Superman Movieverse Forum

I'm trying to get a little ahead.

---

(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)

---

The Earth was gone. Everyone he had ever known, everything he had ever loved – gone.  But unlike Krypton, maybe it wasn’t forever and always.

Kal-El began to move faster, faster than he had ever moved before. Fast enough that that he was vibrating himself and the bubble of space-time around him until they were both out of phase with the ‘real’ universe. He could see Luthor’s equations in his mind, the ‘time’ and ‘direction’ components. He aligned himself with going ‘back’ and began to move along that axis.

It was tough. Nothing in the Kryptonian data or Luthor’s equations had indicated there was a ‘resistance’ component. Images appeared around him. Was he back on Earth? He watched the magma come up, burning people alive. Most didn’t have time to realize what was happening. But others died in screaming agony. ‘You betrayed them,’ voices whispered. ‘Why didn’t you help them?’

More images, more whispers. Lois and Jason, Ben and Mom, all screaming in terror and unspeakable pain. Lois cursing him with her last breath.

‘Why did you leave us? Why did you let this happen?’

Then he realized the kiss on his forehead was burning. ‘They will try to stop you,’ Mike had said. Kal-El closed his eyes against the images. That helped some, but the voices didn’t stop and with his eyes closed, he couldn’t be sure if he was veering off course.

I have to be stronger, and smarter, than they are.

He opened his eyes and began to move along the time axis once again. He concentrated on the ‘path’ ahead of him. The images of terror were still there but with effort he could ignore them. The sounds were harder but he concentrated on his own heartbeat. It was the only thing he knew that was real in this place outside of time-and-space.

He sped on.

Finally he slowed to get his bearings. The Earth was blue beneath him, floating serenely in space, although from where he was it appeared as though it was rotating the wrong direction.

He slowed to a stop and reentered the ‘real’ universe. There was no sign of Luthor’s abomination in the Atlantic. Am I back far enough?

He was exhausted, mentally and physically. The sunlight felt good but he was too high up to breathe easily. He dropped lower into the atmosphere, avoiding the communications satellites and the spy satellites. The population of devices in orbit had multiplied by several times while he was away.

Kal-El dropped further. He pinpointed Lois’s heartbeat in Metropolis. She’s okay. Jason’s heart rate was steady. Mom was at home and her heart rate was also steady. Then Lois’s heart rate jumped. Kal-El could see that Metropolis had gone dark – a major power outage that threatened the entire north-central Atlantic coast. But it was more than just a power outage – cell phones and other portable devices were also affected.

EMP? But there was no sign of a bomb, either nuclear or ‘conventional’. And it would take something the size of a nuke to neutralize such a large area. Lois and Rachel had both told him about a blackout along the east coast.

This must be the first one.

Kal-El scanned Metropolis and located the culprit. A growth program had been triggered in a Kryptonian crystal. The monstrosity was in a basement of a riverside mansion and Kal-El saw Luthor gloating over his achievement. There was a woman and two men standing with him.

So that’s his current gang…

There were screams in the air. A 777 was being dragged into space by a space shuttle – the Explorer. The plane’s tail was burning, and the fire was creating toxic smoke in the cabin. Some of the passengers were screaming. Others were praying. Then the fire burned through into the passenger cabin and there were no more screams. A few seconds later the shuttle tore itself apart, ripping apart what remained of the jumbo jet – one of the three clamps that had held it to the jet had finally come loose. Neither vehicle had been designed for such stress. The trajectory would take the debris over the ocean.

‘You could have saved them…’

More screams, this time near the ground. Another jumbo jet, this one coming in for a landing at Berkowitz Airport. It had lost power at a critical point during landing. One wing scraped the ground.

‘You can save them…’

‘I’m not really here,’ he told himself. ‘I can’t save them…’

The plane cart-wheeled out of control.

Heartsick, Kal-El dropped to Earth not far from the Kent farmhouse. He needed to get his bearings.

“Clark?” Martha Kent stepped out from the corner of the house and stared at him in wide-eyed disbelief before breaking into a run. “Clark!”

He grabbed her in a hug. “It’s good to see you, Mom,” he murmured. She smelled right – Ivory soap and laundry detergent, loamy soil and tomato plants.

She pulled back and looked at him, forehead creasing in a frown. “You look tired.”

He nodded. He was tired and achy, almost like there was kryptonite around. It was one of the theoretical side effects of what he was trying – it seemed that the universe abhorred the type of thing he was trying. Even though the version of himself that belonged in this time was light years away, he was feeling the effects of ‘being in two places at the same time.’ He knew the closer he was to his ‘alternate’ the worse his symptoms would become.  He could only hope his alternate wasn't feeling as badly as he was right now.

“I can’t stay long,” Kal-El said. “But I need to ask you what the date is.”

“September 26th. Why?”

He was only halfway to when he needed to be to solve the problem of Luthor.

“Mom, I have something important I have to do and I don’t know if… If I don’t make it back, you need to tell Lois about me,” he said.

“Clark, you’re scaring me,” his mother said. “What is it you have to do?”

“I have to break another one of Jor-El’s rules, and this one may well kill me,” he told her. “Please, promise me you’ll to talk to Lois.”

“I will,” Martha promised.

With a nod, Kal-El launched himself into the air.



Luthor stood back and admired his creation. He hadn’t been certain until now that he had programmed the crystal correctly. Not that he would ever admit it to anyone else, especially not his current ‘partners.’

Steven Vanderworth’s train set was a shambles. Where the ‘lake’ had been was a mass of alien crystal whose weight had cracked the concrete floor of the ‘playroom’. The blackout hadn’t surprised him too much. He had, after all, disabled the safety protocols on the Kryptonian programming so the crystal could grow faster and be utterly unconcerned with exactly what sort of matter, or energy, was being converted into its matrix.

