67 KiB
[RT] The Metropolitan Man Chapter 13: Finale, Part 2
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Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
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URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10360716/13/The-Metropolitan-Man
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Score: 86
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Created: 2014-07-25T08:31:53
Post:
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+34] Time flies like an arrow (13 minutes later)
And that's the end. I'm submitting this one late at night after editing took longer than I thought, so hopefully I haven't missed anything too major and the number of spelling/grammar errors will be low. If you've got any questions that aren't matters of interpretation, I'd be happy to answer them either here or in a potential epilogue. I tried to think of everything, but sometimes it just didn't get put into the text because I didn't think anyone needed to have three paragraphs of Superman talking about how he stole a piece of kryptonite from a research lab.
Edit: And thank you so much to whoever gave me gold for this post! Also for all the comments over the last two months, and the help with fixing typos!
Edit 2: Here's the Calibre generated ePub of the whole thing, in case anyone is interested.
u/Anderkent [+12] (2 hours later)
Well done! Looking forward to more writing from you.
u/Coadie [+6] (2 hours later)
Indeed, I'd love to know if there is something new in the near future.
u/alexanderwales [+22] Time flies like an arrow (5 hours later)
Define near future. I have some original stuff that I need to finish up, but I'm not sure whether I want to serialize any of it. Not making it serial means the whole thing would be released as a lump sum a few months down the road - serializing would mean that the first chapter would be up in a few weeks. I haven't really decided which one I'm going to be working on, but it's either:
The Timewise Tales
Fantasy. The world is one giant stable time loop, and some people can traverse it with varying degrees of ease. Follows: Ellebeth, a coffee shop girl who gets stuck in a patchwork city following one of the time storms; Wendel, her boyfriend, who vows to reunite with her; Issah, a scholar who has seen his fate and wants to avoid it. First draft is complete at 90K words, but it needs serious editing and some plot tweaks.
Or ...
The Wayward Souls
Fantasy. Detective Jan-Fong dies, and two hundred years later his soul gets put into a new body so that he can help solve the attempted murder of the king. It's a fish out of water story that takes place in a pseudo-Chinese setting, with a lot of focus on souls - which actually exist and are readily apparent as this white glob that falls from your mouth when you die. First draft is at 46K words - I know what the end looks like, but I'm having trouble with the connective tissue.
Or ...
Vampire, Wizard, Robot
Fantasy. Set in 1970s New York City, where vampires have the headquarters of their new world government. The story follows some young wizards, the last of an ancient order, as they combine arcane knowledge with computer science to make robots that will hopefully beat the undead. First draft is at 20K words, meaning it's got the longest time to completion.
One of those three, but I haven't decided which, or whether I'd want to write it all as one lump sum or split it into chapters to post once a week (or faster). I'd appreciate any feedback on which of those sounds most compelling - my hope is to actually get one of them published in dead tree format at some point, and that means looking at marketability.
u/adad64 [+2] Chaos Legion (9 hours later)
I really like the concept of the Timewise Tales.
u/jalapeno_dude [+5] (11 hours later)
Given these descriptions, Vampire, Wizard, Robot sounds by far the most interesting to me.
u/EndlessStrategy [+2] (7 hours later)
I have a particular interest in Wayward Souls: a story about the exploration of the popular idea of what a soul is sounds quite intriquing. But all of them are good ideas.
u/Drazelic [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (16 hours later)
Wayward Souls for me!
u/Jello_Raptor [+2] The Last Tool User (18 hours later)
I second Vampire, Wizard, Robot.
u/tinkady [+2] (21 hours later)
Last one imo
u/trifith [+2] Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper. (6 hours later)
The Wayward Souls interests me the most, followed by Vampire, Wizard, Robot.
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Though it won't tide you over for long, here are links to my winning entries in the /r/worldbuilding competitions, some of which take the form of short stories or snippets from fictional books (though I have to caution that most of them are intended as teasers of one kind or another, since I found that was the best way to get upvotes (and a win)).
Mythic Figures (Gareth Killkenny, King of Theives)
Minorities (The Gift and the Burden)
Remix: Goblins (Goblins of the Written Word)
Unnatural Disasters (Temporal Storms)
Missing Persons (Lost City of Potyr)
Labyrinth (Forest of Lost Time)
u/Nepene [+9] (6 hours later)
Maybe a good epilogue would be a conversation between Jor El and Luthor on their respective visions for the world? The whole technological advancement thing is somewhat ominous, given that the whole theme is that one man having unlimited power is dangerous for the world.
So my question would be what sort of technological advancement would Luthor pursue? Is the world going from having a moral but apathetic superhero caring for it from an immoral involved supervillain?
u/alexanderwales [+11] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
I just realized that I never answered this question. Sorry about that.
At the end of the story, Lex has a huge number of research facilities, a super suit, a spaceship, and possibly some samples from Superman's corpse (it should be assumed that an autopsy was conducted while the body was surrounded by kryptonite, but I didn't really want to lose the narrative focus by making that explicit).
The research facilities go to work on all sorts of areas, with a preference towards those areas that can help lay the groundwork for future science or multiply labor. That means agricultural research, engineering, materials science, and communications. Beyond that, he'd put a heavy focus on getting into space as quickly as possible, since the existence of Superman implies the existence of other aliens (though the fact that this is the first time in a very, very long time that an alien has visited earth means that there's some breathing room). Atomic research is a focus, both nuclear weapons and nuclear power, especially given that other people are bound to be following those paths. Same goes for cryptography, which eventually leads to computing.
But most of that would get delegated to other people, since Lex has a bunch of stuff that he needs to keep very careful about sharing - the Kryptonian technology. It's got a working computer that wasn't actually shorted out (Superman lied about that for his own reasons) which can be used to communicate with Jor-El, materials that are foreign to Earth, the ability to slide through space at higher than light speed using the Phantom Drive, the creche that was used to fabricate baby Superman (and also the suit), and some other stuff like the sensors used to gather data about the planet. Much of it has been intentionally limited, but some of it can be reverse engineered. Lex would go about this carefully, and not share any of the technological advancements unless he was certain that they wouldn't lead to some other dangerous technology (balanced against the need to get humans onto a second and third planet as fast a possible).
I hope that's a complete enough answer for you.
u/Nepene [+2] (a day later)
Thanks, it is.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
The main thing we know for sure is that Lex was working on the atomic bomb.
u/BT_Uytya [+6] The Laundry (11 hours later)
One is tempted to ask why Superman overlooked putting Kryptonite in the lead walls. After all, this involves a moving a fairly large amount of something bright as sun into Lex's house and sudden vanishing of it.
