The character of Dr. Sullivan/Sul-Van is actually (semi)canonical. He makes his one and only appearance in the pilot episode of Superman: the Animated Series. Like a lot of the canon bits I'm using, he's been tweaked and altered until we've got this end result.
Chapter Seventeen: Outside the Lines
Foresight, Lara. A good mechanic always has foresight. Dr. Sullivan thought when the recognition matrix gave him the green light as he presented the sigil badge. The hatch split open like a diamond to reveal the cocoon-like interior that had seen his grandson safely across twenty-seven lightyears.
The engineer rolled his eyes as Nam-Ek started insulting Clark's apparent lack of physicality, just because the boy had come from a rather long line of scientifically-inclined people who didn't exactly get up to egregiously physical things. Honestly, Nam-Ek acted like his father's side of the family weren't all scientists themselves. Yes, his mother's side had a proud tradition of serving in the planetary militia, but it wasn't her footsteps that Nam-Ek had followed in.
He found the crystals located towards the front of the pod, tucked securely into a lockbox that opened at his touch. Inside were four oval-shaped stones that looked like white opals, but the rainbow of colors playing on the surface moved like darting fish.
Four of them? Well done. That should be over four centuries worth of continuous history. Dr. Sullivan thought proudly.
And then Clark shrieked, a hair-raising, agonizing sound that sent such a spike of adrenaline through the engineer because he didn't need a DNA test to know that this boy was his grandson and, more importantly, Lara's son. Really, one of the last things left of Krypton and to hear him to shriek like that and smell the sizzle of flesh...
"Kal!"
Dr. Sullivan may not have been particularly athletic, but he didn't need to be in order to take advantage of the abilities that Earth had given him.
Stuffing the lockbox into his coat pocket, he leapt over the shuttle pod and the gimbals without even a running start and aimed a flying kick at Nam-Ek's head. The idiot barely saw it coming in time, unfortunately, but he was forced to pull away from lasering Clark in the chest. He scrambled off the twenty-something just as Dr. Sullivan struck out with his other leg. He skittered around back towards the shuttles and Dr. Sullivan landed between his grandson and the rival scientist. Clark was still breathing, his heart still beating, but those patches of skin on his chest were red and blistered and a little too singed for anyone's comfort.
"You'd protect him, Sul-Van? Do you even know what vile thing your daughter did?" Nam-Ek spat hatefully.
"Used her womb for its original purpose, as I recall." Dr. Sullivan replied. "How is that vile? The uterus evolved for the very purpose of gestation! It was your ancestors who set all of that back!"
"In-utero insemination is illegal!" Nam-Ek reminded him. "You know what could have happened! It could have been a calamity that Krypton would not have recovered from!"
"Krypton was already facing a calamity it wasn't going to recover from!" Dr. Sullivan pointed out. "Between the yellow sun and the blue sky, I'm sure it hasn't escaped your notice that we are on a very different planet altogether! In any case, he tested clean!"
"That's not a chance we can take!" Nam-Ek snarled. "The House of El must be tried and punished for its infractions against the High Council!"
Then he turned his head and fired a concentrated burst of heat vision at the baby shuttle, between the pod and the engine casing.
"Wait! That's a Phantom Drive!" Dr. Sullivan shouted, but it was too late. The crystal shattered like it was a thin sheet of glass, but fortunately, nothing went up in a fireball like it could have.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the worst of it.
"Jor-El, that was stupid. It could have blown up mid-transit." Dr. Sullivan shook his head.
"I know." Nam-Ek agreed, retrieving the Phantom Zone projector from the shattered casing. He held it up, tapping his fingers on the glyphs etched onto the metal braces. "It could have been disastrous if we'd lost this before we could use it. This holds the future of Krypton and it's not reacting." he realized, because it should have started activating by now.
Dr. Sullivan smiled. "My son-in-law really was never that stupid." he said. "Jor-El isn't going to leave a Phantom Zone projector just lying around for anyone to get their hands on without tying it to the biometrics of the House of El."
