Chapter 73: Return of the Sand

Disclaimer: All things Supergirl/Superman belong to DC. No infringement is intended.

A sonic boom rattled many a window as a red-and-blue shape streaked across the Eastern half the North American continent at tremendous speed. The air almost burned around Kara's shape as she accelerated as much as she dared within a planet's atmosphere. The time she needed to bridge the distance to Smallville was measured in mere minutes, but it felt like an eternity to her, as her mother's words were still ringing in her ears.

You need to come home, immediately! Please, just hurry!

Martha had sounded scared, but not imminent-death-scared, if that made any sense. What could scare her so, though? The farm's perimeter alarm had not gone off, so what kind of danger could there be? Clark and Kona should be at home, too, and both of them were more than competent in using their super powers to defend themselves and the family. So what was going on?

The moment the Kent farm was no longer obscured behind the curvature of the Earth, Kara's telescopic vision showed her the interior of the house. The entire family was in the kitchen, plus someone else. A little girl was sitting at the kitchen table. Clark and Kona were standing protectively in front of Martha and Jonathan, deeply troubled expressions on their faces. Why was a little girl scaring them?

Seeing as there was no imminent bloodshed and everyone else was in civilian clothes, Kara took the extra second to dart into the barn and change back into her Smallville clothes before arriving in front of the kitchen door and stepping inside.

The scene had not changed in the last few seconds. Her entire family was on high alert, she could easily see that. Kara checked out the girl with every single one of her enhanced senses. Everything seemed perfectly normal, though it was strange that the girl looked almost like a younger version of herself. That made her pause and a deeper scan revealed that the girl was not human. She was Kryptonian. There were some minor anatomical differences, not visible from the outside, but easily apparent if one knew what to look for. Another Kryptonian? How...

For the briefest of moments the girl's entire atomic structure seemed to shift and be in flux, what had been organic cells a moment ago shifted into silicon dioxide and back again.

Sand!

"You," Kara hissed, super speeding to stand between her family and the thing pretending to be a girl.

"Hello, Kara-El," the sand thing greeted her, smiling.

"She just appeared at the kitchen door, mom," Clark told her from behind her, hovering protectively in front of the rest of the family. "Just knocked and asked to see you."

"Did any of you touch her?" Kara asked, not taking her eyes off the creature for even a moment.

"Of course not," Kona replied.

"There is no danger in any of you coming into contact with me," the sand thing said. "The quantum state convergence that connected me to Kara-El no longer exists. It collapsed when I abandoned my original physical form."

Kara frowned. "And yet you still look like me, just younger. And your cell structure is Kryptonian."

"Of course it is," the girl... no, the sand thing said. "We might no longer share the same quantum state, Kara-El, but yours was the first physical life form I ever came into contact with. Your genetic coding has imprinted upon my energy pattern."

"Uh... what?" Jonathan asked.

"I think she means that mom's DNA has somehow become part of her," Kona replied. "Right?"

"True," she... it replied. "I have tried rearranging the atomic structure, but the imprint is too fundamental."

"You are still made from sand," Kara said, her scientific curiosity piqued despite the danger. "How can you transmute silicon dioxide atoms to mimic carbon-based organic cells?"

The girl shrugged. "It's all just matter and energy, isn't it?"

Kara tried to process that. Here was this creature that had almost killed her during their last meeting, casually talking about changing the very building blocks of matter as if it were the easiest thing in the world. This was not how she had expected her day to end.

"Why are you here?" she finally asked, which was probably the first thing that should have been on her mind.

"Where else would I go?" was the answer.

"Uh… back home?" Kara proposed.

"I have no home," the girl said matter-of-factly. "I was nothing before your experiment brought me here. I had no sense of self-awareness, no concept of an identity, nothing. Now I am something. Going back, if possible at all, would make me nothing again. I do not want to be nothing."