One can argue that Superman isn't able to overlook this even if he tried to; Kryptonite just is too noticeable.
I'm not that person I'm referring to; I'm playing a Devil's advocate here. But still, I would be interested in some handwaving addressing this.
PS. I greatly enjoyed your work. The characters are intelligent, interactions are believable, both Luthor and Superman look like people who belong at LW meetups, and I still unsure about Bad/Good Guys of the story, which is something you were clearly aimed to achieve — and succeeded.
u/alexanderwales [+13] Time flies like an arrow (12 hours later)
The kryptonite was put into the lead panels and then shipped to Metropolis for installment during the renovation. Lex doesn't discover kryptonite until after Superman has dropped into full-time Clark Kent mode (where he was waiting for his nemesis to make a move), and since the research facilities in Blüdhaven and Dos Rios are beyond the horizon, Clark never saw them, since he spent most of his time either keeping a careful eye on Metropolis (mostly Lois, who was a likely target for his nemesis), or delivering stuff to Floyd.
So Superman doesn't learn about kryptonite until after some random guy walks past him, at which point it becomes incredibly obvious to his eyes, but by that point the new lead panels have already been put in, so the only way for him to know that they have kryptonite in them is to figure out that this is the sort of precaution that Lex would take. Lex also has a convenient excuse for the renovation lined up; he got word from a source within Wayne Industries that they had made a breakthrough in non-x-ray imaging (which is of course a piece of disinformation that he fed to himself).
Hope that answers the question to your satisfaction.
u/LiveBackwards [+3] (2 days later)
How did he not notice Bludhaven on his trips to and from Alaska?
u/alexanderwales [+8] Time flies like an arrow (2 days later)
A few reasons:
First, geography in the DC universe has always been a little bit screwy, so the exact location of Metropolis and Bludhaven is up for debate (and never made clear in the story, especially since Bludhaven is only mentioned by name once). Most of the time, Bludhaven is somewhere in New Jersey or possibly Delaware, but it's supposed to be adjacent to Gotham City, and I'd decided that was taking the place of Chicago (because in the DC universe as it's usually presented, Metropolis is more or less where New York City is, Gotham City is where New York City is, and New York City itself still exists - which means that there are three very large cities that are basically right on top of each other, and the audience is just expected to not think about that too much). Depending on the exact location of Floyd's hole and Bludhaven itself, the flight path didn't need to come all that close to it.
Second, I guess I never made it explicit, but I always thought of Superman's x-ray vision as something that he could turn on and off. This fic owes a lot to Tom De Haven's It's Superman! which describes Clark as feeling his eyes go gummy when he uses x-ray vision or heat vision - as if there's some brief physiological change going on when he exercises it. Most of the time he doesn't use it, and there wouldn't be a real reason to while in transit from Metropolis to the prison. (Note that he says "What do you think it would look like to my x-ray vision" instead of "what do you think it would look like to my eyes".) I figure most of his spare time in transit would be spent listening in on conversations instead of watching the ground beneath him. He's treated as though he has total information awareness by other characters, but that's mostly because he's a mystery to them.
u/EndlessStrategy [+3] (11 hours later)
The whole house is lead shielded, so Superman presumably just assumed that he was keeping it in the house for some purpose. It was a mistake not to have guesed about the Kryptonite in the wall, but for one who isn't that far above average intelligence, I can understand the error.
u/qznc [+4] Chaos Legion (an hour later)
Congratulations for finishing! I fail so often at finishing things. You are awesome!
u/Calamitizer [+2] Shears (16 hours later)
A minor typo: you have "affect positive change" instead of "effect".
Anyway, I loved the story! I've read and enjoyed all the work on your FF account so far. I think you're really good at nailing this type of fiction.
Something else: have you consider publishing to AO3 (archive of our own) as well? As far as I can see, it's a strictly better ff.net (one that I don't have as much frustration with on mobile). I would like to hear others' opinions on it though; I don't know much of the, say, legal differences (if any).
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
I need to do an editing pass within the next month to fix a few fairly minor problems. After that, I might put it up on AO3 just to have it in a second place. All my near-future projects are original, which means that ff.net isn't the place for it anyway - right now, I'm thinking that if I serialize any of it, it'll be go to Fiction Press, AO3, and the Wordpress website that my wife is graciously setting up for me.
(Legal differences basically don't mean anything to me, as far as fan fiction goes. I don't own the rights to Superman, and barring me being contacted by someone from DC, it's highly unlikely that I could ever make any money from it or get it into wider distribution than "for free online". Nor do I really care whether people do their own remixing, translating, etc. I highly doubt that I would get sued, especially since I'd instantly comply with any demands that a rights-holder made, no matter how unreasonable.)
u/elevul [+1] Cyoria Observer (16 hours later)
Thank you. Now that it's over, can you release an .epub of the whole story, please?
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (17 hours later)
Does the link in my edit not work?
u/thakil [+26] (36 minutes later)
I love this ending. Its wonderfully hazy as to whether Lex was right. He judged that if Superman ever snapped then the world could end, but didn't counter balance this with the good Superman could do. Was he right? In this story, Superman does kill one person and leave another in a hole in a ground. He is not necessarily to be trusted. But Lex does spend a lot of life to find a way to kill Superman. Utilitarian calculation are always quite scary (and often the hallmarks of a villain) when handled by humans in particular.
Loved the writing of this, and I think the ending is as good as it can be.
u/MugaSofer [+8] (2 days later)
To be honest, I'm fairly certain Lex made the wrong call - as Superman suggested, probably because of motivated cognition.
Superman was, effectively, working for Lex in order to maximize utility. Unless Lex really thinks Superman was working anywhere close to his maximum QALY output, I think it's clear the benefits outweigh the risks here. (Heck, Lex himself is working in nuclear power!)
Worse still, Superman's existence implies highly advanced aliens - with Supes himself as the only weapon we have that could come close - unless Lex is going to singlehandedly create the singularity over a century early, which seems ... unlikely.
u/drageuth2 [+7] (6 hours later)
Idunno, it seems pretty clear that Lex made the right call.
Supes was already starting a 'super-prison'. His psychology and neurology seems to be mostly human, so that's in all probability the start of a slippery slope. How easy is it to start just taking more and more power, once you put yourself in a position of authority like that?
How long before Superman puts most of the people he catches into superprison? How long until he uses it as the solution to all his problems? Nobody can stop him, and he's already pretty much implicitly declared himself above the law. Hell, he's doing it for our own good.