Nam-Ek's brown skin started to color faintly red and his eyes crackled distinctly blue-white, because the only projector he could find, possibly the very last one in the known universe, and he couldn't even use it.
Before the geneticist could actually do anything, Dr. Sullivan lunged forward and punched Nam-Ek in the teeth. He didn't expect to do any real damage, but it was more than enough to make the geneticist reel back and give him some breathing room.
"Atazitni huura madil, liazorutani Thee'ton Sul-van, Zrytrev ren Van!" Dr. Sullivan shouted at the shuttles, hurrying to grab Clark off the floor.
The shuttles, the last of Lara's stellar engineering, beeped their responding affirmatives. There was a new whine in the air as sleep mode deactivated and he couldn't help but grin a little. He didn't know why he had doubted his daughter's skills, even briefly.
"Koris pener!" he ordered. "Bormoc avt!"
The shuttles obeyed beautifully. The command was, of course, to initiate flight and follow him. So they turned, their audial centers tuning to the sound of his voice, already programmed into their memory banks. They wouldn't be deterred now and promptly bowled Nam-Ek in their programmed haste to obey.
Dr. Sullivan grinned a little wider at the geneticist's yelp and heaved Clark over his shoulders. Then he kicked off from the ground and flew away from the hole already in the ceiling. The shuttles followed, smashing through the damaged ceiling and spiraling after him up through the snow and the clouds. Up to where the stars shone brightly and the moon gleamed.
Dr. Sullivan didn't know how far he ascended, but he left the clouds and the city far below and reached the point were the air felt a little too thin, even for him. Behind him, the shuttles heaved to a halt, like breaching whales. He checked Clark's breathing and pulse, and found them both acceptable. Then he put the moon to his left and flew south.
Lois had a funny feeling everything was about to go to hell the moment she saw Clark shoot an alarmed look towards the ceiling and she had known him just long enough now to start recognizing his tells. You really got to learn about a man's danger tells when breaking and entering was the norm of journalism and Clark really did seem to have a sixth sense about getting out before it got bad.
But before she could ask what was up, Detective Jones shouted "Move!" and something that was far too broad for a hand pushed her away from the shuttle just as the ceiling broke. Something large and shouting loudly bounced off the gimbals of the white shuttle and hit the floor with a ground-shaking thud. Lois didn't get her head up in time to see what was going on because Detective Jones grabbed her under the shoulders and started to bodily haul her away.
"Hey! Hey, let go of me! I can run on my own!" she shouted, kicking her feet out, albeit half-heartedly. "What about Clark?!"
"He is closer to the other side of the warehouse. He will get out that way much more easily." Detective Jones replied, dragging her through the doorway. It swung shut behind them.
"You seriously underestimate the farm boy, you know!" Lois said, struggling against the man's surprisingly strong grip. He had pinned both of her arms at the elbow. "He's got this thing about helping out when he shouldn't! I mean, it's a trait about him you just can't help but admire a little bit, but I seriously think he'd get himself into some major trouble if I wasn't around!"
"He is not that stupid." Detective Jones said flatly, half-pulling her up the corridor to the rotunda. "We are going out the front."
"Where's this 'we' coming from?" Lois demanded. "And where do you think you get off dragging me around like this? I am not a sack of potatoes! And there's a story back there! I can smell it!"
"I do not think this is a story you want to get involved in." Detective Jones said.
"Ah, you need to spend more time talking to Turpin the Terrible about my track record." the black-haired reporter said, smirking.
"I'm actually very aware of your record and that is why I am not about to let you run off on your own." the detective admitted.
"You think you can stop me?" Lois challenged.
Detective Jones stopped just before the stairs back up to the rotunda and released her, only letting her turn around before he took hold of her shoulders in a firm grip. "Miss Lane, I do apologize for this, but the more important thing than the story is to get you safely out of the building." he said.
"Don't give me that! The story always-- always comes... It comes first..." Lois trailed off weakly, because the detective's dark brown eyes were suddenly rather mesmerizing and she just couldn't concentrate on what she was trying to insist upon.
