Steel Over Sunnydale, Chap. 1

by ~TheMightyGeek

Chapter 1


What follows is something I simply had to write down, even if no one else will ever see it. As much as one might marvel at the capabilities of my memory, it simply can't hold a candle to all the detail and nuance of a freshly-written account of an event. That's why the past five days have to be committed to paper. I want to remember as much of it as possible.

        Now, in my other identity, I'm quite frequently the subject of a certain degree of dubiousness. Even after all the years that I've been active, there are people who just can't believe I'm for real. It doesn't matter that superhumans have been operating for the better part of a century at this point, these hardcore skeptics still try to shoot me with run-of-the-mill guns. For the most part, I'm okay with that. I mean, if they're shooting at me, they're not shooting at the innocent bystanders or any hostages. Be that as it may, a few days ago I got a taste of what it's like to be the subject of skepticism to the point of ridiculousness. As frustrating as that experience was, in all, I found it a bit enlightening.

I was covering an event for the Daily Planet, to start things off. S.T.A.R. Labs had entered into an arrangement with CERN that gave them access to the Large Hadron Collider technology, and was giving the local media outlets, along with a few international agencies, a quick tour and demonstration of their revamped facility. That's one of the biggest perks about being a reporter.  You get opportunities to see all sorts of events that wouldn't be available in any other job. Okay, so I'll admit that I was a bit more eager than my fellow correspondents to take the assignment. Lois had seen enough of my outbursts while watching the Discovery channel, so she wasn't all that surprised by my request.

This interest I have in advances in Earth's technology has led to some interesting discussions between myself, Lois and, of all people, Batman. As one of the few survivors of Krypton's destruction, I have the technical data of a large number of devices and power sources, any of which might solve the planet's energy crisis. So, then, why haven't I shared these secrets with the world? For one thing, I only just barely understand the tech involved, and I'm Kryptonian myself. Handing this over to a human scientist would be somewhat like handing a chimp the manual to a car. As much as I identify with humanity, there are times when I have to admit that Krypton had hundreds more millennia worth of development over our current civilization. Secondly, and this is the cynic in me that's developed as a result of hanging out with Bruce far too long talking, a power source such as ones that were developed on Krypton could power any number of devices, including weapons. I'm sorry, but if Earth ever does develop a similar technology, it'll occur without Kryptonian influence.

The supercollider was S.T.A.R. Labs' next phase of serious alternative energy research. The main buildings were situated in the hills just outside Metropolis, which were disturbingly close to the old Cadmus Project facilities. I chose not to ask if they had appropriated the labs located below ground. As fascinating a story as that might have been, I had a few issues with what went on down there. Conner was born in those labs. He might even still be under their control if the Newsboy Legion hadn't found him and broke him out. Westfield the project manager had my body stolen from its crypt and held down there for over a week. Come to think of it, not many people can make a statement like that and have it be true.

People have asked me why I don't talk about that time. I've never had an adequate answer for them. It's not as though I wouldn't like to talk about it. Lord knows I've tried with Lois countless times. I've tried to deny what happened, explain it away in all sorts of rational terms, but the hard fact keeps getting thrown back at me.

I died.

How do you discuss something like that? There are remarkably few people who are familiar with the experience, and those who are tend to be mystic in nature, and therefore aren't terribly forthcoming. What's more is that, since I came back, there are a number of other heroes who have also returned to the living.  Oliver Queen pops up foremost in my mind, since I actually saw him die. I tried to talk things out with him, but he claims his experiences in the afterlife weren't something he could really hang on to, that it was like an extended vague dream. Maybe it's different for humans.  I really don't know. It gets more frustrating each time I try to work through it. I'm dropping it for now (again).

