How could she seem so normal? Billions of people were dead. Why wasn't she more upset? Clark didn't say anything.
"So here's my idea -- not exactly a plan, that's to come, but definitely and for sure an idea. By the way, Lex, how much power can you get here? Since you, like, own everything and stuff. And considering the infrastructure, although I guess we can change that if we --"
Lex cut her off rudely. At least he seemed to have some idea of how serious this all was. "What's this about?"
"Right." Dawn stepped back and swept her arm to indicate all the stuff that they'd brought back to Smallville from her lab in Metropolis. "This here, just as much as is finished now? Put enough power to it, and I can send matter back through time. Not far, not without getting the tolerances a whole lot tighter than I've been able to, and the mass-limit is going to be just a couple hundred pounds, but it's --"
Lex cut her off again. "You have a working time machine?" He obviously thought she'd lost her mind.
Dawn put her chin up and raised an eyebrow at him. "If you have the power supply. That's not what it's for, but brute-force it'll work. You didn't pay that close of attention when you were going over my equations, helping before, huh?"
"I..." Lex's voice dwindled to nothing, and he got a far-off expression on his face. His mouth was hanging open.
Buffy was smiling at her sister in delight.
Clark held tighter onto Cara. Had his friends, his allies, had they all lost their minds? Or could it be that this could be fixed?
"That's. That's a lot of power," Lex said at last.
Dawn nodded seriously. "Yes. But what else were you going to use it for, after the population of the planet is dead?"
Lex shook his head, eyes still distant and speculative. "No, that's not it. I can..." Suddenly he looked completely awake again. "We'll need cable. Plenty of it."
Clark felt much better. Apparently there was a solution, and Lex and Dawn were on it. "I can bring cable, as much as you need," he said. "Just tell me what kind, and where you think I could get it from." He certainly wasn't going to worry about theft right now.
"Great. Yes. Here, I'll make you a list," Lex said. He went off to look for paper or something.
"I'll keep picking at this calibration," Dawn said. "The finer I can get it, the more weight we can send. Don't take your time, Lex! To do more than a twenty-four hour jump would take more electricity than anybody has!"
"Good!" Buffy declared. "I knew there would be a way to fix this. We have a plan in-process. Cara, you and I are in charge of bringing snacks." She took the little girl upstairs with her.
Lex handed Clark a piece of paper with extraordinarily neat printing covering about half of one side. "This is just a preliminary list. After you bring these, we'll have a better idea what else we need. Any questions?" he asked.
Clark looked it over. It seemed perfectly straightforward. He took off.
Mmm. Violating all known laws of physics. Dawn was willing to bet that it was evil for her to be so happy to have the chance to use the equipment for this, all things considered. She kept quiet about it.
Lex and Clark were the best co-conspirators a girl could ever ask for, if she was building a quick-and-dirty limited-range time machine.
Lex was a genius. He understood what she needed almost without having to be told. He had an intimate knowledge of his business rivals' inventories that made Dawn very glad she wasn't a shareholder of theirs -- no way did other Kansas businessmen have the contents of LexCorp's or LuthorCorp's warehouses by heart.
Clark, of course, was the ultimate smash-and-grab man. It took some persuading to get him to really embrace the role, but they did it. Surprisingly, Buffy was better at encouraging the virtuous to larceny than Lex was. Dawn didn't remember her attitudes towards Other People's Things being quite so lax when she was a kid getting caught shoplifting. Funny. The buzz around Metropolis always associated the Luthor name with an ends-justify-the-means attitude, especially about property rights, so Dawn would have expected Lex to be the stronger voice there.
Once Clark had been nagged into being the Procurement Guy, Buffy reverted to her usual planning-technical-stage job of snack-bringage. There was still no answer at the Kent Farm, and Mrs. Digman was nowhere to be found in the castle (Lex had given her the Fourth of July off -- it was actually kind of surprising she'd been there to feed the military occupation earlier) so Cara continued to stick to Buffy like glue.
Dawn didn't really have the time to worry about people's personal trauma, or drama. That twenty-four hour thing was a hard limit. As well as retrofitting the doohickey for a use she'd never considered anything more than a theoretical Oooh-Shiney, she had to design a whole huge honking power system on the fly, and work out something to use as a Recall Device. All her plans had to be clear enough for Clark to understand and implement first-time-every-time, with minimal explication from Lex, who was doing his own, less blatantly illegal, procurement tasks on the phone. Clark had to do quite a bit of the assembly, because a lot of the pieces involved were big. Dawn hadn't been kidding about this trans-dimensional side-effect requiring a ton of power. By the time the last giant coil of copper had been eye-lasered into place, it was almost dark.
