The next morning—yes, morning, because our stamina allowed it, and we had plenty to catch up on—after freshening up and having a hearty breakfast, we held a "war council" (or family council, whatever you prefer). We needed to at least figure out where we wanted to go, what we needed to get there, and what methods we were willing to use to achieve it.
"I don't know," Raven replied after some thought. "When I was... there, I always dreamed of escaping. And now that I'm free, I... um, feel lost? Probably." She paused again. "Yes, I want to continue studying magic, to develop in that direction. And to be sure that Trigon stays where he is. Better yet, that he disappears entirely. And also..." She blushed adorably and even turned away, nervously scanning the room, the interior details—anything to avoid looking at me. "I... want to be... with you... that's all."
"Damn, you can't be this cute!" I couldn't resist—well, I didn't even try—and she was back on my lap. I wasn't planning another marathon... at least not yet. But having the chance to just hold this beauty, enjoy her warmth, the scent of her hair... and occasionally let my hands wander and "steal" a kiss or two—that was a definite yes!
"... " She pouted cutely and blushed at the same time. I didn't know how she managed it, but she did. What can I say? Talent.
"Ahem, anyway, regarding your wishes, I fully share them—from studying magic and the dream of bottling up one Archdemon to my interest in a certain charming sorceress who's currently sitting on my lap. But that's the general strategy; we still need to work out the tactics."
"What do you mean?"
"What and how will we do to achieve our goals? Living in the modern world requires a ton of documents, and not just papers that can be forged, but electronic copies in the databases of various agencies. And that's not even counting money, which isn't just about having it, but also about legalizing its source. The option of 'I found a gold vein on no man's land and dug up a chest of nuggets with my bare hands' won't fly, I'm afraid... at least not without using force," I clarified.
"Force?"
"Well... I suspect that a high-ranking employee of some pompous bank who refuses to buy such gold from us would quickly change their mind if they were dangling upside down a couple of dozen miles up. But... it's not that I don't think high-ranking representatives of such inherently criminal and fraudulent structures as banks deserve such treatment, but this kind of behavior on our part is unlikely to help us establish friendly ties with society."
"I'm not very familiar with how things work on Earth, so could you explain why you're so negatively disposed toward high-ranking people?"
"I'm not disposed negatively; it's just... As far as I know, Earth is currently governed by a capitalist system of relations, one where profit is the ultimate goal by any means necessary. And, again, as far as I know about this system, it's impossible to achieve a truly high position in society through honest work—only through deception and villainy. So an ordinary bank employee is probably a decent person, but the CEO is 100% a fraud and a hardened liar, most likely with a long list of crimes under their belt. That's why I don't respect them. Plus..." I hesitated, glancing at the girl's attire. "When people are used to deceiving and exploiting their own countrymen for their own gain, it's hard to expect them to show genuine sympathy and understanding toward obvious outsiders. More likely, their greed will skyrocket, and our problem with documents will only embolden them."
"Yeah..." Raven looked at her ashen-gray hands. "Something tells me that at least in my case, I won't be able to just walk in and ask... wherever you need to go to get all the documents you listed?"
"Right. I'm afraid that with such a question, we'll only attract a lot of attention, and not the friendly kind. And it's not just you who will have problems; it might be even harder for me to get documents legally."
"Why? You look like a normal human."
"To be precise, I look like Superman, the local most powerful hero, just younger. No, that alone wouldn't say much—the world is full of people who look alike—but I also have the same abilities as him. At least the ones that don't involve magic. And that could raise interest, including from Superman himself."
"And that's bad?" Raven fidgeted nervously, momentarily distracting me.
"Not so much, but..." I shrugged. "I'd need to check, but as far as I know, he's a pretty decent guy. It's just... imagine you meet someone who looks like you did a decade ago, and they say, 'Hi, I'm your upgraded clone, created as a living weapon and probably your killer, but then something went wrong, and I was teleported to Hell, where I hung out with demons and killed almost everything I saw.'"
"Yeah..." Raven was impressed. "But won't he try to kill us after that?"