“Lex, your little crystal broke everything,” Kitty Kowalski observed.

“So it did,” Luthor agreed. The growth had actually been faster than he’d anticipated. It wouldn’t be long at all before he would be in a position to demand fealty from all the governments of the Earth. He, Lex Luthor, would rule this benighted planet with a firm but benevolent hand. It was only right that the world’s greatest mind should be entrusted with the fate of the planet.

“Uh, Boss,” Stanford, one of his ‘associates,’ stammered. The man was staring at the little screen in his hand.

“What?” Luthor demanded, irritated at the interruption.

“There was a blip on your Superman detector.”

“Where?”

“West. But it’s gone now,” Stanford said.

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know. It just sort of appeared out of nowhere right before the blackout and then it disappeared a few seconds after the power came back on.”

“And you didn’t think it was important enough to tell me?” Luthor grated.

Stanford just stared at him, obviously too frightened to make excuses.

Luthor shrugged mentally. He still needed Stanford’s skills for now. But when the time came for them to part ways, Stanford would pay for his inattentiveness.

There was a more immediate concern. Superman had survived and was back. Luckily, Luthor knew how to handle that little problem. Superman’s no doubt triumphant return was going to be greeted with a nasty surprise. A green, glowing, Kryptonite surprise.

With a feral grin, Luthor started planning his surprise.



Lois fumed as she sat at her desk in the Daily Planet newsroom. She glowered at the nearest overhead monitor that was showing the inaugural launch of NASA’s newest orbital shuttle. The people around her had enough sense to stay out of her way, including her fiancé.

Lois was supposed to have been on the 777 that was launching the shuttle. Even though it was just a PR piece – NASA’s safety record per passenger mile was at least as good as any commercial airline - she had been looking forward to getting away from the office, doing some real field work. But the morning had started out bad and had turned worse.

Her car wouldn’t start so she took Richard’s car to the office to get in a little work before heading to the airport to catch her flight to Florida. Only Jason’s schoolbag was in the back of Richard’s car. Then to make matters worse, her morning’s coffee from the little coffee kiosk in the lobby had exploded on her, ruining her suit and new silk blouse and burning her where the liquid caught her skin.

By the time she got home and changed, and got burn ointment on her legs and hands, she had missed her flight.

The newsroom lights flickered and went out. All around her people were swearing at their computers, pressing Ctrl-S on their keyboards in the vain hope that not all was lost.

Then the lights came back on. The computers came back, along with the hum of the building’s air conditioning. Overhead, the monitors came back to life. The news anchor on the screen Lois had been watching looked puzzled.

The anchor squared his shoulders. “This just in… The inaugural flight of the Shuttle Explorer appears to be experiencing extremely serious technical difficulties.”

The noise level in the newsroom went down as people started to listen to the newscast. The picture went to a live shot of Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center.

A worried looking reporter was listening to his headset then he looked into the camera. “We’re coming to you live from Cape Canaveral, where it seems there is a problem with the inaugural flight of the new orbital shuttle Explorer. Reports are just coming in, but it appears that the shuttle’s boosters have fired before detaching from the jet, veering both craft dramatically off course and out of control…”

Moments later, the scene changed once again. A telephoto shot of the shuttle and jet. Flames and smoke could be seen trailing behind them. Then there was a bright flash and debris started to fall.

I was supposed to have been there…

“A jumbo jet just crashed on landing at Berkowitz,” Perry yelled. “Wilson, McCoy, you’re on it. Lane, you’re on the blackout, work with them. The shuttle and the crash are too much of a coincidence for it to be a coincidence. ”

I should be dead… If my coffee hadn’t exploded on me…

Then Lois shook herself. She was alive and she had a job to do. Her reporter’s instincts told her that Perry was right – the ‘accidents’ were connected. She just had to figure out how.

And for the first time in a very long time, Lois wished her old partner was back from where ever he’d disappeared to. Clark’s input on the blackout would be helpful, even if it was just to check her spelling.



Once again, Kal-El sped up through the atmosphere, through the stratosphere to the mesosphere and beyond. He vibrated himself out of the ‘real’ universe into what he was now calling the time stream. He oriented himself to the proper axis and once again headed ‘back’. Beneath him, the Earth seemed to rotate in the wrong direction.

The whispers began once again. ‘Why didn’t you save them? You could have saved them…’

‘It is forbidden for you to interfere with human history,’ a familiar voice thundered – Jor-El. ‘It is forbidden…’

Jonathan Kent’s voice reverberated. ‘…there's a reason why you're here.’

More images of death and destruction. But he didn’t dare close his eyes against them. He needed to keep track of how far back he was going.

‘…we wait for the savior to return,’ Lois’s voice echoed softly. ‘But the savior never does, and we realize it was better had he never come at all…’

“I never claimed to be a god,” Kal-El murmured to himself. “I never claimed to be a savior. All I ever wanted to do was help… And I have to fix this.”

‘It is forbidden for you to interfere with human history… It is forbidden… It is forbidden…’

The kiss on his forehead burned until he felt nauseous. He wanted to claw at it but he didn’t dare.

Lois’s voice again. ‘People have always longed for gods, messiahs, and saviors to swoop down from the sky and deliver them from their troubles… But the savior never does, and we realize it was better had he never come at all…’

‘Why did you leave us?’ voices screamed at him. ‘We looked for you, we called for you, you never came…’

“I’m sorry…” Tears clouded his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

A part of his mind noted the passage of time. He was nearing his target. Once again he slowed, praying he had hit his mark. Too far back and Luthor might spot Superman’s arrival and change his plans, making it impossible to stop him. Not far enough - he might not survive a third transition into the time stream.

It had to be right. It simply had to be.