addy. You’re so kind, too, you have such a bright, creative mind. Your fascination with waterfowl is
a bit bewildering, and your colour choices are bold, but you’re also your own person. From your own people. You
killed Indigo, you tried to enslave her for me, and that... hurt. I got upset, I couldn’t handle you, what you did, I tried to
process it but then that lab fire and the red kryptonite and...”

Kara faltered, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. She took a steadying breath in, then out, working her mouth
open and shut in loose circles. Addy wanted to reach up, to pat her face, but her hand was occupied, and her stump
was not long enough. A leg might work, but that’d be considered improper.

“It all came out. The things I was refusing to deal with, that you might have different views of morality to me,” Kara
continued, breathing slow. “I got so angry at you, so angry that you weren’t Kryptonian enough. That you weren’t a
good enough replacement. I fixated on how you were different, and I... hurt you. Badly. My words, my actions—only
after the haze was lifted and you were dying I realized I... hadn’t accepted you properly, as you.” Kara’s smile was
sad, brittle. “I had taken what I found acceptable, and turned what was close enough to that as your ‘eccentricities’.
Colours were important to you, are, but they’re significantly more important than I know, aren’t they?”

Sparing a glance at the ruined tatters of her costume, crusted red with blood and looking like she’d fed it through a
shredder. Glancing back up, she nodded slowly. Colours were important, more than Kara knew.

“I want to change my perspective, I won’t make you Kryptonian, I won’t try to teach you unless you ask for it, but
uhm,” she fidgeted, fingers twitching. Pulses of activity, touches, things Addy enjoyed. She wanted to push her face
into the hands, she wanted to be tactile, but she couldn’t. “I was going to ask, and you can refuse me, but uh. There’s
this thing, a ceremony, for adoption into a house. I had been putting it off because I was conflicted about... you,
about whether or not you were Kryptonian enough, but... well. I’ve realized, Addy, that there’s just three of us who
won’t try to murder me left. You can take as long as you want to think about it, but I was hoping I could formally
adopt you into the House of El. It’s silly, and just another cultural thing, and I know this is weird to tack onto a
conversation about me overcoming my inability to accept—”

Addy made a hushing noise.

Kara hushed.

She let herself process the information for a moment. It was a nice idea, warm, made her fuzzy, she wanted to
accept. Felt like she should, too, it was clearly important to Kara. If it was just a formality, just some sort of cultural
touchstone, she wouldn’t ramble about it. Kara only rambled about things she found interesting, important, or
otherwise had the last name of Grant. If this was nothing, it wouldn’t’ve been brought up.

“Do you want to?” Addy asked, simply.

Kara bowed her head in a nod. “I... realized I did. Addy you were dying on the flight over, your skin turned black, the
antidote had destroyed so much in you. It was awful. I realized that I’d always regret not at least doing that much
with you, that I’d hate myself for not taking the leap and bringing you into the fold more officially. It’s important to
me.”

“Then I’ll do it.”

Kara flushed. “You don’t have to—”

“I’ll do it.”

“Addy, maybe you can take some time—”

“I. Will. Do. It.”

Kara’s mouth clicked shut. She breathed in, then out. “Okay,” she said, voice a little shaky, almost trembling, but not
bad. Addy knew what bad trembling sounded like, and it wasn’t that. “Okay, that’s good. I promise I’ll try harder, I
want to be close to you, Addy. You’ve become part of my family in a surprisingly small amount of time. Maybe it’s
the genetics, maybe it’s just, you, but. Thank you.”

“We may have a problem,” Addy reminded, rather simply. Kara jolted, glancing up at her with panic in her eyes. “I do
not have my powers.”

Oddly, that made her relax. “Actually, you just solar flared.”

...No, she didn’t. “I am not a stellar body,” she reminded. She hoped Kara wouldn’t need regular reminders she wasn’t
one, but if that’s what it took.

“It’s a phrase, Addy,” Kara chided. “It means that you used up all of your solar energy, or rather it got hauled out of
you. We were worried you would die without it but uh, actually, how do you feel?”

“Heavy.” Which was true. “Tired.” Also true.

“Huh, so it’s probably a little worse on you than it is on me. Anyway, your body will gradually reaccumulate sunlight
and eventually kickstart a process to give you your powers back. For me, it takes a couple of days, you? Kalex
estimated a week, I think?”

A week without flight. That was not great. What if she was needed again? Her capacity to engage an enemy in
combat was somewhat reliant on her ability to get near them. Her powers were impressive, yes, but having a durable
body had done quite a lot to ensure she could make up for the crippling-derived weaknesses she received as a result
of being a noble shard.

Wait, she was getting distracted again. “Cadmus,” she said, because Clark had said Kara was going to save Hank
and if Hank was in trouble she definitely needed her powers again.

Kara blinked, visibly processing the tangent. “Oh! Hank’s safe, Addy. Me, Alex and Lucy sprung him.”

Yes, Lucy would be capable of doing that, wouldn’t she? Still, she was more relieved about J’onn being okay. He was
her second favourite person at this point in time and if he was trapped somewhere she would find him and ensure
her second favourite person remained her second favourite person. It would take time and effort, but it would not be
too taxing to retrieve said information from the right person, so long as she got close enough.

Finally, though, Addy let herself relax a bit more. She blinked sleepily up at the ceiling, dragged her heel side-to-side
against the crystal. “Can we go home?”

Kara shuffled somewhere to her right. “I—actually, Kalex?”

There was the sound of something coming to life, the steady shudder of metal and servos churning. The low hum
was soothing, somehow. “Yes, Mistress Kara Zor-El?”

Kara made an undignified noise at the state of address. “Is Addy here free to go?”

“Of course. Please be advised, keeping her off of her feet for the next two days will ensure the least chance of a
violent death due to straining healing parts of her body. But otherwise, she is free to return to her home.”

“Thanks, Kalex.”

“You’re very welcome, Mistress Kara Zor-El.”

Kara grunted. “Have to change that setting,” she mumbled. “Sounds so much better in Kryptonese.”

After some shuffling, Kara’s head appeared back in her line of sight, glancing right down at her. She’d risen from the
chair she’d been sitting on, her cloak hanging wide behind her. “So, football carry, sack carry, or princess carry?”

Bodysuit? Discarded.

Goose pyjamas? Worn.

Television? Rugrats.

Addy leaned in further against Kara, eyes lidded, as she watched the meandering of still-diapered toddlers. This
movie was, apparently, one of Kara’s favourite, named rather simply “The Rugrats Movie”. She had promised scenes
with a giant, Godzilla-esque monster somewhere in there, though to be truthful she wasn’t particularly sure where it
was going to pop up.

They had arrived back home sometime into the late end of the afternoon with little fanfare. She’d needed some help
cutting her way out of the iridescent bodysuit, largely due to it being mangled to the point of rendering the zipper
inoperable, though Kara proved once again that very little could not be overcome with brute force. After that, it had
been getting a drink, some food, and settling in for what Kara swore by was the best movie from the month of
November, 1998.

She was still a bit drowsy, sluggish. Her body wasn’t completely responsive as it had been, but the exposure to
actual sunlight had helped alleviate some of that. Apparently the sunlamps - the things she had been stuck under -
were good for pumping huge quantities of solar energy into things, but there was some sort of quality to naturally-
created stellar radiation that just affected things differently.

How? Addy still had no idea. She’d pursued the astrophysics journals for answers, looked up what humans defined
as the laws of the universe, and despite some being slightly wrong, there was no real way to explain the stuff that
was going on.

Against all protocol, she had decided that, at least for now, that would just have to do.

Blinking, she returned her focus to the movie, trying not to feel put off by the high concentration of diaper jokes.

Kara bowed her head back, letting off a groan. “I swear to Rao if that’s for me—”

There was a knock.

Addy glanced at the door.

Kara remained still.

There was another knock. Timider.

“Maybe whoever that is will just go away?” Kara muttered.

A third knock, significantly less timid. More of a bang than anything else.

“Ugh. Fine!” Rising from the couch, Kara took great care to reposition her box of potstickers on the table and march
over towards the door. Addy watched her go, glancing back and forth between Kara and the movie, though her
lapsing interest in violent toddlers was proving to be a detriment to her attention.

Kara unlocked the new door - after all, the last one was a lot of splinters at this point - and pulled it open.

Winn, with a huge suitcase in one hand and the other upraised to knock, stared back. His eyes tracked from Kara -
wearing sweatpants, a National City University sweatshirt, and a scowl - to Addy. Addy personally thought her outfit
was better, but then Winn had been tremendously reluctant to talk about geese, so he might favour Kara more.

Then again, he already did that normally.

“Hi!” he chirped, sounding excited.

Kara slumped. “C’mon in, Winn. We’re watching Rugrats.”

Winn did as she asked, hauling the massive, reinforced suitcase up with one hand, plopping it down on the table. “I
won’t be here for long, I just heard from Alex that you two got back from the arctic and decided I could show Addy
her costume!”

...She had forgotten about that. Craning her head around, Addy glanced at the massive suitcase, the television, Kara,
Winn. Kara won outright for her attention, but the prospect of a costume was significantly more appealing than
toddlers. Pressing her good hand into the couch cushion, Addy was about half of the way up before Kara swooped
over and helped her up the rest of the way.

She really did not like being this weak. How did the infirm and the elderly function? It was awful.

Ambling her way over to the suitcase - on her own, because she had made it clear that Kara did not need to help
support her everywhere, just sometimes - Addy arrived just in time for Winn to pop the latches and throw the lid
open.

Inside was black fabric. Lots of it. There was a main bodysuit which included sewn-in boots and a turtleneck-like
bottom face covering. Above that was a cape, also black, that went down to her hip and resembled more of a
matador’s cape, meant to cover her right side. Tucked away on one side was an arm, not quite a prosthetic, she
didn’t think, but it was clearly meant to be attached to the costume to give the impression that she had two arms.

Addy glanced up. Stared. Hoped she could get across the sheer loathing she felt towards the colour black. There
had been too much black fabric in Taylor’s life. She was not going to make a similar mistake.

Winn, however, held up one finger, a gesture for silence. Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved a phone, tapped the
screen a few times, and then pointed at the suit again.

It was now bright, fluorescent pink.

Addy blinked.

He tapped again, and the suit and cape were now both covered in pinstripes.

“So, I uh, miiiight’ve gotten a little invested in Kalvar tech after Alex offhandedly mentioned to it? And uh, I might’ve
stumbled onto the D.E.O.’s storage of information on said tech during their, y’know, recent leadership spat.” He
tapped again, the suit was now covered in red and black geese. Geese. “Of course, since I am, you know, me, I
figured it all out. Or at least enough of it to make this.”

Turning to Winn, Addy stared him dead in the eye. “You are now my third favourite person,” she declared, simply, and
then turned back to the geese print.

It changed to ducks with another tap from Winn. Then to tigers. Then back to geese. She liked the geese the most.

“You, uh, want the phone? I got to go along with this? Addy?”

“Just leave her be, she’s fixated.”

“Alright. So should I just?”

“I mean, unless you want to watch The Rugrats Movie with me?”

“I, uh.”

“You can say that you don’t, Winn.”

“...Sorry, Kara. I kinda have a thing about mindlessly destructive toys.”

Last edited: Sep 16, 2020
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OxfordOctopus Sep 16, 2020 View discussion

Threadmarks: SEASON 1 - EPISODE 15 - INTERLUDE 2 [LESLIE] View content

OxfordOctopus She/Her
(Unverified Jackanape)

Sep 20, 2020  #1,000

EPISODE 15

[INTERLUDE: LESLIE WILLIS]​

You know, had you told her seven months ago that she’d end up in some sort of off-the-record detention facility, she
probably would’ve guessed it was because one of her errant comments about some fed with a creepy fascination
with teenage immigrants ended up being very, very true.

The reality, as with most things, was significantly less glamorous.

Leslie stared up at the ceiling of her little octagonal cubical of unethical detention and reinforced glass and tried
really hard to imagine what her parents would think about this. It was, after all, not like either of them could
comment on it, both being very thoroughly dead unless some other bizarre distortion of reality took place over the
last six months of, to be entirely honest, fucking boring semi-solitary confinement in some bunker in the middle of
the desert.

Normally, when you try to violently murder your boss in a fit of pique after being, in no particular order: ousted from
your day job as a shock jock after making some - in her opinion - pretty fucking valid comments about Supergirl’s
boy scout bit being as transparent as her skirt was short and red, forced into the role of a traffic reporter, and then
struck by motherfucking lightning, you’re just sent to prison-prison. Shuttled in through the justice system, do the
time for your crime, all that shit, and then you’re let out four-to-ten years later as your life deteriorates under the
weight of a criminal record and being functionally blacklisted from the industry you are pretty fucking invested in,
and you die, homeless and frozen, after trying to rebuild your life in Seattle.

Bleak, but normal. It happened every fucking day.

But oh no, normal was not on the table, because instead of just suffering crippling nervous system injuries she got
powers. Electricity became her, she became electricity, all fun. Very cool party tricks, and completely fucking
worthless in her current environment. Point was, because she dared to, say, gain wicked fucking powers and try to
use those to brutalize her boss, she got dumped into California’s alien GitMo.

Do you know what it’s like living in a perfectly transparent glass cage for seven months? Surrounded by fucking
culturally inept and thoroughly upsetting aliens?

It’s not fun. At all. For the couple of hours every day they took down whatever noise mufflers stopped her from
communicating with her nearest neighbours, one of which still could not speak English, she got to talk the piss and
complain about Supergirl or whatever and just, do nothing. Three meals a day, two hours of social interactivity, and
precisely sweet fuck all else to do. She was bored, bored in the sort of criminally insane sort of way that was deeply
worrying.

The worst part was that they stuck her in a row with two of the most unappealing, completely fucking annoying
aliens on the planet. To the right of her glass cubicle of human rights violations was, as far as she’d been able to tell,
a thing by the name of Screech. That’s what the D.E.O. agents called... it? She? He? Look, the point was, it looked like
a bipedal spider with like, seven too many limbs and the only way it communicated was in ear-shatteringly loud
screaming. All the time.

She’d still take Screech over the one on her right, all things considered. That one? Name was J’kuza, looked like a
human except they had semi-translucent skin that showed off all the icky arteries, veins, and was tinted vaguely
blue. J’kuza was a little shy of nine feet tall, built like a fridge, and came from a planet where, upon evolving into an
industrial era alongside several other species, proceeded to completely wipe them out for perceived discrepancies in
their religious text. J’kuza was a Morthan, apparently, and they only had one biological sex, with the ability to both
give and carry children. Unfortunately for literally everyone else, they belonged to a zealous sect of cult-like religious
imperialists who viewed the existence of gendered behaviour - or anything even remotely sexual, as they reproduced
without any chutzpah - as antithetical to a puritanical belief system and were obligated to ‘cull the degenerate
masses as one culls diseased cattle’.

J’kuza, unsurprisingly, liked to spend their two hours of conversation telling her how much they would delight in
ripping the skin from her body and using it to make a rug.

Leslie was, in complete fucking honesty, genuinely surprised she was still even remotely sane. J’kuza had been here
before her, meaning they’d been around to remind her each and every fucking day how much they would just delight
in her torturous murder. Back when she’d only been around for a few months and had expected, fuck, maybe a bullet
in the skull or just shipping her off to be picked apart like some prized pig at a laboratory, she’d responded to
J’kuza’s goading with equal threats of physical and electrical violence.

Nowadays? She just, fuckin’ tuned him out. The wonders life could bring her, and all that. She’d had a lot of trouble
really handling conflict since she was a kid. A chip on her shoulder had kept her basically in a constant cycle of
fights and it was genuinely fucking shocking - hah - to just be able to ignore someone trying really hard to upset her.
Thicker skin came with its downsides, admittedly, she was languishing in a secret prison facility full of alien threats,
but, well.

She would trade her thick skin for freedom, honestly. Seriously, fuck this place.

Honestly, the only thing that was even remotely positive about the place was the fact that the meals were
suspiciously good. Like, prison slop is generally some gray semi-solid which looks, smells, tastes, feels, and just. It is
revolting, disgusting pig slop that the prison industrial complex gets to force on inmates because human decency
was apparently a faux pas when it came to making tons of cash. Normal shit. Instead, in casa de alien hellhole, she
got three full meals. Not the sort of full meals where you chuck someone three packages of dried out carbs and
calories, she got like, fuckin’... actual food. Cooked by someone who was good at cooking, that tasted homemade.

All of it was fucking suspicious, but then again maybe it was because they weren’t completely equipped for it?
Screech ate like, as far as she could tell - bastard hid the bucket each time it came over like she might be able to
reach through the goddamn glass to steal it - lots of insects and something that smelled faintly of bleach. J’kuza, on
the other hand, got literal cyanide. How did she know that? Prison guards. They talk a lot, and apparently it was a
huge joke about the staff about how J’kuza both ate poison and was a poisonous fucking individual to be around.

She was glad for their ability to enjoy it and remain at least a solid hundred feet from J’kuza. Really. In her hearts of
heart, she would not tangle her hands around their throats like she might Cat fucking Grant’s long, swan-like—

No. Begone homoerotic thoughts. Seven months was nowhere near enough to turn the aching antipathy she felt
towards that pompous, self-entitled, rich blonde bitch into something even brushing up against attraction. No, that
came two years later and three fingers worth of scotch into a bottle as you realize the teacher you really fucking
hated in university was mostly because you couldn’t get over how attractive she was. She still had nearly a year and
a half left on that calendar date, thank-you-fucking-kindly.

Anyway. Maybe it was because she was like, probably the only human they had tucked away for a later date? She’d
seen Maxwell Lord of all people get dragged kicking and screaming into the depths of the prison area but then that
hadn’t lasted particularly long, as he’d been out basically a month later, looking significantly less composed than he
had the first time. God, if anyone deserved to stick around, it was probably the opaque tech baron who liked flirting
just too much to make it clear that he was a creep.

Bringing her head up, Leslie let it drop back down onto the concrete bench they thought was suitable enough for a
bed. That was the other thing, no bedsheets, no pillows, just... a fuckin concrete bench that she had to flip up and
shit into when the need arose. Complete bullshit. Even most prisons gave people beds, or at least a fucking throw
pillow and a shitty goddamn towel. She got none of that.

Fuck, she’d asked a guard not two days ago for crosswords, for anything they could give her to just, make time go by
quickly and not get stuck in her own motherfucking, shitty, blisteringly awful fucking head!

Leslie breathed out, tapped her head against the concrete. Again. Because this was a mental conversation she had
gone over so many times before at this point it was starting to drive her mad. Six months of captivity, six months of
the occasional shrink coming in to arbitrarily decide she wasn’t safe enough to remove from their custody. Six.
Fucking. Months.

The only thing keeping her sane at this point was the fact that insanity was not a good look on her. Hell, it wasn’t a
fucking ‘good look’ on Gotham’s weird clown fetishist and he basically defined that. Nobody wanted to be the Joker,
nobody wanted to be even remotely close to the Joker. People who did had a terrible habit of going insane, trying
something suicidal, and then getting murdered. Not by Batman, oh no, not that he’d been around for any length of
time in the last several years. No sir, you got murdered by the other fuckheads in prison, stabbed or some shit. Easy-
peasy, cleaning up the bat’s mess.

But she would not be Joker. Because despite, y’know, probably being like, significantly better, stronger, cooler,
smarter, and all the other shit she was to some fucking mid-life crisis in clown paint, she was also significantly more
level-headed. Sure, she tried to kill her boss, and sure, she’d fuckin’ do it again in a heartbeat, if only because at this
point the sunk cost fallacy was really chafing and there had to be some fucking value out of being stuck in a
goddamn glass prison for six months. But she wasn’t Joker insane, or whatever. She at least could fucking look back
and go ‘yeah, I could see why they stuck me in here’ without a lick of irony.

Flopping over onto her side, Leslie spared her neighbour another look. J’kuza was doing his daily push-ups, weird
semi-translucent body quivering in odd and fucking really unsettling ways as he worked himself up off the ground.
The dude was like, the sheer opposite of her type. It sucked. Where were all of those hot blue girl aliens she was
promised? Did Jake English fucking lie to her? Did Avatar?

...Well, the latter was obviously a yes. Who the fuck even remembers Avatar for anything but the shitty blue aliens
and weird colonial guilt thing it had going on that it couldn’t completely reconcile with the fact that the entire thing
was basically one dude wearing a blue alien skinsuit and had no real claim to the identity of being one.

Shit. It was actually kinda getting bad if she was going off on tangents about Avatar of all fucking things.

J’kuza glanced towards her, mid-pushup, face stretching itself into one of his wild, ‘I would drink you if I could’
smiles that showed off his like, she was pretty sure three rows of raptor teeth. Honest to fuck, genuinely fuck this
guy. Creep.

She flipped him the bird.

He kept smiling, because nobody had probably told him what the gesture meant. Ignorant fucking alien.

Glancing to her other side, Screech was... being Screech. Mandibles open, volume set to max, screaming its big
fuckin’ lungs out despite nobody being able to hear it, curled up in a ball near one corner, hiding all the trash it’d
managed to pile together. She was pretty sure even the damn feds who kept them all here had zero fucking clue
what Screech exactly was, but she was also pretty sure nobody was going to try to disarm a violently poisonous
humanoid arachnid for a few metal buckets.

Flopping back around to stare up at the bare ceiling - couldn’t they have given her, fuck, tiles or something? Shit
would be so much easier if she could just endlessly count something - Leslie forced herself to relax. Six months of
this, six months of being trapped, of getting just enough electricity to keep herself alive. Her power, it was like a
secondary sense, a gaping maw that was so hungry all the time and she couldn’t fucking feed it. Whatever they
made the prison out of kept electrical currents from going in any direction. She couldn’t even strip the damn lights
for it.

They fed her fucking duracells. Literal, duracell-bunny fucking batteries on a platter alongside her ham and mash or
whatever the fuck was on special this week. It was humiliating, it was fucking beneath her, and there was sweet fuck
all she could do about it outside of implying everyone who gave them to her was being cuckolded or whatever. Even
her insults had started to fall flat, which was a pretty big blow considering her entire thing was being vehemently
insulting like nobody’s business.

Well, electricity was also her thing nowadays, but that really fucking wasn’t the point anymore.

Leslie brought her head up, brought it back down again with a thud.

Honest to fucking god, was she bored.

God, she was so bored she could almost feel it. It was like a dull, noisy fucking feeling in her ear. A buzz, or whatever.
Like that white noise you get, except real.

It was getting louder, too. And stronger.

...Huh.

That uh, was either insanity or not her boredom, wasn’t it? What the fuck even was it? It felt like... like a tug, like open
electrical sources she’d felt when she’d had her brief stint of freedom with her powers. Just it was huge,
overwhelming, she could fucking feel it. It was itchy, it felt... really close to her own energy, honestly. Almost
identical.

