Chapter 57: Attack of the Clone (Sand - Part 2)

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


A thorough check-up at the Fortress showed that everything was fine with Kara and both she and her family soon put the incident behind them as little more than a failed experiment. Kara dove back into her work, intending to construct a new Phantom Zone projector. The world moved on, though, and important matters required the attention of Justice League leader Superwoman, K-Solutions CEO Karen Kent, or Smallville single mother Karen Kent. A few days of rest and relaxation on Paradise Island in the arms of Philippus was about the only break she had and recreating the Phantom Zone experiment slipped further down her list of things to do.

It wasn't until several weeks later that Kara got the first inkling that something was wrong.

It was a perfectly normal day for Superwoman, or at least it should have been. A passenger airplane approaching an airport reported an emergency, the landing gear refused to extend. It wasn't exactly a major catastrophe, but seeing as Kara was relatively close by, she decided to fly over and lend a hand, if only to spare everyone the stress of an emergency belly landing. A brief burst of X-Ray vision quickly revealed the problem, a jammed mechanism, and it would have taken but an equally brief burst of heat vision to unjam it without any further problems.

Only her heat vision refused to work.

Kara was so baffled that, for nearly a solid minute, she just hung there, clutching the underside of the speeding airplane, unable to comprehend what was going on. She had had her super powers since she had been 13 years old. Perfect control since she was roughly 15. Her powers had never failed her, not once, in well over a decade. That they would do so now... it was inconceivable. It was as if one of her arms suddenly refused to move.

When she finally recovered her wits, she improvised. Carefully punching through the hull of the airplane, she unjammed the landing gear with her fingers and manually unfolded it. Flying off, she quickly passed the cockpit and signaled the pilot that all was well, who gave her a thankful wave. She stayed put just long enough to see the plane land safely, then she took off at her best speed.


J'Onn and Diana watched as Kara unleashed searing red beams from her eyes and quickly reduced a large metal plate to so much slag. J'Onn observed the readouts of the Kryptonian medical scanner Kara was hooked up to.

"Everything seems to be normal, Kara," he replied. "The readings all match your normal baseline. Nothing out of the ordinary."

Her eyes returning to their normal blue, Kara sighed. "I don't get it. Nothing like that ever happened to me before."

Diana walked over to her, putting her arm around her shoulder. "Maybe you were just tired? You've been pushing yourself a lot in recent weeks."

Kara shook her head. "I've been pushing myself much harder in the past and it never affected my powers before. If I was really, really tired, my heat vision would be less powerful, but it wouldn't just cut out completely."

She sat down in a chair, studying the readouts from the scanner as well. "I don't get it," she muttered, running her fingers through her long hair in frustration.

"There are no studies about the long-term effects of yellow sunlight on the Kryptonian physique," J'Onn said. "You have been metabolizing solar energy for over 15 years now, on a very large scale for the last 10. Maybe..."

"You think I might be... what? Burning out?"

J'Onn shrugged. "I'm just saying that there are many possible explanations for what happened, Kara. I fear without more data to go on, we have little chance to find out more. We need to keep a close watch on this phenomenon, should it repeat itself."

As much as she hated to admit it, he was right.

"We should ensure that you are not operating alone, at least for a while," Diana told her. "It was a harmless incident this time. It might not be so the next time."

Kara nodded. It made sense, no matter how much she hated the thought.


The thing made of sand had walked in a straight line for weeks now. It did not require any rest, nor any sustenance, and neither was it in any way affected by the scorching heat of the day or the freezing temperatures of night. When it finally reached the first scattered outposts of civilization, it just kept walking. The few people who saw it reacted with confusion and a healthy amount of fear.

"What is that?" they asked.

"Is it... is that sand?" someone else wanted to know.

"It almost looks like... no, that can't be, can it?"

"Uh, hello? Miss? Can you understand me?"

The thing stopped walking suddenly, now facing a store front with a mirrored window. For endless minutes it gazed at its own reflection. A humanoid shape, clearly made from sand, yet cast in the image of a woman. The features of its face were rough, almost unfinished. Yet one thing stood out very clearly. On its chest, there was the outline of a symbol. A diamond shape with something that looked like the letter S inside it.

"Superwoman," the thing muttered, its voice rough and barely understandable. "Kara-El. Karen Kent."

By the time the police arrived, called by the concerned citizens who had seen the thing made of sand as it marched through town, it was no longer there. The few souls courageous enough to have observed it said that it had simply leaped upwards and vanished into the sky. Nothing was left behind except a trail of sand.


