Author's note: I originally posted the prologue to this story sometime last year, and then took it down again because I wasn't sure I could make certain later events work out logistically. I think I've resolved that now, though, so I'm reposting it together with the first chapter.

As before, I will be taking tremendous liberties with the DC timeline to get all the good ideas in at once. I make no apologies for this; it seems to me that the original authors would in most cases have done the same thing, had they known what was going to happen to their characters down the road. (For instance, you'll note various references to Kara's stepparents being Georgians. This is because, in my conception, Midvale is just across the Florida-Georgia line from Metropolis - since, of course, if Siegel and Shuster had known that their hero's powers came from sunshine, they would obviously have put his adult residence in the Sunshine State. I mean, that's a no-brainer.)

Disclaimer: They tell me that soon I will own nothing and be happy; all I can say is that I've never owned the DC Universe, and I'm not actively suicidal. (This was the disclaimer I had on the original posting; I don't know whether it's still topical, but I'm keeping it anyway for historical purposes.)

Now that it's all over, I find myself wanting to write down the story of the past few months: all the life-changing things that happened to me, and everything that I thought and felt about them. And everyone tells me it's a good idea: Kal, Mama Edna and Papa Fred, Mr. Wayne, even poor Brainy – they all say that it will do me good to put my memories into words, instead of letting them remain unexplored and unmastered inside me. I suppose they must be right; they usually are – or, at least, it's not often that all of them are wrong.

But it's not easy to begin, somehow. The changes that I've been through lately have been so great, many of my memories feel as though they belong to a different person, and I couldn't really be describing my own thoughts and feelings if I wrote them down. It's an illusion, I know – that's been the chief lesson I've had to learn from it all, that even the biggest changes in my circumstances can't make me any less myself – but it's still a little bit of a problem for me, and another lesson I've learned lately is that there's no shame in outflanking problems instead of attacking them head-on.

So let me start by telling the very first story of all, about how I came to be where and what I was when it all began. I won't spend too much time on it, since I know it's been told before, but it'll help me get to the rest more easily – and it's always good, in this life, to be ready to accept the help you need. (Yes, that's been one of my lessons, too.)

I was born on an unstable fragment of the planet Krypton – the native world of one of the galaxy's great peoples, which had been utterly destroyed nearly two Earth decades before I was born. Through my father's foresight and compassion, a single small mining village had alone been preserved; the dense ore deposit on which it stood had been torn away intact and become a single huge meteor, and my father had used the advanced technology of Krypton to preserve that meteor's air and water, and to line it with a thin leaden shield before it decayed into a lethal green mineral like the rest of the planet's fragments. It was a perilous, makeshift existence, but it would do, he hoped, until he could perfect his brother's designs for warp spacecraft and lead his fellow survivors to a new and better world.

But of course there weren't many materials for spaceship-building on the meteor – and, though my father was a fine technician and as brave and good a man as ever lived, he didn't really have the inventor's mind. He did the best he could, but in three Earth decades he only managed to build a single one-man vessel with a load limit of 100 pounds – and then, in the thirty-third year from the explosion and the fourteenth from my birth, a barrage of small meteors came and punctured the sheet of lead, and released the deadly rage of the Kryptonite beneath our feet. So the settlement perished, and only I escaped to the distant world called Earth, where my long-lost cousin Kal had been sent as a baby and had become a hero of preternatural might.

Kal met me just after I landed, having seen my ship as it entered Earth's atmosphere; he found me a place to live, and helped me to master my newfound powers. For the light of Earth's yellow sun had done the same thing to me as it had to him: as soon as I had gotten within three astronomical units of it, I was changed from an ordinary Kryptonian girl into a being of audacious myth, stronger than a hundred men and more invulnerable than diamond, able to see through solid walls, to hear the grass growing a thousand miles away, and to spurn gravity itself whenever I chose. And, when I felt those powers enter into me, I vowed that I would use them, as my cousin had done, to defend the helpless against the forces of chaos and evil.

My name is Kara Zor-El. On Earth, I call myself Supergirl.

Or I did, until a little incident about three months ago.