Intermission: The Maid of Steel, Part 1
Please Read and Review. I'd like to know what I'm doing right (to keep doing it), and what I am doing wrong (to correct it.
Notes, the parenthesis indicates languages other than Japanese, in this case, English.
Day Eight
Tokyo-3, Japan
Katsuragi-Ikari Apartment
Living Room
Shinji followed Hikari into the apartment, and both left their school bags by the door, as always.
He cleared his throat, "Um… Hikari?" He hesitated, once he shared his secrets with her, there would be no turning back. "I need to tell you something very important."
Her brow furrowed, was he..? No, he was very devoted to Asuka. Had to be something else. "…Sure. Go ahead."
"Well… now that you are a pilot… in training, I mean… This is harder than I thought…" he scratched the back of his head, "um… how far are you into the book?"
"Almost done, only a few pages left. I thought I'd read them here and give it back today." She went back to her school bag, and got the book out.
"Great! Have you wondered where they are? What happened to them after Second Impact?"
"Yes, of course; if they were still around, fighting the Angels would be easier."
"I need to show you something. It is very important and you must keep it secret, okay? It's a life and death matter. People could die if the wrong people gets even a hint of it. I am not being dramatic, this is literally death or life stuff."
She could feel his sincerity in the back of her own mind 'Is that my telepathy?' She thought. "Um, yes, of course. You are scaring me."
He took a deep breath, and exhaled it softly, like he had taken a heavy decision. "Remember how I was just when I first came to school? I mean, how I acted with everybody?"
"Yeah, you were very reserved."
"It was much worse than that. I was scared of everything and everybody. I had just been to my first time piloting an Evangelion, and that was the first time I even had gotten into one!"
She covered her mouth behind her hands. "You could have died!" She wheezed.
"I was awfully self-destructive then. I almost managed to get the Fourth Angel to kill me (1). I really didn't care much then. If it hadn't been for Toji and Kensuke, I…" he stammered. "Misato put me in the brig for a couple of days because of that."
"I had no idea! But you got better, didn't you?"
"Not because of spending time in the brig made me think hard on my life, Hikari. I had some unexpected help." Quickly, he passed pages of the book, until he found the one he wanted. "Look, this is the Justice League of America, all the then current members posed for this picture. Look here." He tapped his right index finger on the image.
Hikari squinted to examine the picture, "Looks like a reflection of somebody…" she said after a moment.
"That's an Honorary member of the JLA, the Phantom Stranger, no one knows much about him, but he is still around, protecting the world." He looked intently into Hikari's eyes. "He is doing his best to stop Third Impact. Helping us."
"Is he working with NERV?"
Shinji saw the colors shift around them, feeling relief and hope. A wide smile spread on his face.
A deep voice sounded from the couch on which the Stranger sat comfortably. "In certain aspects, our goals align admirably. But in others, they are absolutely incompatible, Miss Horaki." He stood up, looming over the two teenagers, and tipped his fedora at them. "Hello, Shinji."
"I'm so glad to see you! I thought you were dead when the Angel blew the Matsushiro Base!"
Surprised, Hikari saw Shinji stand tall again, as if a great weight had been taken off his shoulders. His familiarity with the strange man who had just appeared was something she had never expected to see in her friend.
"Took me a while to recover." The man seemed to shrug, somehow staying still.
"Wait," Hikari waved her arms, "We're you there when Toji got hurt?"
"I was incapacitated by that same explosion." He stood up. "But the details will have to wait."
Hikari felt like the shadowed eyes were looking into her soul. "Shinji? May I speak to Miss Horaki in private? It will be just for a few moments."
"Of course." He turned towards Hikari. "Don't be scared, Hikari. I vouch for him."
She nodded, and Shinji saw the colors shift back to normal, but Hikari and the Stranger had vanished from sight.
"I must confess you are a surprise, Miss Horaki."
"W-what do you mean?" She stuttered.
"I was not expecting White Martian descent in you, that's all."
Nervously, Hikari played with the hem of her school uniform.
"Your secret is safe with me, Miss Horaki. Shinji vouches for your character, and I trust in his insight."