Seriously. What the fuck?

Pushing herself up, Leslie slipped her legs from the bench and glanced in the direction the whatever was coming
from. None of the feds were around to yell at her about ‘trying to do something suspicious’ - because, of course, the
sound dampening was somehow only one way so they couldn’t hear her but she could—

The noise was getting worse. It... kinda hurt, now, actually. Burned, really, felt like she was being pulled towards it,
and her resistance to it was pulling her apart. Fuck. Fuck-fuck-fuck.

She staggered, hands going to her knees. Raptor teeth looked her way, curious, and even Screech had stopped
screaming and was staring at her. She glared at both of them, even when her shoulders sagged with another
powerful pull from that source just—FUCK it hurt. What the fuck?

It was hard to breathe now. Genuinely, each breath she tried to take got all caught up in her chest and came out like
a wheeze and it genuinely fucking felt like she was trying to breathe around a wad of sandpaper. It hurt, hurt so
much. Like a seizure, or a stroke, not that she’d had any of those before. Was she having one now? She was
sweating pretty hard, and parts of her had gone numb, and well, fuckin’ anybody’s guess at this point. Fuck was she
really going to die here? Did she get a tumour from the fucking lightning? That would just figure.

Fuck. FUCK.

“Livewire!” A voice yelled, and she managed to glance up. The butch agent, the one with the fucking scrunched-face
and hickies she wore like a weird fucking collar. Black hair, kinda tall, built like a shithouse. Tried to flirt with her
once, she was pretty sure.

Other agents were spilling in now too. The camera probably tipped them off. She was feelin’ real fuckin’ awful. Hard
to see, too. Black around the edges of her vision. Why.

“Stop trying to escape!” The butch lady said loudly, angrily.

What the fuck were they even—

Her arms were lightning again. Which, y’know, wasn’t possible, because they never gave her enough electricity to do
partial transformations. But here they were, lightning arms. Kinda funny, if not for the fact that it probably didn’t
mean anything good that the lightning was progressively climbing its way up her body. Shoulders, chest, head. Who
the fuck cares, it clearly had other opinions.

The tugging grew stronger. Leslie choked on her own breath.

“If you do not desist, we will activate defence protocols!” Butch-bitch-dumb... Just. The fuckin’ lady said.

Leslie blinked sleepily at her. The defence protocols were... right, the sprinklers. Fuck, did she ever say how much
she hated water now? It sucked. She hated that more than death.

The tug pulled on her stomach.

Butch-Agent brought her hand up to one ear. Probably to get them to initiate that.

Fuck it. She’d rather die.

The next tug that came, she didn’t resist it.

There was a flash of blue, sparking along the surface of her cage, then nothing.

The sky was very, very blue. Full of fluffy clouds, and a sun. And shit.

Staring at her own arm, stretched up to the sun like some sort of... cringey fuckin’ Japanese cartoon intro, Leslie
watched red lightning pluck between her digits. That was certainly new, before then her lightning had been very
much a wonderful colour of cyan. She hadn’t bothered to check yet, but fuck she hoped her eyes hadn’t changed to a
demonic red to accommodate. That’d be fucking awful, blue was a good look on her.

The hunger was just... gone. The constant need for energy, completely and utterly fucking sated by, well, energy. So
much of it. She’d just rematerialized here. On a roof. Watched Blonde-in-blue-red-and-gold - she needed better
nicknames - hauled ass with some one-armed, beat-to-shit girl who was like, turning black? Or whatever? Hadn’t
even noticed her sitting there, kinda just existing, with an unfathomable amount of energy in her.

Was this what Supergirl actually felt like? Like, the amount of energy in her right now—it was uh, a lot. Like, godlike a
lot, like, if she wanted to, she was pretty sure she could glass half of the city a lot. The amount of energy that had
been fed into her was just like, so much that she didn’t even really feel the urge to draw from other sources anymore.

She was so full, so fucking powerful. Fuckin’ red lightning and shit.

Shouldn’t this be going to her head? Leslie wasn’t really sure. By all accounts she could just... fuck off to CatCo and
nuke the place. It wasn’t outside of her abilities, but then that kinda felt... not wrong, but like. You know how much
better shit feels when you have to fight to get it? Kinda like that. There was no reason to anymore. She was just...
above Cat. In every meaningful way. She was possibly the strongest thing on the planet right now and why fucking
waste the time to nuke a highrise if you’ve transcended like that?

What’s the point of hurting someone like Cat Grant if not to make her beg for forgiveness? For clemency? And then
betray any thought of survival she had by electrocuting her to death? She could just... delete her now. Copy and
paste that bitch into the recycling bin. There was no fun in it anymore.

Even Supergirl didn’t really... feel like a good target? Weirdly? It was like, sure, she could probably fuck her up, but last
she checked Supergirl was basically invulnerable in any meaningful way and unless she got access to something
that made her not invulnerable it’d be pointless. Very cathartic, sure, which was why she wasn’t shooting down the
idea to like, empty a payload at her fading figure and try to shoot her out of the sky, but not like, really important? Or
with much of a point? She’d just get back up, after all.

Fuck she was feeling a lot. Totally calm, weirdly enough, completely in her own head. But like, what was the point of
being calm anymore? She should be doing something with the power she had. She had so much of it too, like,
honest-to-fuck she... She should really do something. Fuck up Superman or something, maybe take out a chunk of
Europe and claim it as her own like every half-bit moron over there did.

Leslandia sounded nice, but like, for probably different reasons than linguists would want. Probably be better to call
it Sappho 2: Electric Boogaloo to be blunter about it.

Honestly, she kinda felt stoned. Like, really stoned, like all the secondhand accounts of being on a gram of weed
brownie type of stoned. Not completely out of it, but very close, a forced neutrality to everything. Just, this time, the
edibles came with godhood.

Fuckin’ neat, that. She guessed.

But no, seriously, she’d be giving blondie the boy scout a pretty big fuckin’ props if she felt like this every day. She
had unimaginable power, enough that just a whim was all that was needed to do some real damage. Supergirl was
probably in a similar place? Like, impossibly strong, invulnerable, capable of generating laser beams. If she wanted
to, she could just... end someone’s life, destroy an entire building with little thought.

She could do that now, like it was no big deal. She made red lightning and she could just fuckin’ up and disintegrate
her enemies or things which impeded her forward march of existence. If Supergirl felt even an iota of the like, fuckin’
power high she was coming down off of right now? She probably deserved like, an eight pack, or The Purge, where
she could just go out and like, stretch those limbs a little. Fuckin’ kick in that one asshole’s head who called her ass
fat or whatever. That or just break everything.

Fucking...

What was she even going to do with herself?

Leslie glanced down at the shingles she was currently splayed out across, still in her fuckin’ ugly D.E.O. prison
sweats.

Leaving the roof would, actually, probably be a good start. Maybe.

...She’d do it in a sec. Just, when y’know, she got the motivation to do it. Speaking of, her power was... weirder now?
Like, before, her power was just her, right? No upper thought about it. You don’t refer to your damn arm by a name
and all that shit, but it was like, more alive. It had its own existence, or whatever. It felt content, which, y’know,
fucking weird. Very, very content, like it had wrapped itself up in a blanket that it was refusing to share.

Somehow, it was alive. Or at least she’d gone insane enough during the euphoric feeling of taking in all that energy
that she’d mentally fractured and made up a secondary personality or something. Honestly, it wouldn’t even be the
most fucking bizarre thing that could happen to her, really. She’d gotten the ability to transform into electricity after
being struck by lightning, very little about herself could actually really surprise her anymore.

Was this what narcotics felt like? She’d been offered speed a few times, and thank fuck she hadn’t taken it if this
was even remotely what it was like to experience something like that. No wonder that shit was addictive, she was
living her best life and all she had to deal with was, what, a second feeling in her head? Some sort of fuckin’...
bullshit red lightning shit? Red lightning was cool as hell, fuck that. Sure, cyan was still like, obligatorily better, but
like, red wasn’t half bad either. Made her look more menacing and shit.

Sucks that all that power just also simultaneously stole her fucking thunder.

...Heh. Thunder.

Stepping out from the cab, Leslie kept a hand to her hat as she took in the smell of rural, bumfuck nowhere America.

Midvale, in all of its 15-thousand people glory, stared back. Or, well, the house did, anyway.

Turns out, that whole, high-as-a-kite? Yeah, totally temporary. Thank fuck, she wouldn’t’ve ever managed to get off of
that roof if not for coming down from it. Still had that red lightning though, which was... not horrible, to be honest.
She’d gotten used to it, and thank fuck it hadn’t changed her eyes. They were still ass-kickin’ cyan, completely
unnatural, but cool as fuck.

After getting her head back on her shoulders and all that shit, she’d decided a vacation after 6 months of forced
confinement was probably warranted. With her powers combined or whatever, she’d figured out that she no longer
needed like, electrical shit to reconsolidate after going fully electric. Which, you know, had made it tremendously
easy to remotely turn into a ball of electricity, infect the bank’s computer network, and siphon several hundreds of
thousands of dollars from the richest while systematically bricking everything to stop them from tracking her.

Couple of days later, with some noises about being too rich for this shit and pretending really hard to look like the
estranged daughter of a very comatose oil baron, she’d bought herself a house in the one fucking place Supergirl
could not possibly come looking for her: Midvale.

Midvale had really only been an option because it was among some of the very few places with only one sighting of
so-called ‘weird shit’, and that came down to one cherished instance where Superman had been seen flying over
with something like, a solid ten or more years ago. They had a plaque for it and everything. The place was basically
quintessential rural-but-not-poor America.

Hell, just up the street was a pretty big place housed by some scientist woman who’d waved politely at her when
she’d had her new furniture shipped in. Eliza Danvers, familiar name, but then again so was half of the town’s names.
God, bet most of them were like, 90% of the way to inbred or something.

She might hate the town, but all things considered, it was like, the dead ass opposite of National City.

So she had a house, had a new cover as Roseanne Leslie Johnson, the flighty daughter of some fat balding ugly
fucker who exploited off-shore oil resources like he was running out of money. She was moderately wealthy,
pretended to be a web designer - not that she knew the first fucking thing about it - and was totally not a recently-
escaped unhinged supervillain who tried to kill her boss.

Nope. She was just the rich daughter of an oil baron with nothing to do but sit around and... fuck, do something with
her life. Maybe.

Seriously, who knew being so strong could take the fun out of being a villain? She’d considered firing off a beam just
to fuck with Kitty-Cat some, but... like. No fun. If she wanted Cat Grant dead, she would be a cloud of vaporized
carbon in a heartbeat, and there was just nothing fun about that. No real catharsis, just like, an orphaned 13-year-old
kid and Supergirl probably trying to snap her neck.

Seriously though, why the fuck did Eliza Danvers’ name sound so fucking familiar?

Sparing another glance at the ritzy, hilariously expensive house just up the road, Leslie eased her grocery bags up
with one hand, propping it against her back.

Fuck knows. Maybe Supergirl’s whole ‘be evil for a bit’ schtick was just fucking with her head or something. She’d
get over it, and never have to see hide nor hair of Supergirl again.

Thank fuck.
Last edited: Sep 20, 2020

 522

OxfordOctopus Sep 20, 2020 View discussion

Threadmarks: SEASON 1 - EPISODE 16 View content

OxfordOctopus She/Her
(Unverified Jackanape)

Sep 24, 2020  #1,055

EPISODE 16​

Spoiler: ORIGINAL VERSION

“Are you sure?” Kara asked for the sixth time and counting.

Had Addy not been several hundreds of feet above her, she’d be giving her one of those looks she had learned to
copy from Cat Grant—what Kara called the ‘are you sure you want to say that?’ look. Unfortunately for her, despite
protesting it vehemently, her spatial warping options had been restricted even before the cycle had begun and so the
feat wasn’t within her afforded skill-set.

Reaching up, Addy pressed her thumb into the button on her earpiece. “I am,” she said, trying to do... something with
her voice, convey something other than a monotone. She was still working on that, though studies had proved
fruitful in managing to sound on three separate occasions ‘exasperated’, if what Kara said was accurate.

“It has only been a week,” Kara said, voice pinched and worried in a way that was, against all reason, simultaneously
very nice and also very, very unsatisfying. “You’re allowed to take some time before trying things again, you know?”

Personally, Addy wasn’t so sure about that. The last time she’d checked social media for something outside of her
regular correspondence with ‘tothe_max19’, Kara had still been facing some unprecedented backlash. Even
historically, after causing semi-crippling damage to the local shoreline ecosystem during what had come to be
known as the ‘oil tanker incident’, she’d still had a fair contingent of supporters. By contrast, this time around, Kara
seemed to face no end of barely-concealed antipathy from most, with her supporters dwindled down to the most
ardently fixated few.

Mostly because everyone thought Kara had killed someone—her, in this instance. There was a, for lack of a better
term, unflattering video floating around both Twitter - for short periods, largely due to the fact that it broke their
terms of service, not that it had apparently stopped people before - and a website by the name of LiveLeak. It
showed, in great detail and clarity, Supergirl driving her head repeatedly into the concrete while she screamed in
rage.

There was a lot more blood than she remembered there being, but then apparently she had taken severe head
trauma that vastly augmented solar-powered healing could only fix so far. She didn’t like it, but then that had become
an unfortunately common fixture as of recently.

Nevertheless, the fact was that people couldn’t continue thinking she was dead. For multiple reasons, of course,
primarily that it was deeply insulting for someone to believe she could be terminated with some casual application
of blunt force trauma. Not only that, but her death was being attributed to Kara, and it was seemingly serving as a
perpetual reminder, which had made her very... clingy. Again, the paradoxical nature of something making her feel
both very good and kinda bad was something she’d probably need to look into in the future, but she had been able to
operate her body for the better part of four days at this point and she was starting to get tired of Kara looking at her
like she might, at any moment, randomly cease functioning.

There might be a precedent for her doing that, yes, but it was still not particularly wanted.

“Alright,” Kara finally acquiesced, tone a touch defeated. Addy could hear her take in a steady, deep breath, before
letting it out in a huff. “Before we engage, Add—ministrator, do you remember who we’re trying to take down?”

That was the other thing too. Just because she had some mildly worrying holes in some of the long-term memory
she had developed during her operational period, Kara kept making sure she could remember functional tasks. It
was, again, insulting, but sweet, but mostly insulting. Before she became who she was now, she had kept a
categorized list of every species her kin had ever come into contact with. She’d used it mostly to occupy herself
while her hosts weren’t doing interesting things, but nevertheless, she had impeccable memory.

Pushing down on the spike of annoyance, Addy adjusted her own gaze down, towards the courtyard-like space
nestled between a few larger buildings. “We’re going after a Citadelian, Giant-Giant, an escapee from Fort Rozz.”

Citadelians were interesting. Without the D.E.O. being particularly accessible - now being run by a Jim Harper, Kara
had been abundantly clear that he was part of Cadmus - Kara had run her through a list of the most common
escapees from Fort Rozz, their species, and what that brought to the table in a fight. Citadelians were all clones
from an original, and suffered from a degenerative genetic disorder which resulted in incredibly low intelligence
among the majority of its population. However, the original had at some point grafted his mind into a computer and
taken more or less full control over the species, established the Citadel - an interplanetary empire mostly made up of
Citadelians - and proceeded to begin enslaving most of his nearest neighbours, apparently for sport.

Citadelians, for all that they were genetically predisposed towards mental dullness, also happened to be twelve feet
tall, extremely muscular, and retained immense strength and durability. This had come together to make the majority
of Citadelians very unsubtle, and as a result, the majority had been captured or killed not long after Fort Rozz had
crashed in the first place.

Which meant that the only ones remaining were the ones with enough intelligence to try to blend in.

Out of the corner of her eye, Addy watched Kara begin to rise up from her impromptu hiding place behind a hedge.
Addy tugged on her coreself, widened the information flow between herself and the myriad of bugs she was
currently in control of. The few fruit flies she’d planted on Giant-Giant’s back were still there, and the alien himself
was still on the fourth floor of the apartment building she was staring down at, doing whatever he did in his spare
time.

“You’re taking the left window?” Kara asked, voice strained, but focused. Intense.

Addy bobbed her head before she remembered Kara couldn’t see her. “I am.” Largely because Kara had demanded
as much, deciding that being in the flanking position was safer than the one barreling right into him. Addy still wasn’t
totally sold on the idea that the Citadelian could crush her skull - Kara hadn’t been able to, despite making a
concerted effort to do so, though saying as much hadn’t assuaged her concerns any - but she wasn’t about to
disagree or possibly grind the operation to a halt. It had been a struggle to get Kara to let her return to work, let alone
going out and helping her with her Supergirl duties.

“Okay,” Kara more breathed than said, and Addy could even see her bobbing her head in a nod, her shoulders
tightening out, body bunching. “Alright.”

Addy adjusted her angle, ran the predicted path back over in her head. She’d need to adjust her angle mid-flight, but
that much was elementary.

“Approaching in—”

Addy wiggled her stump, felt the false arm attached to it click against her side.

“—three—”

She reached up, smoothing the domino mask back down on her face. Her costume today was simple, as was
suitable for her first outing. Her bodysuit had been configured to be primarily white, with multicoloured circuit-board-
like details spreading out from where the joints were on her body, twining together to form a large ‘A’ in the center of
her chest.

“—two—”

Even the half-cloak Winn had made for her was detailed, though this time around it was a flat black with
multicoloured stars covering it. Most of them were constellations from past places her kin had been, the few
interpretations of the random placement of stellar bodies she’d really enjoyed, but Kara had helped her find where
Rao would be on a chart and she’d made extra sure to make it stick out against all others.

“—one—”

But now wasn’t the time to be thinking about that. She’d had a lot of time to think about it, to consider what she
wanted to look like, to configure things to her liking. She would have plenty of time later, too.

“—engaging!”

Addy shot herself forward before cutting her flight off and letting gravity take hold of her again. She dropped, wind
scraping up past her face, the horizontal speed only adding to the arc’s steady arc towards vertical. Buildings
passed her by with mere inches to spare, she caught sight of people looking up at her, gawking, down on the street
below.

The world rushed up to meet her, concrete skipping against her toe, as she yanked herself back up, channelling all of
that speed forward. She shifted her arc, barely heard the shatter of glass as Kara entered in through the main living
room windows. Her point of entry rapidly approached, a tall window set into a brick facade, her own reflection
glimpsed in the half-second before her body crashed right through it.

The Citadelian was as large as Kara had described him to be. Maybe twelve feet tall, and extremely muscular, with a
bald head and skin dark blue. He had a forward-jutting jaw, ape-like in truth, though most of it transitioned into dense
fat, preventing her from getting much of a good look at his neck.

He was mid-turn towards her, as though he’d already seen her coming. This was unfortunate for him, as in the
following brief second of action, Kara slammed into him, tackling him hard enough to jostle forward, if not enough to
send him down, and reached out with one arm to wrap it around about where his neck should be, forearm closing
down hard against his windpipe.

Addy kept her momentum, snapping the connection from the bugs and drawing her range back in. Palm facing
forward, she drove it into the thick of his belly, her wrist jarring under the force as the fat proved out to be about as
pliable as a bone. Not that it mattered, with the touch she could reach out to his mind, reaching for it, feeling the way
it was built.

She was, frankly, not impressed. Minds were complicated, varied dramatically between species, and the ones that
weren’t the product of natural evolution tended to have some degree of elegance to them. Giant-Giant’s mind was a
mess, if she could make a comparable descriptor it was that most minds were balls of yarn, and this was more of a
knot. Or a hairball. Something unpleasant and made up of a lot of tangled neural webs.

Giant-Giant made a loud, bellowing noise, his entire top half writhing as he tried to free himself. Why exactly he
wasn’t trying to use his legs—well, Addy could make an educated guess.

Still, working through the mind wasn’t easy. It felt like it was purpose-built to be difficult to psychically engage with,
like it was built for someone else entirely. Shelving that thought for later, she reached deeper and nudged one cluster
of his mind, about the area she was pretty sure controlled his memory retention.

She slipped her body back just in time to avoid a reflexive kick of his leg.

Swooping back in, she pressed her hand back to his skin and dug in hard. If they’d combined his muscle memory
with actual memory-memory then she could just...

Giant-Giant went limp.

Do that.

Kara let out a breath of relief, letting the Citadelian drop from her grip. “God, he smelled,” she muttered, sounding
none-to-pleased about it, even going so far as to tug at her cape and take a sniff, nose wrinkling. “So is he like, under
your control right now?”

Addy glanced back down at the paralyzed Citadelian. “I couldn’t figure out his brain quick enough.” Which, now that
she thought about it, she reached back down to re-establish skin contact. She was going to figure this out, because
let it be known that stupidity could not prevent the continuation of progress.

“Then what did you do?” Kara asked, voice suddenly sounding very weird. Like she was both curious but also
resigned? Yet also she didn’t want to know and sounded like she was going to panic. Addy was impressed, that was
a lot to fit into five words.

“Partitioned his brain,” she explained in lieu of the more complicated answer that she’d more or less made her own
knot in his brain made out of knots to cut off information flow between the two ends. “He’s currently conscious, or...
No, he isn’t.” This was delightfully interesting, had she just figured out the biological process for sleep among his
people at random? She poked it again—

Giant-Giant started screaming. Loudly.

—and promptly poked it a second time.

He stopped.

Kara was giving her one of those concerned looks she normally did.

Addy ignored her, sending out errant pings to see how different things lit up. It’d taken half a minute - a frankly
unacceptable amount of time, but she could make exceptions for brains that had nearly been overrun by an alien
degenerative disorder hellbent on braiding every neural synapse in the brain together - but she could not confidently
say she understood his brain.

Urging Giant-Giant to stumble up to his feet to the best of his abilities, Addy stepped back and gave the Citadelian a
once-over.

“Administrator?” Kara said, sounding even more concerned somehow.

Addy glanced her way, caught sight of that wrinkle she wore between her brows when she got upset or concerned
about something. “Yes, Supergirl?” She liked calling her Kara better but she would make the sacrifices needed in this
line of work.

Kara’s face worked over a small number of expressions, most of which Addy didn’t have the applicable data to
parse, but after a moment she shrugged. “Why did you look at him like that?” She asked, finally.

Addy glanced back at the Citadelian, urged his arms to stretch up over his head. That gesture also somehow caused
a good portion of the hormone-producers in his body to generate a flood of what she was pretty sure was the
chemical equivalent of ‘rage’ for his species. Fascinating.

Turning towards Kara, she opened her mouth to respond—

A red blur slammed into her Citadelian with enough force to drive it into the nearby wall. Then through the wall, or at
least part of the way through, leaving his front half dangling out of the wall of the building while the bottom half
remained.

