Chapter 56: The Phantom Menace (Sand - Part 1)

Disclaimer: All things Supergirl/Superman belong to DC. No infringement is intended.

"I don't get it," Kona huffed, sitting back from the computer terminal.

Looking up from the work she had been doing, Kara gazed at her daughter. They were sitting in the control room of Kara's polar fortress and while Kara was working on one of her projects, Kona was catching up on her Kryptonian education and had been for quite a few hours already.

Normally Kara taught her about her Kryptonian heritage at a more sedate pace, and usually back at the farm, but this was also something of a punishment, given that Kona had disobeyed Kara's orders, leading to her adventure with the self-styled Teen Titans. While she was proud that Kona had handled herself so well and had aided her brother, she had still disobeyed her and so some punishment was due. From what she had heard from Zatara, Zatanna was still grounded.

"What don't you get, honey?" Kara asked, walking over and sitting down beside her.

"This," Kona said, pointing towards the screen. She was going through the Kryptonian history files and was currently in the time period where the Kryptonian empire had begun to collapse.

"Kryptonians had lots of off-world colonies, right?" Kona asked, causing Kara to nod. "So, I get that their empire had become unsustainable and all that, collapsing under its own weight, but why did they all return to Krypton then? I mean, surely some of their colonies where in systems with yellow stars, right? Why would they willingly abandon places where they had super powers in order to return to a world where they had none?"

Kara nodded, understanding why this would confuse Kona.

"I asked myself that very same question shortly after I arrived here," she explained. "When my abilities manifested, I, too, wondered why anyone would willingly give them up, especially the flying part. I went through every scrap of data I could find looking for an answer."

She briefly paused, remembering a moment when she had been more than willing to give up her powers if only she could preserve her home world with its bright red sun, but those had been very special circumstances.

Kara entered some commands into the computer and called up a new file. "My dad and my uncle Jor did extensive research before sending Clark and I here. They explained a lot about the enhancing effect Earth's yellow star would have on the Kryptonian physique, given our well-documented ability to metabolize sunlight. They did predict that I would be stronger, faster, and tougher here than any of the natives. But can you see what's missing from these files, Kona?"

Kona quickly scanned the pages before her, moving through them at super speed.

"There is nothing in there about flying," Kona finally concluded. "Nothing about laser vision, either."

Kara suppressed a smile at Kona's continued frustration at her lack of laser vision.

"Exactly. Which made me wonder and caused me to go through all the historical records from Krypton's empire days. There are numerous notations about Kryptonians experiencing enhanced strength and speed on other worlds, of being tougher and harder to hurt, but nowhere was there anything about them achieving flight or any sort of energy projection power. Neither are there any records about Kryptonians lifting mountains or moving at supersonic speed."

She looked at Kona, waiting for the young girl to draw her own conclusions.

"So...," she began, "obviously the old Kryptonians didn't have any super powers? Not on our level, at least?"

"Yes," Kara agreed. "From what I could gather, our species always had the ability to metabolize sunlight, but not nearly to the degree that the three of us have. Otherwise I doubt the empire would have collapsed as it did and I agree that at least some of the old Kryptonians would probably have resettled on a planet with a yellow star, if for no other reason than to keep flying."

She leant back in her chair. "There is not enough data to conclusively prove it, but I suspect that at some point between the collapse of the empire, which was roughly 10,000 Earth years ago, and the destruction of Krypton, our ability to metabolize sunlight increased dramatically. 10,000 years isn't really a long time in terms of evolution, so I suspect that some kind of outside event triggered a mutation. Possibly the destruction of Krypton's moon Wegthor, which caused a radiation shower over large parts of the planet. Our sun, Rao, also went through several phases of increased solar flare activity during that time, which might also be the reason. We'll probably never know, though."

"Okay, that makes sense," Kona admitted, then gave her a hopeful smile. "Think that's enough learning for today?"

Kara shook her head. "No way, young lady. You got four more hours of studying to do and that's just today, remember? You want to sneak out and have adventures? You better be prepared to accept the punishment, too."

Kona huffed in disappointment, but got back to her studies. Kara ruffled her hair, causing her to groan, but she could see the slight smile on her daughter's face. She walked back to her worktable to resume her own work.

Exactly four hours later (to the second) Kona turned off her computer screen and came over to join her.

"What are you working on, anyway?" she asked, peeking over Kara's shoulder.

Kara took a step back and regarded the fruit of her labors. The device looked like a big spotlight, a circular lamp with a button on top.

"You made a lamp?" Kona asked. "Oh, a Super Lamp?" she teased her.

Kara gently swatted her shoulder, though very happy that Kona felt comfortable enough to tease her by now.

"No, smarty pants! It's something my uncle Jor was working on shortly before Krypton's destruction," she told Kona. "When he and my dad figured out that Krypton was going to die, they were considering several alternative ways to save as many people as possible. Uncle Jor had discovered the existence of an interdimensional realm outside of normal space/time. He called it the Phantom Zone. He was planning to build a device that would allow access to this other dimension and use it to bring the population of Krypton to safety. Sadly he did not have the necessary time to complete the project, especially when the Science Council cut all his support and funding, so he and my dad instead focused on building escape ships."