"How do you know it? I have only known for a couple of days!"
"I see and know many things, though I am not omniscient. I am not exempt from making mistakes, as was proved at Matsushiro. I must act as I believe best with what I know, like anybody must. I can see your heritage worries you. Shinji himself does not know about your secret. Only you can decide if he, or others, are to know. So, if you allow me, I can show you, and Shinji, the life of a hero I think will help to settle your worries. There is a great potential in you, both for good and evil, and I see doubt corroding your soul."
She answered with barely audible voice. "Please."
"To fully understand what's at stake, you must know the truth behind Second Impact, and why we must act in secret to stop Third Impact from happening."
A wave of his hand, and Shinji materialized next to them.
Later
Shinji patted awkwardly at Hikari's back. The normally composed girl cried openly. "All that suffering!" She sobbed. "Those men are monsters!"
"Yes. They are, Hikari." Shinji wiped her tears with his handkerchief. "They must be stopped. SEELE and Commander Ikari will destroy the world unless we can stop it."
"Do Asuka, Rei and Toji know all this?"
Shinji shook his head, a sad expression on his face. "Only Asuka knows. Rei is still under Commander Ikari's control, though she is slowly freeing herself. There was no time to show Toji. After Matsushiro blew up, the Stranger was incapacitated."
"In fact, I have just recovered enough to intervene, Miss Horaki." The Stranger noted. "I would have preferred to reveal you the truth of matters after careful consideration, but circumstances have forced my hand."
"What? What circumstances?" Hikari asked.
Shinji answered. "You will have to try synching with Unit-02. We don't know when, exactly; that depends on how long it takes for the repairs to be done. If you synch with Unit-02, and somehow contact Asuka, you could reveal too much to Commander Ikari, and that knowledge could give him the upper hand."
"I see. But why do you call him Commander Ikari? Isn't he your father?" Family was very important for all the Horakis. She couldn't fathom such disconnection.
"After all he has done, I just can't call him my Father anymore. I do so in public, for the sake of appearances, but I have… what's the word? Disowned him." He tapped twice against his chest, right over his heart. His meaning was clear.
Hikari nodded slowly.
After their emotions had settled down a bit, the Phantom Stranger beckoned them to follow his steps. He opened a door, and they crossed into an abandoned street. The hot wind pushed around dust and debris. Abandoned vehicles dotted the street, some with the doors open, their interiors rotted away by time, sun, and weather.
Tokyo, Japan
"Where are we?" Hikari's whisper sounded loud in the dead silence.
"This is the original Tokyo, the target of an atomic bomb attack, two heroes were lost here in an effort to save the city. They blunted the effects, but the fall-out rendered the city uninhabitable anyway. Tokyo was abandoned in favor of Tokyo-2, as a temporary capital of Japan; and had the Angels not arrived, Tokyo-3 would have been the permanent capital of the country."
Shinji bowed his head solemnly. "The first Flash and Captain Atom." He said.
"The Flash laid his life to save his successor, the third man to carry his name. Captain Atom's power sent him into a future. Probably the future to come after Third Impact."
Hikari's brow furrowed as she thought. "What do you mean with 'a future'?"
"The future is not written in stone. Time travel is possible, within certain rules. If you travel to the past, you go to the past that created your specific timeline. For you, events in the past are immutable. But if you go to the future, you'll go to the most probable future created by events up to the moment you travel forward in time. There are many possible futures. Some of them are mutually exclusive. In one of them, humankind spreads to the stars, and is part of a loose coalition of worlds and races. That future has its own superhero teams. The best known is the Legion of Superheroes." A wave of his hand, and an image of a group of brightly clad teenagers appeared. Not all of them looked human.
"Another future is dominated by sentient animals. It's a world sunk into barbarism, where death stalks constantly. That world will last a few centuries, and then, it will die." The image changed, showing humanoid tigers, rats, gorillas, and other types of animal. "The few human beings alive are primitive creatures, barely smart enough to wear clothes and make and use simple tools and weapons." They saw a tribe of people who looked like they had escaped from a bad dinosaur movie, but some of them held familiar objects, like traffic signs, or garbage can lids, as improvised clubs or shields.