—and shut it.

Standing right where her specimen of new data had once been was, well, a person. He was wearing a full red
bodysuit that even went so far as to cover his chin and transition into a full head covering with odd, lightning-bolt
shaped fixtures on each side of his head. His outfit doubled as a mask, though it only covered the area around his
eyes, as hers did, and he even had an odd device clamped to his chest.

None of this was bringing up the sudden concentration of energy, represented by arcs of gold-yellow energy that
seemed to primarily come from him. This, of course, wouldn’t normally be an issue, he had just run at speeds Addy
could not reasonably follow with her eyes, likely up a wall if the trail of fading energy from the window she’d entered
through was any indication, but rather than it being simple radiation of some kind, she could not process it.

The energy existed, but it didn’t feel like energy. It felt energetic, but also not. It wasn’t quantum—was this what deja
vu felt like? Kara had described it before and, well, she’d felt like this around Kryptonite before and she was getting
this crawling feeling of sudden frustration and—

“Are you two—oh,” the-man-in-red faltered, glanced around. “Oh you two didn’t need help at all, did you? Shoot, did I
just punch your friend through a wall ohmigod—”

“Who are you?” Kara managed to get out, her mouth a bit loose, like she’d been gawking.

The man boggled at her. “I’m the Flash. Y’know?”

Kara’s smile turned awkward. “I, uh, don’t.”

“What do you mean you don’t—”

Addy tuned them out, focused back on the energy. It was fading rapidly, and not for the first time she wished she
could siphon it directly. She wanted to study it more, study its composition, study everything about it. It felt closer to
dark matter somehow, an existing force that pushed against the universe and—

“Oh my god I’m on the wrong Earth,” Flash said, sounding almost panicked.

Addy’s head snapped around fast enough that both Kara and Flash flinched.

“Dimensional travel?” She said, just for clarification, because maybe he could be an alien from a near-identical planet
or—

“Afraid so,” Flash said.

That was important. She had been trying to figure out dimensional travel here for a while. It had been a bit of a side-
project, largely because the avenues she’d normally operate under to transition between dimensional fabric hadn’t
worked right. She could do most things, such as exert psychic influence by filling in other dimensions with it,
however it had fallen apart when she’d tried to make substantive alterations or attempt to push through. It had
frustrated her.

And here was her answer.

“So, uh, what about your friend?” Flash said, awkwardly.

Addy nudged Giant-Giant’s connection to her before urging him to pull himself free.

Giant-Giant just jerked back, pulling out a large portion of the wall with him.

She should’ve been more specific in her command. She’d make note of it. “He’s fine,” she said belatedly, glancing
back at Kara and Flash, who were both staring awkwardly at her. “I checked his neural pathways. You only caused
minor concussive damage, he’ll recover quickly.” Or at least, if he sustained any long-term damage from the trauma,
it wouldn’t be her problem by the time the symptoms started to emerge.

Quickly glancing through Giant-Giant’s eyes - and, truly, as with most things, visual information took a half-second to
disentangle and process into something her own tools could parse - she noticed the vans below. The D.E.O. had
arrived, and so had the cops, apparently. Scanning the crowd, she caught sight of Alex and Susan talking hushedly,
but staring resolutely at the Citadelian.

“We need to talk about your dimension stuff,” Addy said, glancing back towards Flash with her own eyes.

He boggled a bit at her. “We do?”

Directing the Citadelian to jump through the opening and down onto the street below, Addy ignored the panicked
screaming that rose out of the onlookers for the few seconds before it became clear Giant-Giant wasn’t about to do
anything. She even made him raise one of his hands to wave at Alex and Susan like she normally did with her own
body.

Alex tilted her head back and groaned. Susan jabbed her elbow into her side, but other than that, they were already
pulling out the cuffs and making their way over to the wire fence she’d accidentally flattened beneath Giant-Giant’s
girth.

“Administrator, we need to, er, get back to work,” Kara started.

Addy turned her head to stare at her. “You use work all the time to plan things,” she pointed out, justifiably so. “You
even have a room for it.” One that Cat Grant clearly knew about, but she wasn’t about to bring that up. Kara was very
ignorant about things like that, and she wanted to know more about how Flash crossed dimensions before working
on other pertinent issues, such as Kara’s continued refusal to accept flying lessons from her, and her horrible
operational security.

Kara opened her mouth, visibly about to protest, before tilting her head to one side like a curious dog. A few
moments passed before, finally, she shut her mouth with a click.

“Alright, that’s fair. Let's do that, then.”

Easing her folded-up costume into the confines of her backpack, Addy gave her current ensemble a look. It was
normal fare for her, acid-green chinos, accompanying blue chucks, a long-sleeved shirt of an identical colour to her
shoes, with the sleeves rolled up near her elbows. She looked, at least in her opinion, like she was ready to take on
the world.

Sparing her reflection a look and then accompanying nod, Addy made her way towards the bathroom door.

Kara had been committed to returning to work on foot, despite two out of three of them being capable of flight and
the last - Flash - being able to move very, very quickly. Supposedly, it was the better way to hide their identities, to
make them blend in easier, not that Addy was in total agreement with it.

Arriving at the door, she eased the lock open, tugged on the handle, and ventured back out into a world that didn't
smell like urinal cakes and sanitized excrement. Why, exactly, humans thought public restrooms needed to be as
unpleasant to exist in as possible was beyond her, especially considering single-unit bathrooms such as the one she
had just been in were supposed to be better kept than the crowded, communal variations you found almost
everywhere else.

She spotted Kara and Flash immediately. They were both across the hallway to her, leaning up against the wall,
talking in low voices. Kara was in her normal apparel, trading out the Supergirl costume for a white dress shirt
tucked into a pair of black slacks, with a pair of white flats beneath those. Her hair was pulled back into a tight
ponytail, a little higher than it normally was, possibly a sign of stress - Kara did tug at her hair when stressed and
when she thought nobody was watching, not that it had stopped Addy from observing it - and her glasses were fitted
firmly back on her face. She'd chucked her light-gray jacket over one shoulder, half-folded, and her purse hung
diagonally across her body, braced against one hip.

It was, as with most things Kara wore, very her. But also very nice to look at, if a bit bland, in Addy's personal opinion.
The pants were a good touch—Cat hadn't even made a rude comment about them, which was almost praise, coming
from her.

Flash, meanwhile, had shed his garish - but not unpleasant - red costume for more conventional streetwear. A
flannel shirt, half-tucked into oil-stained jeans, with a pair of raggedy-looking running shoes beneath those. He also
had a jacket, not that he was wearing it, the faux-fur clad winter coat tucked beneath one arm.

Flash himself wasn't much to look at either, on closer inspection. Maybe Addy was just more used to interesting
people - Hank, Kara, even Alex - but Flash was just... bland. He had short brown hair that sort of stuck up around the
crown of his head, a very lightly freckled face - with most of the freckles being condensed around his cheekbones -
big eyebrows, lidded eyes, a smattering of stubble and ears that just barely stuck out.

Kara glanced away from Flash, mouth stopping mid-speech, her face lighting up once she caught sight of Addy.
Addy couldn't help the warm feeling in her stomach, that twisty happiness that she normally got when she thought
about Taylor. Their relationship wasn't perfectly repaired, Kara had been right in that it had only been a week, and
tension was still there, but the improvements had been nice. Comforting.

Addy liked being smiled at, liked this Kara even more than she did the Kara pre-red kryptonite. This Kara was trying
much harder than the original, this Kara cared, but in a way that didn't feel vaguely insulting. She could be a bit clingy,
but that was a small price to pay for something so comfortable.

Kara raised her arm, waving. “Addy!” She called out, before something like comprehension dawned on her face and
her lips formed an aborted attempt at blurting out what Addy was pretty sure was 'shit', one hand coming to rest
over her mouth.

Why, exactly—well, Addy couldn't be sure. Kara was just like that sometimes. Tugging her bag up over one shoulder
and trekking forward, she snaked her hand into her pocket, and glanced Flash's way.

Flash's look was, by comparison, significantly less enthusiastic. He looked at her with something between confusion
and bewilderment, eyes skipping between her stump, her clothes, and her face.

Coming to a stop a few feet in front of them, Addy opened her mouth, if only to find out what about her exactly was
so amusing to look at, and—

“Gosh, I'm so sorry Addy—I already told him my identity and I just—”

Addy glanced back towards Kara, who was fretfully looking between the two of them. She blinked, tilted her head,
and thought back to some of the lessons Annette had pushed on Taylor in her youth. Good manners would save the
day, she always said.

Tugging her hand out, Addy extended it towards the possible answer to all of her problems. “I am Addy Queen,” she
announced, cutting to the point.

Kara made a noise behind her, somewhere between relieved and wounded.

Flash glanced between her hand and her face, before finally reaching out with his free arm, taking it and giving it a
shake. “I'm Barry Allen, and—uh, you have one arm.”

"I do," Addy agreed, and even went as far as to bump her stump against the side of her torso for emphasis. "You are
very bland to look at."

Barry's face scrunched for a moment, looking almost wounded, before it smoothed out into something like humour.
"I guess I deserved that," he admitted.

Addy really wasn't sure what he was going on about. She'd thought they had been making obvious observations of
their peers.

But, still, maybe he did. Reality was like that sometimes: deeply unfair, callous, and yet deserved.

Letting go of his hand, Addy spared a glance down the length of the mostly-abandoned strip mall. Kara swore by the
fact that all the cameras were out of commission due to Livewire, back before she'd disappeared, and that it was
one of the very few places they could change without ducking into an abandoned building of some kind.

Personally, despite how dirty something like a decomissioned factory would be, Addy wasn't completely sure she
wouldn't've preferred it to the bathroom she just used.

Neither Kara nor Barry were making any attempt to move or do anything in particular. They just kept fidgeting,
standing there awkwardly, spinning their wheels.

"Can we go now?" Addy tried, instead, because while she wasn't terribly interested in getting back to work, she also
liked it more than the long stretch of stained linoleum she was currently standing on.

Kara jolted. "Oh! Right, yeah. Let's get going!"

"So, you're really an alien?" Barry half-whispered, glancing towards Kara as the three of them made their way towards
the ever-towering CatCo building.

Kara smiled, though it was a touch strained. "Yup." She even popped the 'p' when she said it. Addy thought it was
pretty cool. "Earth's my home, though. I think that's what matters."

"Hey, no disagreement there," Barry said, hands raised up in the universal show of surrender. "I uh, took some time to
check some newspapers. You're doing good work, it's really weird to not see S.T.A.R. Labs anywhere, though. All the
tech news is taken up by LordTech and Luthor Corp."

Kara's face tightened at the last one, though from the way Barry kept staring on, he probably hadn't caught it.

She had, however, because she wasn't distractable despite what Kara would say, and made a mental note to go
looking up Luthor-related topics. It seemed important.

"You're from another dimension, then?" Kara switched tracks and clearly didn't try to be subtle about it.

Barry, again, missed it. She was the one who was bad at social cues, the fact that he was worse was starting to
become a worrying trend. "Yeah! I—uh, I'm from Earth-1."

"We're not Earth-1?" Kara said, voice somehow both teasing and mildly offended.

"Nope." Barry copied Kara's impeccable 'p' popping abilities, his voice gratified. "That's us. We started this mess, we
get to name it."

Kara conceded to that with a nod, the conversation dying as CatCo grew ever-larger.

"...But, seriously, aliens?" Barry asked after another moment, his voice pitched low. "Like, E.T?"

Kara glanced his way again. "Does your world not have aliens?"

"Don't think so?"

"No Superman?"

"Who?"

Kara's mouth thinned into a line, visibly processing something. "Well, I hope that just means Krypton didn't explode
over there," she said, voice thin.

That much, at least, Barry seemed to have noticed. Thankfully, Addy was starting to get a little worried—that perhaps
even social norms were different from where he'd come from.

"Did I just step on a landmine?" He asked, almost to himself.

Kara smiled at him again, and this time it was a bit less forced. "No, sorry, it's just—the reason me and my cousin are
here? It's because our planet died. We were sent away in pods—and so, I'm hoping that Superman's absence is
because Krypton never died, and not because we never made it."

Addy wasn't sure what to do with this information. She wanted to step in, to say something, because she was
starting to notice that there was more to it than that. Something about how Kara was handling the topic, the way she
spoke about it, it sounded almost... bitter.

Blinking, Addy took a quick step forward, reached out, and gently pat Kara on the head.

Kara huffed noisily. "I'm okay, Addy," she said, and at least this time around it sounded like it too.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Barry scratch at his chin, looking both awkward and guilty.

Pulling her hand away, Addy let herself fall back the few feet of space she'd been putting between herself and the
duo in front of her. Personal space was important. Perhaps not as important as colours or the textures of things, but
she needed it, and Kara understood that.

"Anyone want something from Noonan's?" Kara asked, if a bit belatedly, suddenly beginning to take the stairs leading
up to the front entrance of CatCo in twos.

...She was significantly less interested in that. Noonan's was nice, sure, but she didn't want anything. She wasn't
hungry, wasn't even thirsty, but going by the way Kara was staring resolutely at her, she probably was about to get
something regardless.

Pointedly glancing away, Addy tried to glimpse the very top of the CatCo building. She couldn't manage it, but it beat
being on the end of one of Kara's staring contests.

"Noonan's?" Barry asked, ignorant to the complex politics at play.

"It's a cafe located on the bottom floor of the building we're about to go to. They have good coffee, donuts,
croissants, pies, baklava, pudding, beaver tails, pretzels..." Kara went on, and on, and on. Addy was pretty sure she
was just listing the menu from top to bottom, even.

Barry stared vacantly at her as they walked, distracted enough to nearly careen into someone, who then proceeded
to yell a handful of profanities their way before bustling off back down the stairs behind them.

"...and cakes," Kara finished brightly, sounding excited. She had probably just worked herself up by going over them,
hadn't she?

Addy tried not to worry.

"Can I just—get a coffee?"

Kara stared at him with no small amount of intensity. "Drip, pour, cold, espresso or ristretto?"

"Just... what do you normally order?" Barry tried weakly.

That was a mistake.

"An espresso," Kara said, confidently, and Addy could already hear the following sentence because she'd gone
through this exact thing when she'd shown even a modicum of interest in coffee for the tenth of a second it took her
to realize it tasted nothing like it smelled. "How do you want it?"

"...How can I get it?"

That was also a mistake.

Kara opened her mouth, coming to a halt just next to the front doors, and in no order Addy could identify, began to
dutifully list every single solitary espresso she could reasonably obtain. Red eye, black eye, americano, long black,
macchiato, cortado, breve, cappuchino, and on, and on, and on.

It was obvious - to Addy, at least - that Kara sometimes forgot not everyone was Cat Grant. She could understand
the mistake, Kara devoted a particularly large portion of her life to tending for and meeting the woman's needs, but
Cat Grant was not a good representation of the average American. She was, in fact, the opposite, anal-retentive on
very specific things with a notoriously refined palate for very specific things.

Going by the way Barry's eyes had since started to glaze over, she was pretty sure he could not say the same.

"Look—just," Barry interrupted, struggling for a moment. "Just a coffee, please. A double-double, does your universe
do that? I went to one where they didn't, but surely that's fine, right?"

Kara bobbed her head, not missing a beat. "One coffee for you, one for me, and a juice for Addy."

Addy, having not been included in the decision-making process of that complete injustice, opened her mouth to
protest.

Kara had already pulled the front door open and slunk inside, leaving her in her metaphorical dust.

Addy shut her mouth with a click.

"So, um. Do we follow her in?" Barry asked after a moment, presumably to catch his bearings, because Kara could
just be like that sometimes.

Addy shrugged. "We need to arrive at the elevators to head up to our workplace. If you wish to stay out here, you can,
I am personally not a fan of how Noonan's smells."

"Is it bad?" Barry asked, looking a bit nervously through the glass door. Addy followed his gaze, caught sight of
Kara's blonde ponytail as it bobbed and weaved between the people milling around the front counter.

Flicking her eyes back to the dimension traveller, Addy shook her head. "No, it's just very... intense. I get
overwhelmed easily, it's better in the mornings, but now they're probably making a lot of pastries since they would've
run out by now, and therefore it smells."

She ignored Barry's sigh of relief. As though he was, what, worried Kara would poison him? Possibly give him
something he didn't like? That was a poor opinion of her.

Then again, Kara was rather pushy when she was excited, and despite everything, Addy was pretty sure she was very
excited about meeting a new superhero other than herself. She could forgive that much, she supposed; it wasn't like
she hadn't been overwhelmed by Kara before.

"So, uh, you've got powers too?" Barry tried, after another moment of hesitation.

Addy nodded.

"What are they?"

Was he fishing for intel? Probably not. Interdimensional though he may be, it wasn't as though he was an imminant
threat to her, and he already knew her civilian identity. "I have super strength, I am very durable, I can fly"—"I'm
starting to sense a pattern," Barry chimed in, somewhat pointlessly—"and I am psychic."

Barry stared at her for a moment, a curious tilt to his head. "You can read minds?"

Addy nodded.

"What am I thinking?"

...Why was he—oh, he wanted her to prove her abilities. Okay, she could do that. Reaching out to her coreself, she
flicked it on, switched to the 'human' template, and reached out—

—"My god she's tall. Like, at least six foot, that's huge, wait, shit, I need to think of something nice, she's probably
reading my mind right now—"—

—and promptly shut it off.

"I don't think I am much beyond the norm in terms of height," Addy said, feeling her brows wrinkle together in an
unvoiced protest.

"The average woman is like, five-six," Barry said rather aptly. "So you are above the average, six foot is pretty tall,
even for a man."

There was a pause before Barry's face scrunched into something like recognition mixed with horror. "Not that being
tall is a bad thing, or makes you a man!" He rushed to clarify, almost babbling. It might've been endearing, if it wasn't
pointless. "I'm sure you'll be able to find the right guy—or, uh, girl, I don't judge!—who would love you for it anyway!"

Addy more felt than made her face wrinkle up in protest. "I don't think I want anyone like that," she said, rather
simply.

Barry's face crumpled. "You can't just give up because some people were mean or rude about your height, like,
people are awful! I grew up bullied and stuff because of things outside of my control, but I never gave up hope that
someone would like me for who I am. You shouldn't either."

What.

"I don't want one," she said, again, because she wasn't sure what else to say in response to the verbal diarrhea just
thrown her way.

Barry blinked back. "You... don't."

"I am asexual."

She got another blank look. "I have no idea what that is."

The front doors opened, Kara peeking her head in through. "It means she's not sexually attracted to other people,"
she announced, one hand clutching a tray of drinks while her other arm curled around a brown bag, no doubt stuffed
with high-calorie, sugary foods that Addy wasn't very fond of. "You guys do know we have to, like, go in, right?"

Barry, apparently still processing, nodded along dumbly. "Right, yeah, I'll—look that up? Or something. I think."

"You should," Addy agreed. "You lack a lot of pertinent information, it's worrying."

Barry shot her another wounded look.

She ignored it.

“That is not how dimension travel works!” Addy yelled, her voice higher than she normally let it get.

Barry, hunched into the seat with shoulders high and arms crossed, stared back mutinously. “But it is!” He argued,
loudly. Like a moron who was stupid and didn’t know what he was talking about. “That’s how it works! Do you want
me to write down the math for you, because I will if it will mean you’ll stop yelling at me!”

Dimension travel wasn’t fun and games, and he had arbitrarily come to the belief that apparently, if he just ran fast
enough, in just the right way, he could vibrate into another dimension. As though separate dimensions were based on
unique frequencies or something equally ridiculous. He was wrong, very wrong. Wrong in a stupid way too, not in the
fun way that humans were normally wrong, like when they personified random acts of chance and chemistry as
gods.

“Fine!” Addy shouted, for maybe not the first time, but it felt like it. “Show me!” She motioned at the whiteboard,
where he’d drawn his stupid little incorrect very dumb very wrong diagram about how the multiversal mesh worked.

Barry just about leapt from his seat, snatching the whiteboard marker up with a snarl and stomping his way over to
the whiteboard, using the sleeve of his dumb, ugly jacket to begin scrubbing off his equally wrong and dumb
diagram.

“Are you sure you checked for, er, y’know?” Kara’s voice asked, somewhere behind her.

Someone shuffled. “I did a full-building sweep for the specific type of radiation it gives off,” Winn replied equally,
sounding exasperated. “She isn’t infected.”

“But then why is she—”

Addy wheeled, feeling for the first time like she was at the end of her rope. She normally liked that saying, because it
was very evocative of the stomach-plummeting feeling as the last bit of patience snaps and you lose control, but
then she’d only ever experienced that vicariously through Taylor until now. “I’m acting like this,” she started, trying not
to yell and managing it somewhat, though Winn still shrunk back like a spooked dog, clutching his tablet to his
chest. “Because dimension travel could fix so much for me. It could help provide short-term remedies for my power
issue, among other things, and he’s over there telling me he vibrates to pass dimensions!”

Honestly, it was like they didn’t get it! This was huge—impossibly important. If she booted up her task list and
automatically inserted her priorities, this entire thing would be priority-prime, effectively unbreakable because it was
so necessary. Her functions had been heavily crippled due to her disconnect from the network, she could no longer
utilize other tools. Her coreself was effectively isolated and trapped on a barren planet on a universe almost
completely disconnected from this one and it would no longer be if she could pass through dimensions.

“Because I can,” Barry said, stupidly. Like a moron. Addy turned on him next, only to find him standing next to the
whiteboard, marker in hand, the full breadth of his mathematical falsehood written out for her.

She ignored him, marched up to the whiteboard, and took it in. Accessing the calculative part of her coreself was
instant, and she fed the information through, adjusted to some of the observed differences in this universe, applied
her own understanding of multiversal theory, and—

...

She ran it again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

But, that—it—

She ran it again. And again. And ran it at twice the power for nearly three cycles. She adjusted for variables, included
all the power-expensive options, even let herself get fractional strings and—and—

“Why is this right?” Addy asked, voice completely blank.

Because it was. No matter how she ran it, how she twisted it, it came out solid. No errors, no weird predictions of
infinite density like the human’s piteous theory of relativity. It was rock solid, something she expected to calculate
herself, with no margins for error. The entire string, the entire concept, it was all-encompassing, existing perfectly
alongside her own theoretical framework. It completed it.

And it was wrong, because that was not how dimensions worked. It was not how multiversal travel worked, and she
should know, her kin had been born on a planet which passed through a ragged crack in spacetime and occasionally
shunted individuals into alternative versions of said planet. Dimensional travel was, in almost every way, a
fundamental understanding for her kind, and had only been further augmented by years of subsumption.

Her understanding of dimensional travel was perfect.

It should be.

Then why wasn’t it?

