Lightning in the Night

"I just wanted you to know exactly what you where dealing with," Doctor Papolov said.

"I'll try and get back as quick as I can after I get rid of the engine," Supergirl said as she flew into the burning building, knowing that people were going to die no matter what she did. All she could do was try and make the number as low as possible.

Entering the tall three-story test chamber, Supergirl found the room illuminated with a searing blue-white light that hurt even her eyes. She could feel the fiery radiation washing across her skin and hoped that the S.T.A.R. Scientists hadn't chanced across something new that was going to defy her near invulnerability.

Surprisingly, the engine itself was only a dozen feet long and half as wide. She could make out the connecting fuel and coolant lines and once again wondered if there was anyway she could seal them off after disconnecting the engine. The answer was the same as before. There simply wasn't enough time. In order to take care of both, she'd have to be in two places at once.

"Rao help me get back before it's too late," the Maid of Might said as she ripped out all the connections and supports holding the Darkstar in place. No sooner had she done so, the level of energy pouring out from the engine jumped dramatically.

Taking a firm grip on the half-ton unit, Supergirl lifted it up over her head and taking once more to the skies, pushed it out of the large hole in the roof. Exiting the building, she could already hear the rushing coolant pouring out of the now shattered conduits.

Higher and faster she went, this time cracking the sound barrier without hesitation. The sky grew dark around her and still she went on. Already beyond the point where the resulting explosion would harm anyone on the ground, she had to make sure that the resultant debris didn't become a future hazard to manned and unmanned spacecraft. Mankind had taken the first steps to becoming a space faring race, and the dark void was a dangerous enough place without her adding to it.

"Now!" her mind screamed as she gave the now weightless engine a powerful push and sent it hurling across the blackness on its own.

Scant seconds later, the darkness gave way to a searing, silent light as the Darkstar died an incendiary death and a miniature star appeared in its place. A star that quickly faded as all its energy dissipated in the agony of its birth. A deadly wave of radiation washed over the point from which Supergirl had sent the Darkstar on its maiden and only trip into the void, but it passed on harmlessly to soon dissipate. Supergirl had left that spot far behind her, already entering the upper atmosphere as fast as she was able to fly.

"Forty-five seconds," she thought as she plummeted through the clouds. "it's been forty-five seconds since those coolant lines broke."

She knew that even in those brief ticks of the clock, the toxic gases could've already claimed lives. A new plan of action formed in her mind as S.T.A.R. Labs came once more into view and she reduced her velocity lest she crash through the pavement when she landed.

As her feet once more touched the ground of her adopted world, Supergirl steeled herself to face the possibility that she might be too late to save a number of people. Or that she might even have to ignore some people who might otherwise have been saved while she took care of the source of the danger.

What she wasn't ready for was the image that confronted her. Her words from before echoed in her head. "What is going on here?"

All around her were dozens of S.T.A.R. Labs personnel, hale and healthy. According to the picture Doctor Papolov had painted, most of these people should've been gasping their last breaths by now.

"Not that I'm complaining, Doctor," Supergirl said as she spotted the Director of Operations, "but what didn't happen?"

"I don't understand it either," the obviously relieved scientist said. "By all rights, many of us should be dead."

Turning her telescopic and x-ray vision on the now half collapsed test building, Supergirl was astonished to discover that every shattered fuel and coolant line had been squeezed off. It seemed unbelievable that debris of the collapsing building could have closed off every one. Yet seeing was believing.

"I don't even want to try and imagine the odds of something like that happening," Papolov said after Supergirl described to him what she had seen. "There was an explosion as you lifted out of the building, one of the fuel lines igniting I would think, then nothing. The rest of the roof must've come down and sealed off the lines. It's a second miracle."

"A second miracle?" Supergirl asked. "What was the first?"

"Why you and your arrival here, my dear young lady," the older man said, his old world manner returning now that the danger had passed.

"I'm not a miracle," she said quietly.