How long until Supes stops being a vigilante, and starts just being a dictator, putting anybody who disagrees with him into superprison for life?
u/EndlessStrategy [+16] (7 hours later)
A slippery slope that I think he had well in hand. Luthor had done so many bad things, was Superman's only threat, and he still wouldn't have imprisoned him if he agreed to cooperate. There are very few if any other people that Superman would choose to imprison, especially with Lois supporting him. It was wrong to imprison Floyd, but on the whole Superman still seemed far more ready to do good than evil.
u/drageuth2 [+4] (7 hours later)
By 'cooperating,' Lex would have to effectively turn his whole life over to Superman's whims. He'd have to devote his mind and all of his assets financial and otherwise to Superman's projects. He may not have been in a cage, but he'd still be imprisoned just the same. It might be even worse, for all that he'd have to disassemble his life with his own hands
u/EndlessStrategy [+18] (8 hours later)
Yes, but it's still the life of one man who has done many reprehensible things, against the lives of millions that could be helped through such measures. Luthor had pushed and pushed and pushed Superman to his very limits, and that's why he got the treatment he got. Had Superman gone on to live another 100 years, the number of people who'd go as far as Luthor did against him would be utterly negligible.
He had a few kinks to work out, but on the whole Superman was a very moral person. And if dealing with all the horror he dealt with in his year of crimefighting didn't cause him to snap, it's not too likely that anything else would cause it.
...the mere risk of Superman going rogue puts Luthor more in the right, yes. But the risk was small enough that I very much wanted to put my faith in Superman.
u/drageuth2 [+5] (8 hours later)
You don't think there are a lot of Willie Calhouns out there? A lot of people like those rapists? A lot of foul murderers and psychopaths?
And what about the world leaders who commit horrendous sins against their people? What about the warlords, the violent cult leaders. Not to mention Gotham's villains, and all the rest of the earth-origin'd DC supervillains, if and when they start showing up.
Deadshot's sitting in the superprison, being a nice little bundle of no problems whatsoever. How many criminals do you think supes is gonna handle, how big of a problem do they have to make themselves in comparison, before Supes decides that he has better things to do than chase down the same petty criminals again and again?
He's already broken three times, for criminals who weren't the worst that humanity has to offer by a long way. He'll break again, sooner or later. And each time he does, it'll get a little easier for him to break again.
u/EndlessStrategy [+4] (9 hours later)
It's not an easy road, or one without potential for failure. But he cares very strongly for all of humanity. And if he keeps himself in the company of moral people, and works with them to find the best way to do things, and voices whenever he has doubts, and stays clear of the more traumatizing tasks that aren't the most efficient thing for him to be doing in the first place, and makes sure to take the time he needs to keep his sanity in check...it doesn't seem improbable for him to keep to the right path.
u/trifith [+7] Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper. (11 hours later)
Considering the timeframe the story takes place in, a flyby over Germany or the USSR would cause a severe SAN check. One I don't think TMM!Superman will make. This is one of humanities darkest hours.
u/drageuth2 [+4] (9 hours later)
Moral people like Lex Luthor? :P
I think it's too big of a risk for too little of a reward, since we're probably gonna get relatively close to a similar boost with Lex disassembling the Kryptonian spaceship (and probably doing tests on a few samples of super-hamburger) for fun and profit.
Supes could only be in one place at a time, no matter how fast he could move between places. Ultimately, the technology he brought with him was always gonna end up being a bigger boon to humanity than whatever services he could offer. We lose a bit by losing him, but we don't lose all that much overall. And it alleviates a huge risk.
u/EndlessStrategy [+3] (11 hours later)
It does have a significant risk to it. From a purely utilitarian standpoint it's probably not worth it. But there's still a fairly high chance of success, and I wanted to see Superman succeed. Or at the very least, fail in a way that didn't feel as miserable.
u/drageuth2 [+4] (12 hours later)
Hey, at least he fell to a really convoluted and paranoid measures-within-measures thing. After he'd unravelled 90% of it.
u/thakil [+4] (9 hours later)
I feel like this argument demonstrates my point reasonably well...
u/EndlessStrategy [+2] (9 hours later)
Indeed.
u/drageuth2 [+3] (10 hours later)
Probably!
u/zedMinusMinus [+6] (11 hours later)
So? Wasn't Lex one of the people saying that if Superman really cared, he shouldn't have a personal life as Clark Kent? If Lex really cared, he should realize he could do much more than his current philanthropic gestures.
Of course, it may be that Lex doesn't particularly care about the rest of the world.
u/drageuth2 [+2] (12 hours later)
The difference would be that Superman could give up Clark Kent willingly. Lex would have given up under duress.
And yeah, Lex may or may not actually care about improving the world. But in all, his company is probably a net positive on the world's values, so it works out the same :P
u/RMcD94 [+5] (a day later)
What happens if people develop science that starts killing other? What happens if they etc, etc, they're all human so the probability of a slippery slope starts.
All development can be headed off with this logic.
How long does science be a tool for the benefit of mankind and starts just wiping earth out?
u/drageuth2 [+2] (a day later)
On the other hand, if there's even a 1% risk of the nanotech you're working on devouring the atmosphere, or the expert machine you're coding ascending into an unfriendly AGI...
It pays to be careful sometimes. It pays to mitigate risks. Especially when those risks are on the scale of destroying the only planet we have right now. It may be slower, it may even cost lives by slowing the development of a new medicine or something. But big risks mean big safety margins.
And I'd say the odds of superman going bad at this point were way, way over 1%. He was showing pretty bad signs all around.
u/RMcD94 [+1] (a day later)
On the other hand, if there's even a 1% risk of the nanotech you're working on devouring the atmosphere, or the expert machine you're coding ascending into an unfriendly AGI...
So what's the percent chance that the comment you've just typed leads to that?
Or more relevantly, the leading work in the science field go that way? I'd say if we continue to develop science some people might say that the percent of world ending is very high.
u/drageuth2 [+3] (a day later)
Look, not every action is an existential risk. You're being silly and taking extremes of my argument that are wildly off course.
Yeah, science in general is gonna pretty much inevitably lead to scary stuff. But with any hope and a lot of carefulness, we can see the risks ahead of time and mitigate them by creating defenses and counters to all the bad stuff. Or hopefully evolving our society to something that doesn't use bad stuff so much.
And in general, hazy future probabilities that might produce existential risks are a lot less important than a single, extant, and capable threat like Supes was. The only thing holding him back was his choices. And he was very much basic-human in terms of psychology in a number of ways.