They were quite nice brown eyes the detective had; ochre dark and the faintest hints of umber and a good limbal ring to set them off rather fetchingly. They were like the eyes of a long-time friend, someone you could really trust when the going got rougher than usual. Eyes that said 'trust me' in a way that suggested no deceit.
"Please vacate the premises, Miss Lane, as quickly as you can." said Detective Jones's voice, though it seemed to be coming from unusually far away. "Get as far away as you can. You'll be safer."
"Okay." Lois agreed with a compliancy that she fleetingly realized was uncharacteristic of her.
But then the thought was gone and she was trotting up the stairs. For some reason, leaving the SCU sounded like a very good idea. Odd, it wasn't her idea; she somewhere deep down that it wasn't her idea because she would never have ideas like that one and she tended not to listen when people had ideas like that. But she was already half-jogging across the rotunda by the time she concluded such an idea wasn't hers. Everything seemed to slide past her as though she was dreaming, bearing a quality that seemed a little too shiny and a tad unrealistic.
It wasn't her idea to leave, but it seemed like the only one she could muster up.
She was out the main doors and back into the cold winter night before she could blink. The air nipped at her ears and nose as she broke into a much more pronounced run down the sidewalk. She nearly ran over the unsuspecting worker clearing the walkway of snow and thinking vaguely that she oughta be turning back Why the fuck was she running?!
Lois threw her arms forward like she was trying not to run into a wall and skidded to a halt just shy of the next crosswalk, staring at the traffic with a sense of disorientation and confusion. She was three blocks away from the SCU and she had no clear idea how she had gotten that far in the first place. She felt like she had just woken up from one of those half-asleep dreams where you were vaguely aware of what was going on around you and then clarity bitch-smacked you.
Detective Jones had told her to leave, but she wouldn't just obey...
"Sonuavabitch! He whammy-hammered my brain! He's a mind-whammy meta!" Lois realized, admittedly not sure how she had made it all the way to that conclusion, but seriously. Mindless agreement was not something she would do. Leaving when there was a story to be had? Never.
Detective Jones had pulled a little Harry Potter mind-control bullshit to get her out of the building.
"Oh, I'm giving him a piece of my mind all right!" Lois growled, spinning around on the balls of her feet. "Let's see how he likes having someone shove it down his throat! No one whammy-hammers Lois Lane!"
She made to march back to the SCU and take Detective Jones down at the knees. Metahuman or not, she was going to make a scarf out of him. She was ninety-nine percent sure that he had gone and violated the human rights edicts that the original DMHA had laid down about the mind-whammy thing, so there were going to be words.
A loud *crack!* like a gunshot split the relative silence and Lois ducked reflexively alongside everyone who wasn't running away or pulling out their smartphones. A visible cloud of black smoke burst into the air somewhere just around the SCU's building. It was easy to spot the accompanying glow of flames slowly creeping up the surrounding buildings.
"Agh, not again!" Lois growled, kicking off into a run. "I swear to god, Smallville, if you get caught in another explosion...!"
And trailed off into grumbling under her breath about all the ways she was going to kill him.
Clark was pretty tough, she had come to learn in between all the breaking in and then making narrow escapes through a second-floor window. He had landed some jumps she hadn't expected from him and did display rather more agility than one could anticipate from someone whose own shoes conspired to trip him. All that hard farm work and fresh country air had toughened him up and maybe when the adrenaline was going, he was confident enough to do things that resembled parkour.
Nonetheless, he had been lucky enough to survive just one explosion with barely a scratch. Making it through a second one would be pushing that luck something fierce, so frankly, she had better find him standing on the sidewalk.
She didn't find him.
As Lois got close enough to see exactly where the explosion had originated, she didn't see Clark anywhere in the crowd of people crowding in on the sidewalk around the SCU building. He was so noticeable; she could have recognized his shoulders anywhere. But he was not standing around and watching the evidence warehouse of the SCU burn. The entire roof was very much on fire, the flames reaching higher into the air as the witnesses watched.
"Dammit." Lois hissed, taking her phone out of her purse and turning away from the scene. She fired off a 'where are you' text to Clark and made her way out of the crowd.