Against her better judgement, Kara felt her heart begin to soften. No home to return to. Only nothingness behind her. Thrust into a strange, alien world. Now where did she know that one from? She almost chuckled. What was it with the orphans and strays always ending up on the Kent farm? Still, this particular stray had almost killed her and worse, it had hurt her children.

"You honestly expect me to just open up my home to you?" she asked, steeling her resolve. "After what you did during our last encounter?"

"But we are family, are we not?" the girl asked.

Kara took a step forward, though being careful to stay out of the girl's reach. "Listen, just because you somehow got imprinted with my DNA does not make us family!"

"But you took in Kona just because of your shared DNA!"

Kara almost growled in response. "Kona did not try to kill and replace me, nor did she attack my family!"

From the corner of her eye, Kara saw Kona stiffen. Okay, technically Kona HAD attacked her family when she punched Clark, but that had been the chip, not Kona herself. It was not even remotely the same.

"My only defense is that I did not know better," the girl replied. "I do now. I wish to remain who I am and who I am is a direct result of my interaction with you."

"Uh... excuse me," Martha asked, looking out from where Clark was hovering in front of her. "Could you... could you give us a chance to talk about this? Wait outside for a minute?"

"Of course," the girl said, climbing down from the chair she was sitting on. "I will be outside in the barn."

Once the girl was through the door, everyone became a tiny little bit less tense. Everyone was aware that their visitor being outside did not really make much of a difference. The sand creature had turned itself into a Kryptonian and despite her pre-puberty appearance, Kara was prepared to assume that she had the full range of super powers.

"No one got hurt?" Kara asked, looking across her family.

Martha shook her head. "No, we're all fine. She didn't really do anything except knock on the door and come in."

"How did she make it past the farm's perimeter scanners without setting them off?" Clark asked. "They did last time she was here."

"Last time she was still mostly sand," Kara reminded him. "Right now she seems to be a near-perfect copy of me. The scanners probably thought it was me or Kona."

Jonathan went over to the fridge and took out several bottles of beer. "I think the more important question should be, what now?"

Kara took one of the bottles from him and drained most of it in a single gulp. "I don't know. She... it tried to kill me last time and while I do believe that there was no truly malicious intent behind it, that does not lessen the danger. It's a life form unlike any other we have ever encountered; we cannot predict its behavior."

"We can't just send her away, though, can we?" Clark said, taking a bottle of his own. "If she has your DNA, she has all our powers, too. She also seems to have your memories, or at least enough of them to know all our names and where Kona came from."

"I am not sure she is entirely stable, either," Kara remarked. "Her atomic structure occasionally shifts back to sand."

"What if she is telling the truth?" Kona asked. "What if she really has nowhere to go but here?"

Kara put the empty bottle down on the table. "Before we can make a decision, we need to learn more about her. I am taking her to the Fortress and running a full diagnostic on her. I want to know what exactly we are dealing with here before I even begin to entertain the notion of ... taking her in."

Martha shook her head, smiling slightly. "We keep taking in strays," she muttered.

The sound of the door opening wrenched them out of their discussion.

"I don't mean to intrude," the sand girl said, peeking inside, "but Mr. Lang, Lana's father, is coming towards the farm and he has a shotgun with him."

Kara immediately recognized the very guilty look on her son's face.

"What did you do, Clark?" she asked.

Clark just gulped.

Kryptonians do not get headaches under a yellow sun, Kara reminded herself. Kryptonians do not get headaches under a yellow sun. Kryptonians do not get... Rao be merciful, her head was pounding. She did not have time for this. A highly dangerous extra-dimensional entity had somehow copied her DNA and was currently in her family's barn. She should be dealing with that. She had no idea how to deal with that. She should be figuring out how to deal with that.

Instead she was sitting in her living room, listening to Lewis Lang rant about the lost virtue of his daughter.

Kara was not stupid, she knew what had happened. All it had taken was a quick look at Clark and Lana, the latter of whom had turned up only a minute after her father, looking mortified and embarrassed.