Superman's probability of being a threat was rising higher and higher. There were way too many paths he could have taken to going bad, and those paths were each not all that unlikely to happen. Lex could see the risk of that ahead of time, and he chose to mitigate it by the only means he had.
u/None [+2] (7 hours later)
Yep, I bet there's been lots of revolutionaries aspiring to be rulers in history who surely had good intentions, but not a single of them has turned out to be nowhere near as good after being absolute power. Instead, most of them have become the kind of corrupted dictators we know many examples of. There's nothing saying Superman is any different from them, especially after the kind of behavior he's exhibited.
u/rthomas2 [+14] (5 hours later)
A two-part finale of Metropolitan Man, another chapter of Ra, and tonight the last chapter of HPMOR before the finale...I think this counts as Christmas in July.
u/None [+2] (13 hours later)
[deleted]
u/rthomas2 [+2] (13 hours later)
Hpmor.com has progress reports roughly once a month that tell when new content will be posted; I'd recommend checking them out. They've kept my hopes perfectly in check while I've been reading the series.
u/Coadie [+14] (42 minutes later)
It was good. Sad, but good.
Thanks for the entertainment across thirteen chapters, it was fun.
u/Kodix [+12] (an hour later)
That was sad, disappointing, and I like it a lot. Thank you.
u/Pluvialis [+14] Second Age Sauron (3 hours later)
Great story, Ben, congratulations! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Anyone else very conscious of how big a loose end Mercy is, though? I was more than half-expecting her to feature in the last few paragraphs in some twisty way.
She's a funny character. It seems I suppose, if I'm going to be critical, slightly unrealistic that Lex would have such a loyal, dependable, and implacable robot, ah, assistant who didn't crack all the way through to the end. I liked her though :P
u/alexanderwales [+16] Time flies like an arrow (9 hours later)
This story had been brewing for a while, and in the very early plot sketches, Mercy got revealed to be something other - another Kryptonian, a secret identity for Wonder Woman, Raven, or something like that at an appropriately dramatic moment (and in an appropriately dramatic way, with plenty of foreshadowing that doesn't actually exist in the text). But while I kind of liked that twist, the story needed a pretty tight focus on just the three main characters (Lex, Lois, Superman) and so I just left her as this enigma, which hopefully works well enough.
Aside from never having full insight into Jor-El and the Kryptonians (a scene that I cut because it didn't really add all that much), she's the biggest question that goes unanswered. Hopefully that works - you never get inside her head, and she never really expresses herself, but ... if there was a scene where Mercy was walking down a dark alley and some thug started to approach her, you wouldn't be entirely surprised if she quickly and efficiently dealt with him, or cast unnatural shadows behind her before revealing her True Form. But the story isn't about her, so she'll remain as this mystery that sits at the periphery of the plot. Maybe she's just very good at her job.
u/Pluvialis [+4] Second Age Sauron (9 hours later)
I think a tiny teaser that revealed there was something special about her would have fitted in perfectly, actually! Nothing specific or seriously cliffhangery, but it would have both given some sort of explanation for her behaviour, and given us a little 'dot dot dot' to think about :P
u/alexanderwales [+25] Time flies like an arrow (10 hours later)
Oh man, there were like ... four different cliffhanger endings that I was ready with, but I really wanted to avoid people messaging me about when I was planning on writing the sequel (because the answer to that is "whenever I get struck with an idea that I really like", which isn't really satisfactory). The short versions of the cliffhanger endings, in order of how likely I was to use them:
- Mercy and Lex are in his study, which has been renovated. Lex is reading from the Metropolis papers, while Mercy is sifting through the ones from other cities. As she's reading the Gotham City newspaper, she tells Lex that there's a masked vigilante there. Lex doesn't think this is worth his attention until Mercy reads that there are reports of the vigilante somehow creating constructs out of hard, green light. (Which would set up Green Lantern Batman for the sequel, with a layered conflict between Wayne Industries and LexCorp and an introduction to the wider galaxy.)
- Luthor connects in with the spaceship's "brain" and gets some information from Jor-El. It would probably have to be set years later, but I liked the idea of one of the computing pioneers getting their hands on ridiculously advanced technology (Alan Turing, shortly after publishing a paper on his novel "Turing machines" gets introduced to a ridiculously advanced computer). Jor-El gets bypassed, and the fic ends on "Welcome to the Brainiac system - what would you like to know?" (It never made it in the story, but Krypton was doomed by the Brainiac system - UFAI that shut down the species without them really realizing it. That was a thought I had when watching Man of Steel and hearing that all of their many colonies had died on the vine. Three times, it's enemy action.)
- Mercy makes an uncharacteristic request for time off, which Lex readily grants. She goes down to the docks of New York City and boards a ship that has all female sailors, and the final words we hear are that they're sailing back to Themyscira. (Probably raises a few too many questions about what her motivations actually are - why she would help Lex, what she actually feels, etc. and would need to have just a touch more foreshadowing. I also worry that it would destroy some of the grounding of the story - introducing more of the metahuman DC universe might make it feel less like the real world)
- Someone shows up (Supergirl, Zod, Darkseid). Probably too bleak of an ending, given how fucked the world would be - I would probably have had to change current ending around to be more optimistic in order to allow for that to be acceptable. And the ending is already pretty damn bleak.
u/jalapeno_dude [+5] (12 hours later)
I would read the hell out of those first two possibilities! (Well, I'd read all of them, of course, but those two sound by far the most interesting...)
u/rthomas2 [+3] (13 hours later)
Would you give your blessing to an alternate ending/sequel fic?
u/alexanderwales [+11] Time flies like an arrow (13 hours later)
Sure, go right ahead. Doubly so because I know this ending is not to everyone's taste.
u/HandsofManos [+5] (5 days later)
I didn't want it to end that way, but man it was a good ending.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
I'm not very knowledgeable about DC comics, but I think that having the Green Lantern and Batman being separate persons would be more interesting. Both characters have their own potential, I think.
You're also the first person who makes me want to check out non-Batman DC comics.
u/MugaSofer [+2] (2 days later)
Yay behind-the-scenes Braniac!
All of these sound interesting, if you ever get around to a sequel. But I think your instincts were right.
I particularly like the last one, actually, for the simple reason that Superman would have to come back from the dead at some point.
u/-daimaou- [+2] (3 days later)
Thank you for writing this Superman fic. You have really increased my interest in the DC universe.