"He shouldn't. As I said, he's a good guy, but there will definitely be some lingering tension in our relationship, at least for a while. And then there's the scrutiny from him and his friends. I wouldn't want that."
"Me neither," she admitted. "Especially..." She trailed off worriedly.
"Especially?"
"Two-thirds of our books, if not more, have very... questionable content. And if his friends include Earth's mages..."
"Yeah, that would be awkward," I said, vividly imagining the scene. "On the other hand, constantly hiding isn't an option either." I sighed, emerging from fantasies about Batman's famous paranoia going berserk. "And I don't want to hide—I'm tired of it."
"Hmm..." The gray-skinned cutie on my lap fidgeted again. "Illusions? Not our specialty, but for small things..."
"To walk down the street—it'll work, but full registration in the system... I feel like it'll be a lot of headaches. Unless..." An idea flickered in my mind. Two, actually.
"Unless what?" the lady asked, intrigued. "Did you come up with something?"
"We could try reaching out to the scientist who created me. The situation clearly got out of his control; that's obvious. But it's also obvious that he didn't do it because he had nothing better to do with his time and resources. A person with resources sufficient to create a being with my level of power can easily 'draw up' completely real 'papers' for a clone, an alien, or even the devil himself."
"He probably won't be happy that his tool has gained its own will and desires," Raven said darkly, clearly drawing on her own experience.
"Yes, but based on what I know about him, he's smart enough to cooperate rather than do something stupid, like trying to capture or eliminate me."
"Well... maybe," the sorceress agreed. "But first, we still need to gather at least some general information. We both know too little about the world—only the most general outlines. We need to fix that. And while we do... I don't think there's anything wrong with using things people don't need right now."
"Like empty hotel rooms, houses like this, defective but usable goods, and so on?"
"Yeah... We probably won't be able to get resources honestly, given our situation... Although I wouldn't want to stoop to stealing from ordinary people." Well, Raven was a kind girl with an unpleasant past, so it made sense that she didn't want to hurt anyone, but she wasn't exactly law-abiding either. I suspected that a number of "illegal actions" wouldn't just fail to earn her disapproval; they'd likely be approved. And that couldn't help but please me.
"Okay, then for the near future, I propose the following plan: we move to more populated areas; if necessary, we use illusions, or at least don't draw attention to ourselves. We acquire food and reconnaissance information in a way that doesn't harm others, and based on that, we'll see where and how we can best settle down. Maybe it even makes sense to move to Australia."
"No way," the sorceress shook her head, nearly making me sneeze—yes, she was still sitting on my lap. "I've had enough of demonic landscapes."
"If you've had enough, then you've had enough," I agreed amiably. "Then, since we've decided, let's start preparing to move, but first..." My hand reached for the clasp of her outfit. "Someone owes me for all this squirming!"
"Your indignation would be more convincing if you hadn't put me here yourself... and weren't pressing against me..." Her displeased tone didn't match the way she turned, settling more comfortably on me and leaning her back against my chest. And she arched slightly, offering me a wonderful view. And she tilted her head, inviting me to kiss those slightly parted gray lips. And what her hands were doing, raised up and tangled in my hair...
"Yeah, of course, it's all Henry's fault; he taught you bad things. Great job," I nodded, fully giving in to the "provocation." Because yes, my girl had clearly "tasted the forbidden fruit" and was now more than willing to indulge in debauchery with one charming novice dark mage in her free time. And we had plenty of free time. And yes, our mood was still sky-high, our "deep relationship" had only recently reached that "deep" stage, so... we wanted a lot of sweetness, often. And since we wanted it and could have it, why waste time?
So we didn't waste it. In the next moment, I was already leaning toward the face of the beauty pressing against me and engaging in a "battle" with her tongue, while my hands, having dealt with the clasp, slipped under her "swimsuit" and began to knead her breasts in the most shameless and lewd way. Raven, without breaking the kiss, returned her right hand from the back of my head and used it to pull down the fabric of her outfit, freeing the riches I was caressing and kneading.
