"It was Martha Kent's idea. You recall the previous books about various pets in the White House? We'd like you to take the pictures and Martha would write the text for one about the Furies."
"It would be a pleasure." Daoud scratched the perfect spot on Meggie's chin and she extended it to platypus length.
"Just one thing. The photos should all be from their time in the White House. Let me know if Clark brings you any photos from earlier, and I'll explain. There are one or two that he particularly likes." And he's not coming anywhere near the book with That Photograph. Superpowers or no superpowers.
Eightmonths later.
Our Life in the White House, by Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, with assistance from Martha C. Kent and Daoud Wadi.
Lex sat with a pen, a glass of brandy, and the first book off the press. He'd cleared the entire evening for annotating the version that was going to the special Archives collection.
"We got to watch the peace treaty signing." And notice how all the signatories involved are keeping their distance from us. Some of them were still limping from the time they tried to walk out. We stopped them.
"We love to visit the Smithsonian Hall of Gems." By a strange coincidence, the emerald we're staring at was stolen the next week and later showed up around Ally's neck in a very intricate setting. The President was injured when he tried to remove it. Batman was the one who recovered the rest of the jewels and returned them via Secretary of Defense Bruce Wayne.
"Superman always comes to see us when he comes to the White House." Not many people know that there's a pocket in his cloak. He didn't know that we knew about it until he found a hairball in it.
"The GAO director keeps toys in her office for us. Ally just found one of them." Which was in a safe inside a locked cabinet behind locked steel doors, so it took me only two minutes to dig it out.
"Meggie sometimes visits the Supreme Court and say hello to the Justices." The reason you only see my tail is that I was under his robe, shredding his legs.
"The NASA director enjoys giving Tisiphone a ride on his shoulders." I just smacked him across the face with her tail to tell him to take me flying.
"The National Aquarium is one of our favorite places to visit." We think of it as a 3-D menu. After we pick out a fish, we make the President call the White House cook to tell her what to order for our dinner that night. Sometimes we mess with the President's mind by telling him we want an endangered species or one that only lives 3000 miles away or way down deep. Then he has to figure out a substitute or call Superman and ask him to please fly to the Amazon or Lake Victoria in Africa or go diving in the Mediterranean. Superman always makes fun of the President when he has to do that.
"The Vice President's desk is a great place to nap in the sun." The papers he was working on are artistically scattered on the floor. We sent some of the extra important ones under the credenza. He doesn't always like playing hide and seek as much as we do.
"The Federal Reserve Chair sometimes makes us treats in the White House kitchen." She thinks that we're sweet kitties, thanks to our excellent acting skills. This has to go down as one of the greatest deceptions in all history.
The final section was nothing but pictures, so Lex had a few more sips of brandy before getting ready to think of new captions instead of adding to existing ones. When he turned the page, the very first of the section got brandy spatters all over it when Lex saw that one he hadn't gone over with Daoud and Martha had somehow gotten in anyway.
"That does it, Clark. I'm going to change it to the Bright Green Glowing House."