Okay, back to the supercollider. The goal of the project was to create enough positrons (anti-electrons) so that the energy released by their annihilation could conceivably jumpstart nuclear fusion. I knew the researcher in charge, Dr. Katherine Faulkner, and I figured that if anyone ever worked out the mechanics of that kind of reaction, it would be her. Her involvement with energy research goes back to the early days of my career. She was more interested in solar power then, but a chance accident turned her entire body into a living solar cell, not unlike my own.  The only thing is, she has to wear a regulator harness to contain the energy, otherwise her body absorbs too much of it too quickly and she mutates into an incredibly strong being she calls Rampage. I suppose that may have put her off any further solar investigation.

Anyhow, they were convinced they could control and effectively harness the energies released from the positronic annihilation. On reflection, at least they had the foresight to conduct these experiments outside of Metropolis.  How many times have I had to stop, fight, or otherwise intervene with whatever some wacky scientist had managed to cook up in his downtown laboratory? In the most highly populated part of town? I know Metropolis has a reputation of being on the cutting edge of technology and science, but I'd sure sleep a lot better if they'd just simply build a proving ground about 30 miles out into the desert and test all those prototypes out there. In fact, I know several insurance companies who'd probably offer to fund that. Maybe I should bring that up at the next underwriters trade show.

After a brief presentation on how the whole facility was going to work, we were ushered into the control room where, at the designated time, the fuel was going to be introduced into the containment unit and the particle acceleration was going to commence. I know it was supposed to be a tense and exciting time, but at that moment, to be honest I was more impressed with how clean the facility was then the impending event. I can see a quite a bit of detail when I want to, and it took me a while to see even one particle of dust in the air. They must have had five or six air-scrubbers in place and going at the same time to get that kind of air quality. We're talking clean air. If the control room had that kind of sterility, I was fairly confident that they had managed as close to a pure vacuum within the containment unit as possible.

The procedure started off without a glitch. For two or three minutes, it looked as though it might have actually worked. The deuterium-3 was loaded into the fuel nacelle, the proton acceleration was going smoothly, and all was ready for the collision/ignition. It takes about .004 seconds for the target protons to be released from the secondary chambers and into the collision chamber. Less time than it takes to blink your eyes. Barry could probably have counted the exact number of protons and still had time to go get coffee, and it seemed to take just as long to me. I think only part of that had anything to do with my powers. The rest I can chalk up to good old anticipation.

If only it had worked. I can only hope I'm going to live long enough to witness when mankind will finally be able to rid itself of petroleum-based energy sources, but it would have been nice for it to have been that day. With all the strife, pain, and misery going on in the world, God knows we could use a bit of major good news.

I reacted to the warning alarms a full three seconds before anyone else even registered that they'd gone off. I wasted a half-second changing into my work clothes before I could get to the source of the trouble.  When I got to the fusion core, the deuterium globe was untouched, but there was a brilliant light just outside of the accelerator tunnel where the proton collision ought to have created enough positrons to initiate ignition. Something had gone and contaminated the fuel nacelle.  When the particle collision set off the reaction, there was some substance that prevented the nuclear fusion from taking place.  Not only was that going on, whatever had happened also prevented the positrons that were created from being destroyed on contact. Apparently, now they were converting whatever particles that came into contact with them into more positrons. It was the energy build-up from that conversion that set off the alarms, as the heat was rising dramatically.

By "dramatically," I meant that it was at least 5000 degrees Celsius and rising. The magnetic fields that had been set up to contain the heat from the fusion reaction weren't calibrated for a heat increase at that precise position and hadn't compensated quickly enough. Before the field strength increased, quite a few monitoring circuits had been fried, and I couldn't safely vouch for the electrical shielding anymore.

I turned my attention to the positronic phenomenon occurring behind me, and noticed that it had grown substantially in the quarter-second it had taken me to assess the reactor damage. Now, positrons are theoretically electrons with an overall positive charge, and are considered to be the same size as electrons. It takes literally billions and billions of electrons, protons, and neutrons to form what we call matter. What I was looking at was the size of a golf ball and getting larger. This was definitely becoming catastrophic.  If whatever was preventing the positrons from being annihilated suddenly ceased, the resulting explosion could quite possibly have taken out not only Metropolis, but everything in a twenty mile radius. I needed to get that thing as far away from Earth as possible before that happened.