It always bothered her when people thought of her as such. She might have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, but they were the result of the natural laws of physics and not the result of divine intervention. No, she wasn't an angel by any means, not even one sent by Rao.

Rao had been the name of Krypton's God, and it seemed as normal for Kara to seek his help as it did for an Earthdweller to invoke any of the many names they had for their own Deity. The names weren't as important as the beliefs they espoused.

"I'd like to stay around and give you a hand with the cleanup but..." Supergirl said as she remembered her now overdue appointment.

"Nonsense," Doctor Papolov said, his voice now containing an element of cheer. "You've done more than enough. I'm sure words are inadequate at this moment, but we are so very grateful for your help."

"That's what I'm here for," Supergirl smiled, borrowing a standard line her cousin used.

"Nevertheless, I don't know what we would've done if you hadn't shown up just when you did."

"Perhaps you might consider that when you review your safety precautions when you undertake projects like this," Supergirl added in a stronger tone, again using a phrase her cousin Kal had taught her. It was important that people, especially people in areas of responsibility, learn that people like her and Superman wouldn't always be there to save them from their mistakes.

"Yes, yes of course," Papolov quickly agreed, leaving Supergirl to wonder if he'd even remember this conversation when they planned the next test.

Supergirl had just turned to leave when she caught sight of a figure standing behind two others over by the side of the administration building. It was only a brief glimpse, but for someone with her extraordinary vision, it was more than enough.

"Mary?" she said loud enough for Doctor Papolov to hear.

"Excuse me," the Doctor said. "I'm sorry, I thought I saw someone I knew," Supergirl said as she looked again, this time scanning the area with a telescopic and x-ray sweep. "I must've been mistaken."

With that, she gestured goodbye to the Director and slowly glided into the sky. Below her, she could see the San Pablo Fire Department and other rescue agencies filling the S.T.A.R. compound.

After a few minutes of flight and a quick change of clothes, Linda Danvers walked into the offices of Stellar Cartography Incorporated. Prior to hearing about the possible opening on Good Morning San Pablo, she had sent her resume to the Space Exploration Firm looking for a job. Who better, she reasoned, to work for a company that produced maps of Outer Space than someone who had spent more time there than all of the Astronauts and Cosmonauts combined. They more than understood that she had been delayed by the near disaster over at S.T.A.R. Labs. After all, it had been the truth, even if it had been in a way they never could've imaged.

All through her interview, Linda had a hard time concentrating on the questions being asked. When they thanked her for coming in and told her they'd be in touch, she knew she had blown this opportunity as well.

The memory of that brief glimpse of the girl who looked like Mary had kept coming back to her. It was rare that her vision played tricks on her. If the girl had really been there, then she would've spotted her again during her vision scan. There was no way anyone could've gotten out of her field of vision that quickly. Had the young woman made that much of an impression on her that she was now imagining her?

True, there was something really special about her. That much Linda was ready to admit. It wasn't just that she was beautiful, although that was equally true. She had the face of an angel framed by soft long brown hair and matching brown eyes.

No, it wasn't just looks. There was something equally extraordinary behind those eyes. Long ago, back when she was a young girl in Argo City, Kara had read that the eyes were the windows to one's soul. Here on Earth, Linda had read much the same thing. What stood behind the window of Mary's eyes was still a mystery, but one which tempted the woman of two worlds in a way she hadn't felt in such a long time.

After her break up with Barbara Gordon over Kara's inability to deal with the danger the redhead constantly faced as Batgirl, Supergirl had decided that maybe she should confine her search for a companion among those the press had labeled meta-humans. Men and women who she wouldn't need to feel so protective of.

Her first choice of course would've been her cousin Kal-El. Kryptonian culture and genetics had no restrictions for the cousins to be a couple, even if Earth mores might have a problem with it. On the other hand, few people realized that the two were even related, many of them already thinking that she was his girlfriend or something. If only that had been the case, she'd told herself many times.

Unfortunately, at least for her, Kal-El thought of himself more as Clark Kent, a Child of Earth then the Last Son of Krypton. As such, he followed the morality of his upbringing and preferred the company of human women, one human woman in particular.

