CHAPTER Two

"Once again, terror was thwarted by the meta-human Captain Marvel," the youthful newscaster reported. "Here is the caught on camera footage of the Captain triumphing over known terrorist Sivana..."

"Gosh!" Chloe yelled and crawled on all fours to the television. She stopped and read the graphic under the newscaster, 'Billy Batson, WHIZ-TV news'. She looked over her shoulder at the guys in her life. "That kid has to be the same age as me!"

"Yeah," Clark agreed, trying hard to look straight at the screen, not at how she was positioned, especially with her father in the room.

"Billy Batson was a junior reporter for the Fawcett City paper, but he was so good, he got a TV job," Gabe said. He thought of Chloe and how seeing this could affect her. "I think he's too young to do dangerous stories. But the Captain? He's a godsend."

"Captain Marvel? I know meta-humans are coming out of nowhere...BUT WHY WASN'T I INFORMED OF BILLY BATSON?" Chloe screamed and, to Clark's dismay, sat on her heels; investigative reporting was in Chloe's blood and she felt that she was toiling away in a hick town while this...this KID was on television reporting a story that she was already thinking that she could have written much better. "I am so a better reporter than he is."

Meta-humans was the media's blanket term for humans that were endowed with special abilities and powers that set them apart from normal humans. For Chloe, they were just like meteor freaks, but not as close to home.

"I never heard of the Captain...I thought he was the football team's mascot," Clark admitted.

"No...that's where the team got its name," Gabe informed. "Just watch."

Suddenly, the footage switched from the reporter to footage from a hand-held cam and Clark's focus switched too, from Chloe to what happened on screen. He saw the good Captain fight, and to his shock, fly.

"Cool," Clark said and both Chloe and Gabe agreed that the Captain's abilities were amazing. But Clark felt that he had a kin in the Captain, and that he was not alone in the world; he had some that could do some of things that he could do.

Chloe went back and sat by Clark on the couch. She looked at him and saw that he was looking at the repeat footage of the Captain with the same intenseness he would look at her. She wanted that focus back. "Hey...Captain Marvel is Fawcett City's hometown hero like you're mine." Gabe cleared his throat. "Like Smallville's hero," Chloe corrected.

"Except you don't have any powers or a publicity department," she smiled at him when Clark looked at her wide-eyed. "I could write about you saving me yet again and turn that into the Ledger..." She got out a post -it and on that sticky scribbled her headline, 'Smallville's Superboy, Clark Kent'.

"Thanks Ba...Chloe." Clark almost said 'babe' and her eyes went wide; 'Babe" was vocabulary non-grata for the time being. "But let's concentrate on the science fair."

The teens bounced ideas for the project back and forth and Gabe even offered that they should prove that beans were indeed the musical fruit. But talk of the fair couldn't keep their concentration. Other than thinking about kissing each other, Chloe and Clark thought about the footage they had seen; Chloe was jealous of Billy Batson and Clark was inspired by Captain Marvel.