Lex snapped his cell shut with an air of finality. "There," he said wearily. "The aluminum plant in Grandville is shut down. It took the plague being confirmed in North America, before they'd agree it was pointless for them to continue operations. If I hadn't been able to convince them, I would have had to call in a bomb threat."
"Perfect. Let's get this bird in the air," Dawn said, a lot more confidently than she felt. Yes, theoretically this would work. Theoretically, though, a lot of things would work.
They hadn't been listening to the radio or TV -- too distracting. Lex's comment about the blood-rain reaching North America must mean California. That was closest to China, wasn't it? Or would it be in Alaska or Canada instead, creeping around over the North Pole? Dawn had a sick certainty, which she refused to acknowledge, that Giles and Willow had to be dead by now. She squelched the feeling down.
It didn't matter.
They'd fix it.
"Okay. I figure we can get the full 24 hours with a weight limit of 150 kilograms -- about 300 pounds. That's also probably light enough that the Earth's gravity will hold you here, in Lex's basement, instead of your own inertia having you end up where this spot was 24 hours ago, a day's travel back along the path of the Earth's orbit. We need as long in the past as we can get -- the aliens' plan to poison the planet will probably be a lot more stoppable before they get it all the way set up. Clark, you better put on your..." She stopped talking, because he was already changed into the Superman suit. He sure had gotten a lot faster the last couple of days.
Clark took his position on the base plate. He stood heroically, the full Superman posture, but Dawn could tell he was scared. Who wouldn't be? He was trusting his life, and the lives of everybody he loved, to the hair-brained schemes of a non-real person. Dawn shook that thought away.
"What do you weigh, Clark?" she asked. "About one ninety?"
"Two oh five." It was the Superman baritone.
"And I'm right around a hundred," Buffy said cheerfully, setting Cara down and joining Clark on the salvaged copper plating that he'd battered smooth enough to serve as their transport pad.
"All right," Dawn muttered. She didn't want to pick a fight, especially since a)They didn't have the time, and b)Buffy did look like she was at least back up to ninety, after a week of Martha's home-cooking.
"Oh, here. Take these," Dawn added. With a flourish, she drew a white cloth off of a white dish, displaying two little objects. They each consisted of a sharp, pointed quartz crystal wrapped intricately with various kinds of wire. One of them had a thin sliver of kryptonite (from Lex's rather extensive collection) wrapped together with the quartz -- too small to glow or hurt Clark from even this small distance. Deliberately, Dawn stabbed her left palm once with the sharp point of each crystal. She wrapped the kryptonite-containing one in a little piece of lead foil she had ready, and handed that one to Clark and the other to Buffy.
"It seems like a good idea to have a Recall Device, so I made these. They're magic, not technology, but I think they'll work. To return here, you just stab your hand with the bloody point of the doodad there. The spell's already on it; you don't even need to say anything. Clark, you might want to pick Buffy up." He did it. "And, um, hover. But concentrate on staying in this room."
His eyes widened in surprise (and they were Clark's eyes again, not Superman's) but he lifted into the air a couple of inches. His head still cleared the top plate, by a similar distance.
"Okay, Lex," Dawn said, stepping back. "Hit it."
Lex threw the big heavy-duty horror-movie-looking electrical switch, that they'd snagged from the corpyard at LexCorp Fertilizer Plant No. 1 here in town. Fat sparks jumped across as the contacts got close, but Lex jammed it shut tightly anyway. A low hum started.
"Oh!" Dawn yelled. "Be sure not to MEET yourselves!"
The hum grew and sharpened in tone, and a blue-green miasma seemed to form between the apparatus's metal plates, bathing Clark and Buffy in a freaky-looking glow. The glow got brighter. The tone rose to an almost-unbearable pitch.
Suddenly, with no warning at all, Cara streaked past Dawn and jumped into the field. She leapt and grabbed onto Clark and Buffy, just before they all vanished in a flash of green light.
Lex was supposed to open the switch as soon as the transport event was concluded, but he must have been too shocked. Dawn certainly was. He left the juice on, and the apparatus started melting, and then all the power went out.
Private residence. No battery-powered emergency lights. It was pitch black in the basement. The melted circuits smelled strange.
"Oh my God," Dawn said faintly in the blackness. Then, after a minute, "What do you figure she weighs?"