บท 55: Chapter 51
Pushing her chair away from the table, Kara squinted her eyes and stared at the patch of skin, her improved vision allowing her to see every pore, every defect. It seemed the tone still wasn't perfect, but everything else looked good.
She wasn't exactly a medical expert, but the AI had done the majority of the work and it was easy enough to follow instructions, her muscle control guaranteeing she wouldn't make any mistakes during the transplant.
Really, Kara would have normally taken more time to study some more or found an expert for anything more complicated but, while the wound was large, it had been mostly cosmetic.
Grabbing the solar lamp at the side, she adjusted the focus and pushed it closer to the skin, bombarding the new transplant with sunlight until even she couldn't see the difference.
Turning off the device, she turned off the operating table and smiled towards the hero leaning on the wall. "It's done. He should wake in a few minutes."
"Thanks. His mother was about to kill me," the Flash said. "The kids didn't even notice how deep the wound was until they got back to the mountain."
Kara was barely able to follow his movements with her head as the man dashed towards the side of the bed, leaning over his protégée and checking his face.
"Anything wrong?"
"Nope, looks good to me," the Flash said and shook his head in exasperation. "You know, he really wanted to keep the scar, but it was a little too visible."
"Hard to keep a secret identity when he shows up with thirty stitches in his cheek," she nodded. Another good reason to use full-face masks.
Wally's wound would have healed completely… Eventually. His accelerated healing factor made sure of that, but Cheshire had hurt him enough that it would take months, time in which anybody could notice he had gotten a VERY large scar at the exact same time as Kid Flash.
"Still, sad to admit, but having to fix it was a shame. The kid looked badass with that scar," Flash said, a smile on his face as he leaned against the operating table.
Getting up from her chair, Kara scratched an itch on her prosthetic leg and cracked her neck. "You know, I thought you guys would be angrier about this?"
"I mean, don't be mistaken, we are angry they got hurt," Flash said, scratching at his exposed face with a finger. "But we're also really proud. Their coordination was something else and they achieved every objective despite the surprises. I didn't even know Deathstroke had a psychotic daughter."
Kara nodded in agreement, she had seen the recordings and the operation had gone about as well as anyone could hope for.
With a snap of her finger, two Karabots walked into the room, the robots working in perfect synchrony to put away everything she had used for the operation. "Still, is the League gonna let them continue after this?"
"Ugh, those things give me the creeps," Flash shivered, giving both robots a wary glance. "Anyways, you think we can stop them now? After they got their first successful mission? I'm just glad they're smart enough to accept our supervision. Besides, those emergency teleports you gave them take a huge worry off my chest and it's not like they haven't gotten hurt in patrols before. Thanks for that, by the way."
"Huh, you're welcome," a third Karabot walked into the room, a plate with some snacks in its hands. After getting blasted by the demons, Kara's hunger was finally getting back to normal.
"Speaking of coordination," Flash said, using his speed to steal a handful of her food before she could react. "The League is planning on starting some exercises to help with that, want in?"
"What kind of exercises?" Kara asked, quickly protecting her remaining snacks while glaring at the speedster.
"Well, we do train together sometimes, but that's more so we don't get in each other's way in a battle. Knowing there are villain teams out there, we're thinking of copying the kids and organizing some larger exercises, maybe coordinating something with the military, even," Flash said, a glint of excitement in his eyes as he bit into a cookie. "Not now, obviously, everybody's too busy for that, but after the League finishes reorganizing itself?"
"So you guys want me to act as an independent hero then? See how the League deals with an unfamiliar hero trying to help out in the field?"
"Well, that's certainly important, but I was thinking in the opposite direction," Flash shrugged, finishing his meal and glancing down at his sidekick. "You see, the League will need an opponent and I keep hearing you'd make a great villain."
Kara lifted an eyebrow at the hero and, slowly, her face blossomed into a predatory smile, a chance to plot against the League… She had so many ideas.
"There! That's exactly the creepiness I mean!" Flash pointed at her smile. "That's totally a vicious smirk if I ever saw one."
"I'll think about it," Kara snorted, then noticed Wally starting to move on the table.
"Ugh, is it over?" the kid asked, still a little out of it.
"Yeah," Flash said, helping Wally to get up into a sitting position. Then he put on a completely serious face. "Don't worry; I made sure she didn't put any explosives under your skin."
Wally shivered and then managed to turn, giving his mentor a vicious glare. "Haha, very funny. You do know that's a perfectly rational worry with her, right?"