  Before I could do that, I needed something to carry the thing in. There was enough lead in the area for me to wrap a one foot thick layer around it, figuring that might be dense enough to not convert easily into positrons. With my impromptu container in hand, I smashed through the roof of the reactor chamber and headed for space at top speed, which is something approaching mach forty. Even at that speed, though, it took me nearly ten seconds to get to what I thought was a safe distance.

As it turned out, I had more time than I thought. A minute went by, and soon I was a full five hundred miles into space. It was about that point that I noticed my lead wrapper was starting to glow. I went into my wind-up, and threw. The additional force of my throw, I would say, put half again the amount of velocity it already had, and it zoomed away from me at approximately forty-four thousand miles an hour. NASA, it turned out, was tracking my movements as an unknown projectile, and determined that when it finally detonated, it was something over one thousand miles from the surface of the planet.

It was a very spectacular and violent explosion, and I was a couple of hundred miles away at that point. I later learned that it was visible over most of the northern hemisphere. That would have been major-league trouble had it gone off on-planet. As it was, I was woefully unprepared for the strength of the shock wave that hit me. As I write this, I have no way of knowing just how fast I was moving towards the earth or, as it turned out, what frequency at which I was vibrating. I was quite unconscious.

I'll admit that adding the lead was probably a mistake.  Giving the phenomenon that much mass to convert made the detonation exponentially larger than it might have been otherwise. At the time, though, I was more concerned about the reaction it might have had to my skin. I know I'm tough, but when you're dealing with the building blocks of matter, it usually doesn't hurt to take precautions. Usually.

It was dark when I woke up. It was also quite damp. I had no idea of how long I'd been out of it. I stood up groggily and looked around. There was nothing recognizable to immediately determine where exactly on Earth I was. That in itself was unusual.  Now, I'm not claiming that I've totally memorized the surface of the planet, but I normally have a pretty good sense of where exactly I am at any given moment. After a few more moments of shaking off the grogginess, I saw that I was close to the west coast of the USA. Somewhere in central California, I concluded. I did a quick scan of the area, and saw that I was about thirty miles outside a small town.

My idea was to go into the town, call Lois and tell her I was all right, then fly home.  I've found that calling before I show up helps to head off any unpleasantly dramatic confrontations. You see, when I suddenly showed up alive after nine months of everyone thinking I was dead (which I was) and dropped in on Lois without any warning, I was met with a good deal of skepticism. Of course, I didn't know that four other people had come around and claimed they were me returned. Now, after any lengthy disappearance, before I show up I call in and give the prearranged code word (muskrat. Don't ask), and I'm good. At any rate, I had started in that direction, when I picked up the sounds of a fight. Being who I am, I had to check it out.

The confrontation was taking place in a small cemetery on the outskirts of the town. Four men seemed to be having trouble with a young woman, who was quite methodically knocking them around. Her strength seemed to be quite a bit out of the ordinary, as she was throwing those full-grown men through the air a good ways away from her. For some reason, it seemed to me that I ought to know who she was. After that discovery, I noticed that the men were unusual as well. Their faces had a shared brutal quality to them, with red eyes, and a pronounced brow ridge, with severely wrinkled foreheads. Then I noticed the fangs. Vampires.

I don't like the undead. Not only do they tend to be evil, bloodsucking, flesh-eating, creepy things, they're more often than not mystical in nature, and I have problems with magic. Apart from kryptonite, that's the only thing that can mess with me. The first vampire I ever ran into bit me. His fangs not only penetrated my otherwise invulnerable skin, they drew blood.  If Batman hadn't been there to intervene in the process, I might've become the greatest threat ever to humanity; an indestructible vampire with an immunity to the sun.  And, being undead, there was a definite question as to whether or not kryptonite would have affected me at that point.