Places like that warehouse didn't just spontaneously catch on fire; they were specifically designed not to, due to the often sensitive nature of the items being stored there. It took a bomb for the roof to be burning already. Lois could only conclude that the fire had been deliberately set, but slipshod in its execution. It wouldn't take very much to get people believing that something was being covered up.
Trask. It had to be the psychotic agent trying to cover his tracks. He had been storing some pretty big goddammned UFOs there -- things that would be incredibly recognizable as UFOs to the general populace. And Trask must have realized that he'd been rumbled and so had sent something to burn the place and the UFOs to the ground.
(She didn't know, of course, that the cause of the fire was Nam-Ek venting his frustration on the electrical system.)
Lois pulled up Clark's number and called him. She got his voicemail.
"Smallville! First, where the fuck are you? I'm heading back to the Planet, so meet me there." she ordered. "Because second, I think we've made Trask nervous. I don't know if you're seeing the burning building from where you're at, but the warehouse we were in a moment ago is on fire right now and you know what he was keeping in there. We've got to expose him before he gets the chance to really bury everything, so I'll be at my desk doing research. Bring coffee."
She ended the call and hurried up the sidewalks back to the Daily Planet. There wasn't time to wait for Clark to call back. The best thing he could do was to show up at her desk with that coffee and she might not ask him where he had been.
The fifty-seventh floor newsroom was as empty as Lois had ever seen it at seven o'clock during the winter. With the sun going down as early as five, no one wanted to stick around after a full day's work. The night crew was on the floor above and the bulk of the work on tomorrow morning's edition had already moved off from the reporters. Lois was so used to the place humming with work and people that the silence and emptiness was jarring. It was a little like being in a school after hours and you knew no one was around.
She fired up her computer and rifled around in her desk for a fresh notepad and checked the working pens and dragged a stack of post-it notes out of the wire-mesh desk organizer that had fallen to chaos within a week of purchasing it.
She wanted to figure out where all Trask had gotten around to in the last few years. In order to build an appropriately scathing article against him, she needed to prove that he was no sterling member of society, much less a productive one. More like one who needed to be excised from society entirely.
Lois connected to the internet and got to work.
After the first few passes, she realized that Trask hadn't been making much of an effort to cover his tracks, or at least his name hadn't been erased from any search algorithms. Still, he was rather easier to find than she'd thought he'd be.
"And I was hoping for a challenge." she lamented.
The most recent incident involving the likes of Jason Trask traced back to just this past spring in Ontario, Canada. Another alleged UFO sighting; Lois had seen the videos and followed the story until someone had debunked it all as a hoax. She had to admit that she was a skeptic on the whole alien thing, but she also had to admit that there had been something mighty fishy about the thing.
The UFO sightings had been staggered over a period of three weeks, showing up about every two days at 3:44 in the morning on the dot and sticking around until 3:48. There had been four daylight sightings and all the videos had featured something moving too bizarrely and too jarringly to be a military aircraft or a whacked-out bird or some kid's RC helicopter.
In between the lines of the story there had been Agent Trask.
He wasn't given a name. Most of the newspapers knew him as the Man in Black, a presumed government agent trying to cover up the truth and dragging people away for lengthy interrogations, many of them returning with fresh bruises. One of the blogs covering the sightings had gotten rather deep into describing the man's appearance and behavior and it matched the agent to a tee.
Working back from there, Trask seemed to have appeared all over North America and then some, appearing as far south as Panama after some rumors that mermaid-like creatures had gotten briefly trapped in the lock system, and as far north as Barrow, Alaska after another round of UFO encounters.
By the beginning of 2004, the proliferation of social media dribbled away and Lois was left to trawl through archived newspapers and outdated blogs left over from the bare bones of what the internet had once been.