"And now you have finished that device?" Kona asked. "Why?"

Kara smiled at her. "Well, two reasons. One, it was the last thing my uncle worked on and I wanted to finish it in his memory. And two, well, it's an unexplored dimension, an entirely new frontier. I might spend a lot of my time as a superhero, but I do consider myself a scientist, too."

Kona nodded. "Okay, so it's finished then? It can open a gateway to another dimension?"

"It should work, yes, but now we need to test it. Not here, though. Just in case, we're going to take this to some place a bit more remote."

"What's more remote than the middle of the Arctic?" Kona asked, confused.

The Saharah desert, at the border between Niger and Chad was as remote and hostile a landscape as to be found anywhere on Earth. Nothing but sand for hundreds of miles in any direction. No traces of human civilization, only glaring sunlight. It was here that three aliens and a human-alien hybrid came down from the sky.

"Remote enough for you, Kona?" Kara asked Kona, grinning.

"Ice, sand, not a big diff," the teenager replied, shrugging. Then she spread her arms and turned her face towards the glaring sun. "I must admit, though, the sunlight is far more plentiful here."

"Wait until you get your first space flight," Clark told her teasingly. "Unfiltered sunlight up in space is the absolute best."

"This desert does remind me of Mars a bit," J'Onn said, walking up besides Kara. "The sand is not the right color, though."

"I know what you mean," Kara replied. "A bit more of a red tint to the sand and the sky, and this could almost be Krypton."

She had asked J'Onn to accompany them, both because of his technical expertise, and because he – more than anyone else – would understand how important it was to her to finish something that had begun on her lost home world.

"Why here, though?" Kona asked. "The Arctic isn't really any livelier than this place, is it?"

"True," Kona agreed, "but on the off chance that something goes wrong, I didn't want our Fortress to be in danger."

"Is there any danger?" Clark asked, regarding the Phantom Zone Projector that Kara was setting up.

"There shouldn't be," she replied, "but it never hurts to be careful. Which is why the two of you will watch from a distance! Three miles, minimum!"

Both her children huffed with nearly identical looks of teenage frustration, which only increased when they noticed that the other was doing the same. Kara had to resist the urge to hug the stuffing out of them both.

"Go and fly, my pretties!" she shooed them, grinning broadly.

Still looking put out, the two of them took flight and were soon just tiny dots in the totally cloudless sky.

"I am glad to see you so happy, Karen," J'Onn told her, smiling.

"I am," she agreed, still not entirely used to the feeling. Most days she still felt guilty about it. Survivor's guilt, she knew and understood that. But she was no longer that broken girl that had fallen to Earth these many years ago, forced to go on and survive when everyone else had died. Clark, her wonderful son, was almost a man. Kona was settling into her family as if she had always been there. Somewhere out there was Kandor, a city full of her people, alive and well. Sure, there were always problems. Brainiac was out there somewhere as well. Luthor had escaped from prison and refused to be found. Overall, though? She was happy.

Which probably meant that something bad would happen sooner or later, but she refused to think too much about it.

"You should probably put in some distance, too, J'Onn," she told him. "Just to be on the safe side."

"No need for that," he replied, his body shimmering in the way she had come to recognize as his phasing power. Right now a bomb could go off right next to him and it wouldn't impact him at all.

"Show off!" she muttered fondly, then turned toward the device.

Seeing as the so-called Phantom Zone was not so much a different place, but rather a different state of being, the device would not open a portal or any such thing. It would emit a short-range beam and any matter within that cone of light would experience a phase-shift. The expected effect was actually not that different from what J'Onn could do naturally, but the principle behind it was entirely different.

Kara's "guinea pig" was a primitive robot drone she had built, actually little more than a big metal box with sensor arrays, cameras, and everything else she could think of to get a proper look at the Phantom Zone. Positioning it before the lens of the projector, she flew back a good distance herself and then activated the device with a remote control.

A beam of bright white light emitted from the projector and enveloped the drone robot. Within moments the drone's shape became indistinct, transparent, and then vanished entirely. Kara shut off the projector and flew closer again. Focusing on the spot where the drone had vanished, she shifted her super vision through all possible spectra, but there was nothing to be found. The drone was completely gone.

"Well, step one seems to have worked exactly as predicted." J'Onn said, appearing next to her.

"Yeah, but maybe I've just created a really fancy disintegration ray," Kara replied, using a handheld scanning device to verify what her eyes had already told her. "We'll give it a minute, then we'll bring it back. If it's still there to be brought back."

Returning an object that had been successfully shifted into the Phantom Zone to normal space had actually been the hardest part of the entire project. She suspected it was also the reason why Uncle Jor had eventually abandoned the idea. Once something was in the Zone, it was completely impossible to perceive or locate it from the outside. No communication was possible, either. So while the beam of the Phantom Zone projector could reverse the phase-shift and bring an object back into normal space, it required perfect coordination. Someone needed to turn on the projector in normal space and whatever (or whoever) was in the Zone would need to be there at the exact place and time to be hit with the beam, all without any possibility of communication between the two parties.