"Hah..." When we broke apart to take another breath, she exhaled. "We haven't tried it like this before."
"Well," I leaned toward her neck and began to kiss and "nibble" it with my lips, changing my grip on her lovely "twins," now coming from below and beginning to "support" her already perfectly shaped breasts. This allowed me to play with them so nicely, m-m-m! "Experiments aren't just in magic..."
"O-oh," she blissfully closed her eyes and turned her head to make it easier for me to explore her neck. "D-don't stop..." And while her left hand continued to "scratch" my head, causing pleasant chills, her right hand, freed from this task and having helped pull down the top of the "swimsuit," continued its journey downward.
There, she stroked her lower belly, and then my girl spread her legs wider and began to caress her slit through the fabric of the suit. Obeying the beauty's desire, I continued to caress her neck, only occasionally pausing to get a new kiss from her and enjoy how the sorceress's tongue playfully opposed mine. Well, and then—how could I not support the sorceress in her caresses? So soon my left hand left her breast and, descending lower, joined the girl's fingers in caressing and fondling her lower lips.
"Now," I whispered into her nibbled ear, pushing aside the fabric of the "cloak-swimsuit," "let's make it even more pleasant for you," and plunged the phalanx of my middle finger into her.
"Mmmmh," she exhaled noisily, accepting and squeezing my finger. "C-continue..." A hot whisper escaped her lips. Well, the lady's wish was my command, so I really did continue to stroke her mound and plunge my finger into her increasingly wet depths.
Raven began to moan softly and climbed a little higher, wrapping her arms around my neck... and offering her excited breast to my lips. The changed position allowed me to free both hands to caress her slit, while the girl herself focused on additionally stimulating her nipples... and caressing my face.
"I think you're ready enough," I said, tearing myself away from the tempting mound and catching the beauty's frankly "floating" gaze.
She could only nod, not particularly intending to emerge from the stream of pleasure my hands were giving her. So when my clothes obediently parted and I began to rub my member against her slit, she was slightly confused. However, the confusion passed quickly, and the girl took matters into her own hands. At the same time, she demonstrated that her skills in caressing very sensitive parts of the male anatomy had greatly improved compared to her previous experience. Although as pleasant as it was, we both wanted more, so after a couple of minutes of such warm-up, the sorceress guided me into her.
"A-a-ah!" She was as narrow and tight as the first time.
Raven leaned back as far as possible and spread her legs wider. In this position, it was almost impossible for her to move, but I could comfortably support her hips, lift her, and impale her as I wanted, fully controlling the speed and depth. This openness and submission of her "modest" part, in my opinion, was the most attractive and "tasty." In addition to the purely physical pleasure of how her lower lips squeezed my member, how I plunged into this hot and slippery tightness, it also brought sensual, emotional ecstasy. The sorceress gave herself to me completely, with full trust and sincerity. And this generated an incomparable thrill. Moreover, Raven didn't forget to catch my lips in new kisses, additionally caress herself, and stroke me as much as possible. So very soon we reached the peak, and I even had to use acceleration to avoid the risk of "consequences." But it was so good.
"I'm the happiest man on Earth," I didn't deny myself the pleasure of kissing the beauty again, who was once more sitting on me.
"You're flattering me," nevertheless, the sorceress's voice radiated joy and satisfaction, and I dare hope it wasn't just due to my bedroom successes. And speaking of the latter... "Shall we continue?" Although it was phrased as a question, she had no doubts about the answer, so, sliding off me and in a few movements completely freeing herself from her clothes, she sat on me again, this time facing me. And then there was a new kiss, and... I was inserted again. "M-m-m," the girl pressed against my neck. "Now it's my turn to lead, so let me take care of you!" And she began to lift and lower herself, setting the rhythm and clearly showing that my "lessons" hadn't been in vain. However, she didn't change into her demonic form, nor did she pin me to the bed... at least because we continued to remain in the chair. In general, embracing the beauty around the waist, I allowed her to do whatever she wanted, receiving and giving kisses and playing with her breasts and buttocks, bringing both her and myself to a new peak.