"Inhabitants of both timelines have traveled to this age, though not in recent years. At this moment, both of those futures are possible, the event that discards one of the timelines has not happened yet. That event is Third Impact. The future is at stake."
Hikari pressed her lips together into a tight line. "We have to stop Third Impact, then."
"That is our purpose." The Phantom Stranger agreed.
"Um… what are we doing here, Stranger? This city is dead." Shinji shuddered.
The Stranger stopped in front of a sprawling building, with a crumbling plinth at the center. "Visiting a museum." He extended a hand, and time seemed to run backwards for the building. The dust disappeared, water and sun damage repaired itself, peeling paint straightened itself over the surfaces, and a stone statue appeared on the plinth, it was a young woman with a short cape, a pentagonal shield on her chest, proudly showing a famous "S" symbol.
A moment later, the fallen letters of the marquee reappeared. "Supergirl Museum" (2) they proclaimed in western style letters.
"Wow…" Shinji wheezed. "How come she has a museum in Tokyo? Did she move here? I thought she lived in Metropolis."
The door opened, and a fanfare broke the silence. "The story of Supergirl is complex and winding (3). It begins in a future that don't exists anymore, not even as a possibility.(4)" They entered the museum.
The exhibits were mostly photographies, with a few mementos and trophies. The pictures showed a young woman, apparently in her early twenties, with bright blue eyes and blonde hair. In the pictures, she smiled happily at the camera, some times alone, some times with other heroes or captured villains. Sometimes a red headed man in his early thirties was with her. Shinji felt an immediate dislike of the man, as he groomed his beard in the same style Gendo Ikari did. One of the pictures identified him as Lex Luthor II.
"Supergirl was believed to be Superman's relative, probably a cousin. But that was a mistake neither wanted to correct. In truth, she was a lost girl, the last survivor of her whole universe."
The Stranger touched a big tapestry, showing Supergirl saving a girl from being crushed by a falling wall, and the image changed.
"In a no longer possible XXXth Century, a group of young heroes was inspired by legends about a young hero, who lived a millennium before them, in the XXth Century. Superboy." A wave of his hand, and the image changed to show a teenage Superman, accompanied by a flying white dog, who also wore a red cape.
"Wait." Shinji noted. "Superman debuted as an adult, and his clone never wore that uniform. Not that I know."
"That's right. Because in this timeline, Superman never was Superboy, and he didn't have a flying dog."
Hikari asked the obvious question. "Then what happened? Was it just a mistake in recorded history? Maybe somebody made stories about Superman as a boy, and they were mistaken for real facts."
"A very good guess, but no." The image changed again. This time, it showed a sinister figure, who wore a rotting purple robe with a hood, and bandages on his hands. "This is the Time Trapper (5), a frequent enemy of the Legion of Superheroes, able to manipulate time and space. He stole a single small piece of time, and created what would be known as a pocket universe (6). It contained only two inhabited worlds, Earth, and Krypton. And after Krypton exploded, only the Earth remained. As in our world, Kal-El, the only survivor of Krypton, was found and adopted by a kind couple of earthlings. When the Legion decided to use a Time Machine to recruit Superboy into their ranks, the Time Trapper sent them to the pocket universe to interact with his version of Superboy. Part of his plan to dominate the entire timeline."
They saw the young heroes first meeting, and some key moments of their adventures.
"Eventually, the Legion tried to take the fight to the Time Trapper, and arrived to their Superboy's universe. A part of the group was betrayed and caught in stasis by Superboy, but four managed to flee into the future, where to their surprise, met the real Superman. After a brief fight, Superman and the Legionnaires joined forces, and returned to Superboy's universe. Superboy's betrayal had been a desperate attempt to protect his universe from complete annihilation. Superman returned to his rightful universe and time, while Superboy and the Legion took the fight to the Time Trapper. A fight that would cost the life of Superboy."
The image changed to show key moments of the story. "In the end, Superboy saved not one, but all possible universes with his final sacrifice. Though his last heroic sacrifice in returning his friends to their rightful place meant he would not find his final rest in his own world, but in a future he did not belong to. His body was interred, with full honors, in the asteroid Shamballa, the Graveyard of Heroes."
