(Drat, I had to change my favorite paragraph when they killed off Lionel. Phooey.)

The last time they had spied on Kal-El, the two world-savers had spent a good ten seconds looking at each other in blank disbelief at the sight of the bizarre old billionaire drinking tea in the Kent kitchen. Pete Ross's middle brother, who had a slight mutation of his own -- eidetic memory -- was recruited to keep track of that particular peculiarity, in exchange for his express wish for an inside track to the CIA, where Baron John figured he could do some whistle-blowing, get fired, get "disappeared," and come to work for Special Operations for real training. So far, he was on track, and stood a good chance of being the only one still employed when the next administration took over.

They dropped a courtesy card (with untraceable fifty-buck bills) off at the Ross house, but despite his excellent reports (according to the Rosses, Lionel had apparently finally lost it entirely, to let his guard down so completely), the rest of the family wasn't ready to be brought into Special Operations yet.

Clark was dickering with the bankers over what he could get for the farm without selling it for condominium development. The herd was going to free-range ranchers, the corn to food stock ("And not corn syrup, no matter what the subsidies are!" Clark demanded in that tone of voice that would later earn him his "Man of Steel" nickname). Chloe was standing by with a cool eye, injecting occasional advice, and despite being out on probation (Lake had, well, "taken care" of that, but Chloe didn't know it yet), still looking ready to take on the world. The two agents all but winked at each other. Target acquired.

"If it ain't Mister Kent!" Nicole said loudly, slapping him on the back. Since Nicole could throw a space shuttle orbiter like a paper airplane, Clark staggered without having to fake it. Lake turned to the banker and made a calm inquiry as to the holdup, and would a phone call from New York or Washington expedite matters? Because right now they had better things to do than listen to excuses.

Chloe stared. Then her eyes narrowed suspiciously.

"Come on, kids, it's way past lunchtime, and we got places to do and things to be, and the sun don't feed itself. Well, actually it does, but I rate myself one aphorism a day at least." Nicole put one of her arms around each and steered them out. Since Nicole was a little over two meters tall, eye-level with Clark, the bankers weren't going to argue. Especially when Lake turned back and fixed them with a stare that had broken Afghani soldiers.

Clark, prudently, gave Nicole a ride in the truck. Chloe offered Lake a ride in her car, which Lake declined, in order to drive their own microvan to the Kent farm. Leaving it in the bank parking lot might have prompted some teenager to investigate the slight modifications.

Clark, well-trained by Martha, offered them fresh juice as soon as they parked. The agents accepted, bemusedly. Lake, at least, had a human stomach.

Chloe went into the confrontational mode she had inherited from her mother as soon as they were out of observation range. "Okay, I remember you. The government agents who offered us scholarships. Wish I could have accepted, but things happened."

"Yes," Lake said softly. "Our sympathies about Gabe. And your foster-mother."

Chloe blinked that away. "So long as you're not here to criticize..."

"No. We're here to offer you a different future."

"Huh?" said Clark.

"Why don't you go out and practice hand-to-hand with Nicole, Kal-El? Even at full speed, your timing and observation still suck. Nobody Baron John had trained would EVER be caught out that way. Nikki? Kick his ass. He needs a reminder."

"Roger that, boss." Nicole grinned (the first expression she had ever learned to mimic, and that from Lake, which was not exactly in the "win friends and influence people" book), seized Clark by the wrist, and dragged him outside, while he yelped and protested.

"Not near the house! Or barn! Or cows!" Lake reminded them belatedly.

Chloe sat down on the floor. "Okay, I officially now know that you are more than offering a scholarship. You -- you know? About Clark?"

Lake tilted her head and tried to look friendly. "We know about Clark, and Kara, and that second-rate Brainiac, for whom we also have plans. But the most important point is, we know about you." Lake lifted her legs and sat in a semi-lotus position -- a meter off the ground, supported only by thin air and her ability to psycho-telekinetically convert gravity into potential energy. "We are, as the saying goes, offering you a shot at the game."

Chloe felt the whole world go gray, and weird, and a little sick. Then it cleared, and she felt more clear than she ever had in her life. "You're a mutant."

"Actually, most of the talents we know about -- and I'm by no means the most unusual -- could be fairly normal to the human species, just suppressed. We're still working on finding everything encoded in DNA. There's a lot more in our genes than you'll see in the careful 'I am not a tin-hat conspiracy-theory' journals.

"If you join us, you will be asked to submit blood samples and maybe even bone marrow, to help answer exactly that question. Kal-El, Clark, did -- from which we determined that he could cross-breed with Terrans, which suggests that he's more a product of an extremely altered environment, not alien biological ancestry. I did also, which determined that I'm so far out of the genetic norm that I'm clinically sterile."

Chloe glanced towards the window, where the sounds of gleeful combat and shouts of "WHOOPS!" were raging at high speed. "And ... Nicole?"

"Well, she can't give blood, since she's a machine, but some day we may be able to dissect and duplicate her. Not any time soon, since absolutely nothing can cut her dermal covering, but tomography gets better every day. And she's perfectly okay with that."

"You're kidding."

"Chloe, child, she spent last month taking apart nuclear weapons while we were being shot at, in places where I had to go under drug-forced hypnosis to learn even rudiments of the languages. We aren't going to ask you to go on the front lines -- but we will ask you to accept that Clark is not the strangest of us. And you're barely a mutant, by our standards."

Chloe closed her eyes and tried to imagine it. Mutants who LIKED being mutants. People who -- ROBOTS who -- thought that your first priority was to do whatever you could, in defense of the whole planet.

"I'm in," she whispered.