On the third round, I laid her out on the table. On the fourth, we tried standing, first facing each other, and then "sneaking up from behind," while the dark mage braced her hands against the nearest wall and arched her back. In short, we spent our time very fruitfully until the next morning. And we probably would have continued, but Raven began to get tired, and she didn't want to switch to her demonic form, so we did stop. And in high spirits, we finally started preparing to move to more populated areas.
Later
I flew upward again, getting closer and closer to the clouds, but this time they weren't dirty brown, but milky white, gliding like amorphous lambs across the sky's blueness, until I plunged into the white foggy haze that the cloud turned out to be up close. It was wet, cool, and... immediately began to condense into droplets of moisture on my suit, but these droplets were transparent, not pitch black. The coolness didn't cause chills; even the gusts of wind among the clouds didn't cause any discomfort, not forcing my eyes to tear up or squint for even a moment.
Then I rose above the clouds and saw the starry sky. I wasn't breathing, holding my breath and not feeling any discomfort about it. And I kept rising—higher and higher—until the horizon turned into a huge blue hemisphere beneath my feet, and the bright rays of the sun struck my body with a sharp and unexpected intensity, momentarily bathing my skin in heat, like a fleeting gust of wind and... pleasure. The kind where it felt as if gentle hands of a skilled lover had caressed my entire body at once, and at the same time, there was a small surge of endorphins (or whatever the hormone is called that's produced during a strong surge of positive emotions?).
The heat from the rays passed after a second, as if on a hot, sultry day I had ducked into the shade of an air-conditioned room, but in reality, I hadn't moved an inch. And the pleasure also disappeared... almost. The stream of sunlight still caressed my body, making everything inside tremble, like from weightless, slow tickling. Maybe I even got goosebumps at that moment. And I could feel how greedily and almost joyfully my Kryptonian aura absorbed this radiation. I had felt something similar before only when extracting magic from demonic parasites, but much... much more modest in terms of pleasure. There, my aura adapted—it learned to feed on what it shouldn't, but here I felt with every cell that I was getting exactly what I should—what I was originally adapted to by my nature.
Breathing wasn't required; the cosmic cold didn't cause discomfort, and I fell into a meditative state suitable for sunbathing. Only ordinary sunbathing on the beach couldn't compare to what I felt. I didn't know what I expected—maybe some kind of fulfillment, satiety, or perhaps the awakening of suffocation—but none of that came. Only the solar disk changed its position relative to the blue sphere beneath my feet. I tried to take a breath, and something even managed to enter my lungs, but it felt like... pulling a thin, slippery cord from a spool, so much so that it was infuriating. For the sake of a clean experiment, I risked exhaling, ready to crash down at full speed at any moment, but... again, nothing. If I were to translate the body's sensations into some phrase, they would look like: "Well, there's no air in the lungs, so what? And in general, get lost, I'm sunbathing here."
Interesting...
And even more interesting was that, having left the planet, I began to distinctly sense its gravitational shadow. Previously imperceptible, it acquired form and clarity in my sensations. It didn't interfere, didn't constrain, but now, having risen above it, I felt as if I had emerged from the water. When I was inside the planet's gravitational field, it was everywhere around me and eluded perception, but here I got the opportunity to look at it from the outside and somehow... feel the difference in environments. It wasn't vision, temperature, or pressure on the body, but, closing my eyes, I clearly felt the vector toward the center of gravity, perceiving it all as if I were mentally constructing a map of the nearest space. And also, although I didn't feel any difference in the effort applied to flying, psychologically, in space, it somehow still felt "easier" to "swim."
The idea came quickly, and I looked around. Individual planets of the solar system stood out against the twinkling of stars and coal-black darkness with no effort on my part. One panoramic glance was enough, and I easily picked out the spheres floating in the void, as probably not every telescope could boast. By straining slightly, I could even catch echoes of their gravity, small eddies floating in the giant stream of the star's attraction. And also, by focusing my gaze, I could literally see the surface of some planets, as a person with good vision would see the pattern on a tree leaf a few meters away. But flights to other planets weren't necessary for me yet, but the huge gray disk, whose gravitational shadow was hidden in Earth's shadow, was much more interesting.
