Lightning in the Night

The following is a work of erotic fiction and includes scenes of sexual activity. It includes characters that are copyrighted by DC Comics. This story is intended for the non-commercial enjoyment of fans and should be considered a parody. No copyright infringement is intended and no profit will be made from the distribution of this story.

Author's Note - The characters in the story are based on those in the original comics (pre1985) and not any current versions.

All characters in sexual situations are 18+

*****

The tall, pretty brunette walked, full of confidence, into the office waiting room. It was a confidence that faded just a bit as she saw the long line of equally beautiful young women that had gotten there ahead of her. Walking up to the receptionist's desk, the twenty-five year old started to introduce herself to the older woman but was cut off as the seated blonde handed her a small handful of forms.

"Put your name on the waiting list, then have a seat and fill these out," she said, not even looking up from the magazine she was reading. "When it's time for your interview, they'll call you."

Not used to being ignored, the dark haired girl was about to say something, but then thought better of it. For better or worse, the woman behind the desk was the absolute master of her domain. Unless the brunette wanted her name to go on the bottom of the list, if not be lost entirely, the practical thing to do was just swallow the insult and do what she was told.

It was amazing how much information they wanted to know on a simple interview form, she thought. Especially since there was no guarantee that you would even get an interview. The television station had issued an open call to fill a spot on the early morning talk and news show, and it seemed like every out of work reporter or actress in the city had decided to try out for it. They had stressed that applicants need not be experienced. They were looking for someone fresh and new. Thinking she had faced far worse hurdles, the new arrival took out a pen from her purse and started to fill out the forms.

"A real bitch isn't she?" said the voice of the girl sitting next to her.

"Excuse me?" the brunette said, looking up from the forms she was filling out.

"The receptionist," the other girl, also a brunette, clarified. "There's no reason for her to be so rude. The way she's treating everyone makes you want to just pick her up and toss her out the window."

"Something like that," the first girl said, a smile filling her face as if she was enjoying a secret joke.

"My name's Mary," the second girl said. "Mary Bromfield."

"Linda Danvers," came the reply. "Nice to meet you.

"The same here," Mary said. "Have you been interested in television journalism long?"

"I took some courses in college," Linda answered, "but it was really my cousin who got me interested. He's a print journalist back east."

"That's interesting," Mary replied. "My kid brother is a radio reporter in the Midwest."

"Well maybe that'll be lucky for one of us," Linda said.

With Mary's help, it took a lot less time to fill out the endless forms than Linda had first thought. Despite the little fact that they were competing for the same job, she couldn't help but like the other girl. They were only a year apart in age, with Mary being the younger. Linda was a little taller, by only by an inch or so. Both had well-developed, athletic bodies and in a room of attractive women, both stood out as fresh and clean rather then glamorous. Hopefully what was what the producers were looking for.

The wait turned into an hour, then an hour and a half. The two young women took to time to get better acquainted. During that time, they drew the curious stares of more than one of the other waiting applicants. Evidently, they weren't used to friendly chatter during auditions. Not when the person you were chatting with might use something they learned about you to get the job you wanted.

"Excuse me ladies, can I have your attention?" the receptionist said in a loud voice as she put down the phone receiver she had been talking into and stood up from her desk. "I'm afraid that the rest of the interviews have been canceled. The producers have already decided on their choice."

A number of loud groans filled the room, along with a few low expletives. Absorbed in her conversation with Mary, Linda hadn't noticed which of the girl's around her had been the last called for an interview. Looking at the closed door to the inner office for a moment, she wondered whom the producers had chosen.

"It figures," she said to the empty air.

"What figures?" Mary asked, wondering what her new friend meant.

As if in reply to the question, the newest member of Good Morning San Pablo stepped through the now open office door. Rather than the All American Girl image that they originally had claimed they were looking for, the final choice looked more like yet another of the California beach bunnies that flooded the airways. Blonde haired, tanned and stacked with an over abundant bust, she almost cried out airhead rather than journalist.