There wasn't much information on the apparent fracas in Central City back in 2002. Either really nothing had happened or someone with enough money had paid to smother the information. Given that two of the people involved were Vivian and Meredith Furie, (Vivian, still a successful actress and her daughter Meredith, the current CEO of nationally ranked Atlas Industries), information smothering was highly likely to have occurred for the protection of their privacy, seeing as the dead businessmen was Atlas Industries's former CEO Gregor Furie, the husband and father of the aforementioned. Nonetheless, Trask's name still turned up in one of the police reports that had been made public and one such report was indeed about his verbal and partially physical harassment of some high school students. It seemed that he had gone after the daughter of a cop. And as if he hadn't been stupid enough to hassle just a policeman's daughter, Trask had likewise turned on the ward of one of Central City's former mayors.
Fool. Lois snorted.
His name also dotted reports spanning the length and breadth of the nation, almost always connected to an unprovoked assault on someone of the female persuasion and usually regarding a local happening that looked quite strange out of context, but soon proved to have a sensible rationale. More UFO and Bigfoot sightings. A few other times it had been breaking and entering, theft, and arson. Every time, Trask had waved his government agent badge to escape everything down to a parking ticket.
Lois dug back into 1999. She skipped over the Smallville incident, since she could just badger Clark for the details (whenever he turned up) and read up on what had happened in the Florida Keys just a few weeks before the meteor shower.
It only superficially matched what Agent Stoolie Canary had said. Clearly, he hadn't actually turned up any of the newspapers from Tempest Key or else he might have sung a different tune. Because it was way more than supposed shark attacks, contaminated fish, or red tide.
One day, early spring, shredded bodies had started washing up on the beaches. At first, it has been assumed to be a shark attack. In the warm, semi-tropical waters with tourist season starting and the seasonal migrations beginning, it wouldn't have been all that unusual. But an expert had gotten a look at the bite wounds and declared that it was no goddamn shark he had ever seen.
Then the frequency of the attacks had started to increase and the bodies had turned up in increasingly shredded states until the victims might have gotten in a fight with a cheese grater. The teeth marks were too small, the shark expert had said. Too pointed and needle-like and too close together. The positioning of the teeth had been much more akin to that of a human jaw. Slightly elongated, but otherwise very human-like.
It only got more baffling from there.
A pod of pilot whales had beached themselves, all of them suffering open sores and fevers and it had taken two days to coordinate the air-lifting effort to get the whales to a medical facility to be quarantined and treated. The beaches had been closed for the remainder of the week to test for contaminants in the water. A sudden surge of bioluminescent algae had coated the surf. Red tide, which had been presumed to be the cause of the kamikaze seagulls that deliberately rammed themselves into the ground or into buildings, with more still just dropping dead in midair. Dead jellyfish from the wrong part of the world. And a freak hurricane. During all of this, Trask had been in and out of the scene, screaming at people and causing more damage by himself than anything else could have managed.
The freak hurricane seemed to have been the end of it. A coast guard captain named Tom Curry had ridden out into the raging storm for reasons no one could have imagined and had come limping back in the morning, his boat listing in the water and half-sunk by the time he had made it to the docks. The damage to the boat had been one of the last odd things for the community. The hull had had long scratches down its length, as though a bear had attacked it. Every window had broken. The entire super-structure had looked like it was just going to sink like wet cardboard.
The last piece of weirdness -- Captain Curry's eighteen-year old son Arthur had disappeared without a trace, never to be heard from again. A statement about it from Curry had read: "Don't bother with a search. I know where he is and what he's doing. He'll be fine. He's my son."
Then life on Tempest Key had gone back to normal. No more red tide or dead gulls and all of the pilot whales had recovered from their sickness with no sign that they had been ill at all. Trask had run off to attend to the meteors in Smallville, leaving more than four dozen hospitalized people behind him.
There was a massive mystery there. Lois wouldn't have needed her paranoia to sense it. As much as she would have liked to dig into it further, it wasn't fully relevant at this stage of the investigation. For now, she was just following Trask's trail back to the start. All she needed to know was where he had been. She could investigate his egregious list of wrong-doings later.
Reports of the man were thinner on the ground from 1998 and on back. Either Trask had been less active or more discreet. He popped up here and there in places like Boston and Raleigh and Bismark and San Antonio for pretty much the same offenses, though they had a much more perverse and violent undertone, but the police reports turned up heavily redacted or obviously altered (witness statements not so much and she scribbled down names as she went). There was a passing reference to him with 1997's Lights Over Phoenix; another alleged UFO sighting. Finally, Trask reappeared in prominence in mid-1996 in Brookings, Oregon for attacking a young woman named Rose Canton.