A week had passed without any incidents, so Kara was almost ready to write the whole thing off as an odd one-time occurrence. So with no terribly pressing issues ahead, she finally found the time for something that was long overdue.

"It's so beautiful," Kona said, her eyes fixed to the curved horizon of the Earth, where the sun was just rising. They were hovering at the very edge of space, hundreds of miles above the surface, and the bright smile on her daughter's face made Kara so happy she felt like bursting. She still remembered the first time she had taken Clark up here after he had mastered his flying ability. It was every bit as amazing the second time.

"No trouble with the lack of air?" she asked, her voice carried to her daughter via Kryptonian-tech devices that picked up and interpreted the vibrations of her throat as she sub-vocalized her words.

"No, it's just like you said," Kona replied. "While it does feel weird not to breathe, there is no dizziness or anything."

"Just remember that your body compensates for the missing oxygen by burning through stored solar energy at a faster rate. It doesn't matter for a short-term jaunt like this one, but it can become a problem during extended space travels, especially in systems with older, red stars."

Even as they spoke, they flew higher still. What little blue tinge remained in the sky vanished, replaced by the blackness of space.

"Amazing," Kona whispered, trying to take it all in as she spun higher and higher.

"Be careful," Kara reminded her. "Unfiltered sunlight up here in space can make you a bit giddy at first. Don't overdo it!"

"I LOVE IT!" Kona cheered, flying a corkscrew pattern that took her still higher.

Kara wanted to laugh about the antics of her daughter, but suddenly found that she couldn't. She had gotten used to the somewhat weird feeling of not needing to breathe in space, so it took her a moment to recognize the sensation for what it was. The burning of her lungs, the black spots appearing in her vision, the numbness spreading through her body.

She was suffocating, she realized. She tried calling out, but nothing came out but a choked croak.


The first inkling Kona had that something was wrong was the weird, croaking sound she heard over the transmitter. For a moment she thought that the thing might be broken, so she looked around, having lost track of Kara during her flying antics.

"Kara, where are you?" she asked, not seeing her immediately. The sky was so damn big.

She heard the weird sound over the transmitter again and then she finally spotted Kara, who was at least several hundred feet below her. Zipping down, she pulled even with her and her eyes widened. Kara was just hanging there, her hands clutching at her throat, and her face was turning blue.

"Kara? Mom? MOM?! What's wrong?"

Kara opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. It took Kona another few previous moments to realize what was happening. Kara had told Clark and her about the mysterious power outage she had experienced a week ago, just in case it should happen again. This time it wasn't her heat vision that had failed. It was her ability to function without breathing. She was suffocating.

Not wasting anymore time, Kona quickly grabbed Kara around the waist and headed downwards at her best speed. Within seconds the silence of space was filled with the howling of wind and Kona only levelled out once they were well within the atmosphere again and she could hear Kara take deep, gulping breaths.

"Thank you, Kona," Kara said, her voice scratchy.

"What happened? Did your powers fail?"

Kara nodded. "It seems that way. I just... suddenly my lungs burned and I started blacking out."

Kona hoped that she didn't look quite as scared as she felt. She had only known Kara for a few months, but she was Superwoman. Invincible, unconquerable, indomitable. The very idea that her powers could fail... that something might happen to her...

"We should get you to the Fortress," Kona said, worriedly chewing her lip. "Try and figure out what's happening."

"You're right. Let's head there right now."

Kona let go of her, preparing to head north, but the moment she did Kara dropped like a stone. A scream escaped both their lips, Kara's probably one of surprise, Kona's definitely one of distress. This time Kona reacted faster, though, and immediately dove after the plummeting form. Thankfully they were still quite high, so Kona had more than enough time to catch her with room to spare.

This time, though, Kara looked even more distraught than the first time.

"I can't fly anymore," she muttered, clearly unable to believe it. "I can't fly!"


For the third time in just a few weeks Kara found herself hooked up to the medical scanner in the Fortress and for the third time the scanner told her that everything was just fine. She was hovering a foot above the ground, she had been holding her breath for the last ten minutes, and her eyes had just melted yet another poor steel plate. All her powers worked just fine, as if she hadn't nearly suffocated in space and fallen to Earth like a stone mere hours before.

"This is getting ridiculous," she swore under her breath. "The finest technology from two different worlds and all it tells me is that everything is just fine?"

She looked at her worried audience. Kona, her brave little Kona who had carried her all the way to the North Pole, was doing her best not to show how worried she was. Clark, who had arrived just minutes ago, looked confused, not sure what to make of the story he had been told, and worried as well. And J'Onn looked as neutral as he usually did, even as he studied the readouts of the scanner.