"What are you staring at?" Mary asked, seeing the intensity of Linda's gaze.

"I guess I just wanted to see if she managed to clean off her mouth after she finished her interview," Linda said in frustration.

"That's wicked," Mary laughed softly.

"I shouldn't have said that," Linda said a moment later. "It sounds so petty."

"I guess so," Mary responded. "Then again, who knows, it might be true."

Now Linda had to laugh.

"Maybe we should've come as blondes," Mary noted as they got up to leave.

"Maybe I should've," Linda replied, again smiling as if hiding a secret.

Leaving the office building, the two seemed reluctant to have their chance meeting come to an end. Mary suggested that if Linda didn't have anything else to do, maybe they could get some lunch. Not feeling the least bit hungry, Linda replied that she was famished.

At a small restaurant around the corner from the television station, Linda and Mary continued to learn more about each other. Both of them had been orphans and both had the good fortune to be later adopted by wonderful people. Both had grown up in the Mid-West and other parts of their backgrounds were similar enough for them to almost be sisters. Each seemed to look at life's problems in much the same way.

The conversation moved from subject to subject, until Mary decided to take a chance and ask what had been on her mind since meeting the other brunette.

"Linda, can I ask you a personal question?" she said, glancing over her shoulder to be sure the people at the next table couldn't hear her.

"Of course."

"Are you seeing anyone?" Mary asked. "I mean, what I guess I really should be asking is, how do you feel about other women?"

"Other women, as in relationships," Linda replied cautiously. "Other women as in dating?"

"I guess that's what I mean," Mary admitted, a touch of worry in her voice. "If I'm way over the line here, just tell me. I hope I haven't offended you because that's the last thing I'd ever want to do. It's just that since the moment that we met this morning, I've been getting the strangest vibe from you. I can't really explain it, but it's there. That, and the fact that I think you have the most beautiful eyes that I've ever seen. I don't think I've ever met anyone with eyes that blue."

"It's a family trait," Linda said, ignoring the rest of Mary's statement for the moment. "My cousin has the same color eyes."

"I guess I should take that answer as your way of letting me off the hook for what else I said," Mary said, noting what response the woman across from her didn't give.

Linda paused for a long moment, thinking that maybe silence was the best answer to give. It would be so easy to simply say that Mary was mistaken in those vibes that she had felt. The only problem was, Linda had felt them too.

"I have been in a few relationships with other women," Linda finally said. "They don't seem to work out for me, at least not in the long run."

"Could I ask why?" the younger woman asked.

Now an even longer pause filled the air. Linda had never told anyone why her most serious relationships had failed. But something made her want to tell Mary. Something told her that this woman sitting across from her might understand.

"A few years back," Linda started to explain, "I fell in love with a woman named Susan Wienczorkowski. She was a police officer back in Metropolis. I met her while I was visiting my cousin. Things were great in the beginning, as I guess things usually are. But then we began to have problem. Actually, I was the one who began to have problems.

I found myself becoming overprotective and constantly worried about her. You see I lost my family and all of the people I loved in... in a disaster when I was younger. I guess that made me fear losing Susan as well."

"What happened?"

"One weekend, after we'd been together for a while, we had a big argument about it. She said she couldn't do her job with me constantly trying to watch out for her. It was a bad time for it all to come to a head. I had to go out of town that night, so I promised her we'd try and straighten it all out when I got back."

"Did you?"

Linda stopped her story for a few heartbeats. From the look on her face, Mary knew the story didn't have a happy ending.

"Susan as a member of the Special Crimes Unit and that night, they responded to a building collapse. It turned out that there was a child that had somehow been missed when the original Fire Department units had evacuated the building. Ignoring the danger, she went in after her. The little girl made it out, Susan didn't. I got home as fast as I could when I heard about it, but it was too late."

"I'm so sorry," Mary said, "but even if you had been there, there was nothing you could've done. That was her decision, her life, and you have to accept that."