“See?” Barry started, voice gloating. “I was right, now you can’t—” the rest of his words came out muffled, likely
blocked by some sort of intrusion. She wasn’t listening.

“Hey, Addy,” Kara’s voice said, so soft, soothing. She was resting her hand on her shoulder, but she almost couldn’t
feel it. “We already knew there’d be some differences.”

This wasn’t just a difference, though. This was a complete restructuring of her framework of the universe. This
established rules, concrete ones. She was already readjusting to this new information and it was taking the
foundation out of her baser knowledge. How much else had she gotten wrong? What else was she missing? None of
this made sense, and yet as she incorporated the data, everything did.

Baseline calculations were already spitting out wildly divergent theories, such as the possibility of there being a 5th
dimensional pocket of spacetime in which things could exist, that things from outer dimensions could co-exist in
this one despite the closest she personally had gotten to that was the capacity to interface with extra-dimensional
things because that had not been fundamentally allowed by the universe.

“What?” Barry’s voice said, again, somewhere from behind her.

Winn made a noise. “Dude,” he tried to whisper, and failed. “She’s clearly freaking out about this, don’t be an ass.”

“Why should it upset her? Outside of me being right,” Barry tried to whisper back.

Kara said something. She was still processing.

“Because she comes from an alternative universe and you likely just upended the logic she works from!” Winn hissed.

It even predicted weirder things, such as energy being capable of being intertwined with certain states of mind. How
much had she been relying on the new logic to run telepathic attacks? A lot, apparently. She would need to adjust,
the energy loss would be lower, but it was still bothering her. This upset her entire foundation of reality. She couldn’t
deal with this.

Because, as predicted, it meant there was no getting back. It shouldn’t’ve hurt, she’d made her for herself a good life
and she knew better than to expect people from Earth Bet to willingly welcome her back in. She was piloting the
body of a person they either loved or viscerally feared. But it still would’ve been a comfort to say that she could, that
she could go back.

But this made it clear she couldn’t. Ever. There was no path to reach across the dimensional mesh because the
mesh did not properly align anymore. There had never been a way to reestablish an access point to her original
multiverse, because by her own calculations wherever she had been dragged, however she had been brought here, it
was... separate. It worked differently, it was as though a second big bang had taken place somewhere out in the
timeless, spatially impossible void that would need to exist to host it and an entirely new universe under utterly
different paradigms in almost exactly the same composition took shape.

There was no real way to quantify it, no way to really put into emphasis what this meant. She had to readjust
everything, even the baser laws of thermodynamics were now ever-so-slightly different. She needed time, time to...
she wasn’t sure. It felt like a hole in her chest, she felt wrong, but she didn’t feel upset about not being able to
reconnect to the network. Not really. She didn’t like it, but it wasn’t upset, but it still hurt. She hated it, she hated not
understanding what she was feeling; she had a bad enough time figuring out other people in the first place.

Nothing made sense anymore.

“Can I go home?” She asked, still staring at the whiteboard.

There was some shuffling behind her. “Yeah,” Winn said, at last. “I’ll cover for you, alright?”

“Addy?” Kara tried, but Addy... couldn’t, right now. It was a very odd feeling.

“I thought she was a metahuman?” Barry interrupted, sounding confused.

Addy, slowly, forced her head back around. Right. That was the other aspect. His powers. She stared at him, and he
stared back, though the wrinkles on his face said he didn’t much like it. She didn’t either, but then eye-contact was
bad in general. “Explain your powers.”

Barry’s face scrunched more, but into a more angry way, before settling. “Well, I can go really fast.”

“Where do they come from,” Addy cut in.

“...The metagene—wait, do you guys not have metahumans?” Barry asked, glancing around. “Random and sudden
occurrences of spontaneous superpowers?”

“We have Livewire,” Kara piped up. “Or, at least, we did. She kinda went missing again and nobody has seen hide nor
hair of her since.”

“Well,” Barry began, voice taking on the sort of tone that meant he felt like he had to explain something very simple.
“Most living things, as far as we can tell, have a metagene. It’s dormant, normally, but if you get in just the right sort
of environment, it can activate. It... kinda breaks the laws of physics? A lot? It’s... it’s a gene, yes, but uh, it does
things weirdly.”

That... did not sound right. But, again, what did she know? Nothing, apparently. “How did you get your powers?”

That got a wince out of Barry. “Particle accelerator accident. It caused me and a bunch of others to end up with
powers, something about how the dark matter interacted with the gene, which activated it. It varied wildly with each
person, some got lightning powers, I got speed, for example. That sort of thing.”

“How widespread is it?” Addy continued, already processing, because she had a thought. It was very tenuous, but
she was already processing, it was helping distract from the crushing reality that she had been wrong. Very, very
wrong. She disliked being wrong and would take steps to ensure it never happened again.

“Er,” Barry faltered again, looking at her oddly. “We’re not entirely sure? But that’s kinda the thing—this is my own
personal theory, so grain of salt, but the gene isn’t... It isn’t unique to humans, but not like, because we have dogs
suddenly flying? It’s more that the gene, its existence, it’s... universal. Most people who know about it would just
shrug it off as another oddity for the metagene, but like, I’m pretty sure it’s universal in the literal sense here.”

Working that into the equation wasn’t difficult. The hunch was getting stronger, she was processing faster, it wasn’t
hard to put two-and-two together. Kara’s absurd abilities, drawn seemingly from an evolutionary predisposition
towards sunbathing, other aliens with their own reality-defying abilities. The prevalence of telepathy, of the relative
uniformity of alien shapes—species when she had been a shard had been wildly diverse in appearance, but most in
this universe trended towards bipedal with two arms and one head.

Oh.

It clicked. She could focus on this, this was new and exciting, she had ideas now. That gene? Barry might be right,
unfortunately. Kara’s abilities, they weren’t derived from evolutionary pressure as she expected. The gene was
random, as explained, and at some point in her species' history someone must’ve activated one on Krypton. It laid
dormant, the hosts unaware, because Kryptonians couldn’t siphon energy from a red sun, but it had spread, become
dominant among the species.

There was something odd here. A gene shouldn’t be able to do as much, but then again she was being faced with
new realities every day. She could work with this, she would need some time and some way to process things but,
but—

Snapping her head around to Barry, Addy stared at him. “I need you to bleed,” she explained matter-of-factly.

Barry spluttered. “I thought you’d forgiven me!”

How was that relevant? “I need it for study,” she clarified, glancing around for a sharp object and finding a pen. She
reached for it, only to be stopped by Kara.

“Addy,” she said, sounding almost tired. “I can get a needle. Don’t try to stab people with pens.”

She’d keep that in mind.

“I still haven’t agreed to any of this? You all know that, right?” Barry interrupted.

Kara let go of Addy’s arm. “Please?” She asked, sounding a bit awkward. “I know this is weird but, like, if it can help
Addy figure something out?”

Barry stared, and stared, and stared. Finally, after a long moment, he sighed. “Fine, but only once, if you lose this
blood I don’t care because I am not letting you stab me with anything after that point.”

Addy still thought the pen would’ve been quicker.

“Alright, give it here,” Alex said, holding out one arm.

Addy dutifully handed the vial of blood over.

The apartment was pretty packed, despite everything else that had happened today. She didn’t really want it to be,
but then today was the one day they could manage to put together to ensure everyone could get here. Supposedly,
Alex’s new boss was being very unfair in scheduling.

Still, she also didn’t totally mind it. Coming down from realizing her entire world was fundamentally different to how
it was before had been... difficult, yes, but not so bad that she felt like she needed to lay on her bed and try not to
think for a while.

She could hear James, Winn and Lucy talking to one-another somewhere behind her, a low murmur of chatter. Kara
was still absent, having gone to see Barry off, and the air smelled pungently of Kara’s more favourite foods. It wasn’t
perfect, she wanted it to be less intense, it felt like everything was too loud, too much, but she had endured
significantly more for less, so she could deal with this.

Alex tucked the vial away into a small metal clamshell container, clicking it shut shortly after and slipping it into her
bag. “I’m not sure what I’ll get out of sequencing it, but I’ll tell you, alright?”

Addy liked this version of Alex, honestly. She knew that Alex didn’t totally see her as an equal, or at least that Alex
had difficulties reconciling her outward presentation with the vast sums of knowledge she had access to. Still, like
Kara, she was taking steps, and this was one of them. Alex was taciturn, but not unkind, professional and very
straightforward. Honestly, Addy thought Alex and Taylor would’ve gotten along really well. “Thank you.”

Alex smiled a bit awkwardly. “It’s really not a problem, the current head of the D.E.O. has me basically on-base all the
time. I’m barred from any actual operations.”

“Did you know they wanted me to come in as a military affiliate for your interrogation?” Lucy piped up, causing
James, sitting next to her, to startle. He shot her a worried look, but she just rolled her eyes at him, flicking him on
the nose. “I said no, obviously, but they offered. I think my dad wanted me back in, pulled some strings, otherwise
the salary they were offering me would’ve had a few fewer zeroes.”

“I guess we can all be glad you didn’t, then,” Alex said with a sort of forced calm. The idea probably terrified Alex,
though whether it was the idea of Lucy knowing her well enough to out her true involvement with J’onn - being an
accomplice to what was technically a wildly illegal act - or simply because the idea of Lucy being in a position of
unmatched authority over her was deeply unsettling, Addy couldn’t tell.

Lucy just snorted, flipping one leg over the other and wagging her foot in Alex’s general direction. “I wasn’t even
tempted, I’ll admit, but it did cross my desk. You can now thank me for saving your job.”

Alex’s face scrunched, but not in that bad, bitter way. More in the playful way she’d seen her glare at Kara. “That’s an
awful lot of smug, Little Lane.”

Lucy’s foot waggle stopped mid-motion, her eyes narrowed dangerously. “Where’d you hear that?” She asked, voice
all sweet and happy and somehow more intimidating for it.

Alex’s face broke into a broad, shit-eating smile. “I’m going to let you figure that out on your own.”

Lucy’s head snapped around to James. He brought both of his hands up in a silent surrender, shaking his head. It
went to Winn, who shrunk back and shook his head like he might manage to detach it from his shoulders.

Then she turned to her.

Addy blinked. “Why would I call you that?” She asked, simply. “I have no context for what a ‘Large Lane’ might look
like, why would I call you little without the proper context?” Outside of an actual lane on a paved street, in any event.

Lucy’s head snapped back around to Alex.

Alex just shrugged, grin broad.

The front door behind her opened. Addy craned her head around, catching sight of a slightly haggard-looking Kara
with a few smudges of dirt on her chin. She waved.

Kara, tiredly, waved back.

“I swear to god, Alex,” Lucy said, voice thick with harmful intent. “You tell me or so help me go—”

“I sent Barry back,” Kara announced, stepping fully in through the threshold.

She could all but hear Lucy’s head snap around. “Kara did you tell your sister about what Miss Grant calls me?!”

Kara jolted, probably because she hadn’t expected being snarled at. Addy could sympathize. “What? No. Alex, what
did you do?”

“Me?” Alex interrupted, sounding faux-affronted. “Why, I just called her by her title.”

Kara’s face scrunched in confusion. “Lieutenant?”

Lucy made a garbled, offended noise. “Major, Kara, I’m a Major.”

Kara bumbled on past, nodding thoughtfully as she marched her way towards the fridge. “Sorry, Major.”

Addy glanced back down at the screen of her computer, still working through a few tricky problems that Winn had
refused to even give her hints on. Python was turning out to be wonderfully complicated, as it would turn out.

“No, but, really. What did she call you?” Kara said from the kitchen.

There was no response.

“Guys?”

Addy glanced up just in time to see the four other occupants - excluding herself and Kara - rise in sync from their
seats. Their expressions were glazed-over, empty, completely vacant, without any comprehension whatsoever.
Without even a moment’s hesitation, the three began to walk, a steady stomp-stomp-stomp of synchronized
footfalls.

Addy pushed her laptop to the side, easing it up onto the table next to her chair. Winn was almost at the door
already, arm outstretched to try to pull it open.

Scrambling to her feet, Addy pushed aside the thoughts that maybe they just wanted to leave, that maybe someone
else was giving her a cold shoulder, that they’d turn and yell and scream at her for interrupting them and tugged on
her flight, jarring forward just fast enough to ease herself between Winn and the door, arms outstretched.

Winn twisted the knob, pulled, and Addy didn’t budge.

He tried again. And again. And again.

Kara scrambled out from the kitchen, her eyes wide, horrified. Addy watched something in her ease at the sight of
what was going on - Winn trying repeatedly to open the door, the three other odd-acting-people waiting patiently
behind him in a line - but nothing about her face was calm or collected.

“Kara?” Addy asked, feeling the bump of the door against her back.

Kara’s throat bobbed. “It’s happening outside,” she said, at last. “The streets—there are hundreds, thousands of
people out there.”

Addy trained her eyes down towards Winn, the way he kept trying to open the door, the glazed look on his face. She
held back on the urge to dig into his brain, to reach out to him, to activate her powers. Just in case, she had to be
sure that she wouldn’t hurt any of them, that she wouldn’t be alone again.

She glanced back up.

Kara met her gaze, her face twisted. “Can you fix them?” She asked weakly.

Addy glanced back down, felt the steady thump-thump-thump of the door against her back, the sound of the knob
clattering as Winn tried and tried and tried and instead of getting upset or pouting when he didn’t succeed he just,
kept going. It was the opposite of Winn, of who he was, of how he acted.

Something was controlling him. She wanted to check, wanted to make sure, but again, it was a risk, wasn’t it?

A risk she didn’t want to take. But she’d have to, wouldn’t she? Because she didn’t know what was happening, why
other people were like this. She wasn’t sure why she wasn’t affected, why she couldn’t feel whatever great presence
had overtaken everyone else but her and Kara.

“I don’t know,” Addy said, and it was the truth.

Last edited: Sep 25, 2020
 576

OxfordOctopus Sep 24, 2020 View discussion

Threadmarks: SEASON 1 - EPISODE 17 View content

OxfordOctopus She/Her
(Unverified Jackanape)

Sep 29, 2020  #1,156

EPISODE 17​
Addy watched Kara pace back and forth, the rhythmic sound of her footfalls not even remotely soothing despite
having been a source of calm not too long ago. She was muttering under her breath rapidly, in a language Addy
couldn’t speak, and every once and a while her head would snap up, eyes staring off towards something Addy
couldn’t see, before yanking itself back down.

Behind her, attached to various pieces of furniture, were the four others she’d started the night off with. Lucy had
been attached to a kitchen chair with duct tape, wrapped at least four or five times around, not that it had stopped
her from attempting to slowly inch her way towards the door. James had gotten much of the same treatment,
though his surprising strength had necessitated he be taped to the recliner, and with more than a few additional
layers of duct tape.

Alex and Winn had been a struggle in a different way. Alex was, unsurprisingly, significantly more strong than anyone
in the room bar herself or Kara, including James, and as a result, had been the only person Kara had tied up with
rope. Both legs had been tied, and then her arms had been tied down to her torso. Where, exactly, Kara had procured
the rope from—well, that was a question for later, but nevertheless she’d been hogtied and left laying on the couch,
where she kept trying to wiggle off, much to Kara’s very verbal frustration.

Finally, there was Winn. Unlike the other three, somehow he’d retained more of his cognitive abilities, and the three
attempts at taping him down had quickly ended in him adjusting to pull the tape off. Kara had, on her fourth attempt
to restrain him, resorted to locking him in the bathroom and wedging her heavy oak dresser beneath the knob.

She could still hear the steady clack-clack-clack of his continued attempts to break free, not that he appeared to be
getting very far.

Addy wasn’t really sure what to do with herself. She’d been running through a small tasklist of sensory tuning
protocols, just to see if she could identify the source of the mind control, to little success. That either pointed
towards something that wasn’t broadcast at all, that she was dealing with something everyone had simultaneously
digested and was now controlling them, or she was working with something deeply alien or very encrypted.

Which, as any sane person might understand, worried her. Observations on how those under the influence of the
unknown controller pointed towards the entire thing being mostly compulsion based. Simplistic commands that
people were unable to resist, as if it had been direct puppeting, that would’ve necessitated someone controlling
every living human being in the local region simultaneously. She, personally, could do it; given a requisite amount of
energy and some way to unnaturally amplify her range, but Addy was relatively certain little else could say the same.

That, combined with the fact that everyone was acting, broadly speaking, very stupid—that only Winn, for whatever
reason, appeared to be capable of removing things preventing them from carrying out tasks, almost certainly
reaffirmed the compulsion idea. She’d done plenty of personal research into compulsion-based control in previous
cycles, there were limitations to it, but it was effective if you were constrained in terms of processing ability. Rather
than control someone from the nervous system down, dictating every movement, every breath in or out, you could
just simply get them to do the thing you wanted while they were unable to resist.

It just so happened that, if a compulsion was significantly strong enough, people started showing degrees of tunnel
vision behaviour that only got worse the more absolute a compulsion was. If a being’s entire mind is devoted to a
singular task, or at least the majority of it, the person will begin to forget to use basic tools that would expedite the
process. The fact that Alex, among some of the more clever people Addy had the pleasure of meeting, could not
fathom trying to free herself from the ropes and was instead trying very stubbornly to roll off of a couch while her
sister repeatedly put her back on it, pointed towards a similar trend there.

Altogether, this meant that whatever was controlling people was vast, powerful, and nearly undetectable.

Thus, her justifiable fear towards actively trying to break it. Which she had relayed to Kara, and which was the reason
why she was pacing back and forth, gnawing on her lip and looking very heartbroken about things. Addy could
vaguely relate, in a distant sense, she understood what Kara was likely coming to terms with right now—that they
needed to handle this problem before they could go out to find out what was causing it in the first place, and that
required an attempt to subvert the control, which required her to choose someone to possibly risk being rendered
braindead.

The worst part was, Addy had no real frame of reference for what the percentage chance of it was, outside of
relatively low. That was the problem with psychic abilities and mind control—the sort of connections that did things
like this, they weren’t easy to break, and more to the point, it was generally somewhat dangerous to do so. Having
that degree of control over someone’s autonomy meant you were interfacing with some extremely important parts
of the human brain, and having personally dealt with it herself, Addy was confident in saying that human brains were
unfortunately very, very fragile and prone to never quite being able to be fixed if or when they break.

Which left them here. In limbo, while Kara paced and muttered and Addy tried not to count the grains on the ceiling
as she leaned against the front door, looking for any sign of what exactly was controlling people.

If she’d known this sort of thing was coming, Addy was pretty sure she could’ve shielded them from it. It wasn’t
preventing whatever was controlling them from doing so that was the danger, it was the sudden and abrupt removal
of that control. Generally, as a rule, psychic interfacing was easier to prevent than it was to break in the moment, and
significantly less costly to boot.

At this point, she was working through various interdimensional psychic frequencies, the sorts that she worked off
of, not that she particularly expected to find it there.

Kara’s head snapped up again, and Addy watched her crane her neck around to stare at something off towards the
big main window near the back of the apartment. For a moment, she was certain Kara would look away, but then she
tilted her head, squinted, and breathed out noisily.

“There are two buildings on fire,” she said, almost blankly. “I think from people leaving their stoves on. I need to go
and stop it before it spreads, because the fire department isn't responding to it.”

Addy nodded, slowly. “I can keep watch of them.” Though she wasn’t looking forward to being the one to stop Alex
from falling onto the floor repeatedly.

“I—” Kara paused, swallowed again. “About the mind control, you said the chance was?”

She blinked. “Low, but not insignificant.” Which was about the best way to put it; there were too many unknowns to
make an accurate statement to any end, but the fact that there were unknowns in the first place was what made it
so dangerous. If the control was deep-seated enough, and was sufficiently primed to retaliate in the event it felt
another psychic presence near it, then the chance of damage to the brain was significant.

Kara nodded a bit jerkily, breathing in, then out. She reached for her cape - she’d switched into her suit not long after
they’d tied the majority of her friends down - and toyed with the edge, pinching the fabric almost nervously. Her face
was pale, eyes a bit too wide, and her lips were thinned out, slanted awkwardly—somewhere between a grimace, a
resting face, and a frown.

She was guilty. Addy could see the signs of it, had lived through an endless deluge of stares like that in Taylor’s
memories. Danny had been the generator of the vast majority of them, he had always been an apologetic man, and
that hadn’t been helped any by the death of his wife and the brief period of neglect his child underwent as a
consequence.

Kara was guilty, and scared, and worried, and tired. She was so many things.

But Addy could help.

“If you leave without telling me not to,” she said into the silence of the room, Kara jolting a bit, eyes flicking towards
her. “I can choose someone to try to free their minds for you. If you just leave and don’t tell me not to.”

Addy liked people who could carry their own burdens, who would work through things. Taylor had been one of them,
Taylor had all but been beholden to her emotional burdens and eager to add more to her back. She had snubbed
every chance at an easy out, controlled by her need to prove herself worthy. Kara was the same, to a point, though
she handled the emotional aspect of it significantly better, and had a proper support network to blunt the edge of
that poor behavioural pattern.

Kara just stared at her for a moment, blank-faced, almost uncomprehending.

Addy just stared back, arm folded behind her back.

But then, Taylor hadn’t been given an out, all of that time ago. There were ones available, but none of them had ever
been offered or considered. She didn’t have someone who could help her, who could do or make the tougher
choices.

She could do that, now. It was far too late for Taylor, but not for Kara.

She could take those burdens.

“No, Addy,” Kara said, voice settling into something firm. It startled her, not that she let it show on her face. “No, this
is—if this is a decision we make, we do it together.”

But. She could handle it, she could do those things, she could make others hurt less. She could be useful. “I—”

“If you thought you were about to cause something catastrophic to fail, could you stop it before it happened?” Kara
interrupted, something in her voice having settled. Her shoulders were broad, she stared at her, eye-to-eye, and Addy
had to resist the urge to cringe away from it. Her eyes were focused, her entire posture had changed, something
about it was confident, more Kara, less the panicked woman she’d watched pace in place for the last fifteen
minutes.

Shaking away the thoughts, Addy considered. “Possibly?” She was powerful, and had fine-detailed control, but part
of the problem was that psychic retaliation was almost always near-instant. She’d need to be ready for it, if it
happened, and it might happen the very second she initiated a connection with the other party. “They’d need to be
someone I was more familiar with, that and someone possibly with a more durable mind, or at least someone who
might be able to resist the influence to some degree.”

Kara’s head turned, and Addy followed it, her eyes ending up pointed towards the bathroom. The door shuddered
against another attempt to open it, wood-on-wood clattering reaching her ears alongside the persistent rattle of a
metal knob trying to be jarred free.

“We’re in this together,” Kara said, not looking away from the door. “So, we don’t have to, but if you think...”