I will admit that your first bullet point about pitting Wayne Industries vs. Lex Corp sounds like a fantastic story in itself. Two brilliant masterminds, Wayne vs. Luthor would have a large number of possibilities/directions that would be very engaging.
I personally loved the ending. Thanks for going with it rather than trying to please the masses with a more optimistic ending.
u/RMcD94 [+2] (3 days later)
Would have been funny if a supervillian that only a superhero could deal with showed up a few days after Lex successfully killed Superman.
RIP Planet Earth
u/Rodnap [+1] (10 years later)
Lex was so preoccupied with viewing Superman as the worst-case scenario that he never considered the possibility that Superman might actually be the best option for humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrials. The next alien encounter might not be so friendly.
What’s even more unsettling is that Kryptonian technology doesn’t seem prohibitively expensive or advanced enough to prevent earlier contact with Earth. This suggests there might have been a third party actively enforcing a kind of "quarantine" around Earth. Superman’s arrival could mean that the quarantine has been lifted—and now, other aliens are ready to make their move, with far less benevolent intentions.
u/Rodnap [+1] (10 years later)
Lex was so preoccupied with viewing Superman as the worst-case scenario that he never considered the possibility that Superman might actually be the best option for humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrials. The next alien encounter might not be so friendly.
What’s even more unsettling is that Kryptonian technology doesn’t seem prohibitively expensive or advanced enough to prevent earlier contact with Earth. This suggests there might have been a third party actively enforcing a kind of "quarantine" around Earth. Superman’s arrival could mean that the quarantine has been lifted—and now, other aliens are ready to make their move, with far less benevolent intentions.
u/loonyphoenix [+9] (5 hours later)
Damn, that was a downer ending.
Having read the whole thing now, I have to register the complaint that Lex Luthor is completely unrealistic as a character. He seems not to have any emotions, he's too robotic, too Vulcan. I don't think people like him exist.
That said, I don't think it's completely impossible for a person like him to ever exist, so suspension of disbelief is mostly intact. However, I'd have liked him to have a bit more flavor than simply "ruthless pessimistic utilitarian optimizer".
u/None [+13] (12 hours later)
[deleted]
u/TimTravel [+2] (23 hours later)
I started reading that one and then lost track of it! Thanks.
u/makemeunsee [+10] Mock turtle (3 hours later)
Now what I'd like to see: post end plot twist, superman's father/designer actually prepared for this contingency. Fusing the engineered organism of Superman with kryptonite only triggers the second layer of the plan, elaborated in case the original plan fails. In this second plan, Superman becomes one with the planet, and reaches his full potential as a quasi omniscient and omnipotent being, becoming some sort of oracle and source of magic for a selected few who will drive humanity forward.
Then Lex becomes Voldemort and everything goes awry again...
u/FeepingCreature [+5] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (31 minutes later)
Well that's a bit disappointing.
u/None [+2] (4 hours later)
In a bad way or a good way?
u/FeepingCreature [+8] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (4 hours later)
I won't call it bad. I guess it's a bit of a letdown.
u/aeschenkarnos [+9] (an hour later)
Damn, that's a downer. Oh well. Great story. Thank you.
Telling Lois that he'd weighed the odds of catastrophe and found them acceptable would probably to endear her to the plan though.
"not"?
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (8 hours later)
Thanks for the correction (and for reading).
u/mordymoop [+7] (5 hours later)
Immensely enjoyed this.
Please never stop writing.
u/EndlessStrategy [+11] (6 hours later)
That was...still quite well written, but I think you fumbled it a bit.
So, this whole story we've been moving closer and closer to Superman's demise. Inexorably, Luthor continued his advance. We were made to see Luthor's point of view quite well, even to the point of thinking he was in the right. Superman was going to die, and we as the audience had accepted that.
...But then an alternative path presented itself. Superman was learning, he was ready to use his power for the greatest good possible. He could trump Luthor's efforts, he could overcome his weakness and be the Superman that everyone deserved. A Superman that transcended the comic book version, that transcended cynicism. A Superman that showed everyone that it's alright to hold your morals high and have faith in a better future.
Two paths. Either Luthor kills superman for the sake of humanity's safety, or Superman survives and does his best for humanity. For the majority of the story the Luthor path seemed unavoidable. I was fine with it, it would've been a fitting conclusion to a powerful story. But when that alternative path presented itself, I so dearly wished for you to pursue it. And you came so close to pusuing it. So very, very close.
But then Mercy pulls out the Kryptonite, and it's all over. And what's worse, judging by Luthor's thoughts, he thought he'd lost. He didn't have any contingencies left, Mercy wasn't told to execute this plan, but instead did it on her own. So what would've been a masterstroke, a last ditch effort that resulted in the death of superman, comes off as blind luck. That's quite unsatisfactory.
u/None [+28] (11 hours later)
It's almost definitely that way by design. It's a downer ending, because the whole thing is a tragedy. Luthor has his flaws, and Superman has this whole speech about how Luthor is really driven by his fears rather than cold emotion. And you get this whole bright future stretching out in front of you as you realize that Superman really is offering a truce, only to have it snatched from your hands and smashed to the ground.
Luthor wins, but it's not clean or pretty, and from how he repeats to Mercy twice that it was the right thing to do you get the sense that he's trying to convince himself. I maybe would have liked for it to be more explicit than it was, but I don't think I'm reading that much into things there.
If it had simply been a masterstroke by Luthor, you might have felt that he was right to have done it. The way it played out, the reader is denied the satisfaction of seeing Luthor win, and that adds to the bad taste that the ending is supposed to leave in your mouth - which is probably why the whole story ends with a man laying at the bottom of a deep hole with a broken leg and nothing but certain death.
If the story had ended with Superman offering a way out and Lex accepting, then an epilogue about how they made the world a better place ... well, I think it was obvious that we weren't headed anywhere happy.
u/EndlessStrategy [+7] (11 hours later)
It's a story that ultimately say that it's wrong to believe in Superman. And while that does make sense...I really wish it had ended more optimistically. Destruction wasn't a foregone conclusion if Superman lived; Superman very well could've lead the world into a brighter future. If you're gonna write a story with this sort of moral, it doesn't seem right for things to seem so very hopeful up until the last minute.
Deconstructions are all well and good, but it burns me that we were so close to going beyond that, but didn't. More than just deconstruction, there could have been reconstruction. Tear Superman apart and show him for all his flaws. Then, at the point where it seems foolhardy to believe in Superman, turn around and build things back up. Show us that, just maybe, he can be the hero that we always wanted him to be.