"There was something I could have done," Linda said, but didn't explain further.

"And there's been no one since?" Mary asked.

"Actually there was," Linda went on, seeming to feel relieved to finally share this with someone, even someone who had been a total stranger only hours before. "I met Barbara a year later, after a few meaningless affairs that didn't go anywhere. In a way she was a lot like Susan, but different enough for me to fall in love all over again."

"Was she also a police officer?"

"Not exactly," Linda said. "More like a private detective of sorts."

"And what happened with Barbara?"

"Pretty much the same thing that happened with Susan," Linda explained. "Everything was fine in the beginning, but then I began to become obsessed with her safety. If anything, what she did was even more dangerous than Susan. There were a few incidents where I sort of burst into the middle of her cases, trying to help out. In the end, we both decided that splitting up was the best thing to do."

So now you've just given up?" Mary concluded.

"On relationships, yes."

"Do you have these same problems with men, or do you only date women?" asked the younger woman.

"There have been a few men in my life that I felt my equal, just as there have also been a few women," Linda replied. "Just none that I ever fell in love with."

"Then you just have to keep looking," Mary smiled. "After all, new people come into your life every day. Look at me. When we both got up this morning, we had no idea who the other was. Now, when we go to bed tonight, we've already become part of the other's lives."

"Are you speaking figuratively or are you that confident in your charm?" Linda finally smiled back.

"Let's just say that I have a strong belief in magic," Mary returned with her own smile.

Linda wasn't sure if it was magic, or maybe simply the reluctance to abandon the hope that the next relationship might be different. Surprising herself, she agreed to have dinner with Mary the following night.

"Would you like to share a cab?" Mary asked as they exited the restaurant. "I'm headed uptown."

"No thanks, I have an afternoon appointment over on the West Side," Linda said as she looked at her watch and realized that she was running late. "I really have to fly."

"Okay," Mary smiled as she waved her hand to flag down a taxi that quickly pulled over to the curb. Before she climbed inside, the long haired brunette turned back to Linda and gave her the warmest smile she could manage and said, "I'm really looking forward to tomorrow night."

As she watched Mary's cab pull out into the afternoon traffic, Linda hoped she wasn't making a big mistake. The way her social life had gone these past few years, she could be running right into another disaster. Then again, Mary's comments about taking a risk did sound right. Either way, it was something she'd worry about later. Right now, she really did have to fly.

Slipping into the small alleyway between the restaurant and the next building, Linda glanced around to make sure that she was totally alone. Aside from the pigeons on the roof, it was as private a place as she could managed in the middle of the city.

In a blur of motion too fast for normal vision to follow, her conservative brown skirt and jacket faded from view, to be replaced by a blue and red outfit familiar the world over. Hair, now blonde, draped down above a long sleeved and form fitting blue shirt, the centerpiece of which was an irregular red and yellow pentagon with a stylized "S" in the center. Matching red skirt and boots, coupled with a flowing red cape, completed the ensemble.

Standing five seven and just a hundred and twenty pounds, the young woman projected an image of quiet strength. With sure, powerful steps, she bounded down the alley, then leapt into the air like a swimmer off a diving board. Unlike a swimmer, she didn't drop back to earth but rather took to the sky as if she had been born to it. In a way, she had been.

High over the city, Kara Zor-El, known around the world these last few years as Supergirl, soared across the small municipality by the ocean. Nowhere else did she ever feel as free as here among the clouds. There were perhaps less then thirty individuals in the world who could share the feeling as the sun washed across your face and the wind blew back your hair in quite the same way. It was at times like this that she pitied those earthbound thousands that passed under her wake.

The quickness of her flight more than made up for the lateness of her start. With a little time now to kill, the Girl of Steel continued out over the Pacific and kept pace with a school of Dolphins for a few minutes. Born on the last remnant of a long dead world, Kara appreciated the fact that the Delphinidae were an intelligent race in their own right. A fact that seemed lost on the humans that covered most of the globe.