Addy blinked, processed for a moment. Winn was important, not important like Kara or Taylor, but getting up there.
He had been supportive, had made her a suit, taught her things he knew she didn’t need but appreciated because
she liked learning. He did a lot for her, even despite his misgivings about her abilities at times. That and what he
called her ‘casual breach of privacy’ about his wallet, but they had been working on that too.

She could be responsible for the death of his mind if things went poorly. He could be taken out of her life. She could
be separated from someone important again.

Kara’s hand came to rest on her stump, jolting Addy out of her thoughts. She’d approached at one point, and was
looking up at her with something like quiet comfort on her face.

Addy swallowed, her throat was thick, it almost hurt.

“El mayarah—it means ‘stronger together’,” Kara began, her thumb drawing soothing little circles on the skin just
below her shoulder. “It’s the motto of the house of El. Even if it's not official yet, you’re still a part of that, Addy. We
make this decision together, we carry the burdens of the consequences together, so it can’t crush us.”

Addy breathed in, let it out. Her chest felt heavy, her head felt light. It was very distracting. She processed, and
processed, and tried and ran the limited numbers over in her head, and—and...

“Alright,” she said, letting her breath out again. Kara’s hand stopped, rose to grip her shoulder firmly, before letting
go.

Kara stepped forward and Addy followed after her, tracing the short path between the living area to Kara’s bedroom,
and then to the sole washroom in the apartment. The sound of wood-on-wood, of metal rattling, was louder up
close, more insistent, almost panicked. The knob would twist and turn at random, then the door would be pushed,
ramming against the dresser. Almost like someone had made a list of steps on how to open a door - twist knob,
push - and Winn was trying to follow them, albeit a half-step off rhythm.

Coming to a halt next to Kara, Addy felt her free hand get taken, fingers tightening around one another. She heard
Kara mutter those words again, el mayarah, a small whisper. It almost sounded like a prayer, like that time Taylor’s
grandmother had come to visit and everyone had to say grace, almost reverent.

Addy accessed her coreself sluggishly, pulled open the connection. She felt the broadcast jump through the
dimensional connection and then spread out from her. She shaped the exact specifics of her range, reduced it and
turned it into a cone directed out from her front.

She brushed a psychic tendril over Winn’s mind, and let herself in.

The influence was obvious now that she was sensing it. The amygdala and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex were
not so much shut down as they had been immensely stunted. Regions of the brain meant to moderate and allow for
things like hope and optimism. From there, the remainder of the psychic frequency was used to apply a broad-
reaching compulsion that she couldn’t quite decipher, but had something to do with relocating him to a nearby office
building.

The reason she hadn’t been able to sense the frequency, as it would happen, was because it had been everywhere
and nearly identical to the baseline frequency the world gave off. The frequency itself was being generated from
electrical devices, primarily ones connected to the internet, though it did so clumsily. Not that she could see signs
that a more direct operator was missing, that there was some unfinished piece of the psychic system itself. No, for
all that it was powerful and subtle, it was simplistic, meant to fulfil tasks by accessing the personal memories of
those under the influence and utilizing their expertise in the furthering of a project.

It was unguided, too. Less of a living psychic bandwidth as she was and more of a field, a blanket area it had under
its own control. Someone was operating it, she was pretty sure, but not interfacing with it. She would have noticed a
texture to it if they had, a signature that J’onn had—that even she had. She was almost sure other people could
sense them as well, but part of the reason why she could was that it was significantly less straining to have the
ability to sense the variance between psychic presences among shards than it was to embed a personal signature
with each broadcast and have someone process it once they received the data package.

It was not responding to her, because there was nobody there to respond to her with. The psychic frequency felt
bland, like the equivalent of plastic; uniform in ways it was not when naturally occurring. It was technological in
origin then, she guessed, or at least not something naturally produced.

She could subvert it too. Had she just tried to snap the connection, things might’ve gone bad. As she expected the
compulsions were nestled deep into the brain at this point and abruptly removing them could have any number of
side-effects, up to and including Winn suffering from long-term depressive episodes as a result of his brain learning
how to operate certain parts of it again. He could’ve also struggled with a lasting compulsion to be somewhere, or
even some neurological damage.

But that would’ve been if she’d simply snipped the connection. Now that she knew it was there, and it wasn’t
responding to her presence in any meaningful capacity, she could do so much more. Reaching out to it, she adjusted
her own frequency to match it, hiding just in case. It was hard to describe—there was nothing fundamentally
physical about the process, but she still coaxed her own presence over top the other and began, simply, to subsume
it, slipping into the cracks she ripped into it, replacing their control with her own, keeping the psychic system stable
as she wore down the previous presence until the connection snapped altogether.

She took a brief glance over Winn’s brain to ensure nothing had been damaged before, finally, pulling herself free.

The first thing she noticed, coming back into focus, was that the door had stopped rattling. Kara was still holding her
hand, but had started to lean forward, a bright look on her face, something like hope crawling over her features.

“Uh,” Winn’s voice said out from behind the door, sounding disoriented. “That was possibly the most uncomfortable
thing I have ever experienced.”

Kara let out a crow of triumph, and Addy tried not to smile so hard.

“I’m not going to ask how you know how to tie a sheet bend knot,” Alex groused as Kara finished untying the rope
around her arms, her fingers a blur of movement. “But couldn’t you have freed me first?”

James and Lucy were leaning against one-another off to the side, James a bit more frantically than Lucy, while Winn
had set up his computer on the desk and was typing quickly into it, shoulders locked. Alex and Kara were sitting
upright on the couch as the latter worked through the rope she’d wrapped around the former.

They were all under her influence, in a manner of speaking. She wasn’t actually doing much more than buffering their
brain from the outside frequency of the mind control, which continuously pressed against everyone but herself and
Kara, now that Addy could sense it. She wasn’t spending much, almost virtually no energy from her body to do this,
though she’d run out of the solar energy in her body in about three days, working from the assumption that she
spent those three days sunbathing in clear weather, in any event.

The only downside was the range. She’d have to remain within about thirty-to-fifty feet of everyone to continue
keeping them shielded from the presence. If her shielding broke, they would immediately fall back under the sway of
the presence and begin to attempt to do as it willed them to, and that usually meant vanishing into the throng of
people outside, which would make finding them again a significant difficulty.

The last rope around Alex’s torso fell, and the woman in question let out a noise of relief. “You tied them too tight,”
she supplied a bit awkwardly, reaching up to rub at one of the reddish marks on her arm where the rope had bitten
in. “That and this reminds me of McCormac.”

Kara, meanwhile, stared at her sister for a moment, face a perfect cast of ignorant innocence, before the words
apparently settled in and her face wrinkled into disgust. “Ew!” She said, faking a gag and shoving her sister back into
the couch, who let out a huff of laughter. “I didn’t need to even think about that, what the hell Alex?”

“Not that I don’t like living vicariously through your healthy family dynamics, Kara,” Winn interrupted, glancing up
from his laptop. “But uh, I think we need to talk about this.”

Alex’s posture tightened, turned rigid, and Kara nodded a bit solemnly, the faux horror falling from her face to be
replaced by something almost tired.

Winn leaned back in his chair, typing something, before breathing out shakily. “Right, so, uh, whatever this is? It’s
viral. Or at least, in National City. The frequency it is broadcasting to control us propagates through technology
connected to the local internet provider, though going from the steady increase in range of about one meter per two-
and-a-half hours, with slight acceleration, my best guess is that it’s going to continue expanding to cover the globe.
It’s currently contained mostly to National City, and some of the fringe communities near the rural parts have even
managed to escape it.”

He tapped his keyboard again. “Also, we’ve gone to national news. People have noticed, and they’re, well, terrified.”

“Well,” Kara began stiffly. “Do we have a name for it? Or like, at least a description? A goal?”

Winn nodded. “Myriad.”

Kara froze, face cast in something like horror. Alex, beside her, twitched violently at the word.

“...You have an idea of what this is?” Winn asked.

Kara shook her head, the motion jarring her expression, which twisted from horror to hate. “No, but I have a good
enough idea of who did it. Non.”

“Oh, Kryptonians,” Winn said, almost exasperatedly. “I could’ve told you that much, considering I now apparently have
a passing grasp on Kryptahniuo.”

Kara’s head snapped around, blinking owlishly at him. “I never told you the proper name for the language,” she said, a
bit dumbly.

Winn shrugged. “Yeah, and during my time feeling no hope I somehow managed to collect a vague understanding of
the language. Did anyone else?”

James shook his head, Lucy just stared at Winn, and Alex looked bewildered.

Reaching up, Winn pinched the bridge of his nose. “So it’s either a me thing or just because sometimes the self-
propagating mind control frequency screwed up a little. Great. Totally won’t have existential anxiety about that.
Anyway, we kinda have to deal with this before it spreads to consume the planet, any ideas on where to go from
here? Or can I get back to trying to disrupt the entire thing?”

“Well,” Lucy interjected, speaking up. “I think we need a base of operations, and sorry, Kara, but your apartment isn’t
going to work. We need to be somewhere well-connected, where we can keep an eye on things, possibly with a
vantage point. If this is Non’s doing, it likely means the rest of the Kryptonian fighters he has are, like him, active.
What else he has for resources? I don’t know, but I don’t think we can properly address even some of it without
additional tools.”

“Okay,” James picked up the thread, nodding along. “So we need a place which has access to information feeds, is
high enough that we can react if things start going wrong, and is centralized so that we’re not out of the way when
things do start going wrong. Anyone know somewhere like that? Because uh, I think we all do.”

Most of the room, Addy included, glanced Kara’s way.

Kara tilted her head, a thoughtful expression on her face. “It might work,” she agreed.

Arriving at CatCo proved to be a more tedious project than originally assumed. For starters, the original idea was for
Kara and herself to take two people each and fly close to one another, but when that turned out to be impossible due
to extra supplies Winn was bringing, they decided on walking. Of course, at that point, Lucy brought up the fact that
since they weren’t packing light due to the restrictive nature of Kara and Addy’s vehicular restraints, they should
probably get some supplies first, so they made a detour to Alex’s apartment - across the street, as it would turn out -
to gather them.

With everything else, by the time they were riding the elevator up towards the CatCo offices, it was starting to get
light out and everyone had at least one backpack. Addy had switched to her costume, going with the same
configuration as the time before, but sans a faux arm - which she had left packed away in her backpack - due to how
cumbersome it was. CatCo elevators, as Addy had come to learn, were not suited to contain 6 well-packed
individuals, and as a result the entire ride was unpleasantly cramped.

Addy was the first out of the elevator when the doors finally opened, stumbling out in a rush just to give herself
some space. There were people here, Kara had informed them as much, but none of them even looked her way. All
of them were seated at their desks, typing mindlessly, Kryptonian pictographs scrolling across the screen in rhythm
to the tap of a notably very English keyboard.

Kara, the next out, eased the backpack she’d been wearing off of her back and quickly marched up to her desk,
dropping it on the surface. “Right,” she said quickly, Addy listening to her as she turned her head to watch Lucy,
James, Alex and Winn file out of the elevator behind her, looking various shades of disgruntled. “I have to go and
stop several fires, please don’t leave this building?”

“Kara,” Alex started, only to quickly close her mouth at the glare Kara sent her way.

“Alex, I need to do this,” she said, almost quietly. “Not only is the city starting to burn down, but it’s not just office
buildings anymore, and nobody’s doing anything to stop—”

The elevator dinged.

Everyone, including Addy, turned as Cat’s private elevator in particular peeled open, golden doors ceding as the
titular woman herself strut out. Kara looked completely gobsmacked, probably for good reasons considering she
claimed to have some of the most powerful senses on the planet and regularly used it to keep track of important
people’s heartbeats.

Cat, not knowing any of this, with her sunglasses on her face and a thermos of coffee in one hand, just strut past.
They all watched her in complete silence as she missed Kara, missed everyone staring at her, and made a straight
line for her office, reaching up to take a sip out of her thermos. She prowled around her desk, tugged her chair out,
and eased herself down onto it, placing her thermos to the side as she began to pick through her purse.

“...Miss Grant?” Kara said weakly.

Cat glanced up from her purse at that, sunglasses sliding down the length of her nose until her eyes were peeking
over the rim. “Supergirl,” she said, sounding a bit surprised. “Rather early for a visit. Is there something I can do for
you? Maybe an inter—”

“How is she—” Winn started to say, before—

“Miss Grant, people are currently being mind-controlled,” Kara explained thinly, sounding almost frustrated. “You
haven’t noticed?”

Cat spared a glance around the office, eyes flashing to Addy before flicking away just as quick. “A bit more quiet
than usual,” she conceded, placing her purse down. “But I’m not sure what you’re saying, Supergirl.”

“I’m saying—” Kara began haltingly, only for her voice to cut off as her phone gave a rather loud beep. Scrambling,
she hauled her phone out of her pocket, ignoring Cat’s “so you do have a phone, can I get the number?” as she flicked
through it. After a moment, a relieved smile spread across her features. “That was Kal—er, Superman. He said he
was on his way over to help, he saw the news.”

Without even waiting for Cat to respond, Kara was quick to jog towards the balcony. Glancing behind her, Addy
shared a look with the rest of the group before inclining her head, moving to follow Kara. Wordlessly, James, Alex,
Lucy and Winn trailed after her, all of them spilling out of the small door and onto the balcony, Cat already there, at
Kara’s side, glancing into the horizon with a squint.

“I can see him!” Kara said brightly, her smile growing wider.

Addy caught sight of him, then, a little black dot on the horizon, growing rapidly larger. The closer he got, the more
she could make out about how the colours of his costume reflected against the light.

Then, just as quick as he’d arrived, his distant figure dropped. Landing on the street below, still thick with a throng of
ambling people, all making their way to destinations unknown, he moved in lock-step with everyone else, vanishing
into the crowd.

“Oh my god,” Cat muttered, sounding horrified.

James behind her made a noise, drawing Addy’s gaze. He had a hand to his mouth, eyes blown wide in a panic,
pupils growing larger. He turned, rushing towards something, only for Lucy to take hold of his arm, stopping him with
a sharp grunt.

Addy inched back a few steps, just to keep a good buffer between James and the fringe of her range.

Lucy and James devolved into a whispered, snappish argument that Addy didn’t even try to tune into. Finally, after
some more whispering, Lucy gently led James towards one of the unoccupied offices, glancing Addy’s way before
closing the door behind them. She took a few steps towards it, again, to give herself something of a buffer.

“If it’s affecting Superman, then are any of us safe?” Cat’s voice said from somewhere behind her, sounding almost
panicked.

“Miss Grant,” Kara tried, her voice smooth, attempting at soothing. “Please calm down, we can—”

“Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do, Kara,” Cat snapped back.

Everyone went silent. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Kara fumbled, eyes flicking between Cat and Alex. “I—”

“Kara it’s a ponytail and some thick glasses I am not that stupid,” Cat interjected sharply. “I know about Addy too, or
at least I have a pretty good idea—”

“But you saw me with Su—Kara!” Kara tried, again.

Cat made a noise of frustration. “And not two days later we were running an article about the ethics of illegal
immigration and included in that was an interview with a shapeshifting alien, Kara. I’m not that stupid.”

“Well,” a new voice interrupted, and Addy jolted around, coming nearly face-to-face with Maxwell Lord. He was
wearing his normal suit, though this time there was a metal device of some kind tucked into the space above his ear.
“I may not be Superman, but I’m not stupid either. Matter-of-fact, you can thank me for this city not being overrun by
aliens, actually.”

A closer inspection of Maxwell Lord pointed towards some inconsistencies. While his suit was clean, his skin
wasn’t, with bruising around his neck, dirt and soot smudges, alongside other signs of wear and tear. His eyes were
bagged, with bruises under each, and his upturn lick of hair was more of a messy bush.

Alex’s hand reached to where her gun was, and Maxwell, accordingly, brought both hands up in a silent surrender.

“You’re supposed to be at the D.E.O.,” Alex said darkly, fingers brushing against the ridge of her gun. “In prison. With
the rest of them.”

“Yeah, well,” Maxwell shrugged. “I had designed this”—he tapped the metal node just above his ear—“because I
figured out what they were going to do in the first place. The D.E.O. wanted to see where it would go, so they let me
keep it. When this whole, mind control thing happened? Well, I was equipped for it. Turns out, Non thought I was an
alien pretending to be a human, or was unaware of his ancestry, because I was unaffected. Said something about
Trombusans? I faked my allegiance to him, he let me out, and I destroyed the central control system for your black-
ops prison to prevent the majority of the prisoners from being released. That and it put the entire facility in
lockdown, so none of the highly-trained agents can be unleashed to commit mass murder.”

He made a stiff bow, all mocking, though the way he winced probably meant it hadn’t been a great decision on his
behalf.

“You’re welcome,” he said dryly, correcting his posture. “I only got nearly shot twice and strangled by a neurotic
woman obsessed with Superman. Thank god for all of that alien tech you’re withholding from the rest of the public,
turns out she was only mostly durable.”

“What do you want?” Kara said, instead, looking tired.

Maxwell sighed, glancing at Addy for a moment before returning the totality of his focus onto Kara. “I want, Kara, to
stop the world from ending. And, turns out, I prepared exactly for it.”

“Why am I not surprised that you of all people survived the apocalypse?” Cat drawled, settling into her seat at the far
end of the meeting room. “You know what they say, cockroaches will outlive us all.”

Maxwell, up near the front of the room, scribbling on a whiteboard with Winn in tow, glanced back. “It’s lovely to see
you too, Cat,” he drawled, voice pitched in just the right way to make Addy feel viscerally uncomfortable. “You look
amazing, considering the end is nigh. Do you like those earrings I sent you?”

Cat just glared, fixing her gaze on him in a way that might almost be called hateful. Maxwell, not to be deterred, just
returned to his work, quickly glancing over something Winn had written down before giving the man in question a
nod, underlining a few words. "I do," she said, reaching up to fiddle with the object in question. It was a thumb-sized
pale-green rock attached to a gaudy golden fixture.

"Well," Maxwell started, pausing. "That's the only reason why you're not a mindless drone. Ion blockers and all that."

Addy watched the byplay awkwardly, fiddling with the hem of her costume. She was seated nearest to Alex, who was
busy texting her mother on her phone. Across the table from her were James and Lucy, who had returned looking
much more composed and put-together than they had originally when leaving her range of focus, though James still
looked wan and terrified when he thought nobody was looking.

Kara was near the door, arms folded over her chest, staring suspiciously at Maxwell Lord.

“So!” Maxwell announced, stepping away from the board. “As you all well know, good ol’ uncle Non broke into my lab
over Christmas. You know how it is, you guys came asking about it, I stonewalled you, and so on.”

Reaching up with his marker, Maxwell circled the big letters ‘LTE’. “Now, the reason why he broke in at all was to get
to this, my LTE interface system. I found a way to prevent it from affecting me, as you can see with this handy-dandy
ion blocker. In most cases, if hostile action against myself and my property had been taken, I could simply take
control of the satellite myself and remove the threat. Unfortunately for everyone, since our planet has apparently
become a hotspot for aliens, whatever tech they used to take my satellites over? I can’t decode on my own, or in any
reasonable length of time, and I can’t even bring it down with failsafe measures since my satellites are supported by
some of the best shielding technology against both kinetic and electro-magnetic bombardment, so bar a nuclear
warhead being detonated in-orbit we’re not going to be able to take it down the easy way.”

Abruptly, James nearly leapt to his feet, chair clattering. “Then why the fuck are we even talking about this?!” He
yelled, staring at Maxwell angrily, his face bunched so tightly Addy was sure he was about to curl his lip and snarl.
“Superman’s—my best friend is under this thing’s control!”

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” Maxwell replied dismissively, barely sparing James a glance.

“Need I remind you that you had me beaten not that long ago, Max?” James sniped back.

“Enough,” Alex interrupted, voice firm. Both James and Maxwell turned to look at her. “What are our options,
Maxwell, get to the point. James, sit down.”

James dropped back down into his seat, hands coming up to press into his eyes.

“Well, we have a few,” Maxwell started, diplomatically. “The one I recommend? I have kryptonite ordinances, and the
easiest way to get Myriad to stop is to just kill the people perpetuating it. Detonating a bomb filled with powdered
kryptonite over National City should kill every Kryptonian in it and by extension end the threat of Myriad.”

“What about Superman?” Kara interrupted sharply.

Maxwell rolled his eyes. “You fly in before the bomb goes off and drag him out of the city limits. You and him won’t
be able to return for, eh, fifty years, give or take, but it’s a small price to pay.”

“And what of the blood price, Lord?” Cat said, cutting through the low murmur of conversation. The room went quiet,
and Maxwell turned towards her, smiling guilelessly.

“What do you mean?” He asked, oh-so-carefully.

Cat’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t bullshit me, Maxwell. How many people are expected to die because you detonated a
bomb full of radioactive dust over the city limits?”

Maxwell’s expression thinned. “Eight percent of the population.”

“That is over three-hundred thousand people, Max,” Cat didn’t so much snarl, but there was an edge to her voice, a
sharp one thick with vitriol and distrust. It was the sort of voice that Addy knew people expected Cat to act like, cold
and calculative and almost mocking in her critique of others. “Is that a low or high estimate, Max? What about long-
term effects, surely you would know if there were any, seeing as you’re offering to pull the trigger and irradiate a city
of four million.”

“He should,” Alex interrupted, eyes narrowing into slits. “Considering he’s been playing around with red kryptonite for
a while. Ever wonder why Kara went ballistic? There’s your answer.”

Maxwell held his hands up, waiting until everyone stopped muttering. “Now, look, not to be the bigger man in this
instance, but... I would take three hundred thousand losses over some alien despot taking over seven billion people.”

“What about a program?” Winn asked from the whiteboard. “We could remotely infect your satellites—”

“Tried that,” Maxwell interjected with a shake of his head. “My tech trumps me. It’s built that way.”

“We have both you and Winn,” Kara pointed out, her voice a stubborn rasp. Addy didn’t like it, but understood that it
was what Kara was feeling, what she had to process. “We can figure something out, we don’t need to kill three-
hundred thousand people.”

Maxwell glanced her way, expression bordering on caustic. “Are you sure it’s not because you won’t be able to fetch
cats out of trees anymore, Supergirl? Do you really want to roll the dice on whether or not whatever Non is working
up to won’t be fulfilled before we can find some way around cutting-edge security tech I purpose-built to deal with
the new heightened tech base of our planet?”

Kara’s face twisted to mirror his, looking heated, angry. “I don’t care whether or not I can stay in National City
afterwards, Maxwell! I love this city, I love working here, I love being Cat Grant’s assistant but Rao! If me leaving
would save this place I would do it in a heartbeat! I might not want to have to give up another planet but I am more
worried about the people dying than I am my ability to be a superhero!”