She did not know what exactly Lang had been thinking, walking up to her home with a shotgun in hand, but the first thing she had done was stalk outside and take the weapon from his hands. He had protested, too surprised by her action to actually do anything, and she had emptied the gun, pocketed the shells, and threw the now useless weapon into the dirt. She did not have time for this.

Now they were all sitting in their living room, talking about sex, while the real problem was waiting in the barn. There were days when she suspected some deity or cosmic entity was simply having way too much fun at her expense.

"Your hoodlum of a son accosted my daughter," Lang ranted.

"He did no such thing," she replied, only just managing to keep herself from yelling. "They are teenagers and teenagers have sex, whether you like it or not!"

"You would know," he muttered.

Kara counted to ten in Old Kandorian in order to reign in her temper. As far as the citizens of Smallville knew, she had had sex and gotten pregnant at age 12. She had actually been a few years older (and never pregnant), but still younger than Clark and Lana were right now.

"Should I begin to mention the various girls you dated while still in High School, Lewis?" Jonathan asked, sitting beside Kara. "I certainly remember you bragging about 'scoring' with quite a few when you were the same age as Lana and Clark."

The discussion only turned nastier from there.

"I am so sorry about this," Lana said to Clark. The two teenagers were in the kitchen of the Kent farm, the raised voices from the living room easy to hear even without enhanced senses.

"It's not your fault, Lana," Clark assured her, wincing as the voice level in the living room rose once again.

"Of course it is," she replied. "I... I just needed to talk with someone about ... what happened. I was talking to my mom, but... I didn't know my dad was also there and heard everything. And when he stormed off to get his gun..."

Clark chuckled. "You do know a shotgun cannot hurt me, right?"

"No, just blow your family's secret wide open."

Lana closed her eyes, shaking her head. "I am also sorry about what happened, Clark. I shouldn't have ... jumped you like that."

"I didn't exactly fend you off, you know?" He awkwardly ran his hand through his hair. This was so not the right time for this talk. Not with the sand thing in the barn and Lana's father yelling just one room away. Still…

"Why did you do it?" he finally asked her. "I mean... I am not complaining, certainly not. You are a beautiful girl and it was... it was great, but..."

Lana sighed. "Do you remember how often we were teased as small kids about being best friends? How often others, kids and adults both, made jokes about us being already married?"

"I remember," Clark said, and he did. He had quickly developed a severe dislike for the old 'sitting in a tree' jingle.

"I think... I think it kinda got into my head. You are my best friend, everyone seemed to expect us to get together anyway, so... and then it felt like you were moving away from me, moving on to greater things and..."

He grabbed her by the shoulders. "Lana, I promise you, there will never be a 'greater thing' than our friendship."

She looked him in the eye. "Only friendship?"

He hesitated a long moment, but finally nodded. "Yes, only friendship. Lana, I'm sorry, but..."

She laughed, though, and hugged him. "I'm so happy to hear that, Clark!"

"You... you are?" he asked, somewhat awkwardly returning the hug.

"Yes, I... God, Clark, I love you, you big oaf, but..."

"But not like that," he finished the sentence, smiling down at her.

"No, not like that," she agreed.

They remained standing with their arms around each other for a minute, only becoming aware of the lack of voices from the living room when someone cleared their throat in the kitchen door. Looking up, they saw Lana's dad, Clark's mom, and his Uncle Jonathan all standing there. Kara and Jonathan smiled while Mr. Lang scowled, though not quite as fiercely as before.

"Satisfied?" Kara asked, turning towards Mr. Lang.

He grumbled under his breath, but finally seemed to have calmed down somewhat upon seeing that his daughter was not the innocent victim of a lewd molester or about to run off and marry Clark.

"Let's go home, Lana," he said. Looking at Clark, he finally added, "I wasn't really going to shoot you, you know?"

"Could have fooled me," Clark muttered.