Emitting a cry that was, as close to goodbye in the sonic language that anyone without fins was ever going to manage, Kara waved to her playmates and headed east, back over the city.

Kara had just passed over the waterfront on her way to the west side when the sound of a distant explosion caught her attention. Reacting automatically, she banked her flight sharply, catching sight of a cloud of bright orange smoke that was just beginning to rise in the distance. In less time then it took to think about it, the last Daughter of Krypton's phenomenal memory created a map of the city in her mind and plotted the location of the explosion on it.

"Rao help me," she called out to the empty air as she pivoted and dove in the direction of the ascending cloud. "That's S.T.A.R. Labs!"

Moving at just under the speed of sound, lest her wake leave a trail of shattered windows behind her, Supergirl arrived at the growing conflagration in seconds. Past experience had taught her that even a minor disturbance at any S.T.A.R. Labs facility could lead to catastrophic results.

The scientists at S.T.A.R Labs were on the cutting edge of human technology, and sometimes just a little beyond it. As was true with scientists of every generation, S.T.A.R. Labs sometimes experimented with elements that mankind was neither ready for, nor fully understood.

As her feet touched the ground, Supergirl could measure the level of panic by the fact that her arrival at the research facility had gone totally unnoticed. Dozens of white-coated men and women were running out of a large granite and steel building. The same structure that had just had half its roof blown off and was the source of the smoke column that drew her here. They didn't seem to have any goal other than to simply get away. From the looks on many of their faces, they really didn't believe that their running away was going to make a great deal of difference in their fate.

The girl in blue and red's first impulse was to grab the closest body in white in the hope that they could tell her what was happening. Then she discarded that thought, figuring that she could just as well wind up with some grad student who didn't have a clue. No, she had a better idea.

"What is going on here?" Supergirl shouted at the top of her lungs.

The force of her voice carried across the compound like a shockwave, causing many of the fleeing scientists and engineers to momentarily pause. It was a hesitation just long enough for many of them to become aware of her presence.

"Supergirl, thank God you're here," an older white haired man off to Kara's left said as he ran up to her. The small nameplate on his lab coat read Dr. Alexander Papolov, and beneath that, Director of Operations. "Now, just maybe, there's a chance."

"Just tell me what's going on, and what I can do to help, Doctor," Supergirl said in a calm, controlled voice. "And please try and keep it simple and direct."

In had been Supergirl's past experience that given the chance, even in an emergency, many scientists would go into far too much detail when asked to explain what they were working on. More so when they knew they were speaking to someone from a much more technologically advanced civilization than their own. The only problem with that was that despite the fact that both her father and her uncle had been two of Krypton's greatest minds, Kara herself was no scientist. Oh she could utilize all the marvels that her culture had to offer, but don't ever ask her to explain how most of them worked.

"It's the Darkstar Impulse Engine that we were working on for NASA," Doctor Papolov said in an excited voice. "The reaction control system overloaded and the engine itself is building to a point of self detonation."

"Self detonation," Supergirl repeated. "You mean another explosion like the one that blew off the roof?"

"The roof?" the bearded scientist said, surprised that the Girl of Steel didn't understand the gravity of what he was saying. "If that engine overloads, you are going to see an explosion in the one to two kiloton range."

"How do I stop it?" Supergirl asked, quickly realizing that the situation was worse than she originally thought.

"You can't stop it," the Doctor quickly replied, "you can only remove it."

"Then it's out of here," she said as she took a step toward the building.

"Supergirl, wait!" he called out to her.

"Doctor, there isn't time," she called back.

"Exactly, there isn't time," he repeated. "When you take out the engine, the high pressure coolant and fuel lines are sure to rupture. There is simply no time to try and secure them because once they're removed, the engine will go critical in less than a minute. The coolant will have no place to go except into the atmosphere. Those fumes from the coolant are as toxic as anything you might imagine. In addition, the fuel is likewise highly explosive."

"Any more good news, Doctor," Supergirl said as she took a deep breath. "I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't."