Breathing heavily, Kara petered off, her face slipping into something like shame.

Maxwell’s own expression softened minutely, so minuscule Addy barely noticed it, but it got rid of that smarm to
him, the insufferable smugness that made Addy want to hurt him. “I’m sorry, that was low,” he started, reaching up to
smooth his hand over his face. He looked tired, at a closer glance. “It’s... this is the end of the world as we know it if
it gets out. There’s no containing Myriad if it begins to spread through systems less secure than mine. He’ll have
continental control in very little time, and move on to worldwide shortly thereafter. Most of humanity will be his
pawns, and the ones who aren’t will have to live in secrecy, hiding at all times.”

Bringing his hand back down, Maxwell stared at them all, going from Winn, to Cat, to Kara. His gaze lingered on Addy
for a while, longer than anyone else, and something about the way he was staring didn’t feel probing, or even
remotely hostile, just... inquisitive. Curious. If sad.

“The bombs are a guarantee,” he explained flatly. “If they go off, Myriad stops. If I can get permission to deploy them
from the government, Myriad is done the second it detonates. There is no room for error, no possible unfixable
problems, and despite everything else three-hundred thousand people dying to ensure the rest of us don’t become
mind-controlled slaves is I think a positive. A very hard to accept one, but it’s better than the alternative.”

“I can’t just let you kill people,” Kara said, sounding so, so very fretful.

“Then you have to decide whether or not you can overcome your own morals for a guaranteed chance of fixing
things,” Maxwell started, staring long and hard at her, the softness bleeding away from him as his expression grew
tighter, harsher. “Or you have to take the chance that your refusal to bend will cause the end of the world.”
Last edited: Sep 29, 2020
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OxfordOctopus Sep 29, 2020 View discussion

Threadmarks: SEASON 1 - EPISODE 18 View content

OxfordOctopus She/Her
(Unverified Jackanape)

Oct 2, 2020  #1,223

 EPISODE 18​
It wasn’t hard to tell that Maxwell’s statement had left an impact. Addy liked to believe that she was getting better at
‘reading the room’, for lack of a better term. The way people tensed, the way they spoke, the stiffness in their
gestures and the way neutral faces weren’t perfectly neutral—they were all little hints towards the general mood of
any one space.

The mood, she observed, was bleak.

Alex had wandered off to one end of the meeting room not long following it, after first pausing to tell them she
needed to call her mother. She was still there - Addy could feel her through the rudimentary shielding connection -
pacing back and forth, all but whispering into the side of her smartphone.

Kara had left not long after, wordless and silent, stalking towards one window and, like her sister, pausing only to
inform them that she needed to prevent the city from burning down. Addy had watched the blur of red and blue fade
off towards an increasingly smoke-thick horizon until she couldn’t see her anymore, lingering just to be sure that she
wouldn’t drop towards the ground like Clark.

Cat hadn’t really responded to anything after hearing Maxwell’s proclamation, eyes fixed on her tablet as she tapped
fingers swiftly across it, expression focused.

Lucy and James had lapsed into an awkward silence. James had looked torn, vehemently twisted, like he couldn’t
and would not accept Maxwell’s prognosis. He’d spent the last half-an-hour glaring hostile daggers at the man, not
that Maxwell himself seemed particularly bothered by any of it. Lucy had been more sombre, quiet, lower lip caught
beneath the top row of her teeth, fingers tracing nonsensical patterns on the table, focused on something nobody
else could see.

Winn was, somehow, the most dramatic out of the lot. Where before he’d been just about rubbing shoulders with
Maxwell, now he kept his distance, a minimum of five or six feet between the two of them, only slipping back in to
scribble errant notes onto the whiteboard. His face was, like Lucy’s, deep in thought, but Addy wasn’t particularly
fond of the cast to it, the way his lips tugged down in the universal display of sadness, the way his expression felt
almost hopeless.

Addy knew what she was feeling too, which was a rather pleasant surprise. Normally, the only things she could really
identify out of the complicated moods she would slip into would be the baser emotions, things she had plenty of
context for with Taylor’s memories. Anger, sadness, guilt, grief—loud emotions, she wanted to call them. Things that
did not just come in small doses, but rather overpowered her.

She wasn’t really feeling any of that right now. No, she was feeling frustrated. She had felt it before, albeit without the
chemical slurry that made everything so complicated and intense, back when she had been just her coreself. Her
own lack of agency, the vexation of being unable to impart changes that would help, the hopeless sense that she
was just an observer, that attempts to rectify that would always fail.

The Warrior had crippled more than just her ability to interface and dictate the behaviours of her kin, after all. Some
shards might get away with being able to send feelings or impulses towards their hosts, the ones who the Warrior
didn’t spare too much focus on. Buds were especially notorious for that, to an extent unshackled due to their
advanced degree of knowledge on host-to-passenger interfacing that they had taken from the original they had
splintered from, letting them get closer, impart more onto their hosts.

But as she had been designated Queen Administrator, it meant that the Warrior could not just let her be. It had
carved off not only the majority of the fixtures she used to interface with shards, leaving only enough behind for a
power-influenced trigger to be possible, but also the majority of the tools she had used to interface with her kin,
relay information, intent. She had been left with a crippled power nexus and no way to influence her host outside of
the powers she gave out and some subtle mental conditioning.

Yet, here she was. She couldn’t leave without risking the continued wellbeing of four people she had varying levels of
interest in, and she had nothing to offer. That really was the problem, too, she could not interface with Myriad - she
had tried, the connection as it would seem was only one-way; she couldn’t follow it back to the source psychically -
and there were no easy problems to directly circumvent. She did not have the requisite tools to alter her current
abilities into that of a Tinker’s, which meant she could not aid Winn - and Maxwell - in their attempts to figure out
ways to subvert Myriad’s control without having to irradiate a city of four million.

It was all very, very frustrating and she very much disliked being frustrated. She disliked it almost as much as being
bored, which only won out over it as the very state of boredom was torturous to her. She wanted to help, she wanted
to fix things, she wanted Kara back and she didn’t want the stakes of another planet to rest on the shoulders of a
small group of severely unequipped individuals, among which one option might be to commit to a scorched earth
project and fire off wide-area ballistic weaponry in the vague hopes that, if they kill the person commanding the
program, the program can either be shut down by a team on-site or the program itself would simply cease
functioning in the event that the one operating it did too.

It felt like the time leading up to the fight with the Warrior again, even when she knew, had even gone so far as to
calculate, that this situation was a distant second to that threat. It made her nervous, it made her want to pace, want
to fidget in a way that wasn’t nice, not like when she needed to tap her shoes against something to get the energy
out of her knees. It felt like the sort of twitchiness that makes you flinch away from things or intrusions, a steady
increase in the pressure along her spine that made her feel oddly spring-loaded.

Things were getting out of her control, and that was unacceptable.

Placing one hand on the table, Addy eased herself to her feet. She felt Alex’s pacing grind to a halt, saw out of the
corner of her eye James’ head craning around to stare at her.

“We need to do something,” she said, voice level.

Winn jolted, so did Maxwell, nearly in sync. Winn was the first to flick his head around, staring at her, while Maxwell
took his time, dragging his focus from the whiteboard and, finally, to her.

“Addy,” Winn started, voice wobbly. “We’re still working on it, you need to be patient.”

She pushed down on the low flutter of annoyance that came with those words. She was more patient than the entire
collective existence that could be defined as humanity; she was the living embodiment of patience. “Kara is out there
doing things,” she pointed out, keeping her voice as steady as she could manage. “We can do things. Sitting around
is achieving nothing other than wasting time.”

“While I appreciate the spirit,” Cat interrupted, still not looking up from her tablet. “Unfortunately, myself and the
cockroach near the whiteboard are the only two people who can be outside of, what was it?”

Addy blinked. “Thirty-to-fifty feet, with the last twenty having the chance of wild variations in potency, some to the
point of risk.”

Cat’s mouth pinched and she flicked her gaze up, staring at Addy’s face, but not at her eyes, and then back down to
her tablet. She appreciated it. “Yes, that. The point is, if you want to go and help Kara protect the city, we’re going to
have to find a closet big enough to fit four people in it and with said closet being reinforced enough to stop them
from breaking the door down the second you’re more than fifty feet away. There is probably a closet that can
manage that, but frankly, my employees are already zombie-like enough as-is, I’d rather not have that get any worse.”

“Is everything a joke to you?” James cut in, ignoring Lucy’s attempt to hush him.
Cat levelled her gaze squarely at him. “Mr. Olsen, I apologize if the way I remain calm and collected in stressful
environments is to make the occasional joke at the expense of my workforce and is not, instead, throwing a tantrum
as an adult, such as yourself. Next time I am unduly stressed in a meeting, I will flip the table and start passive-
aggressively insulting people.”

James opened his mouth, face twisting.

Cat’s eyes narrowed.

Addy, again, drawing from Taylor’s experiences, brought a closed hand down onto the table with enough force to
make it shake.

Everyone jolted. Alex hissed out a litany of curses, and Addy could even vaguely feel - and to an extent, hear - her
stumble forward, narrowly avoiding dropping her phone.

All eyes trained themselves onto her, and Addy ignored the nervousness her brain was forcing on her, readied her
explanations, channelled as much Taylor as she could manage without copious amounts of insects, and stared
directly at them. “Don’t.”

James, seeing wisdom for the first time since she’d met him, breathed out and nodded shakily in her direction,
slumping down in his seat. “Sorry,” he managed to get out, reaching up with one hand to palm at his forehead.
“Superman’s—his status, it’s... freaking me out.”

Cat, too, took a step back, her posture slumping a bit more, losing the edge it carried. “Yes, well, today isn’t my best
day either,” she said absently, eyes flicking back down to her tablet as she tapped her way through it. “You can
imagine that finding out my child is under mind control and that forcefully removing it might lead to him being
permanently disabled as a consequence may be a bit... difficult for me to process.”

Addy could, abstractly. Or at least if she used Taylor’s memories surrounding Dinah she could get a rough
approximation of the chemical composition that the thoughts invoked. Anger, fear, desperation, other things she
was significantly less well-versed in.

“I don’t want to go out and help Kara,” Addy said, finally, working the words around in her head. They didn’t feel right,
didn’t encompass everything. She loathed her inability to broadcast concepts to other people, if only out of fear that
their brains could not comfortably process it without undergoing an aneurysm. “I want to help, however is possible
and within my abilities.”

“In that case,” Alex spoke up, Addy glancing back to find her a few paces away, phone clutched tightly in one hand at
her side. “We need a game plan, things we can fix at the moment. What are our current problems?”

“My range,” Addy said, simply.

Winn raised his hand, almost awkwardly. “There are still people around, if we’re attacked, we’ll need to protect them
too, no matter what they’re typing onto those computers.”

“We have a missing Kryptonian under mind control and I’m not even sure if Non knows about it,” Maxwell said, still
not looking away from the whiteboard. “My guess is that they don’t, though, considering CatCo isn’t currently a
bubbling, molten husk.”

“You do realize they have enough Kryptonians to do that on their own anyway?” Lucy cut in, staring flatly at him. “It’s
not like they need Superman. Non’s a Kryptonian, all of his lieutenants are too.”

Maxwell opened his mouth, paused, and then tilted his head, finally glancing back at them. “That does raise a good
question, though, why aren’t they attacking us right now if that’s the case? Superman, as far as I can tell, is only
under their control because he was raised by humans on Earth—unlike Supergirl, he doesn’t have many of those
alien thought patterns running around in his head to prevent the connection in the first place. If they wanted us gone,
they could just send in one of the several other Kryptonians.”

“They don’t know we’re here,” Cat said, sounding almost bewildered by the notion. “You’d think they would, if they’re
controlling everyone—but, they don’t know we’re here, do they?”

“Not unless they’re trying to make us think that,” Maxwell was quick to interject, drawing a series of glares from
about half the room. He raised both hands in another show of cowardly, belly-showing surrender. “I was just pointing
out that the possibility is there.”

“Putting all of that aside,” Alex interrupted, sounding tired. “What from that list can we tackle?”

“Not my range,” Addy said, before anyone else could derail things again. “It’s fixed, currently, unless I was to obtain a
power source and find a way to move it to my coreself’s dimension, it will have to remain this small to avoid an
exponential increase in power.”

“The people?” Lucy started, tilting her head to one side in a way that reminded Addy distantly of a curious cat. “I
mean, we all know how we acted—wouldn’t they just... leave if we unplugged the computers?”

There was a moment of silence.

“God, I’m stupid,” James let out, burying his face in both hands. “We just remove the reason why they’re here and
they should leave, shouldn’t they?”

They should. Addy wasn’t totally sure if they wouldn’t just attempt to turn it back on, but then they hadn’t shown,
outside of Winn, the ability to do complicated, detail-oriented tasks like that. It was more likely that most would view
an ‘off’ computer as just an inert object, without relevance to their current task, and attempt to find a computer
elsewhere.

Glancing towards Winn, who was notably quiet, staring off into the middle distance with something like a dawning
epiphany stretching across his face, Addy was relieved to find she was almost certain nobody else was on par with
him in terms of esoteric thought patterns and general intelligence. If there was, well, they could be restrained and
locked in a small room, as they had done with Winn, but the majority should be much more like how Alex and Lucy
had behaved, possibly even more simple.

“So we should probably tackle that first,” Alex interrupted, glancing towards the office space. Addy followed her
gaze, stared at the sight of people she knew tangentially stuck in their seats, typing rapidly on a computer,
Kryptonian glyphs scrolling across the screen. “I don’t see any part of the UI which points to an ‘off’ button,” she said.

“Well, then how do we turn it off?” Winn cut in, sounding frustrated.

Alex, to her credit, did not gawk at Winn, but she looked at him like she had looked at Addy during their weird drive
home that one time. Exasperated, but not surprised. “We unplug it.”

“What?!” Winn nearly screeched, sounding horrified at the notion. “Bu—but all of those technical failures that come
from pulling the plug on in-use computers aren’t like, made up, you know?!”

“Winfrey,” Cat interrupted, voice almost harsh. “If it will shut your rambling up, I’ll pay to get every last damn
computer in this building replaced.”

Winn stared at her awkwardly. “But I’ll still have to reconfigure it,” he said slowly. “That and it’s still mistreating
valuable tech.”

Addy pushed down on an odd feeling in her chest. It felt like a yawn, but not, and it had been accompanied by a faint
sense of frustration. Not the sharp, hateful kind she had been dealing with, but rather something more muted and
distant. She tapped her chest a few times, just to make sure it wasn’t some sort of biological failing. Thankfully, it
wasn’t.

“And I’ll pay you overtime to do it,” Cat grit out, sounding exasperated. “We don’t have time to learn Krypto-whatever
to find whatever dumb string of moon runes would make the program shut the computer off. This isn’t Daft Con or
whatever you call that dumb convention, people aren’t going to bully you because you had to pull the plug on a piece
of company hardware to help stop the end of the world.”

“...DEFCON,” Winn corrected, sounding awkward. “It’s, uh, DEFCON.”

Cat’s eyes just about rolled up into her head. “Winscott, I sincerely don’t care. Just go do it, or I will go out there
myself and start chucking monitors out the windows.”

Winn’s head snapped around to stare at her pleadingly, almost panicking. Addy wasn’t particularly sure how to feel
about the fact that his numb state-of-mind could be overwhelmed by threats of damage against technology, but then
Winn often had very skewed priorities.

Nudging her chair back, Addy glanced around the table. “We are moving back to the main office,” she announced,
and made sure that there was no room for miscommunication in her tone.

She caught Cat smiling at her, almost proudly, before she promptly hid it behind the lip of her tablet.

Lucy’s theory turned out to be true, and so had Addy’s, to a certain degree. Nobody in the office exhibited odd or
sophisticated behavioural patterns, all responding roughly in the same way: once the computer’s plug was pulled,
they would rise from their seats and proceed towards either the elevators or the stairs if all elevators were in-use or
not readily available.

Kara arrived back, soot-licked but not wounded, about half-way through the process, easing herself in through one of
the tall windows that framed the main office area. Addy listened to her land after glancing back at the computer she
was about to unplug, the sound of the heels of her boots click-and-clacking against the ground. It was a relief in one
way, but not relieving in so many others; she liked that Kara was safe, but the fact that Kara had to be safe in the first
place worried her.

Shaking her head, Addy reached forward, ignoring the steady swell of unnecessary concerns in her head, and pulled
the plug free from the wall. Turning back towards the computer, she watched as Georgie’s hands stopped on the
keyboard in an instant. The older woman had always been kind to her, always sparing a bright smile, endlessly
exuberant in a way only Kara had really been able to match in the past.

Glazed, unfocused eyes slid right over her, the woman turning her head in one smooth motion, rising from her seat
with almost robotic stiffness, and began to make her way towards the elevators.

Addy tried to keep it from hurting her.

“So we’re evacuating people?” Kara asked from somewhere behind her.

Cat made a low noise in her throat, distinct from anyone else by the way she let it roll into a sigh. “Yes, Kara. Lucy
brought up that they’d likely just leave if we unplugged the computers, and we all figured it would be safer if there
were as few people here as possible.”

Addy rolled the power cord up into a loop, just like Winn had taught her, and folded the forked plug between the
layers, tightening it with a tug, before letting it limply hang from the back of the computer tower.

“Smart,” Kara agreed, though she sounded uneasy. “The fires are all out now, or at least the ones I can hear or see.
There were a few close calls—I don’t think Myriad accounts for hazardous environments when it sends people to
access computers, but nobody died, thank Rao.”

“Thank Rao,” Cat echoed, speaking the words as though she was tasting them on her tongue.

Stretching herself back into a full stand, Addy turned on her heel, catching sight of Kara again. She had smoothed
her hair back, tucking it over one shoulder, and her face had a few bits of soot smudged across the surface, places
where she’d clearly tried to clean it off. Cat was across from her, one arm tucked under an outstretched arm, a glass
of an amber-coloured fluid - whisky, Taylor’s memories informed her - sloshing around inside as she made
calculated circles with her wrist.

“I’m sorry I never told you, Miss Grant,” Kara said slowly, one hand reaching down to fidget with her cape again. “I
just—I didn’t want to be fired. CatCo was so much to me, it was a place to just be... me. Be helpful.”

Cat brought the glass up to her lips, taking a small sip. Her face twisted into a grimace at the taste, and she very
pointedly set the glass down on the nearest table to her. “It’s fine, Kara. I figured it out early enough anyway, and we
all have our secrets, don’t we?”

From the way Kara’s eyes lit up in recognition and she nodded, Addy was clearly missing something, but she felt it
pertinent not to interrupt their moment.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Winn. “I might, uh, have an idea?”

Kara’s head snapped around to him, seated where he normally did his work. Cat’s head turned more slowly, almost
like her namesake, and she blinked slowly at him.

She could feel James, Alex and Lucy turning in their various spots throughout the office where they had been helping
unplug computers and usher people out.

Maxwell wasn’t hard to find, having dragged the whiteboard-on-wheels out into the office area and was still busily
going over his math. As far as she could tell, he was right, but when she’d tried to tell him as much, he’d ignored her.
Still, even his steady motions paused, shoulders tightening.

“So, uh, you’ll have to hear me out here, okay? This might sound ridiculous, maybe even blasphemous, depending on
what your religion is?”

“Winn,” Cat cut in sharply, using his actual name for the first time since, well, ever. “Point. Get to it.”

Shakily nodding, Winn smiled awkwardly. “So, uh, that thing you mentioned before, about uh—alien thoughts, how
Superman didn’t make the cut because he didn’t think alien enough. All that? It made me think, well, what if we’re
going about this wrong? We can’t cut the connection off, but what if we change what it recognizes as a target?”

That was... plausible. Possible. More than what they had now, even. Addy opened her mouth to comment—

“Still runs into the problem that we can’t get around my own security features!” Maxwell barked sharply, snapping
around. His face was angry, twisted up in frustration. “That’s all well and dandy, but how can we access it?!”

Winn didn’t even balk. Which was incredibly surprising, considering this was Winn and he startled like a rabbit more
often than not. “Well, what if we use Indigo’s corpse?”

“I’m sorry,” Cat cut in again. “But I must be missing something, because corpses aren’t computers?”

“This one is,” Addy managed to get out, running the idea over in her head. It was possible, she could already see
where he was going with this, considering Indigo’s capacity to interface with technology—while she couldn’t trace
the signal back to the source with her psychic abilities, Indigo had shown the capacity to jump through something as
rudimentary as a phone signal.

“Unfortunately,” Maxwell continued, his voice thick and prickly. “I put the damn D.E.O. facility into lockdown, Winn, it’s
not going to work—”

“It’s not at the desert base,” Alex almost yelled from somewhere behind her, something like excitement in her voice.
“It’s in the city one!”

Kara jolted. “Wait, the what?”

“The city facility,” Maxwell echoed, sounding almost bitter. “It’s one of the skyscrapers, you fly by it basically daily.”

“You’d know, huh?” Alex said, voice dripping with malicious glee. “We sure dragged you in there for three
unscheduled interrogations, didn’t we?”

Maxwell turned to stare at her, the mask fully dropping away. He looked angry, hostile, like he was about to throw
something at her. “I am an American citizen,” he hissed sharply, pointing his marker at her. “I have rights, and your
branch of the government continues to infringe on them by dragging me away in a black van every couple of hours!
Three times! You interrupted one of my board meetings, I lost millions of dollars because of you and I cannot even
fucking sue!”

“ENOUGH!” Kara yelled, voice loud enough to almost deafen.

Alex’s mouth jarred shut.

Maxwell glared towards one of the walls.

“You were saying, Winn?” Kara said, after another moment to catch her breath.

Winn’s smile came out far shakier, much more nervous. “Right so, uh, if I can get Indigo’s body—cube, thing, I can
download a program into it and inject it remotely into Myriad to first change the specifications of the control. Myriad
will adjust, removing itself from people without hurting them, hopefully, and attempt to find new targets, and then the
secondary program will activate and promptly brick the entire thing beyond any repair.”

“Is that possible? Getting Indigo’s... cube, I mean?” Kara asked, glancing towards her sister.

Alex’s face tightened for a moment, before smoothing over. “I think so, I’ll have to keep you on-call to guide you
through the passwords and such but... I know where it is in the HQ base and nobody there should have Kryptonite
bullets or anything. It should be... not safe, but easier than an attack on the desert facility, considering we keep
prisoners there, some of which may be released.”

“I can help,” Addy said without thinking, without even hesitating. People turned to look at her, Maxwell especially,
who looked wary at the notion. “I have Indigo’s specifications in my brain, I have properly decompiled a good portion
of the Coluan architecture, which would speed up the process of understanding it.”