The last image was of Superboy's funeral, his coffin surrounded by those who called him friend and brother.
Shinji wiped off a tear, while Hikari sobbed quietly, her own tears flowing freely.
The Stranger waved his hand again, and the tapestry returned to its former image. Respectfully, he waited for the two teenagers to calm down.
He wandered around the room, until the others rejoined him. "What happened then, Stranger?" Hikari asked.
The Stranger sighed. "A few years later, evil was let loose in a world deprived of its greatest, and only hero." (7)
They crossed to the next room. It had been once used as a projection room, showing short clips of news shows, tv interviews, or amateur recordings of Supergirl. At a nod of the Stranger, the screen lit up, showing a different place.
"In the pocket universe," he said, "the worst criminals from Krypton were sent into an alternate dimension as punishment. They called it the Phantom Zone. The prisoners were nothing but ghosts inside, unable to touch anything. Unseen and unheard outside the Zone. They were, almost without exception, murderers, sadists, and genocidal." The image showed a place that had some likeness to a courtroom, though the design was very different. A chained prisoner stood on a stand, while an executioner brought a strange device that looked like a miniature spotlight. The executioner pushed a button, and the light of the device shone on the prisoner, who became more and more transparent, until he desappeared. "On Earth, and alternate version of Lex Luthor, one free of the greed of this world's Luthor, tried to use one of Superboy's kryptonian devices to locate the hero, unwittingly making contact with three of the most dangerous prisoners of the Phantom Zone."
A man in a skin-tight uniform appeared, with a bloodthirsty smile on his face and a cap on his head. "General Zod, a militaristic tyrant. Responsible of thousands of death in a failed coup d'etat." He was replaced by a woman with short hair and hard eyes. "Faora, a sadistic serial murderer." She was replaced by a tall man of brutish aspect, wearing a long cape. "And Quex-Ul, a violent killer."
"They convinced Luthor they had been saved from Krypton's destruction by hiding into a dimensional pocket, and Luthor, desperate to find new heroes to take Superboy's place, released them." They saw the three criminals appear in Superboy's lab, mock Luthor, and destroy the place, so they couldn't be sent back to their prison. In a matter of days, they had wiped out the worlds armies, destroyed cities and entire countries, and killed millions of innocent people."
The images were too much for Hikari, who grabbed at Shinji in helpless desperation. She cried in horror, soaking his shirt. He tried to console her.
"Luthor used his genius to organize a Resistance against the invaders, and it is here that Supergirl appears. She is an alternate version of one of Superman's friends, gifted with similar, yet not identical powers. However, Luthor kept a secret from her. A secret that he only revealed under extreme circumstances."
The images showed scenes of horrifying slaughter and destruction. No one was safe from the invaders. They toppled buildings, burned forests, razed cities. They destroyed for destruction's sake. "Luthor build force fields projectors that protected Smallville, Superboy's town, from the invaders, and gathered men and women willing to fight to the end. Annoyed by their enemies survival, the Kryptonian criminals drilled under the oceans, reaching the molten center of the world. They unleashed a complete apocalypse upon the world, the overheated water destroyed the atmosphere completely, leaving only a barren husk, bereft of breathable air."
Horrified, Shinji saw the world boil and die. He covered Hikari's eyes, and swore to himself to not allow another world to end this way, or any other.
"The last survivors now fought more for revenge than hope, and we're killed one by one. In the end, Supergirl was almost killed by the criminals heat vision, and became a semi molten figure. Instead of a human womanwith artificial powers, she herself was a copy of the woman whose face she wore. An artificial being created by Luthor. The scientist, last survivor of his world, gave Superman the way to defeat the monsters, admitting his hubris. He wanted to defeat them by himself, and by not using that resource, he had damned his whole world. In Superboy's lab, there were samples of all types of kryptonite, a radioactive mineral that affected kryptonian sin different ways. The green kryptonite was deadly and painful, the gold kryptonite robbed them of their powers permanently; and other types that are irrelevant to the next events. Superman used the gold kryptonite to depower the kryptonians. Once captured, they mocked Superman as weak, and boasted of finding a way to recover their powers and kill other worlds, or even finding a way to follow Superman back to his world and do the same once again."