Kal, or Clark as he preferred to think of himself, had come to this world as an infant and was raised by humans. Kara, on the other hand, was already a young woman the night her father had bundled her into an escape rocket and sent her away from the doomed city of her birth. In the better part of the last decade, she had learned enough to live as an Earth Woman when she must, but inside she would always be a Kryptonian.

There were other men nearly as powerful as her cousin, Superman. The most notable of which was J'onn J'onzz, a member of the Justice League known as the Martian Manhunter. An alien herself, even though most people forgot that fact since she resembled normal humans, Kara had no hesitation about sharing the Martian's bed for a while prior to her relationship with Batgirl. In the long run however, the age difference proved to be too much. Using an Earth calendar as a base, Kara had been twenty-two and J'onn over a hundred and twenty-two, barely middle age by the standards of his own race.

Kara had always been attracted to women as well. It was not out of the ordinary for most Kryptonian girls to have had sexual relations with girlfriends as well as boyfriends. In her search for comfort, Supergirl had turned her attention to another member of the League.

Since the day Diana of Themyscira, more commonly know as Wonder Woman, had first met the young heroine, the Amazon warrior had made no secret of her interest in Supergirl. At five foot eleven and a hundred thirty-five pounds, the black haired heroine was easily one of the most beautiful women in the world. She'd even had a brief affair with Superman himself, considering it only natural that if she was going to be with a man, it should be the most perfect specimen possible.

From what she knew of the relationship from others, because Kal would never kiss and tell as they say, it had been both brief and fiery. Originally, just the fact that she had slept with her cousin, a man she loved and secretly lusted after like no other, was enough for Kara to shrug off the Amazon's interest. Then, in the depression following her breakup with Barbara, she lost her earlier reluctance.

For one thing, Diane definitely didn't need looking after. The result of a thousand years of warrior tradition, the Princess of Themyscira had also been gifted with the powers of some of the Olympian gods. Kara never really understood where the Olympians or any of the other gods with a small "g" fit into the ways of the universe, but she just assumed that they were just another race.

As a lesbian lover, Diana had those same thousand years of experience behind her. The Amazons had forsaken men centuries before in exchange for near immortality. Turning their love in among themselves, they had refined the art to a degree known nowhere else in the world. The only child born on their island in all that period of isolation, born not of the joining of a man and woman, but rather a being of clay brought to life by the gods, Diana had a wealth of teachers when she came of an age where she could take her first lover.

The downside to their relationship was also the result of that heritage. The daughter of Queen Hippolyta, Diana saw no reason why she should settle for only one lover. That was the point that had ended her relationship with Kal.

Kara was more liberal than her cousin, not begrudging the Princess her occasional outside fling. After all, she had hardly come to the relationship a virgin and could see herself as perhaps wanting a fling now and then.

The problem that finally ended their relationship, which in the end had been as brief as the one with Superman, was Diana's autocratic attitude that while she was entitled to as many lovers as she might wish, Kara should hold herself available in case Wonder Woman decided that she wished that person to be her.

It hadn't taken long for Supergirl to decide that a relationship of unequals was not what she wanted.

After that, it was back to men and women who didn't spend part of their days or nights wearing form-fitting costumes. Most of these had fallen into the category of people who she felt could never be trusted with the secret of her double life. In three cases, she had thought she'd found lovers had pasted that test. In all three instances, she had been wrong.

One female lover had ended their relationship on the spot when Kara had shared her secret, telling her that she loved Linda but couldn't deal with her life as Supergirl.

A boyfriend had been even more traumatized by the revelation that he'd been sleeping with an actual alien. His greatest fear after her revelation had been what kinds of space diseases he might have been exposed to.

The last had been the most devastating of all, a reporter for a mid-western newspaper who after learning of her dual identity, felt that a story entitled "I was Supergirl's lover" was worth more than their relationship. With the help of a device borrowed from her cousin's Fortress of Solitude, the reporter woke up one morning with no memory of his ever having met Linda Danvers at all.