Winn inclined his head, hope flickering on his face. Addy thought it looked good on him to be hopeful, to be anything
but weary and tired and scared. “Yeah, I already had a virus—before you, er, killed her, we intended to inject that, but
the virus itself is only special because it can interface with her body. With your knowledge and some uh, help from
Mr. Lord, it should be easy to adjust it to use the body as an injection method, rather than targeting it directly.”

“And how long will this take?” Maxwell interrupted, breathing steadily. “An hour? Four? Five? We might not have the
time. I can get permission to set that bomb off in the hour, do we really want to bet on this? My option is a guarantee,
why—why can’t we just go with what will work?”

“For the love of god, Maxwell,” Cat snapped, glaring at him. “Stop getting so excited about killing hundreds of
thousands of people with a dirty bomb. For fucks sake, we have an alternative plan that will work without your bomb,
what is keeping you so hung up on it?”

“He wants a place where Kryptonians can’t go,” Kara interrupted, and her voice was flat. There was no intonation in
it, it was that sort of deadpan that Addy tended to revert back into when she wasn’t trying to keep her inflection
relevant to her moods.

“And I want Carter’s father dead but you don’t see me killing him, now do you?” Cat drawled, reaching for the whiskey
again and taking a rather reckless chug of the remaining liquid, her face twisting into a grimace. “You and I are
adults, Max, we’ve been around for longer than almost everyone else here. Start acting like it, sometimes you don’t
get what you want.”

Addy tilted her head, stared at Maxwell, at the way he was clutching his marker. “Do you want me to ensure he can’t
fire off the bomb?” She asked, not hiding the intent behind it.

Maxwell flicked his gaze towards her, looking harried.

“Addy...” Kara warned.

“I will not hurt him, but I can stop him if necessary.” It wasn’t like his ion blocker was stopping her from interfering
with his brain. Not that something as rudimentary as that would on a good day, in any event.

“You won’t even take my idea into consideration?” Maxwell tried, again, sounding weary.

“Your idea involves the deaths of three hundred thousand,” Lucy started.

Maxwell cut his hand through the air in a sharp gesture, face twisted up in frustration. “To save billions!”

“No,” Lucy refuted, voice calm, completely level, but not even remotely sympathetic. “To ensure that Kryptonians
can’t return to National City.”

Addy watched, almost rapt, as the rest of the occupants of the area began to approach. Alex, from behind her, was
touching her gun holster with one hand, ready to draw as she stepped forward. Kara’s arms were slightly slanted
away from her body, ready to grapple, to grab, whereas Winn was on his feet, skittish, but with an eye towards the
only exit. James, meanwhile, was very pointedly gripping the top of a chair a few paces away from Maxwell.

Cat, not needing a conventional weapon to be intimidating, simply stared at the man with lidded eyes, a glass held in
her hand.

Addy took another step forward.

“Alright,” Maxwell said, the marker dropping from his hand. His voice was resigned, tired, and bitter. As it should be,
Addy couldn’t help but think. “Fine. Let’s do it your way.”

The space felt even more empty than before. They’d managed to get the remaining few out of the building, leaving
only them, and then had gone around packing things up. If this was to work, it needed to be quick, efficient, no
bumbling. Winn was still typing away on his computer, working from what information she’d fed him about
infrastructure and core dynamics, whereas Maxwell remained a few paces away, arms stubbornly crossed over his
chest, fingers white-knuckled in the fabric of his own suit jacket.

Addy herself was perched on the desk, letting her legs rise and fall in an unsteady, asynchronous swing, if only to
occupy herself. Lucy was not far away, picking at some food she’d found in the staff mini-fridge, and James had his
head down, clearly trying not to think, sitting in one of the occupied desks, hands occasionally trying to grip at hair
he didn’t have near his nape.

Alex and Kara shared a lingering hug near the open window, tight and personal and intimate in that family-to-family
sort of way. It was odd, but Addy didn’t feel like she was intruding by watching it, not like she did when she observed
Taylor and Annette’s own hugs and shared private moments. At the same time, she felt like she should, which was
all-around very uncomfortable, and she wanted her brain to stop contradicting itself with such frequency.

Alex pulled away from Kara with a huff, patting her on both shoulders. “Alright,” she murmured. “If things go wrong,
you leave, okay Kara?”

Kara set her jaw and said nothing.

“Kara,” Alex tried again, her fingers tensing.

“You have me on the earpiece,” Kara said gently, reaching up to pry her sister’s fingers from her shoulders. “You’ll be
there to guide me through it. I will be fine.”

“Promise me?” Alex said, a surprising moment of weakness.

Kara shook her head, smiled sadly, and stepped back. Another step and she was at the window, reaching behind her
with one hand to push it open.

Alex’s hands turned to fists at her sides, fingers twitching, but she said nothing.

Kara turned, eased one foot onto the ledge, and then pushed off and out, twisting into a blur of red, blue and gold.
Addy watched her go, her figure vanishing quickly out of sight as she turned on an arc, slipping around the side of
the building at speeds that made the glass rattle.

Alex reached up shakily, tapping her earpiece. “Can you hear me, Kara?”

For a moment, she was still, before a soft smile spread across her face. “Good. Contact me when you arrive at the
building, alright?” Her hand fell away again after that, dropping to her side, not clenching back into the tight knot of
digits and white knuckles, but still clenching back and forth, never fully closing, but never quite remaining still.

Addy could relate.

She pushed her legs to swing a bit harder, glanced towards the sun, which had finally started its arc back down
towards the horizon. It wasn’t quite there yet, but it was at least past one or two o’clock in the afternoon at this point.

Out of the corner of her eye, Addy spotted Lucy ambling to her feet and making her way over to Alex. She slung one
arm around her shoulders with casual ease, leaning in to murmur something that made Alex relax, her fingers finally
ceasing their persistent clench-and-unclench. Alex said something in return, but Addy didn’t even attempt to listen in,
glancing towards Winn.

He was looking back up at her, his screen working through the compiling process. “Hey Addy,” he said softly, almost
like he was afraid to wake someone up.

Addy eased her face into one of the smiles she had been practicing, just for him. He was one of the most important
people in her life, despite all of his foibles. Number three was certainly a rather high ranking, after all. “Winn.”

“Did you uh, tell me all you knew about Coluan architecture?” He asked curiously.

Addy shook her head. “The amount of information on them is substantial. They have ancestral memory logs that
compile the tiers of changes done to their people generation-by-generation. I fed you the adequate resources to
create what you intend to, but any more and it would be distracting.”

Winn’s face fell for a moment, before perking back up. “Wait does that mean you’ll teach—”

There was a flash of red. Addy reacted on instinct, reaching out to grab Winn, haul him down.

The windows shattered, an explosion of force as a red laser gouged its way above them, shearing through the
frames of windows, the walls, liquid glass and metal bubbling and openly burning as it fell like raindrops from the
cut the laser carved into the side of the building.

“No, Kara!” Alex’s voice said from somewhere behind her. “We have Addy here—we’ll be fine. Get the thing! No, Kara,
we can deal with this—”

Her attention jumped towards Maxwell, on the ground, clutching his shoulder where a small bit of flesh had been at
once carved out and instantly cauterized. No risk of bleeding out, at least.

The rest of those around her she reached out to her power to find out about. She didn’t access their memories, only
the part of her power she’d delegated to Taylor which would inform her of her subject’s health. Alex had gotten some
slight burns from proximity to the laser, but had ducked. James was covered in small incisions from the shattering
glass, but was otherwise fine. Lucy, much the same, having been hit by similar shrapnel from glass exploding due to
sudden temperature differentials. Winn had some bruising where his legs had hit the ground, but nothing more.

Another scan found Cat, who was on the ground. She hadn’t been so lucky, a portion of her right bicep gouged out
by the laser, deep enough that unlike Maxwell, it would require immediate medical care to ensure it didn’t get any
worse. The cauterizing effect of the laser was likely the only thing that would save both the woman herself and the
arm. None of this was even bringing up the litany of small gouges across her skin, being so close to the window,
though thankfully she had been looking away and had not lost the use of her eyes.

“Alex,” Addy said, processing. “Help Miss Grant. She’s the only one who needs aid.”

A figure outside of the building caught her attention, shadowed by the sun behind her. She floated forward, short
white hair cropped into something resembling a pixie cut, with bright green eyes and pale skin. She wore a similar
suit to what Astra had, albeit one with the sleeves removed, revealing her scar-covered, corded muscular arms.

She floated in through the opening she had made for herself, her flight slowing down until her feet crunched against
the glass on the ground.

Addy eased herself off of the table.

“I am Karsta Wor-Ul,” the Kryptonian announced, voice firm, unrelenting. A soldier’s cadence. “I have been tasked
with killing all of you.”

“Why?” Winn said below her in a whisper.

It had likely been a rhetorical question, but Karsta directed her gaze towards him anyway. Super senses and x-ray
vision, Addy remembered. “Because Non has dictated that since the scion of House El took his family, he would take
hers. We found you by tracking her flight as she handled the fires, and when she left, you were to be executed.”

Karsta’s eyes tracked over to her as she took another step forward.

Addy ran through her memories of her fight with Kara, however full of holes from the damage sustained to her brain.
Fighting Kara had been more focused on surviving Kara, but this couldn’t be the same here. A similar tactic might
work—drawing the woman’s attention, but she could not leave without giving everyone but Cat and Maxwell over to
Myriad. She would need to keep her attention, keep her attacking her, all without forcing Karsta to resort to the far
easier method of executing everyone by sweeping over the crowd with her lasers again.

Flashes of Kara’s eyes, burning red—the fear of death.

Addy suppressed it.

She took another step forward.

“While we will not send any of you to see Rao,” Karsta continued after a delay, eyes now solely focused on Addy, on
the steps she was taking towards her. “I will at least ensure you are properly turned to ash, if only to ensure you are
not buried like others are on this antiquated backwater.”

She couldn’t switch to control in this case, either. She needed to keep her range wide enough to ensure everyone
was blocked from Myriad. She was restricted, the crippling done to her coming back to bite her, again. She couldn’t
create a second instance of her powers, it was one-setting only, she didn’t have the tools to do so.

She felt Winn behind her, his tremulous fear vibrating out from her vague awareness of his position.

She heightened that awareness, letting the energy in her body burn away a little faster, hooked herself into the
senses of everyone under her influence. James, Lucy, Winn, Alex; she even branched out, smoothed her presence
over Cat and Maxwell, took their senses for her own.

Her multi-tasking spread wider, she felt her chest tighten. Karsta, as tall as she was, more muscular than she was by
no insignificant amount, and considerably more capable of mass destruction, watched her with cool, calm eyes.

Addy watched her back with fourteen.

“May you find peace with Rao,” Karsta said, almost too quiet to hear, before blurring forward.

The world slowed, Addy turned her head to the side, lowered herself, and Karsta’s fist missed her head, likely
intending to crush it, by inches. The sheer force of the blow sent the table behind her toppling over with a clatter,
seen through other eyes.

Addy jolted forward, driving her forehead into Karsta’s nose, sending her tumbling back. Not letting her, she lashed
out, caught her arm in the vice grip of her fingers, used Winn’s gaze to position herself as she twisted, spun, and
brought Karsta’s body, heavy and durable, up and over her head before whipping it into the ground.

The floor shattered beneath the impact, and so did the four floors beneath it.

Addy eased herself into the air, avoiding the widening hole she’d left in the floor and centring herself back around the
others. “Get as close to me as possible,” she said, using multiple ears to amplify her own. The creak of drywall, the
crunch of glass, and then the thunderous bang of something moving at impossibly fast speeds.

James narrowly missed Karsta pulping him, scrambling forward on his hands and knees as the Kryptonian erupted
out from the ground, spraying debris in every direction.

A few eyes closed to avoid the spray.

Addy adjusted.

Karsta’s eyes glowed, going from green to red in an instant. Addy didn’t let her, couldn’t, jarred herself forward into
the highest speed she could manage without causing a blastwave, reaching out with her hand. Karsta tried to dodge,
but the multiple perspectives let her adjust to that too, catching her face in her outstretched hand just as the lasers
finally erupted.

Pain. It hurt, almost as much as the red kryptonite dispersal agent. Twin beams of plasma gouged into her skin,
carved past her durability, but not before the reflected energy, so concentrated, was pressed back into Karsta’s eyes.

The Kryptonian screamed, jerking away and through the glass behind her with a loud shatter, hands coming up to
clutch at her face where the skin had blackened around her eyes.

Addy let her hand drop to her side, blood freely flowing from it even as the enhanced regenerative properties of her
biology rushed to repair it. Two quarter-sized holes, down to the bone, freely spread blood. She checked her own
vitals with a twitch back to her coreself; it was in bad repair, but it was nothing her natural healing could not account
for, if her estimates were right. It was however a risk, due to the high amounts of blood loss, but she could cope with
that as things came. She would just not have to sustain similar damage.

Flexing her fingers, she suppressed the spike of pain. Her pinky was inoperable due to muscle damage, the rest were
fine. She could deal with that.

Karsta’s hands finally fell from her face, revealing blackened eyes, pupilless and unseeing. Good. She said nothing,
but everything about how she floated in the air, hands tight at her sides, radiated anger, rage. That was good too.
She could work with rage, rage was the best way to get someone killed, to eliminate targets. People forget about
their limits when angry.

Her eyes briefly glowed red again before she let out another cry of pain, the light dimming and then sparking out, one
hand coming up to paw at her left eye. Her head, nevertheless, turned to her, likely finding her through those
enhanced senses—the beat of her heart, the sound of blood dripping onto the floor, the steady rise and fall of her
breath.

“I’ve got it!” Kara’s voice said through Alex’s ears, felt her body light up with elation, chemicals swirling. “I’m on my
way back!”

That was good too.

But not good enough.

Karsta launched forward again, this time with significantly less grace. She kept her arms wide, her legs too, and
simply drove herself through the environment, a wild flailing that carved through the ceiling, the walls, materials
giving way to an invulnerable, impossibly powerful body.

A piece of ceiling slammed down just next to Cat, causing her to shriek. Karsta’s head snapped around, her entire
body pivoting in the air.

Addy flashed into the air, meeting her launch towards Cat mid-way. She brought her arm up, caught one of Karsta’s
sloppy swings on the arc down, the blow hard enough to ache, sending her down into the ground, her feet shattering
through the floor like cardboard. Karsta’s own trajectory adjusted with it, turning down onto her, both hands lashing
out with uncanny accuracy, catching her head between each palm and pressing.

“Chai rrip,” Karsta snarled into her face, the melodic language spilling from her lips at odds with her actions, pressing
in harder. Addy reached up, grappled with her wrists, ignored the black spots flashing around her eyes, the
unpleasant feeling of her bone beginning to actively give beneath the pressure, the feeling of hairline fractures
settling into place across the surface of her skull. “Dhehriv!”

Addy dropped the plan to pry her off. She was too strong, too anchored, she needed to reverse that. Ignoring the
widening fractures, the pressure in her skull, every last ounce of pain that she simply suppressed, Addy whipped
around, drawing her legs free from the ground in a spray of shrapnel, pushing out with her flight and into the air,
throwing both of them into a spin. The pressure on her head abated enough that her powers could begin to kick in,
the hairline fractures easing shut, the pressure relenting, and she applied more momentum, more force, to throw
them into an increasingly fast spin.

With Cat’s eyes, she timed it just right. Karsta hit the ceiling before she did, and the built-up speed from the
endeavour made her lose her grip on her head, her body cascading through it, up into the floor above. A large portion
of the ceiling buckled, gave way with a tremendous creak, falling towards the ground, and it was only Addy rushing
forward, catching it before its weight could crater into the ground like a meteor, that prevented a total structural
collapse.

Easing the piece of ceiling down, covered in what looked to be filing cabinets, Addy slunk out from beneath, staring
towards where Karsta was. She was still floating, looking disoriented in the air, not a few feet outside.

Everything started to shake; the walls trembled, Addy could even pick up on the sound of distant shattering glass.

Karsta turned just in time to catch a smear of blue directly in the torso, Kara barreling into her at supersonic speeds.
What glass hadn’t yet exploded did, monitors and windows and Cat’s precious glass office all shattered like an over-
pressurized bottle. Addy flew forward, keeping everyone in her range, but getting just enough of a vantage point to
watch Kara and Karsta hit the street with a tremendous bang, dust and debris thrown high into the air and the
ground itself giving an unsteady quake, metal creaking in her ears.

The dust cleared, and Kara, down below, held Karsta’s limp form with one hand tight around her suit. She glanced
back their way, Addy’s way, she was quick to remind herself, and then rose higher and higher into the air, speeding
up. She stopped well above CatCo tower, then shot off towards the distant horizon, Karsta’s limp body flailing behind
her.

Addy lowered herself down, her feet touching the ground. The world swam for a moment, not bad enough that she
needed to sit, but before she could rectify that, her legs promptly gave out on her, dropping her on her rear.

She weakened the connection between herself and the others, became an individual again with two eyes and one
arm, as was normal.

“Jesus fuck,” Maxwell said from somewhere behind her.

“...and that should do it,” Winn said, after another moment, his eyes trained on the cube in his hand, connected up to
his computer via the USB port, begin to pull itself apart into red particulate. It spasmed for a moment in the air, then
surged forward, vanishing into the computer itself.

Addy tried to feel for Myriad’s disappearance, but couldn’t sense any differences, though Alex’s continued prodding
at the places where her scalp had fractured under the physical strain was distracting her. She still had her pain
suppressed, despite everything, not entirely prepared for the pain that would follow when she reopened the sensory
link.

“How long should it take?” James asked, wobbling a bit, Lucy helping him remain upright. He’d taken more damage
over the course of the fight, some minor concussive damage to his left knee as a result of the table that Karsta had
sent flying with that punch. Lucy had managed to get off almost entirely unscathed, by contrast.

“Not too long,” Maxwell said, voice distant, quiet. “A minute, two? I don’t know, it depends on how quickly the
injection process takes.”

“Stop fidgeting, Addy,” Alex muttered, brushing her hair down for the fifth time in as many seconds and wrapping
another length of bandage around her head.

Addy blinked down at her legs which were, to Alex’s credit, swinging a bit.

“Okay,” she tried, because she was feeling very odd. Tired, but not. She knew the source of this state was the
adrenaline, and that she would soon crash as a result of her body cutting off access to it, but still, it was very, very
odd.

Glancing back up, Addy watched Kara ease more of the crumpled ceiling back into place with a grunt. Not that it
was fixed or anything, but rather she was just removing it from the unstable floor they were all on. They should
probably leave soon, now that she thought about it.

Kara landed after another few moments of fiddling with the placement, clapping her hands together to clear them of
some of the drywall dust, coughing awkwardly as it came back up to cloud around her face.

“What did you do with the Kryptonian, anyway?” Maxwell asked, still sounding distant. Ah, no, she’d figured it out, he
was dissociating. Right. Humans could do that.

Kara glanced his way, something like sheepishness crawling over her face. “I threw her into the ocean.”

Alex sighed, out of sight, a belaboured, tired sort of sigh. “We could have captured her,” she pointed out tartly.

“I don’t want the D.E.O. anywhere near another Kryptonian,” Kara explained tightly. “Not after what they did to Astra in
captivity—that and I didn’t think we had any Kryptonite cuffs to hold her.”

She felt it, finally. The receding pressure against the others, that psychic weight beginning to pull back slowly,
intricately. A few seconds later, and it was gone.

Addy, relieved, dropped her blocking.

Alex kept bandaging her head, Winn kept fidgeting with his hands, Lucy and James kept muttering to one-another
and laughing.

They were safe.

“Myriad’s gone,” she blurted, not able to stop herself.

““Oh thank god,”” Winn and Kara said in sync.

Last edited: Oct 2, 2020

 549

OxfordOctopus Oct 2, 2020 View discussion

Threadmarks: SEASON 1 - EPISODE 19 View content

OxfordOctopus She/Her
(Unverified Jackanape)
Oct 6, 2020  #1,254

EPISODE 19​
“Now, after two days, it would seem that the CatCo building has finally started its lengthy repair project,” Coraline May,
one of the more popular newscasters - as far as Addy could tell, anyway - remarked, a small window appearing next
to her head, showing a short clip of a team of workers beginning to set scaffolding up around the place where
Karsta had gouged a chunk out of the building. “Despite early reviews painting a bleak image of the building’s stability,
some even going so far as to say it may need to be torn down, the city council and a small board of architectural
experts agreed to allow for repairs to go forward, with some caveats.”

The clip next to her head changed, revealing a balding man in his late thirties, a bit pudgy around the chin, with a
perpetual sheen of red cast across doughy cheekbones. “We believe the building will need a few adjustments to
compensate for the damage done to it,” the man said in a surprisingly deep voice, easily baritone. Addy had expected
something high, almost nasally, but then perhaps she had been taking too much of Cat Grant’s errant commentary to
heart lately. “That is simply how things are—when materials are damaged in big construction projects such as these,
you must not only replace them, but replace what the damage has influenced. However, outside of that, we do believe
the building is salvageable, given the proper steps.”

Addy rocked her leg back and forth from its place flung over the back of the couch. Her other leg was splayed
straight out, knee leaning off the couch far enough to rest against the hard wooden surface of the coffee table.
Truthfully, she wasn’t particularly sure why she chose this position to lay in—nothing about it was believably helpful,
but it was very, very comfortable.

“The damage done to the CatCo building has put an estimated nine-hundred people out of work for the time being,”
Coraline continued, the window blinking away. She was a very colourful woman, with long, curly ginger ringlets, a
face full of delightful freckles, and eyes a startling green. She wasn’t conventional for what Addy had come to
understand was a female newscaster; most of them were blonde and without blemishes, but then Coraline had
apparently gotten her start as a storm chaser and gained a cultish following, so the network had folded and made
her a newscaster after an accident made any further storm chasing implausible. “Though Cat Grant herself has
stated those directly hired by CatCo Worldwide Media will be collecting their wages and doing their jobs, largely from
home, that still leaves nearly six-hundred and fifty people out of work who had offices in the building but did not
necessarily work for the company. She made this announcement on the back of her decision to apparently decline the
President's request that she become her Press Secretary, citing a need to 'clean up the mess that was left after all that
rot'.”

People had been very busy. Kara was seldom home—National City was a community of four million and there was
an untold amount of damage. When Myriad had kicked into effect, there had apparently been about four seconds
where people were under its influence, but not its control, which meant they did nothing. Ninety-four people had died
from automobile-related accidents, a passenger plane flying over National City at the time had been forced to
ground itself at a nearby airport after nearly crashing.

There were other things, too. Despite there not being a huge fight in the streets, there had been a lot of panic
immediately after Myriad had been released. People, in foreign places, having just felt what it was like to not be in
control of their own bodies, lashed out wildly. Fights had been a constant, people were dealing with unexpected
trauma as people always did: poorly. None of this was bringing up how the fire that had swept through the
downtown part of the city had taken nearly a dozen apartments with it, which was leaving an estimated thousand
people without shelter.