"I heard that," Kara said. She thought about teasing the kid a little, but she heard he had been far more polite since she tattled on him, so he deserved a break. Instead, she threw him a cookie and smiled. "Here, great job with the mission. I watched the recordings and you guys were impressive."
"… Thanks?" Wally said with thinly veiled trepidation, staring at his cookie with suspiciousness until Flash tried to steal it.
Wally reacted quickly, slapping the thieving hand away and stuffing the snack into his mouth instead. Looking up, he grabbed a mirror from Kara's extended hand and looked over the new skin.
"Anyways, the transplant was a complete success," Kara said. "Next time, if you want a cool scar, either change to a full mask or try to get hit in a less visible place."
"Please don't," Flash said. "Your mother already yelled at me for this one, there's no need to go for another."
"Don't worry, I have no intention of getting stabbed like that again, it hurts." Wally said, stepping on the floor and testing his balance. It seems like he was almost fully recovered.
Kara gave them a few minutes to fully get over the anesthesia, but then she almost pushed the duo towards the Zeta-Tube. She liked the Flash and, when he wasn't trying to hit on her girlfriend, Wally was a great kid, but she had more things to work on.
Like starting to plot how to fight the entire League. Would they allow her to hire underlings? Maybe use the Titans?
Watching them disappear in a flash of light, she locked the Zeta-Tube for anyone but her cousin and walked further inside her side of the Fortress of Solitude, passing through the deactivated Karabots and into her personal workshop.
Floating in the air, held in place through several anti gravity devices, Kal's ship was almost fully disassembled, several pieces floating independently from one another, but still roughly in the same position they were while attached to the ship.
Floating up, Kara entered the gravity field to start working, unlocking pieces and slowly prying the ship open with her own hands. One advantage of working on Kryptonian tech was that there was no oil or lubricant needed, so she didn't even get dirty.
Upon reaching her target panel along the underbelly, she touched the inner latch on the power source. Rotating the lock clockwise, she pulled it down, revealing the still functioning hyper-drive inside. Carefully, Kara pulled the large device out, using her flight to avoid any of the ship's components.
Floating out of the gravity field, she held the hyper-drive over her head and flew towards a workstation, gently lying it down. A second later, a mechanical arm lifted from the floor, the hand uncurling into hundreds of sharp devices.
Grabbing a makeshift neural controller for the arm —a temporary measure until she could build a safer and more permanent controller— Kara put it over her head and started working, the arm moving with her every thought to carefully manipulate the drive without doing any damage.
For two hours, she studied the drive's construction, her face frowning in concentration as she kept her microscopic vision active until it started to give her a headache.
Finally, she took off the neural controller and almost threw it at the wall, her hands squeezing into fists as she kept herself from just smashing the damn hyper-drive. One last time, she pulled the designs for her own rocket from the database and compared the two.
With a sigh, she pushed herself back and dropped everything, leaving the mess at the table and walking straight towards the bathroom for a soak in the tub. She needed some time to think.
Dissolving her outfit, she grabbed her phone as it almost dropped to the ground and put it beside the nano-cube on the counter before dropping down on the bath, the boiling water feeling nice on her skin thanks to the gravity generators helping increase the temperature.
Rao damn it, she had really hoped to be wrong for once.
It was clear, the hyper-drives worked in the same way, using the same principles and general design, but they were clearly different, and not only in a superficial way.
From what she remembered, both Jor-El and her father had used her own hyper-drive designs, correcting her mistakes, testing a prototype with Krypto and, finally, building two new ones for her and Kal-El.
Logically, the final designs should have been the same, incorporating the modifications made after Krypto's launch in both devices. Even if Jor-El and her father disagreed with something and worked independently, the base should have been the same.
And yet, on Kal's drive, there were no signs of her own work, her own adaptations. From the code to the hardware, it was as if her uncle had worked on the thing alone, independently from the very beginning.
It was not absolute certainty, but the words she had heard before fighting that eldritch being kept repeating in her mind and, now that she looked at things, they made far more sense:
"You have come very far, wanderer. Farther than you even expect, I'd guess." The Phantom Stranger had said when they first met. Kara hadn't been able to find out much about the man, but everything she knew indicated he was, at the very least, on the level of Doctor Fate, probably with similar, or better, senses and understanding of reality.
And then there were the Lord of Order's own words, his insistence that she did not belong. Kara had thought it meant her soul had come from a different universe, but she had always been Kara, she didn't take over her body or dislodge her original soul.