Superman would've disapproved of her using that memory shifter in the manner she had, so Kara had solved that little problem by simply not asking him if she could borrow it. After all, it wasn't the intimate details of his sex life that were about to be published in a few dozen major newspapers. Thinking about what she knew of her cousin and his relationship with another of the reporters on the Daily Planet, Supergirl decided that an expose of his current sex life might make boring reading indeed. After all, she doubted he had ever initiated Lois into the mile high club without the benefit of a plane.

The long hours of the night could be endless when your body didn't need sleep to replenish its energies. Like a normal human, the girl from another world did sleep in order to relax her mind, but with the indecision about her date with Mary, Kara couldn't relax enough to try for even that.

Standing at the open window, the Girl of Steel looked out onto the city before her. Clad in a simple pair of yellow pajamas, she debated changing clothes and going for a nighttime flight. Instead, she let her eyes and ears bring the sights and sounds of the city to her.

Powerful beams of energy reached outward, turning structures of steel and concrete into pillars of transparency. Images sorted through her mind at a speed beyond the capacity of a human mind to handle.

Aside from the search for events possibly needing the attention of a Girl of Steel, it was inevitable that Supergirl's visual surveillance of the city would present certain other occurrences as well. It was something that her cousin Kal always felt a little embarrassed about. Ever since his Smallville days when, on a nighttime patrol of the town the summer after high school graduation, he had spied his sometimes girlfriend, Lana Lang, parked by the lake with his best friend, Pete Ross.

In his identity as Clark Kent, Kal had a date with Lana that night but had canceled it at the last minute to respond to a bank alarm over in Orchard Falls. It looked like good old Pete had stepped in to take Lana to that movie she had been waiting all month to see. Giving in to his curiosity, Superboy had watched them for what he later realized was a little too long.

If he had gone on his way, he would've missed seeing Lana thank good old Pete by reaching down his pants and taking his cock into her mouth. It was obvious from the casual way she went down on the blond haired eighteen year old that it wasn't her first time. What was also very apparent to the Superboy was that as Clark, Lana had never offered to do anything like that for him.

When he had first used that story to illustrate the possible dangers of their visual and audio powers, Superman had left out the more interesting details of what he had seen. It wasn't until her relationship with Wonder Woman that she heard them. Evidently, her cousin hadn't had any difficulty sharing details like that with the Amazon.

Spying on the people around them might have been a problem for Superman, but Supergirl on the other hand, was never bothered in the least by anything she saw.

In the short time that Kara had lived in her new apartment, she had already learned a great deal about her neighbors. Although for her, the term neighbors took in anyone in range of her nocturnal scans, which included just about everyone in the city if she wished. Based on past results, she actually had a mental checklist of people to drop in on and see how they were doing.

Jamie Berman and Cynthia Sy Su both went to Our Lady of Grace College, and had been study partners since their freshman year three years before. Both their parents would be quite surprised to find that in that time, their studies in human sexuality had broadened to include a subject that was definitely not covered in the textbook.

Kara smiled as she saw that Cynthia was again spending the night over her friend's house. As she had learned was a pattern on most of those occasions, it wasn't long after Jamie's parents went to bed that the two teenagers shed both their clothes and their inhibitions. At the moment, both girls were locked in each other's arms, their mouths exploring the depths of the other's heart.

The Girl of Steel moved on to the home of Debbie and Earl Carter. Married close to thirty years, the couple still made love as intensely as they had on their wedding night. At the moment, Debbie was giving her fifty-two year old husband a blowjob with a skill and enthusiasm that few of her contemporaries could match.

Shifting to another part of town, she found Dr. Roger Smith spending the night at his office as he had many times since his marriage started to deteriorate some months before. Dedicated to her boss, his twenty-four year old secretary, Heather, had again offered to stay and keep him company. At the moment, the long haired redhead was bent half naked over the couch in his office, providing much more than moral support to her forty-nine year old employer.