Lex needed to know what was in the storm cellar. It was a matter of practicalnecessity, but there was an emotional component as well. He’d spent nearly ayear of his life in pursuit of what lay there, slowly working his waybackwards from Superman to Clark Kent and Clark Kent to Smallville. He hadthree agents in Smallville, one of whom was living on

Jimmy Olsen sat at the bar, gulping back his fourth beer. It was possible toforget, for brief moments.

Lois Lane had come over to him, shaking slightly, and said that they needed totake a trip out into the country. He’d grabbed his camera and plenty of film,then raced downstairs where he’d had to wait in the car for nearly ten minuteswhil

From Preethi v New York 293 U.S. 367 (1934):

The State of New York has provided such significant encouragement, both overtand covert, that the actions of Superman must be judged to be that of theState. […] It is this Court’s considered opinion that there would not be muchuse to Constitutional protections if the State could do an end run aroundthose p

Lois Lane had been walking down 15th Avenue looking for a place to eatbreakfast when she’d heard the bang from the next block over. She’d startedrunning towards it seconds after she’d heard it, while everyone else on thestreet was looking around like they’d missed something. If they’d read thepaper, they’d know that Superman had predicted that t

Harry Kramer loved explosives. He loved the danger of working with them andthe thrill of watching them go off. A properly made bomb was an amazing pieceof engineering, a compact device of wires, springs, and explosives all set upin a very precisely and ordered way. When the bomb went off, all that hardwork evaporated in a single transformative mo

Lex Luthor wasn’t the only one gathering information. As the days passed,people began to make their observations, and a few things began to becomeknown.

Superman would show up at misdemeanors in downtown Metropolis, felonies in thegreater metropolitan area, and large disasters in the continental UnitedStates. Those who had done the math woul

Lois Lane was undeniably at the top of her game.

There had been grumbling from some of the other reporters that it had beendumb luck, but obviously Superman had chosen her for a reason, and obviouslythat reason had been her reporting. That’s what she kept telling herself,anyway. Lois worked twice as hard as any other reporter at _Th

“What happened?” asked Sunny. She stared down the scope of her sniper rifle,as did most of the other members of the sniper team. They’d seen the colossusthaw itself out and spring up on top of the building in one smooth motion.They’d taken shots at it, but it ripped the roof up to form a barrier andflattened itself out as it stabbed at the people inside. Abl

Kyle Reese crouched in a small ball, completely naked, and with a flash oflight was transposed a thousand miles and thirty years, from the cold floor ofthe MIT facility to the still-warm air of Los Angeles at two hours pastmidnight, June 22nd, 1997. His whole body tensed, and he readied himself tosprint or roll out of the way of debris, or a car, but the jump ha

Superman has a day job.

It was just a joke, the kind of thing that the brain coughs up when it’strying to match a pattern. Kant said that humor was expectation strained untilit suddenly dissolved into nothingness. Lex had been making maps and doingcomplex math for weeks on end, and if that was a joke, it made sense that thepunchline was simply t

The next morning, the very first stop that Charles made - after anotherenormous and varied breakfast - was to the List Room. Matilda stood by hisside. He’d asked for Kelvin as well, but had been told that he wasunavailable. He hadn’t actually thought that elves could be unavailable, butit was another data point to add to his model of how the North Pole worked.

Charles awoke in the morning feeling more refreshed than he had in years. Thebed was soft and fluffy, and he experienced a moment of confused bliss as helay beneath the warm sheets, until he remembered that he was Santa Claus, andthat the previous person to wear that mantle had been a monster.

He’d practically filled the notebook the night before, mostly with qu

Though he was tired, he immediately went to the viewer. The controls weremechanical and extremely tactile, though smooth and polished. Charles supposedthat there must be a team of elves which built and repaired the devices,unless they were simply conjured from grey blobs like the toys were.

He turned the dial back as far as it would go, to December 25th of thep

Charles wore the red and white suit, which didn’t fit his thin frame. The oldman had told him that it would, with time, but Charles had always been asskinny as a stick. Still, if he grew fat in the coming weeks, it would be fardown the list of miraculous things that needed solving.

“I’m an industrial engineer,” he’d said, when the old man had come to him. “Idon

Derek drove, with Able sitting in the seat next to him. In the back rodeSunny, Bison, Oscar, Reed, and two of the terminators. It churned his stomachto see them. These were early models, without the nuanced appearance of thelater ones that Skynet used to infiltrate the resistance. They looked like thefaded advertising that Derek sometimes saw in the ruins of po