As a result, Kara spent almost basically every waking moment as Supergirl. It wasn’t like she had much in the way of
commitments, Addy could admit, Cat Grant had more or less told Kara her job as an assistant was to be put on hold
for the time being, at least until the chaos in the streets died down.

Alex was busy too. The D.E.O. had all hands on deck, she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Kara’s sister after they parted
ways, despite Alex promising to come and check up on Kara. She had, of course, Addy had overheard their phone
call, but she was clearly just as swamped.

Winn was equally as busy, though for different and less obfuscated reasons. He was more or less running the CatCo
website at this point, full hands-on-deck, and was holed up in the building they’d moved the servers to. He was doing
a good job at it, but any attempt to initiate a conversation with him always got a ‘not right now, busy’ back in
response. Which she believed, yes, but it was still rather disheartening.

Carol was the only one she had managed to have a moderate-length conversation with, and that had been mostly an
afterthought. Carol had called the day after she had been brought home - and not to the Fortress, as neither Clark
nor Kara could spare the time and it wasn’t completely likely that she could lift the key to the Fortress with only one
arm - by Kara and told to sunbathe until the wounds on her hand and head healed. Supposedly, aliens were fearing
retaliation from the paranoid masses and had decided to lay low until the Myriad incident blew over, so the bar
wasn’t going to be open.

That and to ‘keep herself safe’, as though she might be threatened by a human who didn’t like her for her genetic
makeup.

When she had relayed as much to Carol, the woman had claimed that humans had a bad habit of ‘finding a way’
when it came to being dangerous, and Addy had conceded the point, or at least somewhat.

Unfortunately, that left her with birdwatching, television watching, and the internet as plausible ways to pass the
time. Even more unfortunately, the current hour and the next two into the future constituted what she was
classifying as a ‘dead zone’ for cartoons, in that the majority of them weren’t appealing to her for a multitude of
reasons. She had yet to broach Kara on what constituted as a drama show in this universe—Taylor had a fondness
for Degrassi and she had been curious to see if it existed here as well, and that was unlikely to change until the city
itself was mostly fixed, and by that point she would already have some sort of task to keep herself occupied.

Which left her with the news. Dreaded boring, with no interest in making fascinating noises, but at least it was an
adequate way to acquire information on the ongoing problems in the city.

“CatCo is not the only place handling repairs right now,” Caroline said, another window popping up next to her,
showing some unlit streets with popping powerlines. “A large-scale undertaking to fix the city’s power grid is already
underway, and it is estimated that the downtown part of the city will regain power over the next four or five hours.
Downtown National City remains the only place with consistent black-outs. The source is believed to be a mixture of
things; among which was a fatal car crash that caused damage to some essential wiring.”

Most of the national news was focused on National City, for better or for worse, though she couldn’t be so sure
about Fox. Apparently, at some point, Kara had simply banned the channel and Addy was grudgingly willing to say
the security for the cable box, as achieved through making navigating the menus as labyrinthine as possible and
without much consistency, had been adequate enough to discourage her from finding a way to fix that. Purposefully
redundant design coupled with intentionally complicated systems had always been a fond favourite of hers for
security measures, not that she enjoyed it much when she was on the receiving end.

Nevertheless, she’d eventually decided on Caroline May because she was the most interesting, bright, and pleasant
one out of the options available. The other women were all blonde and pale, and the men were all old and had thin,
wispy hair that looked unpleasant for reasons Addy had yet to ascertain. At the very least, Caroline May had some
heterogeneity when it came to her freckles and delightfully curly hair.

“On a more positive note, however, Maxwell Lord has just committed to a live interview and we’re on-site as we speak.
Do we have cameras on it?”

Addy felt her stomach twist, and she instinctively reached for the remote, only for her arm to get caught on the sling
it was tucked away in. That was the other reason why she had so little to do: because they couldn’t get her access to
a sunbed, as Clark was busy dealing with all the things he missed in Metropolis, and Kara dealing with the Myriad
fallout, she was still healing. Quickly, yes, she would be operable in, by her own estimate, a little under sixteen hours,
but Kara had made her promise to keep her arm until it was fully healed. Which was difficult, because Karsta’s
decision to fire her lasers resulted in plasma gouging holes out of her hand and directly hitting her bone for a short
period, the rapid expansion of heat causing a large variety of micro-fractures down her only operable arm that she
had only noticed after the fact. It was mostly healed now, but Kara had made her promise, and she wasn’t about to
break her confidence.

Still, she would rather not watch Maxwell, and Kara had taped the remote to the table for exactly this reason, so she
could poke it with her elbow or the few fingers she could extend out past the sling.

Leaning forward, Addy had perhaps half a second to realize the unbalancing of her weight was pushing the couch
back and opening a gap between it and the coffee table before her knee slipped free, the hard edge of the table
pressed against a bundle of nerves at the top of her knee, and in response, her leg lashed out with utmost precision,
slammed into the remote, and sent it hurtling into the wall, where it promptly shattered into a few hundred pieces,
leaving behind blackish scuffs on the wall.

Addy stared, blinked slowly.

Was this what Kara was talking about, when referencing accidentally using her strength? Addy could relate. That
was very embarrassing, and very frustrating, because Kara wasn’t likely to be impressed. Remotes were apparently
expensive, and she had just broken one across the wall like an egg.

“So, Maxwell,” a new voice interrupted, and Addy, begrudgingly, turned her head to look. On the television, instead of
there being Coraline May, Maxwell Lord and a blonde woman, almost identical to every other blonde woman
newscaster, sat facing one another. They were on some sort of stage, with red curtains covering the walls behind
them, and between them was a small table. “You haven’t been seen since you were spotted coming out of the CatCo
building not long after the mind control fell. What’s kept you?”

Fear, in Addy’s opinion.

“Well, Jessica,” the way Maxwell emphasized the name, made it roll off of his lips, turned Addy’s stomach. Why did
he have to be like that? He could speak perfectly normally, she had seen it, what was the purpose of that sort of
behaviour? “What I witnessed, it made me rethink a lot of things, I had to.”

“Such as?” Jessica probed, leaning forward.

Maxwell’s face, on closer inspection, was drawn, wan. He had bruises under each eye, his fingers stuttered nervously
on the arm of the chair, he looked like he hadn’t slept yet. “That the way I’ve been approaching things, it wasn’t the
right way,” he said tiredly, almost solemnly.

“You’ve always been a vocal critic of Supergirl,” Jessica rushed to comment, smiling broadly. Almost predatory, now
that she looked closer at it. “Has that changed?”

“No, I believe Kryptonians need critics—they need dissent, to ensure their actions don’t get lost in the media, but...” He
trailed off, reaching up to scratch at his chin. “I’ll be blunt, since I’ve learned it's easier: LordTech will be following Lena
Luthor’s example and moving away from weapons manufacturing, and back to the company’s roots, focusing on
robotics and software engineering, as well as some medical technology and material sciences.”

Addy watched as Jessica’s jaw all but dropped. It was oddly humanizing for the woman, who looked nearly
indistinguishable from every other newscaster. It made her seem less like a prop, more like a person.

“I would have thought your experiences would have driven you in the opposite direction,” Jessica replied slowly, each
word visibly being considered. “Considering how violent it was.”

“Let me ask you something Jessica, do you remember the cold war?” Maxwell asked bluntly, voice almost deadpan.

Jessica’s smile strained. “Are you fishing for my age, Mr. Lord?”

“Just answer the question.”

Jessica’s throat bobbed, and finally, she shrugged. “Sort of. I don’t remember much of it, but I was born in the 80s.”

“Right well, we don’t like talking about it, it’s not our greatest moment, but during the 80s people thought they were
going to die.” Maxwell shifted in his seat, brought his hands into his lap. “That one day the nukes would fall. It felt
inevitable, it was the future doomsday that nobody could prepare for. We did a lot of awful things as a result, reckless
things, drugs, unprotected sex, the thought always was you’d never have to deal with the problems because by then the
planet would be a charred wasteland.

“I’m not sure—” Jessica tried.

“Weapons, Jessica, are a deterrent. I will concede that much, but the existence of weapons is to encourage your
enemies to match you. The ‘big stick’ philosophy only works when your enemies cannot, within reason, match up to you.
See, nukes don’t discriminate—neither did mutually assured destruction. The bomb falls, we all die. There aren’t nukes
for black people, white people, Jewish people, communists, capitalists, monarchists—there just aren’t.

“But imagine, Jessica, for a moment, that humans were deathly allergic to... say, platinum. Both touch and proximity, if
you get near to platinum it makes you weak, hysterical, it causes pain. If you touch platinum, it’s even worse. Veins of
platinum on our world would be feared, quarantined, because they’re a hazard.”

Jessica simply nodded, clearly taken in and engrossed.

“Every time someone made a weapon with platinum, we would see it as a weapon to kill us. Nukes were bad enough,
but they didn’t discriminate; you armed them, and they were a unilateral threat. There was no sense that you were
making nukes because you wanted to wipe away a specific type of person, because in the end nukes do not care who
their fireball kills. But platinum? It might only kill us, and a weapon which utilized it would, therefore, be seen as a
weapon with the sole purpose of killing us. It would always be a threat, and what we saw in the cold war - nuclear
proliferation, developments in weapons like that - well, it would be worse, because now the threat was only to us, now
every example of it would be only to kill us, and we would have to make a weapon to at least match.”

“Did you?” Jessica asked, blinking a few times before shaking her head, working herself out of a haze. “Make a
weapon, I mean.”

“I tried,” Maxwell said blandly. “But it was taken from me before it could become one. They repurposed it, made it
something better, by my own estimate. Something that can help.”

Something about this was feeling very personal.

“Over the recent incident, the reality of where I was going with my tech, with my actions—it became clear. I still think we
should have checks and balances, I still think we should protect ourselves if possible, but considering how things are
going with President Marsdin and the Alien Amnesty Act, I think I was taking it too far. It’s one thing to make technology
to protect ourselves with, it’s another thing to be making technology with the unilateral intent to wipe something out
because there’s the possibility it can become a threat in the future.”

Maxwell rose from his chair in one fluid motion, turning to the camera. “I’m sorry.”

Then he left, ignoring the rabid follow-up questions yelled at him.

Kara’s return, as it had been for the last several days, was graceless. It was hard watching Kara’s wobbly flight as
she floated in through the window, costume smudged with soot and dirt and looking utterly exhausted.

Still, Addy kept it off her face, because she didn’t want to add to it any.

“Hi Addy,” Kara mumbled, boots finally touching ground, a wobbly step bringing her forward until her head could rest
against the wall.

“Hi, Kara,” Addy returned, because it was polite. She was still on the couch, still splayed out as she was, and the
television was still on the news. She’d gone looking for another remote but had only come up with the television’s
remote, not another cable remote, and had resorted to muting it and watching youtube videos on her laptop. She
was currently working through a series of recorded lectures on avian evolution during the later years of the Jurassic.

“You eat everything today?” Kara queried, voice muffled by the wall.

Addy, distracted by another diagram, made an affirmative noise. She had found the secret to eating yogurt: granola,
and raisins. After she’d added some texture she’d been able to go through her required nutritional intake with little
issue. She’d also cleared off several glasses of water by first crushing ice and adding it, after coming to the
revelation with granola. The ice gave everything a texture that didn’t make her stomach turn, all good things.

“Anything interesting happen?” Kara asked, face still pressed into the wall like she was talking to it and not Addy.

Addy flicked her eyes back to the television screen, to the sight of LordTech stocks plummeting down to a new low,
but with a ‘tentative stability’ if the analyst was to be believed. Personally, Addy knew that the markets were all
mostly fake and controlled by autonomous programs; market sway was arbitrary and inherently unstable as a result.
“Maxwell Lord denounced his previous actions and has committed to not continuing weapons manufacturing.”

There was a loud, sharp crunch.

Addy flicked her head towards Kara, catching sight of her retrieving her forehead from the small dent she’d made in
the wall.

Kara stared mournfully at the damage, bringing her hands up to her face, covering it in its entirety. “I just got the door
repaired,” she groaned. “I can’t even be happy about that because now I have to go and explain why there’s a
forehead-shaped dent in my wall!”

Her hands came down after another moment, a breathy huff bursting out of Kara’s chest. She turned, likely intending
to be towards her room, only to halt on the muted television. “Addy?”

She had been hoping to put that off. “Yes?”

“Why’s it on the news? I mean, if you’re interested in that, it’s okay, but I’m pretty sure one of your favourite shows is
on right now and you’re pretty... intense about schedules.”

She was, she could agree on that much. She had watched her favourite cartoon on her laptop already, pre-empting
this issue, so she only felt marginally upset she was missing it. Torrents were a wondrous and interesting data
distribution method. Shaking the thoughts away, Addy steadied her gaze on her leg, to the coffee table she’d
dragged back in after she cleaned up the plastic mess she’d reduced the remote to. “Are you aware that humans
have a cluster of nerves on the top of their knee?”

“...I have that too, Addy. It’s a tendon and nerve cluster.”

“Oh.” She would keep that in mind. “Nevertheless, I attempted to utilize the remote after seeing Maxwell Lord on the
television, as I do not like him and seeing his face is frustrating. My weight unbalanced, it moved the chair away, that
bundle of nerves came into contact with the hard edge of the table and my body, involuntarily, may have kicked the
remote into the wall.”

Kara made another noise, a weak keening sort of sound. Her hands returned to her face for a moment as she clearly
tried to process this new revelation. “...Did you at least clean it up?”

“Of course I did,” Addy cut back, affronted. It would be unimaginably impolite not to do that much; she had not just
broken the remote, but she had also reduced the battery inside of the note into an acidic puddle.

Kara glanced at her from between her fingers, a shaky smile flicking over her features. “Sorry, Ads,” Kara mumbled,
using that nickname that she didn’t always but Addy always liked. It made her chest feel warm, she even squirmed
her legs a little because the energy had to go somewhere and she was going to float if she did nothing with it.
“Rough day for me, and all that. I’m glad you cleaned it up, we can get another remote tomorrow, it’s not a big deal.”

Addy felt the pressure on her chest let up, letting out a little breath. Her need to wiggle ended with it, legs coming to
a rest again. “Okay. I’ll be healed by that time, so I can come too.”

Kara, still in costume, tottered over to the kitchen, tugging the fridge open, lips pursing. “We need groceries too,” she
said absently, finally reaching forward to pull some of the takeout leftovers out. It said something that Kara had been
too busy for potstickers and fried rice. “More milk, gotta order yogurt too—uurgh, I am so glad Miss Grant is still
paying me. Expenses have been unfortunately high lately.”

Addy turned her eyes away, content to listen to Kara rummage around in the paper bag, retrieving squeaky
styrofoam bundles and plod over to the microwave, which opened with a loud, electronic chime. A few beeps later,
the thing turned on with a whirr.

Not long after, Kara passed by the couch and made a line for her room.

Addy felt the pressure on her chest release, just that little bit more.

Kara was a morning person. Addy knew what that meant in the abstract, of course, using Taylor’s memories as a
reference point she divined the meaning of the term, muttered darkly by Alex on that drive back from the D.E.O. base.
It felt like ages since that had happened, oddly, her reference frame for time had always been scarily accurate, and
yet it truly felt like it had been... years since she’d first woken up.

The point being, Kara was a morning person. Addy had come to accept this much out of her, even despite Addy
herself preferring to remain asleep when the opportunity was given. Kara’s quiet clattering as she worked through
the kitchen to prepare breakfast had always been a nice thing to listen to as she dozed, just the idea that she wasn’t
alone was soothing.

This, though? This went too far.

“Sorry about how dusty the car is,” Kara said brightly, with too much cheer. She was fiddling with her rearview mirror
with one hand, and with the other easing the car into gear. “I haven’t taken it out since, well, I became Supergirl, but I
kinda don’t want to be caught flying with bags of groceries.”

Addy obstinately didn’t respond, pressing her face into the slightly cool surface of the airbag housing, eyes shut. It
was five o’clock in the morning. She had been awake for thirty minutes. She did not want to be awake. But she had
to be, because Kara had explained that this was kinda the only time she had to herself for the time being and she
really didn’t want to be interrupted when out shopping.

Addy was not even aware there were stores open at five in the morning, but then she had been worryingly incorrect
about a lot of things lately, including the fabric of reality, so she wasn’t really in a place to make predictions until she
could properly restructure her databanks, something she had been putting off in large part due to having
significantly bigger concerns.

The car lurched unsteadily forward at just the right speed to make Addy’s brain, inner ear canal, and all of the other
arbitrary parts of the body that humans used to create nausea from twist unpleasantly.

“Really been a while,” Kara muttered, the car lurching again before finally, finally smoothing out. “It’s all good! I
relearn things quickly, and it’s only been—well, a couple of months.”

Addy was just glad they were both mostly invulnerable.

Early Bird Grocer was apparently named after the idiom the early bird gets the worm. The name was inspired by the
fact that it opened at three in the morning and closed at five in the afternoon, and the fact that it sold everything at
budget prices. Kara had sworn by it repeatedly on the way over, car prowling down largely-empty roads as they
transitioned from the city center to the outer suburbs and smaller communities which were, technically, part of
National City, but not really, but Addy couldn’t help but have her doubts.

Addy had been relegated, after some argument, to cart operation. Kara knew her way around the store - a
complicated maze of interlocking shelves and overly-polite staff members that Addy tried her best to avoid like a
plague because all of them wanted to stare her in the eyes - and Addy more or less just followed her, now-healed
hand gripping the bar and shuttling the thing along as they went.

This was not to say that Kara didn’t include her. No, Kara was too inclusive, if anything. Addy had yet to go grocery
shopping with Kara before, and Kara clearly intended to make the best of the advantage with her here. While Addy
could praise her for the initiative, she sincerely wished it just wasn’t directed at her.

Even saying that, however, Addy had obtained a surprising amount of information and they weren’t even done yet.
She’d found out that she didn’t like blueberries due to the lack of uniformity among each of them, as she risked
biting into a firm, juicy berry one time and next a sour, tart squishy one. Next, she found out that carrots came in bite-
sized form, which she demanded several bags of and Kara had, obligingly, given her.

She had also learned about what Kara considered her secondary favourites. As it would turn out, Kara had a deep
love for Oreo cookies and explained that she put aside money every week to buy them for herself so she could keep
four or five of them on her throughout the day and reward herself when she thought she did something good. When
Addy had asked if she did that when out as Supergirl, Kara had been suspiciously quiet.

“Ooh, pop-tarts are 40% off,” Kara’s words dragged her bodily from her recollections, and Addy obligingly adjusted
her path to trail after Kara. Kara behaved not unlike a bloodhound when shopping, slipping her glasses down to scan
the area with her ability to see through objects to hone in on a specific target before bursting off towards it, swerving
through shelves and around corners at a pace Addy had to match.

If not for the fact that Kara was a very loud person when outside of her costume, stomping around, forever tripping,
clumsy in ways that never ceased to amaze, Addy was certain she would’ve lost her by now.

Coming to a halt next to the frozen goods, Addy watched Kara pull one of the glass doors open, pouting when ‘3 PER
PERSON’ stared back at her, taped just above the line-up of colourful, utterly unhealthy pop-tarts.

“Do you have a flavour you like?” Kara asked, glancing back her way.

Addy glanced towards the frozen vegetables. “I don’t like sweets.” Which was apparently very odd. There was
something about most sweet things that was just too much. It was like biting into a frag grenade and her senses did
not appreciate that. Sure, there were likely some sweets out there that she could palate without getting a headache,
but she had yet to find them.

“That’s sad,” Kara said, but still shovelled three boxes of rainbow-sprinkle pop-tarts into the cart without hesitation.
“Really sad.” She said, as though she was trying to make herself believe it.

Addy felt an urge and let it come, her eyes rolling up in what Taylor had mastered as the unimpressed eye-roll.

Kara choked. “You rolled your eyes at me! Addy! That’s so rude!”

“No,” Addy said, beginning to push the cart forward, Kara trailing beside her. She ignored the way Kara’s eyes kept
flicking towards the icecream section, passing it by even when Kara made one of those noises that meant she really
wanted it. She would not give in if she didn’t look at Kara when she made those unhappy faces. “That is me stopping
myself from commenting on your sugar intake.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t get cavities,” Kara announced proudly.

Addy did turn to look at her then, finally passing out of the temptatious frozen goods isles and into what looked to
be a maze of magazine racks. “Your teeth are not what I am concerned about.” Could Kryptonians get diabetes?
She’d have to look it up, but still, that amount of sugar was likely being burned as wasted energy. Take what you
need was her philosophy about energy intake.

Kara’s cheeks puffed out comically, a pout on her lips. “Miss Grant’s a bad influence on you.”

Ah. She knew how to respond to that one. “I’ll gladly inform her as much next time we go in,” she said, keeping her
voice sage.

Kara’s resulting squawk was very funny, not that she let it show.

Kara ambled back into the car with an almost broken look on her face, a small box clutched in one hand.

Behind her, in the window of the local cable company’s retail shop, a brightly-smiling woman waved politely at them.

“I can’t believe a remote costs sixty bucks,” she said, shutting the door sluggishly. “I can’t believe I almost let them
talk me into a new cable package that would’ve cost me forty more dollars per month for three years! I nearly signed
it, Addy!”

Addy stared blankly. “You could just say no.”

Kara threw her head back against her seat. “But she was so nice!”

And? James could be nice, but she still felt the impulse to tell him ‘no’ plenty of times before. Even sometimes for
things she was totally able to do but just didn’t want to because she knew it would frustrate him.

Maybe that much got across in her expression, because Kara just made more grumbling noises and eased the car
back into motion, pulling out of the parking lot.

“One day, Addy,” Kara began, voice pitched into that voice she took on when she thought she was imparting grand
wisdom. “You’ll understand the true terror of a determined, very polite retail worker.”

Addy wasn’t so sure about that.

“Alright!” Kara said, standing in her costume near the window. “Did we put everything away?”

Addy nodded.

“Even the frozen stuff?”

She nodded again.

“And you know my number to call if things go bad?”

Nod.

“Okay,” Kara breathed out, her power picking her up oh-so-gently, drawing her into the air. “Then I’m off, I’ll see you in
like, twelve hours!”

Addy waved.

Kara smiled.

Then she was gone.

Ambling over to the couch, Addy plopped down onto its plush surface, pulled the new remote out from where they’d
both unpackaged it on the coffee table, and flicked the television on again.

On the top right corner, in one of those graphic panels that the news so liked to use, 6:54AM stared back at her.

Addy changed the channel to cartoons, the early morning circuit just picking up, and let herself slump back into the
cushions.

Maybe she should take a nap.

 512

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