There were some more words, his mom hugged Lana, Mr. Lang grumbled some more, but finally the Lang family departed, empty shotgun and all. Clark kept an eye on them until they were far enough away not to see or hear anything anymore.

"We're going to talk about that later," his mom finally said.

"I figured," he replied. "But we have more urgent things to do right now, right?"

"Right!"

Half an hour later, the super-powered members of the family were up in the air, heading north. Clark and Kona had immediately told Kara that they were coming with her, no matter what she said. They were not about to leave her alone with the creature that had nearly killed her before. So Kara had resigned herself and the three of them started flying.

To everyone's surprise, the sand creature was apparently unable to fly.

"I can reshape the sand particles into a Kryptonian cell structure," it explained, "but it's not a natural state and fluctuates occasionally. Every time this happens, the cells lose cohesion and any energy they have absorbed dissipates."

Even Kara needed a moment to wrap her mind around this statement. The powers Kryptonians had were genetic, but were fueled by the solar energy their cells stored like batteries. If the sand thing was telling the truth, it would potentially have the full range of Kryptonian powers, but without the ability to build and hold a charge of energy for any length of time. The car was fine, as Clark had put it, but the fuel tank was full of holes.

She was about to ask how the sand thing had managed to display her powers before, but thought of the answer herself. Their shared quantum state had both stabilized the transmutation of sand particles into Kryptonian cells and probably given the creature access to the energy stored in Kara's cells, too. She had gotten weaker anytime they had come into contact with each other, after all.

Trying to grasp the physics behind all this made her headache even worse.

So with the lack of flying power and the reluctance on their behalf to touch the sand creature, they had commandeered Jonathan's broken-down old truck. The thing's engine had long ago ceased working, but with Clark volunteering to carry it, that hardly mattered. So three Kryptonians and a rusted old truck with a sand creature inside were flying over the Arctic.

"I do not believe the Krypton-built scanners will be capable of analyzing me," the sand thing said casually as they flew on. "Jor-El breached an entirely new field of science when he discovered the Phantom Zone and he did not have time to actually do much research into it. The computer won't know what to look for."

"Maybe not, but its best equipment currently available here on Earth," Kara replied. "I want to know what you are."

"An energy pattern, imprinted with your genetic code and memories, housed in a physical form transmuted from sand."

"I'd like a few more details than that," Kara growled.

The sand thing just shrugged and remained silent for the rest of the journey. Kara was lost in her own thoughts, torn between two sides of her own nature. Her family was the most important thing in the world to her and the sand creature was a threat to it, intentionally or not. On the other hand, though, it was also in her nature to – as Martha would put it – take in strays. That part of her rebelled against simply abandoning this singular creature that had no home, no people, and no family.

It was driving her mad.

When they finally arrived at the Fortress, Clark set the old truck down in the reception area and took a step back as the sand thing climbed out. Kara motioned for her to proceed through one of the corridors that led towards the base's medical station.

What followed were several hours of frustration. The Krypton-built scanners, the finest medical instruments in this corner of the galaxy, were utterly confused by the subject they were supposed to scan. Depending on the exact timing of the scan, they were either convinced they were scanning a Kryptonian (one named Kara-El, to be exact) or a human-shaped pile of sand. They did pick up the energy pattern, yes, but were unable to classify it beyond "unknown".

"This is getting us nowhere," Kara huffed, leaning back in her chair.

"We'd probably need to build an entirely new scanner to make sense of Sandy." Kona said from behind her.

"Sandy?" Kara asked, turning around to look at her.

Kona shrugged. "Can't call her 'sand thing' the entire time, can we?"

She sighed, not at all comfortable with humanizing this strange creature by giving it a name, but decided to let it go.

"I wouldn't even know how to begin," Kara admitted. "The sand... Sandy was right about Uncle Jor discovering something entirely new here. Maybe if any of the sensor data from my initial Phantom Zone experiment had survived, we'd have a starting point, but as things stand..."