Is that an unrealistic expectation, a ridiculous moral? In practice, maybe. But in principle...sometimes things can turn out for the better.
u/Ulmaxes [+15] (13 hours later)
I disagree that your interpretation of the story is the intended one. The author seems to be purposefully avoiding clarification about those topics. He outright says in his comment that he won't answer direct questions about interpretation. As other comments have stated, I believe it's blatantly left unclear whether Luthor was right. All we know as a fact is that Luthor won, not that he was correct. We're not given a direct vision of a dying world held in the grip by a mad Superman, space rubble. We're simply given Superman's final word that he's maturing and has a head on things, countered with Luthor's complete dedication to removing the Superman as a threat.
Luthor gets more talk time because his view on things is what's on display in this story. "Superman can be a good guy and help the world!" as been discussed and heard a million times over the decades.
I do agree that it missed out on dipping into Reconstruction; doubly sad that it clearly KNEW it could with Superman's final resolution to help in the most useful ways imaginable. But this Luthor was consistent from the beginning- reading up to this point, I would not expect to see this Luthor EVER accept a truce and/or alliance with Superman, and that held true. Luthor's character, as written, kept this from ever having a real shot at Reconstruction.
u/EndlessStrategy [+1] (13 hours later)
If the intended interpretation is that we should believe in superman, or even that it might be alright to believe in Superman, then this is a pointless downer ending. So it's lose-lose.
u/None [+14] (a day later)
pointless downer ending
Tragedy has been an accepted form of story-telling for ages. Stories don't need optimistic to have a good conclusion.
I don't want to speak for the author, but the bad feeling you get from the ending might be completely intended. The ending is saddening, because Superman's full potential wasn't realized. And as you can see from the other comments, not everyone is convinced that Luthor did the wrong thing.
u/EndlessStrategy [+2] (a day later)
Make no mistake, I still think that it's an exceedingly well done story. And yes, Luthor may well have done the right thing.
But still, for a story to project a hopeful vision stretching into the future, only for it to be stripped away...I just don't see the point of it in this case. Tragedy for tragedy's sake. I don't like that.
If Luthor had killed Superman because it was obvious at that point that Superman couldn't possibly live up to our expectations, I'd have been fine with that. Of course, I'd have been even happier with an ending that showed a triumphant image of what Superman could be.
Both solid endings. One showing the futility of the idea of Superman, that one person having so much power is doomed to failure, and instead we can only do the best we can as human beings. The other showing the possibility that Superman can prevail, that it's alright to believe in your heroes. To end it ambiguously like this, I think, just weakens the message, whatever it was intended to be.
u/MugaSofer [+4] (11 days later)
Well, was it worth destroying the potential of Superman to prevent the risks? Would it have been worth the existential risk to usher in the Golden Age of humanity we glimpsed in that speech?
You're supposed to be left wondering - hence the author's explicit refusal to give us his own interpretation of the ending.
(I suspect it's a moral dilemma he's genuinely unsure about himself - similar themes show up WRT the Singularity in some of his other work.)
u/EndlessStrategy [+1] (11 days later)
Indeed. I just think a story that gave a bit more of a definite answer would be more compelling than one that leaves it ambiguous.
u/failed_novelty [+10] (9 hours later)
Blind luck didn't put kryptonite in those walls, nor Mercy in the outer room. Proper planning did. When dealing with a night untouchable physical god, there is no such thing as too paranoid.
u/EndlessStrategy [+7] (9 hours later)
Smart to put Kryptonite in the walls. Smart to keep Mercy nearby. But as it's written, it doesn't seem like Luthor intended to spring the plan; Mercy did it of her own volition. Which is kind of like watching a long chess match, only for the winning move to be ignored by one of the players, so someone else has to step in and correct them.
u/VorpalAuroch [+3] Life before Death (12 hours later)
It's more like a game of half-simultaneous Bughouse where a pair of Grandmasters (Luthor and Kent) are playing and Luthor is on the ropes, but the second game, which was basically an afterthought, is Kent vs. Mercy, and she pulls off a capture that gets Luthor out of trouble and wins the match.
I'd come up with a better metaphor, but there isn't a game I'm aware of where you can set up an independent friendly player. Maybe Civ V, but puppet states/colonies aren't guaranteed friendly.
u/EndlessStrategy [+2] (12 hours later)
Sure. It's not like Luthor failing at this crucial juncture for no good reason is all that terrible, but I still think it's a flaw, and it bugs me.
u/VorpalAuroch [+2] Life before Death (12 hours later)
He didn't fail, and there were good reasons (deception by an excellent actor) why it fell through to the last few fallbacks.
u/EndlessStrategy [+2] (13 hours later)
He did fail. He had clearly given up in his mind, something he wouldn't do if he had planned the contingency with Mercy. He had lost, but Mercy saved him.
u/Ulmaxes [+2] (13 hours later)
I think that's more how it was written (to keep the reader in the dark for the quick reveal/reversal just as Supes has 'won'). I have little issue imagining this Luthor actively hoping that Mercy would jump Supes with the kryptonite; even that assuming he didn't blatantly tell her to do so anyway in case Supes every confronted him in his office, which would be my assumption. Heck, that's what I'd have discussed with her at one point.
"Mercy, if Superman every confronts me, and I haven't warned you otherwise, jump him with kryptonite the first chance you get." Standing on the other side of a lead door was part of her preparing the ambush strategically.
u/EndlessStrategy [+6] (13 hours later)
"But then, perhaps it made the most sense to simply accept the reality of Superman."
That's what Lex thought, straight from his own mind. Then he goes on to think about how impossible it is to kill Superman now. He gave up. If he hadn't given up he wouldn't be thinking like that.
He should've been able to think of the countermeasure Mercy executed ahead of time. He knew he's be in jeopardy if Lois failed.
u/Ulmaxes [+8] (10 hours later)
Mercy is one of Luthor's contingencies. Her insight and intelligence are his final fallback. A brilliant masterstroke doesn't have to be an obvious one, carried out by a stone-faced Luthor sitting a million miles away.
One of Luthor's limits is he is a single man who can only be in one place at one time- the obvious step to avoid this, is to have reliable agents who will act and think on your own behalf. Superman gambled everything on his own actions and limits- Luthor gambled on his plus his agent's. Paying her salary and training her for the past X years was his investment, and this was the payoff.