"Your energy levels are steady," he said.

Her feet hit the ground again, though a part of her wanted to remain hovering just to remind herself that she could.

"It doesn't make any sense," she muttered. "If something were disrupting my ability to metabolize solar energy, then all my powers should stop working, not just one or two. They are all merely aspects of our inborn Kryptonian ability."

From the corner of her eye, she saw a pensive look appear on Kona's face. "What is it, Kona? Did you think of something?"

The girl started a bit, clearly a bit uncomfortable as everyone turned to look at her. "Well, I... I was just thinking of what you told me in my last Kryptonian history lesson. About the ancient Kryptonians not having the same abilities we do. That they had strength and such, but not the ability to fly, nor the laser vision. They probably couldn't survive in space, either, could they?"

Kara nodded. "That's an interesting thought, Kona. All the abilities that have failed me have been the ones that resulted from whatever it was that increased the Kryptonians' abilities after our Empire days were over."

"Maybe that is why the Kryptonian scanner can't find anything," J'Onn continued the thought. "It was designed and programmed at a time when your people had no idea that these additional abilities might emerge upon absorption of sufficiently powerful solar energy. It wouldn't know what to look for."

"Great thinking, Kona," she complimented her daughter, who beamed back at her. "You, too, J'Onn. We need to do a comparison between my DNA and that of Empire-day Kryptonians. I just hope dad and uncle Jor included historical medical scans in the database they sent with us."

They ended up doing another scan of Kara, then one of Clark as a non-afflicted present-day Kryptonian, and had the computer compare it against historical data. A hologram showing three different DNA helixes appeared in the room, showing the gene sequences of Kara, Clark, and a very, very old ancestor of theirs who had lived well over 8,000 years ago. The computer highlighted the differences.

"That confirms my theory," Kara said, studying the differences the DNA of Clark and her showed when compared to their ancestor. "Something did cause a mutation of our species at some point. You can see the additional sequences here and here," she pointed. "No way were those changes the result of natural evolution, not in that short a time."

J'Onn manipulated the controls, highlighting the respective parts, and overlaying Kara's and Clark's DNA.

"I do not see any differences between you and Clark, though," he said. "So whatever is affecting your powers, it does not seem to have impacted the underlying DNA."

"What about that explosion in the desert?" Clark interjected. "When the Phantom Zone thing went up? That's when the whole thing started, or shortly thereafter."

"The scanners gave me a clean bill of health afterwards," Kara said, then swore under her breath. "The same scanners that told me that everything is fine just now."

"We still don't know what kind of energy it was that clung to the retrieved drone," J'Onn agreed. "It's possible that it somehow affected those additional gene sequences."

"Okay, at the very least we have a direction to search in now," Kara said, feeling at least slightly relieved. "I think I need to bring reconstructing the Phantom Zone projector back to the top of my to-do list."

Suddenly an alarm went through the Fortress, a frequency that Kryptonians would have been able to hear no matter where they were on Earth. Here in the Fortress, though, it was especially loud.

"What is that?" Kona asked, pressing her hands to her ears.

"Rao," Kara breathed, her eyes widening in fear. "That's the perimeter alarm I put around the farm."

Not waiting for anyone else, Kara shot out of the Fortress at her best speed and headed south towards Smallville, Kansas.


Kara had still been a teenager when she had used the Kryptonian construction crystals stored in her escape ship to build her polar Fortress, thereby gaining access to all of Krypton's advanced technology. The very first thing she had done with said access was to construct a security system for her new home in Smallville, Kansas. Nothing mattered more to her than the safety of her loved ones, Clark first and foremost. She had known that she wouldn't always be there to personally keep an eye on him, but the alarm was such that she would hear it anywhere on Earth (and on a frequency no human would hear).

Of course the alarm had to be somewhat specific. She hadn't wanted it to go off everytime a grazing cow wandered onto the Kent lands or a neighbor came over for piece of Martha Kent's famous apple pie. So the alarm was programmed to only go off when something unusual was detected. Such as people from outside Smallville. Or things that were neither human nor animal.

A figure made of sand definitely fell under the definition of unusual, so the alarm went off the moment the strange entity crossed the edge of the property. It had touched down roughly a mile away from the farm, the same spot that Superwoman and her family usually touched down when they arrived in daylight, and had walked the rest of the way. The sand thing approached the farm at a leisurely pace, muttering to itself all the time.

Suddenly, though, there was something in its way.