Anyhow, despite the risk, there was no way I wasn't going to help that woman. Okay, so maybe a bit of Midwest conservatism seeped into me growing up in Kansas, but it's just not in me to leave anyone, much less a small girl, to fight three vampires all alone. I swooped down and landed in the cemetery.  Hard. All right, it was excessive, and I realized that when I heard the granite of a couple of crypts vibrating at the impact, but I definitely wanted their attention on me, not her.

Now up to this point, everything, while it might seem a bit stressful, is really just a day for me. What happened next falls completely outside my regular experiences as a world-recognized individual.

Once the vampires got back on their feet and saw me, they started laughing. Hysterically.  I swear, if one of them had been able to, I'm certain he would have wet himself, he was giggling so hard. It took them a minute or two to get themselves almost under control. They took another look at me, and lost it again. I've had a wide number of reactions to my sudden appearances, but up to now helpless laughter hadn't been one of them. One of them finally managed to start talking. "Oh, man," he gasped, "I so was not expecting that. Ow, my jaw hurts. Heh. Okay, really, who are you, dude? Seriously. I mean, we're still going to kill you, but I just have to know."

I was keeping an eye on how close these guys were getting to me, but I didn't want to provoke anything just yet. "You don't recognize the outfit?"

"Duh, not that you look anything like Christopher Reeve, or that other guy on Tee..." The vampire's bon mot wasn't necessarily cut short, but when my senses kick me into high gear, the relatively normal events around me slow down quite a bit. I'd zeroed on some noise and movement. Apparently, while I had been distracting them, the young girl took advantage of the confusion and had snuck around behind them. Then, she raised two sharpened wooden stakes, ostensibly to shove them through the hearts of two of the vampires. I had to admit, she was moving quietly. Not exactly Batman levels of quiet, but she'd give your typical ninja some trouble.

Now don't get me wrong, I knew what the situation looked like. However, I try to keep the number of situations where I take things at face value only to be completely off-base to a maximum of once a month. Believe me, in this line of work, that's a good number. For all I knew, the vampires were actually some rare subset of humanity that's trying to better mankind, and the girl was part of a radical sect of the church dedicated to killing them no matter what stripe they were. Hey, I've heard much less plausible stories than that, and they were true.

Not only was she moving quietly, she was moving fast. I just had enough time to grab the two men by the shoulders and move them out of the path of her stakes.

What, you ask? Why was I moving much less fast than just a few hours ago? When I was taking on a conglomeration of rogue positrons? That's an easy one. Biological material doesn't hold up well under high velocity. Had I moved the gents at those speeds, well, can you say 'chunky salsa?' Of course, had I done that, it would have made the following minutes somewhat easier, relatively speaking.

The shock of moving that fast must have rattled at least one of them, because he quickly twisted around in my grasp and latched onto my arm. Then he bit me. Okay, he tried to, at least. My best excuse is that I was still a little rattled from the major explosion I'd just experienced, so he managed to get his teeth around my forearm. He chomped down, and I winced.

His fangs snapped in two as though he'd bit into a steel bar.

Never let it be said that I wasn't grateful for that reaction, but it certainly wasn't expected.  Like I said, I've been bitten three times now by vampires, and the first two times their fangs sunk into my skin like butter. It must be due to their magical nature, but whatever.  Maybe some vampires are more magical than others. I don't know. I'm just as happy that it didn't work, whatever the case.

Even though he, and by extension they, was no longer an immediate threat, I certainly wasn't going to let them just walk away. Being undead, he might have the ability to re-grow those fangs in time. So, since I wasn't about to jab a tent pole into their sternums, I opted for the less graphic, but no less final solution of throwing them. Into orbit. I did give them a flying start, though. If you just throw objects of that size from the ground with the intent of putting them into the outer atmosphere, the velocity needed in order to achieve that would cause said objects to burn up as though they were re-entering the atmosphere, as opposed to leaving it. Physics. Gotta love it.