The true mark of brilliance is not knowing and planning everything down to the last variable; it's realizing A. you can't do that, and then B. having fallbacks for when those variables fly in your face. Mercy is that fallback.
u/EndlessStrategy [+2] (11 hours later)
He was ahead of the game for nearly the whole duration of the story. It's stupid that he fumbled something so simple at the last minute.
u/embrodski [+6] (10 hours later)
Mercy wasn't told to execute this plan, but instead did it on her own. So what would've been a masterstroke, a last ditch effort that resulted in the death of superman, comes off as blind luck. That's quite unsatisfactory.
I was expecting Mercy to be a major lynchpin as soon as the door closed and Superman and Luthor started their conversation without her in the room. Superman didn't have enough information to realize what a high-level threat Mercy was, but we readers did, so it was entirely appropriate. IMHO.
u/-daimaou- [+9] (3 days later)
I completely agree. It made for a better story to have Luthor make the best plans in the world, but Superman still figures them out. For Mercy to come down as the hammer was a great ending. It would have been predictable if Lex outsmarted Superman in the final moments.
u/philip1201 [+4] (45 minutes later)
Should have left through the door...
Still, I can understand your first instinct not being to move towards the blindingly bright ball of death that's being hurled at you.
u/VorpalAuroch [+9] Life before Death (12 hours later)
Since when near the blindingly bright ball of death, he can't move nearly as fast, I think it was probably the right decision on his part. Ignoring Mercy was his actual error.
u/None [+6] (3 hours later)
I didn't expect this kind of ending. I wait for more stories from you!
"able to put pressure him" -> "able to put pressure on him"?
u/trifith [+8] Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper. (5 hours later)
Run through his FF.net profile. Some good stuff there. 'Branches on the Tree of Time' and "A Bluer shade of White" are both very well done.
u/None [+4] (7 hours later)
Yeah, I've read all his FF.net stories and I especially liked the terminator one. He seems to put out consistently good stuff.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (8 hours later)
Thanks for the correction (and the support).
u/trifith [+5] Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper. (5 hours later)
Hands down the best Superman story I've read.
u/Harkins [+4] (11 hours later)
This was a fun story, thanks for sharing it.
Two odd notes in this chaper: "depower" is a weird, recent word for Lois to use; and Lex doesn't bring the baseball on his sprint? Or Mercy bring it with her after, just in case?
u/DataPacRat [+3] Amateur Immortalist (9 hours later)
Head-canon: The body in the trunk spontaneously self-combusts. Lex considers the probabilities that Superman faked his own death, and spends the rest of his life looking for a Supes working from the shadows instead of in the open.
u/logrusmage [+5] (9 hours later)
The best Superman story I've ever read (though granted I haven't read a lot of Superman and I'm a big Lex fan).
Applause all around dude.
u/embrodski [+3] (10 hours later)
Thank you for writing this. It is amazing. And, like everyone else, I was also made sad. But in a very good way. I won't forget this tale for a long time.
u/Exotria [+3] (2 hours later)
Great as usual. I'd love to see a sequel about how Lex and humanity deal with those three villainous Kryptonians, as well as any other random supernatural terrors that Superman got tasked with dealing with.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (15 hours later)
Great ending. Terrible downer, but still a great ending.
One copyedit: "affect positive change" => "effect positive change"
u/rp20 [+3] (16 hours later)
Wait so supes was out cold? I thought there would be a scene of superman facing his killer and displaying some emotion. Fear of death is something that he never experienced.
u/sullyj3 [+3] (9 days later)
Are we allowed to ask whether you agree with Lex?
u/alexanderwales [+10] Time flies like an arrow (9 days later)
Sure, I think enough time has passed that I won't really be influencing anyone's reading of the story too much.
It depends. I mean, set aside for the moment all of the bad things that Lex does, and the ways that he pushes Clark closer to snapping, and just think about the "existential risk" part of things.
Superman is an existential risk to humanity, given his power levels as presented in this fic. If we take that as a given, then the real question comes down to percentages. Lex says that if the risk is one in a thousand, that's the equivalent of two million people dead, but that's a simplification, since all people dying is more than twice as bad as half of the people dying, given that humanity would be ended forever and we place an enormously high value on humanity continuing to exist in some form, and existential risks don't allow for do-overs. So I think that Lex has a point there, and it's not entirely unreasonable to kill someone who poses such a large risk to humanity as a whole.
However, Superman also lowers total existential risk, even as he raises it just by existing. He could stop an asteroid impact with ease, give a massive boost to space colonization, solve an enormous amount of problems, and stop nuclear war (which wasn't really a concern at the time this story took place).
The story is a tragedy, and it's got a bleak ending, but while Lex was at least in part motivated by an animal fear, that doesn't mean that he was necessarily wrong to do what he did. Hopefully the ending properly hits that note - you could argue it either way. It's a sad ending either way, I think, because even if you agree that Superman presented an unacceptable risk to humanity, you still sort of want to believe in him. If it weren't for the fact that an unhappy ending had been foreshadowed quite a bit, a "happy" ending where Superman puts a stop to Luthor's schemes and forms a partnership with him wouldn't have been too terribly unbelievable.
So I don't agree with Lex, in the sense that he's an amoral murderer. But if this were real life and he were in the news for killing Superman, I might argue on reddit that I could see where he was coming from when he did it, even if it makes me sad.
Hopefully that's not too much of an answer.
u/sullyj3 [+3] (9 days later)
Thanks. I guess I've been kind of shying away from the conclusion that killing him was the right thing to do, because the notion that that's the case elicits in me a pretty visceral disgust. That's partly due to the loss of potential good, but there's probably a pretty substantial irrational component to the reaction as well.
u/Coadie [+2] (26 minutes later)
in the space between blinked
blinks
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (8 hours later)
Thanks for the correction - should be fixed now.
u/ZankerH [+2] Remove Kebab (4 hours later)
Everything I expected from the ending. Thank you.
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (a month later)
Finally got around to finishing this. As someone who has always disliked Superman while craving a better class of Superman story than the ones DC keeps churning out, I absolutely loved it. The idea of showing Superman realizing that despite it all, he's only one man and can't do everything alone, is exactly what Superman has always been missing, and him teaming up with Lex and/or Bruce to really maximize the good he does in the world is pretty much the best rational ending one could expect.
Two criticisms:
Lex never seems to consider that Superman, according to what he discovers about his "true" persona of Clark, ages. So unless he has a reason to expect him to just stop aging at a certain point, eventually Superman will die with or without Lex's interference: whether he'll do so before pulling a Zion is another story.
I do think Superman running out the wall like that was a bit of a fumble: with his ability to think and move so fast, he should easily have been able to simply stay a safe distance from the crystal as it was lobbed. A simple fix would be to depict it as so large that its effects press him up against the wall just by Mercy opening the door, showing that he really had no choice but to go through it.