Had Uncle Jor actually sent the Kryptonians into the Zone, they would have been stuck there forever. With the planet destroyed, there would be no one left to retrieve them, no way to communicate with anyone, they would have been in a phantom state for all time. Which might actually be a fate far worse than death, now that she thought about it.

In this case, though, it should be straightforward. The drone was immobile; it would be in the exact same spot where she had made it disappear. So all she needed to do was to activate the projector again, aim it at that exact same spot, and hit reverse.

"So let's see if it works," she told J'Onn, who phased out again. Kara once again put some distance between the device and herself, then activated it. The bright beam of light lit up once again and a moment later an object shimmered into visibility. The drone was back.

"It worked," Kara exclaimed, smiling broadly and shutting off the projector.

Later on, Kara would blame her enthusiasm for overriding her common sense. Instead of first scanning the drone from afar, she immediately flew close to it. It was only then that she noticed that the drone, while whole, looked different. The metal seemed to shimmer, almost as if coated by some liquid, and the sand it was sitting on was beginning to sizzle.

"Kara," she heard J'Onn's strangely pitched voice from his phasing state. "Be careful, something seems to..."

Kara had half a second to register that there was some kind of energy charge clinging to the metal of the drone before the world went white. A thunderous boom tore through the quiet of the desert and a blinding flash of light put even the midday sun to shame. The energy discharge vaporized the drone, completely shredded the Phantom Zone projector, and sent Kara flying as if shot out of a cannon. None of which she really noticed due to passing out.

"Mom? MOM? Can you hear us?"

Slowly blinking awake, Kara could see the worried faces of her children and J'Onn hovering over her.

"Not so loud," she complained, her head hurting.

Quickly cataloging the situation, she found herself lying on her back in the sand, every inch of her skin tingling uncomfortably, spasms shaking her muscles as if she had been hit with the mother of all electric shocks.

"What happened?" she asked, not making an attempt to get up yet.

"We are not certain," J'Onn replied. "The drone returned from the Phantom Zone as planned, but it seems to have carried over some kind of energy charge. Once the drone was fully back in phase with normal space, the energy discharged violently.

"Yeah, there is a huge crater over where it was," Clark told her.

"Are you okay, mom?" Kona asked, sounding extremely worried. Kara smiled despite feeling stiff and sore as hell. Kona probably hadn't even noticed that she had finally called her mom without needing to think about it first.

"I'm fine, baby girl," she replied, carefully sitting up. "Just had the wind knocked out of me a bit."

J'Onn and Clark were both there to steady her as she stood up, swaying slightly. Kona hovered close, wringing her hands in distress.

"Well, back to the drawing board, I guess," Kara finally said, her super vision showing her the smoking crater. It was more than a mile away, actually. She had flown an impressive distance.

"None of the equipment survived, I fear," J'Onn told her. "We have no data to try and figure out what kind of energy that was."

"We'll need to repeat the experiment then," Kara sighed.

"WHAT?" Kona yelled.

"Without blowing myself halfway across the desert in the process, I promise," she assured her daughter.

"We should first give you a complete check-up," J'Onn reminded her, "just to ensure that there are no lingering effects on you."

Kara was about to protest, but seeing the worried looks on Cark's and especially Kona's face, she finally nodded. "Good idea! Let's head to the Fortress!"

They took off, shooting into the sky and heading North. For a moment Kara felt strange, almost dizzy, and her flight wobbled. A heartbeat later everything was fine, though, and she simply put it down to still being winded. After all, she was Superwoman, wasn't she? It would take more than an explosion to slow her down.

In the middle of the desert, the blazing sun glared down mercilessly on the endless sand. Right in the middle of nowhere was the place where Superwoman had fallen during the explosion, an impact powerful enough to leave a deep impression of her body in the sand.

With an eerie glow, something stirred from the impression, a thing created from sand and rock. It rose, crackling with energy, its form imitating that of the hero who had fallen here. Slowly, ploddingly, the figure took a single step towards the distant mountains. Then another. And then another.

End Chapter 56

Author's Note: Just to avoid confusion, this is not in any way, shape, or form a Star Wars crossover, despite the episode title. With the overall storyline being named "Sand", though, and the Phantom Zone playing a role, I couldn't help but think of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, both the name of the first movie and the fact that Anakin Skywalker really, really doesn't like sand. No Jedi, Sith, nor scruffy-looking nerf herders will appear here, though.

I briefly entertained the notion of bringing in the classic Phantom Zone villains (Zod and his crew), but decided against it as I did not want to have so many super-powered Kryptonians running around. Three are plenty for now. If the ending of this chapter seems a bit familiar, you might have read Superman (Volume 1) #233 from 1971. This chapter here is (very) loosely based on that story.