"Did you ever live in Kandor?" Thea asked, watching the distant look settle across Kara's face.
"I... don't know if this Kandor and the one in my memory are the same city." She paused. "But yes—I spent four years there."
Thea gave her shoulder a brief pat and didn't say anything else.
Kandor's preservation record was, she had to admit, rather extraordinary. Two hundred and fifty thousand years old—and it was still standing, sealed in a glass bottle somewhere in Brainiac's collection. If they had time later, retrieving it seemed like a reasonable project.
They met up with Batman shortly after, and came across a Kryptonian hunting party in the process. These were people firmly in the tribal era—under the red sun, their bodies weren't much different from ordinary Earth humans.
Trying to explain time travel and interstellar origin to a hunting party in the pre-industrial age was not going to work. Records from this era were scarce, and knowing Rao or Kandor at all would already sound learned. She told a story: three emissaries from a tribe across the mountains, come to request an audience with the chieftain Rao.
The hunting party captain looked them over with the careful attention of someone whose survival usually depended on reading unfamiliar people correctly. He noticed that Thea's accent in the local dialect was strange—but put it down to regional variation and decided it wasn't worth challenging. He'd heard there were tribes beyond his direct knowledge. These three didn't look like people who had ever missed a meal. He led them in.
Pre-industrial societies tend to cut to the point. They were brought before Rao in short order.
Middle-aged. Distinguished features. Hair not yet the pure silver of the divine figure they'd left behind in the twenty-first century—this version was streaked with gray, and the face behind it carried the particular exhaustion of someone who had been doing something very difficult for a very long time and had no intention of stopping.
"You're here to see me?" Rao studied the three of them with unhurried attention. Whatever Krypton's current circumstances had limited in his life experience, it hadn't touched his judgment. Three people who moved and carried themselves like they never had to worry about their next meal—in entirely unfamiliar clothing—warranted exactly this level of scrutiny.
"Who are you, exactly?" The question came with an elevated note of command. The guards around them immediately moved inward, long spears raised in a protective formation.
Kara in her uniform looked both impressive and completely out of place. Batman remained still and watchful. Thea took a quiet read of the ambient magical field and confirmed what she'd suspected: magical elements here were sparse to the point of being nearly theoretical. Small wonder Kryptonian civilization had developed along technological rather than mystical lines.
There was just enough to work with.
She raised a hand. Several walls of packed earth rose around the four of them, cutting the guards' line of approach.
Rao looked at the walls. He looked at Thea. He did not look afraid.
"You've come to kill me?"
If killing him would have solved the problem, she would have done it without a second word. But she'd already noticed the irregularity: his life-force was unstable—flickering, almost extinguishable one moment, then replenished by several distinct incoming streams a heartbeat later. The false White Lantern experiment had already begun here, at its most primitive stage. Killing him now wouldn't accomplish what they needed.
"You're doing something dangerous," she said directly. "You're drawing on the life-force of ordinary people to sustain yourself."
"I haven't used force." His voice was steady. "Every person who contributes does so willingly. Only I can lead this tribe to prosperity. I haven't harmed anyone."
From outside the earthen walls, the guards could be heard organizing—throwing themselves against the barricade, finding it immovable. Rao registered his tactical situation without visible distress. What showed through instead was something like unfinished business—a man who had ten more things he needed to do and had just been told he might not have the time.
"He doesn't seem like a villain," Batman said quietly, close to her ear. They'd spent days dodging Rao's influence and scrambling to stay under the radar; now, face to face, Batman had already located the core of the issue.
Thea gave a short, humorless exhale. "He's not. Every word he just said is true. He believes all of it. As a matter of genuine moral character—there are perhaps a handful of sages in Earth history you could stack against him without it being a contest."
The trouble with bad people doing bad things was that you could usually stop them. The real problem was always the good people who were also wrong. A sincere, high-integrity person moving in a wrong direction caused a hundred times more damage than any ordinary villain.
"We won't touch him. We find the device that's channeling the life-force connection and destroy it. He lives out his natural span."
She didn't want to kill this man. The decision came easily once she'd made it.
She let the earthen walls dissolve.
The guards flooded back in immediately, surrounding Rao. The captain from the hunting party threw himself forward without waiting, putting himself directly between Rao and the three strangers.
"We mean no harm. Perhaps we can talk." A flick of her fingers deflected the forward thrust without injuring anyone.
Rao assessed the situation in about two seconds—his guards weren't going to accomplish anything here—and waved them back. He led the three of them inside.
"Who taught you the life-sharing technique?" she asked, the moment they were seated. Straight to the point.
"I learned it in a dream," Rao said, with the careful tone of someone slightly uncertain about their own recollection. "A figure surrounded in white light."
Thea looked at him for a moment.
Teaching via dream. All the way to Krypton.
It sounded absurd—except Rao was constitutionally incapable of deception, which meant it had actually happened. She was fairly certain she knew the explanation: future Rao had come back to this point in his own past and given his younger self the foundation of everything that would follow. The pattern was immediately familiar.
She still wasn't entirely sure how he'd managed the technical side of it. An older Booster Gold had been unable to meet his own younger self without consequences. Highfather had known exactly when and how his wife was going to die, and had never once gone back to prevent it—because that kind of intervention tended to produce worse outcomes, not better ones. Time had enormous uncertainty built in. Interference usually amplified the damage.
And yet.
"You've violated the Kryptonian tradition of freedom." Kara had been silent throughout. She'd had time to sit with the absence of any pull toward this Rao—no draw whatsoever—which confirmed the genetic tampering hypothesis beyond any remaining doubt. The anger she'd been holding in finally surfaced. "You act like a tyrant."
"Krypton?" Rao looked completely baffled. "What is that?"
Kara froze. She turned to look at Thea.
Thea had a hand over her face—as if to say, why are you talking to primitives about "Krypton"?
The planet's name, as it turned out, would not be given for another hundred and ninety thousand years.
"That's a name your people will give this world, far in the future," Thea said carefully. "Don't worry about it—it won't affect anything." She made a small gesture as she spoke, and quietly erased Rao's memory of the last few seconds.
He blinked, briefly disoriented.
Thea looked back at Kara. "Go ahead. He's your people, too."