In any case, thank you for writing this fantastic story, and sorry it took me so long to get to it :) Looking forward to reading more from you.
u/Bubday [+3] (a month later)
- I do think Superman running out the wall like that was a bit of a fumble: with his ability to think and move so fast, he should easily have been able to simply stay a safe distance from the crystal as it was lobbed. A simple fix would be to depict it as so large that its effects press him up against the wall just by Mercy opening the door, showing that he really had no choice but to go through it.
This was the thing that sticks with me as problematic. We establish that Superman can take days of thought in between the words of a sentence, and yet he decides that the most prudent course of action is to bail through one of the walls. Then the Kryptonite in the wall apparently weakens him enough to be shot, in approximately a second or less. So I'm not clear on why Superman chose to flee through the wall slowly enough to be affected by his weakness.
In addition, his plan to disarm Mercy and dispose of the Kryptonite once outside would somehow be different than the method he would use immediately upon seeing her with the chunk inside?
Maybe he could have seen Mercy with the rock and, thinking quickly, ripped one of the lead-lined walls open to use as a covering or shielding for it... only to inadvertently expose himself to the Kryptonite behind the lead lining. Just an alternate idea.
I loved this story, though.
u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (a month later)
Oo, I like that idea too. But I figure he'd want to keep the current types of scenes for the "mental images" they evoke.
u/_brightwing [+3] Feathered menace (4 hours later)
In the end, I am left wondering if this was bigger than Superman. Of Krypton’s message to humanity.
If Superman himself was the message - a controlled, demonstration by example. A mistake down the road they did not want developing sentients to make, like they did.
You left us sad, but I‘d like to think humanity passed. Thank you for writing the story.
u/roystgnr [+5] (8 hours later)
""I studded the walls with kryptonite," Lex said to the empty air." stuck out like a sore thumb labeled "As you know, Bob", and could probably be outright deleted. It seemed too odd (for anyone, but especially for a character whose security concerns would have squelched any habit of talking to himself) to be anything but exposition, but as exposition it was unnecessary. Most of your readers probably figured out "green shards ... that Superman had taken with him when he went through the wall"; any who didn't would be able to piece it together from the discussion a half dozen sentences later.
That's my only worthwhile criticism. This is a fantastic story. Your Frozen and Terminator stories set me up with high expectations and I wasn't disappointed in the least.
(I do have one worthless criticism: for some reason Chapter 10 didn't feel as compelling or as interesting as all the others. I haven't figured out why, though, and if nobody else felt the same way then the flaw may be with me rather than with that chapter.)
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (8 hours later)
I might take that line out, since I think you're probably right that it's obvious enough. Calibrating how much explanation is required is very difficult - the previous chapter included a line where Superman says that his spaceship is in the Arctic, which was meant to be an obvious lie to test Lois's reaction (and the flow of information), but that wasn't obvious enough. It's fairly likely that I'll do an editing pass and remove both of those.
Fanfiction.net keeps docs in the manager for 90 days, after which you have to go through this tedious process of reuploading from the fic itself - so I'll wait for more reviews to come through in order to identify the problems and then make the editing pass within a month. I'll keep in mind what you said about Chapter 10. I do agree there's a slump at some point, but don't really know exactly what's causing it.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+19] Godric Gryffindor (a day later)
Don't take it out. I didn't get it until then, and saying things after you shoot someone is 100% acceptable as literature.
u/thakil [+14] (9 hours later)
I actually didn't quite realise what had happened until Lex said it explicitly, partially because I had assumed he simply hadn't had the kryptonite long enough to do that.
u/Pluvialis [+8] Second Age Sauron (10 hours later)
I think the confusion with Superman saying his ship was in the arctic was because isn't that actually true in canon? Or at least he has a fortress there? So it's sort of plausible enough to make you wonder if Luthor got a decoy, or if Superman stole it back, or something.
As for Luthor's line, I think it should probably stay. I think it needs to be made obvious that he did so, more than just a throwaway line about green shards which could be confusing or have other explanations, and Luthor's been run through the mill at this point and has finally defeated his foe, and may or may not be feeling some trepidation about being about to murder him. For me that's the message I got from his random slip into (a single sentence of) monologue.
u/VorpalAuroch [+6] Life before Death (12 hours later)
One more for 'please keep the line'. Or if you do remove it, move up the "I was actually angry about wasting the money." Something like
Lex had been frustrated at the cost of kryptonite-studding his walls, especially after the brush-by hadn't shown any reaction.
Only better written.
u/EndlessStrategy [+3] (11 hours later)
I agree with Pluvialis, the "kryptonite in the walls" line adds some much needed clarity.
u/clawclawbite [+3] (a day later)
I could see Mercy being the one to make that observation out loud if she was not involved with getting them installed...
u/eaglejarl [+2] (15 hours later)
I fifth what everyone else is saying -- keep the line. I didn't understand what had happened until then...I thought that the kryptonite Mercy was carrying somehow exploded over him, and didn't see how that could work.
u/Nectane [+1] (14 days later)
'"I studded the walls with kryptonite," Lex said to the corpse. '
No! The previous version of this line was actually my favourite of the whole story, the image really stuck with me. Where can I find the original?
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (14 days later)
"I studded the walls with kryptonite," Lex said to the empty air. He kept his eyes on the body, just in case it started moving.
The ePub has the original "finished" version of the story before I began editing some things. I might change the line back if you liked it though - I originally thought it had a nice sort of detachment to it, but some people thought it was too bloodless. I don't know - editing is an exercise in second guessing yourself.
u/Nectane [+1] (14 days later)
Thank you so much for the link.
Here's one vote in support of the older version of the line, anyway. Like I said, it was my favourite.
u/chrisn654 [+1] (4 months later)
Thank you for your work kind sir
u/Rodnap [+1] (10 years later)
Lex was so preoccupied with viewing Superman as the worst-case scenario that he never considered the possibility that Superman might actually be the best option for humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrials. The next alien encounter might not be so friendly.
What’s even more unsettling is that Kryptonian technology doesn’t seem prohibitively expensive or advanced enough to prevent earlier contact with Earth. This suggests there might have been a third party actively enforcing a kind of "quarantine" around Earth. Superman’s arrival could mean that the quarantine has been lifted—and now, other aliens are ready to make their move, with far less benevolent intentions.
u/TimTravel [+1] (23 hours later)
That was great! I liked it a lot.