Luckily, that girl was still there when I came back. As a matter of fact, she was still staring off in the direction I had gone to deal with her undead opponents. Again, I got the very odd feeling that I'd seen her somewhere before. "Hi," I said with all the casualness I could muster. I often fall into the habit of speaking in a very stiff and formal manner when I'm in my work clothes. Lois calls it my "super-speak." I started doing that early on in my career, wanting to make myself look as little like myself as possible. That combined with the suit, the flashy display of powers, and the spit curl were to help keep people from realizing that I don't look all that different when I wear my glasses. Keeping what I do in public as far removed from my private life as I'm able to was and still is a major priority for me. Not that that seemed to be an issue at the time. She just looked at me, eyes half-closed, head cocked, trying to get a good look at me in the dim early-morning light.

"O…kay," she drawled. "Where'd you take your friends?" I guess she must have seen my face, because she quickly followed up. "I mean, if you're helping vampires, then you're definitely wearing the wrong costume."

"What, you think I was with them?"

"Well, the way you picked them up and flew off…"

"Oh, that. No, I'm just not all that comfortable with bloody violence.  They're not going to bother you anymore, though, trust me."

"With you wearing that?  If you think you're the guy who's supposed to wear that, you've got a lot more than trust issues to work out."

"Excuse me, who else would I be?"

"I don't know, but you're sure as heck not Superman."

"Okay, why not?"

"Um, Hello? Rescuing vampires? Plus he's about as real as Batman or Spider-Man."

"And your point…?"

"Superman wouldn't save a vampire."

"Well… he might. If he wasn't entirely sure of the situation."

I know Bruce gets frustrated with me at times. I'll be the first to admit, in some ways he's far more intelligent than I am. Some of his explanations go way beyond even my understanding, and I know it gets to him, because at times he sounds just like this girl did.

"He's…not…real.  You're…not…him."

"I take it you don't read The Daily Planet, don't you."

"Gee, kinda hard to read a newspaper when it doesn't exist."

I gave her a quick smile, and zipped off. I figured it would take me all of three seconds to find a newsstand, pick up a copy, and get it back to her. And it would have, had there been even one edition of The Planet in the city.  Or the county.  Or the state. I know it must have seemed odd to her for me to have just vanished for two minutes, only to come back suddenly with a confused look on my face.

"Sorry.  I seem to have wasted a couple of minutes trying to prove you wrong. I did see a copy of The Sunnydale Courier, though.  That's the town I'm in, right?"

"Yeah. Are you using magic to disappear like that? Sure, it adds to the effect, but that's not the sort of thing you should be playing with, especially with the problems you look to be having."

"Believe it or not, I am faster than a speeding bullet."

"Oh, my god, I so don't need this craziness.  Next thing you'll be telling me is you're secretly Clark Kent."

Yikes.

"Uh, why would you make such a…weird comment like that?"

"This is too much. You're seriously trying to be Superman, but you're denying that you're Clark Kent? Oh, wait, that'd make sense in context…"

I was starting to get the feeling that things were a lot more serious than I'd originally thought.

"Okay, I'll play along. You apparently know who I am, but just who are you?"

"My name's Buffy. Sorry, that's all you get."

The name made a connection in my head all the same. It wasn't one I liked.

"Buffy… Summers?"

"Hey, apparently you have heard of me. Too bad that kind of makes your story even less believable."

Buffy Summers. Sunnydale. Vampires.  Everything fell together and apart at the same time. I had seen her face before.  It was familiar to me because I had seen it on the side of a Metropolis city bus.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Tuesdays at 8 pm on the WB.

There I stood, staring face-to-face with a fictional character, one who had the exact same opinion of me.