Waking up on the wrong side of spacetime.
The first thing he noticed waking up was the alarm clock, which was actually not his alarm clock. When he was younger he found himself with new alarm clocks all the time, whenever he accidentally smashed them while fumbling with the snooze button, but he had been able to keep his current one intact for nearly two years now…
He didn't dwell on it for long, as something else that was quite odd caught his attention; his feet where hanging off the end of the bed, which strangely failed to accommodate him. He cringed inwardly, begging to God it wasn't an alien thing. He was suddenly afraid he was going to get up and find himself 7 feet tall; he really hoped it wasn't 9 feet by the end of the day.
Yeah, there was panic setting in at last. He would have screamed for dad, and really wanted to, but for some reason the whole house sounded empty. And outside the house, it sounded just plain strange… like there were just too many people walking around the farm, and none of the voices seemed familiar at all… He opened his eyes to find himself in a room that was definitely not his own.
He told himself not to panic. It failed.
He momentarily tried to think what Lex would do, but he didn't think Lex had ever woken up in a bedroom with walls clad in stupid superhero posters. He definitely didn't think Lex had ever woken up in stupid, too small, ripped off superhero pyjamas. In fact, he had always assumed Lex slept in the nude.
He stood up and sighed in relief when he realized he was not 7 feet tall after all, unless the door was gigantic too. On the other hand, he was still in a bedroom not his own. The alarm clock started off again, and he smashed it.
He checked out the bedroom, and wondered if this was destiny's way of making him an even bigger dork, but soon realized it was unlikely that he got any less cool. He briefly scanned the house, for which the seeing-through-walls alien thing was extremely useful, but found nobody else inside. That marginally calmed him.
The clothes in the closet were colours not even he would wear, and had superhero pictures in most of them. They were also stupidly small, like something maybe Pete would fit into. He was reluctant to walk around a strange house in only ripped-off pyjamas, but on the other hand he thought it best to see if he could find some fitting clothes while the house was empty. The owners could come back at any time, for all he knew.
In the bedroom down the hall he found pictures of a middle-aged man and his wife, some of a dark-haired boy, and a few of a small dog that looked amazingly scary for a thing so tiny. The closet was full of suits and expensive-looking things, and nothing at all he could feel comfortable in, but the pyjamas were not so good either, and at least the middle-aged man seemed to be his size. He quickly found some grey slacks and a white shirt with blue stripes that he judged would fit and put them on.
Downstairs he found one of those automatic coffee machines with a piece of paper stuck to it; on closer inspection it was a note, which read: "Put some milk in your coffee, or you will be hyperactive all morning. There is money for lunch in the cookie jar, and your subscription to Child Prodigies is on the table. I'll be back around six. Call me if you need anything. Mom."
It seemed mundane enough, so he settled down a little bit. It didn't seem he had been kidnapped by strange meteor-mutants, or abducted by a scary government organization. And he was starving.
It didn't really seem appropriate to have breakfast in somebody else's house without them knowing, but on the other hand he had just popped up there, and he didn't know when he was going to make it home. Perhaps he could just grab a cookie…
The cookie jar was empty except for two ten-dollar bills, and the refrigerator contained only a half-empty bottle of milk and some leftover Chinese food. Since there was no food to be had, and he didn't really feel like staying in that strange house anyway, he left through the back door and locked it down with the spare he quickly located under the ugly pot with the half-dead plant.