In the image, Superman held a metallic cylinder in his hands, his face grave, and his eyes full of conflicting emotion.
At a gesture of the Stranger, Shinji and Hikari heard him pronounce sentence upon the unrepentant killers of a world. Holding the cylinder in his firm hands, he said, "(What I must do now is harder than anything I have ever done before. But as the last representative of law and order in this world, it falls to me to act as Jury, Judge, and Executioner.)" He opened the cylinder, and a poisonous green light filled the improvised prison. Its sickly green glow poisoning the three kryptonians immediately. Soon they fell to their knees, pathetically pleading for their lives. (8)
With grim satisfaction, Shinji watched them turn against each other, and Faora offering to become Superman's slave if he spared her. An empty promise, he realized. Once he was sure the three genocidal criminals were dead, Superman dug three shallow graves, and buried them, leaving the kryptonite piece under the dirt. He didn't left any kind of marker, only three small mounds marked their graves. He thought they didn't deserve a tombstone, they were willingly rabid animals, and deserved nothing to mark their passing.
"Superman brought home the only survivor of that world, Supergirl, though in her basic form she was called Matrix. He left her in the care of the only people he could entrust her. His family (9), while he dealt with the psychological consequences of his actions in the Pocket Universe. (10)" They saw a farm, somewhere in the USA, neither Shinji nor Hikari could venture a guess of precisely where it was. But they saw a kind couple and a young woman speak with Superman.
Author Notes:
(1) I have always thought that at that point in the series, Shinji had some very self-destructive tendencies. His fight with Shamshel looked as if he really did not care if he survived the fight or not.
(2) This is a nod to the Justice League Unlimited animated series, for some undisclosed reason, Supergirl is very popular in Japan, she has her own fan clubs, fan conventions and cosplayers. It was shown only in the episode "Chaos at the Center of the Earth" and was never mentioned again. I thought it would be interesting for her to have her own museum too, much like the Flash/es.
(3) Mostly due to editorial edicts…
(4) The timeline was adjusted after the Zero Hour Event. The original post-Crisis timeline still had the original version of the Legion of Superheroes. After Zero Hour, the whole XXXth Century was rebooted. The second version of the Legion is known as the Reboot Legion, or the Archie Legion, as the writers deliberately distanced the books from the grimdark mood of the then recent Original Legion type of story.
(5) The exact nature of the Time Trapper varies from continuity to continuity, the only constant is his frequent clashes with the Legion. He debuted in Adventure Comics issue 317 (Feb, 1964).
(6) These events correspond to a four part story, written specifically to reconcile the story of the Legion of Superheroes with the post-Crisis lack of Superboy. The issues are, in reading order: Legion of Superheroes issue 37 (Aug, 1987), Superman issue 8(Aug, 1987), Action Comics issue 591 (Aug, 1987), and Legion of Superheroes issue 38 (Sept, 1987). The whole story-arc was reprinted in The Man of Steel, Vol. 2.
(7) The story-arc that introduced the new Supergirl into the post-Crisis continuity was published in the Superman titles. Supergirl debuted in a subplot in Superman issue 16 (Apr, 1988), interestingly, she was found in the Antarctic! The story arc with the events detailed here was published, as The Supergirl Saga in Superman issue 21 (Sept, 1988), The Adventures of Superman, issue 444 (Sept, 1988), and Superman issue 22 (Oct, 1988). The story was reprinted in The Man of Steel, Vol. 4.
(8) It had been established in Action Comics issue 591 (Aug, 1987) that Kryptonians are vulnerable only to Kryptonite from their own universe.
(9) This time, the Phantom Stranger won't reveal the names of the people involved, for respect to Superman, and to protect the children in the Kent Farm, in case Gendo or SEELE have access to some way to obtain that information.
(10) Those consequences were far-reaching indeed. Eventually causing Superman to self-exile to deep space.