And so Earth began to slowly recede, and the disk of the Moon grew before my face. The initially slow flight gradually accelerated until I finally switched to my maximum speed of movement in space, and... in less than a minute, I was already touching the gray dust of the atmosphere-less satellite with my soles.
It was so unexpected, new... awkward. And if the first two feelings were more about the realization that I had literally flown to the Moon, doing what two superpowers of my native world had struggled with for years, never managing to develop the topic beyond test flights and build a full-fledged inhabited lunar station with regular flights, and here I was, just flying on my own, without even ruffling my hair in the process... Then the third was about that very "small step for man." I just... well... almost fell when I tried to take it. The completely different gravity almost sent me flying back into space when I tried to move forward with my usual effort. Of course, I wouldn't have flown away, since I stopped maintaining levitation with my aura, but it jerked me quite awkwardly, with a jolt of a meter and a half. And I had to turn on flight again to stabilize myself in space.
Awkward...
And strange...
And there's no air to even swear...
This wasn't what I expected from my first space flight.
My gaze automatically rose upward—to the giant blue sphere hanging over the lifeless expanse of the Moon's surface.
Amazingly sharp and easily changing its focus, to the envy of the most perfect optics, my vision allowed me to easily find the threads of highways, the islands of large cities, and even the dots of small villages. If I wanted, I could naturally make out the font on the front page of a newspaper left by a mailbox and Raven's face, frozen with closed eyes in the inner courtyard of the house we occupied, while between her palms, brought together in front of her chest, magical energy swirled, calibrating the spell of connection between us. An indescribable sensation, but not at all straining either the eyes or the brain, as if built-in spyglasses with insane characteristics and mental control were sitting in my pupils.
By the way, another point was discovered here. I saw the entire hemisphere of the planet, could look at each point on the surface as if I were standing a meter away from it, but I could only focus on one point at a time, like an ordinary person, and not everything at once. Shifting my gaze from one area of land to another didn't interfere with anything, but my powers didn't give me absolute omniscience, even if I tried to defocus my gaze.
However, it wasn't right to indulge in idle entertainment for long. I confirmed my ability to find the house from which I had taken off and, accordingly, Raven, who had stayed there. Her idea of establishing a connection between our medallions so that we could find each other with magic at any moment and even communicate in the future was also going smoothly, at least I didn't see any signs of failure in the girl's magic, although... the topic of voice communication, like a phone, clearly needed revision, because in the absence of an atmosphere (that is, a medium in which the sound wave would propagate), such a radio was useless. But all this was minor; the main thing was why I had flown higher—to find where we could relocate in North America.
Why not move to Russia? Hard to say. Definitely not because of the language barrier that would arise for Raven. Probably, subconsciously, I feared hysteria or something like that. While I lived in Trigon's domains, thoughts and memories of life in my native world and what was left there could be pushed to the background. I didn't completely get rid of them, of course, and I probably couldn't have completely abandoned them, but there, in Hell, these not very joyful thoughts, frankly, were just "some of" and didn't turn into black melancholy. Here... I didn't know what would happen if I returned to my hometown, went to my native street, to my native house, or found that they didn't exist in this world, and I didn't want to test this empirically. Nor did I want to know if there was another me in this world, my parents, and everything else. These questions were too... complicated. Especially considering that, for my subjective perception, years had already passed, and time not only heals, it also complicates the task of taking the first step.
In general, I didn't want to reflect—I didn't want to open that Pandora's box that my return home could generate. Which, although not my own, but a parallel reality, was... In general, it was better to refrain.