Not that Miss Canton had been entirely faultless in the matter. She had a long rap sheet for petty theft and drunken recklessness and most of the police in town had known her by name. She had also been spontaneously causing plants to grow and take over the town street by street. But the violence with which Trask had attacked her had put her pretty square in victim territory. Five months before she was fit to stand trial for several accounts of negligent manslaughter. Lois thought it was something of a blessing that Miss Canton had been found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to the Middle Haven Psychiatric Care Facility in Central City.
Trask has slipped through the grasping fingers of the law just like he would every single time.
Prior to 1996, he became nearly impossible to track, proving that he had been at least more discreet in his actions or someone had been much more actively erasing his record. Lois didn't find any mention of the man until a Washington D.C. newspaper dated March of 1992. The headline article featured a black and white photo of Trask shaking hands with a stern-faced military man. The first few lines of the article announced that Jason Trask had been formally made the new director of the Department of Metahuman Affairs.
"Well there it is." Lois said in smug satisfaction, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms.
Now it made sense. Bureau 39 wasn't just all that was left of the DEO, but it really was the Department of Metahuman Affairs given a make-over. Trask had his eyeballs on any situation that presumed the presence of a metahuman or an alien because that was his job.
But... The DMHA was the legal branch. It had dealt with the courts and the lawyers and the lawmakers. The DEO had been the watchdog group that policed metahumans openly breaking the law. They were the ones who had enforced the "don't whammy-hammer the regular people with your power". The DEO had had the authority to arrest metahumans and charge them with crimes. They had been the one to send the lawbreakers to court, to gather the evidence that could confine them to Belle Reve.
Trask had been put in charge of the DMHA, which did none of that. He was technically charged with maintaining the legal representation of metahumans in the court system and providing them with legal advice and making sure they knew what the law was so they wouldn't get arrested. Instead, he was terrorassing around the continent searching for metahumans whether or not they were in active states of wrong-doing.
Rose Canton had not been entirely innocent. For sure, causing massive plant growth that sundered properties, leveled homes, and left people needing urgent medical attention fell into a category of wrong-doing. It was well within the limits of the law to bring her in, but the brutal force that Trask had used should have gotten him arrested too.
And then you had people like Clark, who was neither a metahuman nor had he done anything wrong, unless you counted simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was as much as Lois could suss out from the Smallville situation. Maybe Clark had had one of those freaky adrenaline surges that had allowed him to lift half a car off a person and Trask had long since believed that such feats of superhuman strength simply could not be possible unless you were actually superhuman. An otherwise innocuous situation taken right out of context.
The agent was overstepping his legal restrictions as it was by actively attempting to hunt down and arrest metahumans, purported or not. But it was also disturbingly telling that no one was stopping him. No one was even trying to hold him accountable for his actions.
Guess it's time someone started. Lois thought. But who's the asshole who's been letting him get away with this bullshit in the first place?
She scrolled back up the article about Trask's appointment to the photo at the top of the page, where the agent was shaking hands with the stern-looking military officer, hoping for a name. But she didn't need to look for one. She already knew who the man was.
General Sam Lane.
Dad! Lois had to bite the inside of her cheek just so she didn't shout out loud. It would have been a string of profanity, frankly. Of all the people who could have been putting their fingers in this, it was her dad who turned up at the top of the list.
That explained Trask's reaction much earlier today. He hadn't been scared of her threat, but rather alarmed by her connection to the general. Alarmed, perhaps, because he had been moving without authorization?
In that case, he should have been. General Lane was hardly a great dad, but he was a scary fucking military officer.
"Hey, Clark," Lois started, turning her chair around to find that she was addressing an empty room. Clark's desk was several behind hers, but it was in her line of sight. It was still empty and it looked like the farm boy hadn't even come and gone without her realizing it. No coffee, for one.
It was half-past eleven.