Perhaps she had always been displaced, her existence never belonging to this dimension in the first place. Looking down at her recently grown chest, she snorted. Yeah, perhaps she had always been Powergirl, not Supergirl.
No, fuck that, she was here first… well, at least on Earth. She was Supergirl and the other one could deal with finding a new moniker.
Still, if her suspicion was true, did it actually change anything?
Soaking her head under the water, Kara released a slow breath, watching the bubbles join the ones on the surface and trying to gather her thoughts. Her first instinct was to say yes but, really, she didn't feel like it did.
Closing her eyes, she tried to enter meditation as Kal had taught her to better consider things. In reality, the discovery changed nothing in her relationship with Kori; her girlfriend would still be there for her no matter where she came from.
Her relationship with Kal and Kon were far more complicated, but the interactions she had were still there. It would be really hypocritical of her to say everything she did to Kon and change her feelings about him just because of this.
For a second, she considered just dropping this line of questioning and never mentioning it again, but then she shook her head and opened her eyes. No, she'd have a conversation with them, give them all the information she had about this and decide together.
Now she just had to gather the willpower to start talking again. By Rao, she hated talking about personal things. Why couldn't she have just found that Brainiac was responsible for Krypton's destruction or something like that? An enemy she could punch, or discharge the rest of Vortigar's heart at, was so much easier to deal with.
And speaking of more concrete things to deal with, if she didn't belong to this dimension, then where was the Kara Zor-El that did and, more importantly, what happened to her own dimension? Did Kal-El even survive there?
Pushing her head out of the water, she took a new breath and felt herself relaxing, at least a little bit; she always did better when she had a concrete problem to solve.
"Jor-El, store all the data into an independent folder and remind me to talk about it with Kal at least once a day," Kara said as she pushed her upper body into a sitting position. "Also, gather all the Fortress knows about dimensional travel, I'll need it for my next project."
Appearing at her side, the Fortress AI bowed towards her. "As you wish, do you also wish me to inform Master Kal-El you desire to talk with him?"
For a moment, Kara stopped, her mind considering just… leaving the talk to the Fortress, but then she shook her head. "No, I'll speak with him myself, thanks."
With another bow, the hologram faded away, leaving Kara alone in the empty bathroom once more. Unable to help herself, she smashed a hand on the wall, breaking through the crystal and spreading cracks for several meters.
From inside the walls, one of the gravity generators gave a small whine, the water immediately starting to lose pressure and, slowly, heat.
For a few seconds, Kara just sat there, considering her next move. Around her hand, the crystal started fixing itself, the nano-machines she had spread through the Fortress filling the cracks and fusing with the surface at a visible rate.
Perhaps she really should take that vacation with Kori, to drop all of her problems for a few days and enjoy a trip just the two of them. Before she could entertain that train of thought too much her phone on the counter started vibrating.
Pushing herself out of the water, she stepped away from the bath and glared at the phone, she just bet it was some other problem she'd have to deal with.
Kara took a couple of seconds to dry herself, the world slowing down as she grabbed the towel and wrapped it around her hair before checking the caller. It was Dubbilex.
"Good evening, Miss Zor-El."
"Evening, Dubbilex. Is something wrong at the factory?" Kara asked. "You don't usually call me at this hour; did Kon's project turn out fine?"
"Indeed, brother's modifications were really appreciated by the human staff," Dubbilex said. "No, there is nothing wrong. Quite the contrary, I believe I have two announcements you'd appreciate hearing now instead of in the morning."
Tapping the nano-cube with a finger, she caused it to cover her in a gray cloud and reform into a simple shirt and jeans. Stepping out of the bathroom, Kara considered things.
On one hand, she was done for the day but, on the other, she did need some good news and Dubbilex really didn't call her for just anything. "Alright, I'm listening."
"First, it seems Dr. Roquette has finally accepted your offer of employment. As you wished to deal with her interview personally, I have scheduled an appointment next Monday."
"That's great, the woman is a genius. And while that IS nice to know, it's nothing I couldn't read in the morning."
"Indeed, more importantly, the last of the genomorphs just went through gene treatment. After the procedure, Dr. Spencer informed me she's ready to work on Match, possibly tomorrow if you're free."
Well, THAT was something she wanted to hear immediately.
_______________________________________________
Thanks to Eric Faust for helping out with the chapter.
If you like this story, think about reading one of my other works or giving me a tip if you have some spare change by supporting me on patr eon.com/CapCaverna or ko -fi.com/capcaverna
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