Clark came up to them, having gone to the Fortress' kitchen to pick up some coffee.

"Any progress?" he asked, handing out cups.

"None at all," Kara admitted, sipping from hers. "I'm not sure what we can do if the most advanced tech in the entire spiral arm can't..."

She trailed of, thinking of something. While it was true that the Krypton-built equipment of her Fortress was centuries ahead of Earth, there was one piece of technology here that was far beyond even Kryptonian science.

"The Mother Box," she muttered, getting to her feet.

"The what?" Kona asked. Right, she had never shown it to Kona and even Clark only knew of it, but had never seen it himself.

"It's a piece of technology I took from an alien warlord called Steppenwolf during my journey through time," she explained, even as she walked towards the vault where she had locked it away. "It's incredibly advanced; I have never managed to figure out how it worked exactly. Maybe the Mother Box can give us some insight into Sandy's nature."

Kona barely restrained herself from wrenching the Mother Box out of Kara's hand once she had taken it out. Her daughter was utterly fascinated by the exotic technology and immediately bombarded her with questions about it, most of whom Kara could not answer. Yes, it had a telepathic interface. Yes, it could open a kind of wormhole passage. Yes, it could perform calculations faster and more intricate than any other computer Kara had ever seen. No, she did not know how it worked or who had built it.

"Do you think that's safe?" Clark asked as they walked back to the medical station. "A technology we know little about scanning a lifeform we know little about?"

"Well, this little box here helped me navigate the corona of a star in order to travel at relativistic speed to bridge nearly 3,000 years in a matter of minutes. I think if it managed that without failing me, a little scan should not be that big a problem."

A few minutes later Kara would regret saying those words.

"The Mother Box," Sandy stated when she saw the box in Kara's hands. "I remember this device, though the memories seem to be out of sequence."

"Time travel," Kara simply said. "Makes your head hurt."

Kara focused on the Mother Box and with a soft tic-tic-tic sound the device became active. She once again marveled at the technology that could so easily connect a machine to an organic brain via telepathy. She had trouble believing that a brute like Steppenwolf had actually designed such a miracle. Then again, the only other representative of his race she had met, the one called Metron, had seemed far more scientifically inclined. She guessed every race had their brutes and their brains.

Focusing on what she wanted the Mother Box to do, she felt it as the machine began to scan the fascinating creature sitting on the medical bed in front of her. For a few seconds nothing extraordinary happened, the Mother Box steadily ticking away as it worked.

Then all hell broke loose.

Kara yelled out in surprise as the Mother Box in her hand suddenly began to vibrate and spark like crazy. A telepathic scream echoed through her head, making her wince. The device grew scaldingly hot and the tic-tic-tic grew loud enough to hurt.

"What's happening?" Kona asked.

"Are you doing this?" Clark accused Sandy.

"I am not doing anything," the sand girl replied, looking every bit as confused as everyone else.

With a bang the casing of the Mother Box blew open on one side and pure energy spilled out, bright enough to overload the enhanced senses of everyone present. A moment later a monstrous boom shook the room and a gale-force wind picked up.

"It has opened a boom tube," Kara screamed, trying to be heard over the howling of the wind. "Quick, get away from it before…"

With a clap like thunder, the boom tube vanished and silence settled over the Fortress' medical station. Of the four people who had occupied the room just moments earlier, there was no sign at all.

End Chapter 73

Author's Note: Sorry for the delay. This chapter really kicked my ass. I knew how it would start and how it would end, but the parts between those two points really took a long, long time to come together. I hope the part with Clark and Lana made sense. I did not want to have the two of them spell everything out, so a lot what is going on between them kind of remains unspoken. Sometimes good friends do not need a lot of words and I am not a fan of endless exposition. Anyway, as you can probably guess from the ending of this chapter, we are heading off on another adventure.

Up next: Lost in Space!