Lois snatched up her phone and unlocked the screen to check her text history and to see if she had missed a call. But there had been no activity on her phone since she had called Clark some four hours ago.
"Shit." she hissed.
She started to close out the windows and tabs while pulling the numbers for city hospitals out of her rolodex.
"Metropolis General Hospital? Yeah, this is Lois Lane from the Daily Planet. Did you happen to admit anyone in the last few hours from that explosion down by the Met P.D. Special Crimes Unit? A colleague of mine was right in that area when it happened and I haven't heard from him since. No one by the name of Clark Kent? Are you sure? Black hair and glasses, probably super-polite and dorky? He would have been carrying a press badge. Okay, thank you."
She called the rest on the way out of the building.
There were six hospitals in New Troy alone and one was specifically a burn unit. The two closest to the SCU had indeed received several patients to their clinics -- people who had been on the sidewalk when the warehouse had blown, getting scraped and battered with the debris -- but none with injuries so severe that they were admitted to a burn unit. The only truly significant injury was from the person who had hit the deck and fractured their elbow on the landing. If Clark was in a hospital, then he wasn't in New Troy and there were just too many hospitals in the city for Lois to call them all in one night. She could make an effort, but it was halfway to midnight and she didn't really feel up to marathon-calling right now.
She waved to Todd who manned the lobby desk after-hours and stepped out onto the tan bricks of the plaza outside the building. It was a nice plaza, known as Planet Square for all the planet-themed shops to be found around the perimeter of it (from the Venus Beauty Boutique to the Mars Candy Company, Mercury Messengers, and the skin care salon called The Great Red Spot). It had a great big fountain as its centerpiece and in keeping with the planetary theme, it featured the solar system with eight planets plus Pluto (the fountain had been commissioned before Pluto had even been discovered so it had been added in later, was very obviously not a part of the original design, and people kept putting flowers in the fountain pool as sort of a memorial to Pluto's stripped status).
"Miss Lane?"
The call of her name made Lois break her stride for a moment, but she just as quickly resumed walking like she hadn't heard just in case it was someone with less than innocent intentions.
"Hey! Miss Lane!"
And this time, running footsteps. Lois turned around to meet the individual head on and found that Agent Stoolie Canary, better known as Steve Trevor, was sprinting up to her.
"Something I can help you with?" she asked mildly, the hand in her coat pocket curling around the canister of mace all the same. Up close, however, she saw that Steve was clearly disheveled and smelled a bit like he had just crawled out of a dumpster. "Are you okay? You look like you just sprinted across half the city."
"Feels like I did. Do you happen to know some place I can lay low for the night?" he asked, definitely breathless. "I nearly got mugged in my hotel room half an hour ago. It's Trask. He's trying to kill me. I need to get off the grid."
A prickle went down across Lois's scalp and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Trask was out tying off loose ends and the all-American Steve here had babbled like a creek. As much as she should have expected this, she hadn't. You didn't just walk out of an organization like Bureau 39 without a stringent gag order attached to your pink slip.
And that made Lois and Clark just as much of a target too, because Steve had babbled to them and now they were on the verge of discovering all of Trask's dirty little secrets and he wasn't going to like that.
"Sounds like I'm going to need to do the same thing, considering what you told me. Hang tight, I know these streets. " Lois commented, beckoning for the former agent to follow her. "Where did you last see him?"
"Ten minutes ago. He was heading up 29th Street the last I saw the car." Steve answered. "I was hiding in the trash behind a Mongolian barbecue joint." he added, spreading his arms and looking down at himself as if he expected to see stains.
"I know the place. C'mon, we'll head north into Midtown." Lois suggested. If her apartment was on the list of places to check, then heading in the opposite direction was the best thing she could do and if she had to take Steve with her, then so be it.
They made it to the edge of the plaza and a none-too-subtle black SUV screeched up around the corner, its tires squealing for grip on the damp pavement. It had Trask leaning out of the passenger-side window with a semi-automatic and he depressed the trigger the moment Lois and Steve were in his sight-lines.
-0-
straight up easter egging all up in here yo.