"Stop right there," Kara dropped down from the sky, positioning herself between the farm and the intruder. "I don't know what you are, but..."

"Superwoman," the thing muttered. "Kara-El. Karen Kent."

Kara's eyes widened as the sand thing said all three of her names.

"What are you?" she asked. "How do you know these names?"

"Superwoman, Kara-El, Karen Kent!"

„Why are you looking like me?" she asked, seeing that the sand figure was approximating her shape, not merely the symbol of her house on her chest. It was like someone had tried to make a sculpture of her out of sand, but wasn't terribly good at it.

She sensed her children and J'Onn touching down behind her, but her eyes never left the sand thing. It wasn't making any threatening moves, but the very fact that it was here, on the Kent farm, made her consider it a threat of the highest order. Never mind that it seemed to know all three of her names.

"Why is there a sand clone of Kara running around?" she heard Kona ask.

"You mean at the same time when her powers start malfunctioning?" Clark replied, sounding grim. "And looking as if it's made from the same sand where that Phantom Zone thing exploded? I hardly think it's coincidence."

"Is he right?" Kara asked the thing. "Are you responsible for this?"

"Superwoman, Kara-El, Karen Kent!"

„It doesn't seem to have much in the way of vocabulary," J'Onn said. "I am not picking up anything with my telepathy, either. There is just a void there, nothing else."

Kara took a step closer, the sand thing still not moving. It didn't have eyes as such, but it seemed to be studying her as well.

"Are you attempting to copy me somehow?" she asked. She was scanning the thing with her entire range of vision powers, but was getting nothing but sand and yet more sand. Whatever was animating this thing, it was beyond her perception.

"Careful, mom," Clark said from behind her. "Don't get too close!"

Kara knew that he was right, but she also knew that they were standing here on the Kent farm in broad daylight, three recognizable superheroes and a creature made from sand. With every passing second the chance that someone would come by and see them increased. She needed to gain control of this situation sooner rather than later.

"What do you want?" Kara inquired once again, taking another step closer.

Suddenly the air between the two of them seemed to sizzle and spark. Kara stumbled, feeling as if a vacuum had formed directly in front of her and was threatening to pull her in. The sand thing stumbled closer as well, perfectly mirroring her movements, and a moment later their hands touched.

The world went white.

Kara had no awareness of time passing, but the next thing she knew, she was lying on her back and looking up at the faces of Clark, Kona, and J'Onn. A moment later they were joined by Martha and Jonathan, who had apparently come running from the farm.

"Karen, honey, are you all right?" Martha asked, kneeling down beside her.

"What... what happened?" she asked, sitting up with a groan.

"There was a blinding explosion the moment you and that sand thing touched," Clark told her. "Knocked us all off our feet. When we regained our senses, the sand thing was gone and you were just lying there. For a moment we feared... well..."

She reached up, touching her hand to his cheek. "I'm fine, Clark. Well, fine may be pushing it, but I'm here."

Getting to her feet with the help of Jonathan and Clark, she looked around. Something was wrong, though. Everything seemed... less, somehow. She wasn't sure what was going on, but something was definitely off. The world felt... smaller.

She tried to look around the farm, tried to see if there was any trace of the sand creature, but her eyes refused to focus on anything that was far away. She couldn't look through the farm house. She couldn't see into the infrared spectrum.

"Mom?" Kona asked, seeing her growing distress.

Kara jumped, trying to fly upwards to get a better view, but her feet hit the ground again. She looked around, her panic growing, and snatched up a rock lying on the ground. She took it between her palms and pressed, trying to grind it into powder.

The stone cracked a bit, but otherwise remained unimpressed.

"No," she whispered, letting the stone fall down. "No, it can't be!"

She dropped to her knees, trying to hear what was happening in Smallville. She pounded her fist into the grass, trying to split the ground apart. She looked at the tree, trying to make it burn.

Nothing happened.

"They're all gone," she whispered, her heart pounding in her chest, hyperventilating. "All gone!"

She barely noticed that Martha and Kona were there to hug her, didn't see the helpless look on the faces of Clark and Jonathan. She didn't even notice J'Onn's telepathic attempt to calm her racing thoughts and prevent her from going into a full-blown panic attack.

Her powers were gone. All of them.


End Chapter 57

Author's Note: I hope the amount of exposition I put in this chapter hasn't put anyone off. Just remember that Kara is a scientist, so she is going to look for scientific solutions to her troubles. I am also laying the groundwork for some future developments here with Kara's exploration of the source of Kryptonian powers. Just be patient and remember that I am neither a geneticist nor a biologist.