Moreover, facts are facts, and you have to live with them. I already had a different life, with completely different opportunities and priorities. And also a girl who, one hundred percent, would be tried more than once by her scumbag father. At the same time, no matter how big a fan of Batman cartoons I was as a child, I couldn't say that I knew Russian superheroes in the DC universe well. Frankly, I didn't know anything about them at all, except for a couple of passing episodes in the "Young Titans" series, where some not very impressive guys from that side were briefly shown. And guys with serious muscle were quite important in the context of possible showdowns with the Archdemon. So I preferred to head to America, where my body was born and where I at least had some idea of the personalities.
And since going to Lex Luthor completely unprepared was a bad idea from the start, and the option of going to the police with a story about robbery and a blow to the head to get state assistance and some kind of opportunity to legally ask competent specialists about "who's who" in the surrounding world ran into objective problems of medical examination and attempts to take a blood test, we had no choice but to resort to petty crime again. Maybe it was a sudden bout of stupidity, but apart from criminal options, we really had no ideas. Either rob punks under the slogan "I need your clothes and motorcycle," or rob a store, or just rob someone to get cash and then buy something—but everywhere it came down to robbery.
Thus, there were two key tasks: to find a new place for us to live and to find the means to obtain information about the world, preferably in the form of "a computer with internet." And I started with the second, pushing off from the surface of the satellite and heading back to the planet.
I don't know how it was in the States of my past world, but here I found a suitable device surprisingly quickly—literally in the first hypermarket, located not even in the city, but on the outskirts of one of the federal highways. They sold everything in this center: from toothpaste to mobile homes, sports and biker motorcycles, like Harleys or... I think this design is called a "chopper"? Not the point. About an hour of my "personal" time and a fraction of a second of real time—and I was already leaving the branch of the trading empire with a couple of laptops that had the ability to connect to wireless networks (who knows how many coveted G's there were) and Wi-Fi.
Next, I needed to find the aforementioned Wi-Fi, preferably unpassworded and where Raven and I could stop for a couple of days. This was more difficult, but I remembered the practice of various hotels with their card of "codes" from the door to the coveted digital web located in the room. Finding such a hotel turned out to be not much harder than finding a hypermarket, thanks to the huge glowing letters on the facade. Breaking into an empty room was also not difficult—the keys were hanging right behind the concierge's desk, and the cards with passwords for the internet were close by, and taking one of them was a piece of cake. Of course, the keys would be missed after some time, but I chose a not very busy hotel, so if there were no accidents with a sudden check-in to the very room I took for us, we would have a day or two, especially if we helped the staff a little with magic not to notice the absence of keys. A little, I don't argue, but for the initial familiarization, it would be enough, and if necessary, the location could be changed.
And so, having prepared everything, I returned to Raven, ready to take her to our new place of residence.
"How did it go?" I emerged from acceleration near the gray-skinned beauty.
"There are some minor interferences; I'll need to refine the spell, but I'll manage," Raven said businesslike, opening her eyes.
"Is it possible to make the connection without using sound?" I clarified the worrying point.
"Mental communication..." The girl paused for a moment. "Yes, it's possible, but I'll need time to read the necessary books."
"Okay," I smiled involuntarily. "Well, for now, I suggest we move. I just found a suitable place."
"Uh-huh," Raven glanced at the house. "Just let's take out the trash..."
Later
While Raven went to luxuriate in the bath, radiating megatons of blissful serenity even through the walls (though okay—I was peeking through the wall and saw her face), I settled into a comfortable chair and began typing queries like "chronology of events of the last century" into the search engine, gradually delving into reading.
The search engine itself was unfamiliar, differing from everything I had seen before, but quite "intuitive," as was the operating system on the laptop, but it was usable—and that's the main thing. After the "chronology," I moved on to "recent achievements in..." Then I needed to clarify some events in more detail, like the "Meteor Shower in Smallville" almost thirty years ago, and only after that, having roughly figured out what was going on here, did I start directly with news feeds and archives of various newspapers.
My mind calmly performed the assigned task, analyzed the incoming data, and didn't show the slightest hint of fatigue, and my superspeed allowed me to absorb information, limited only by the characteristics of the mouse wheel and the page refresh rate when scrolling down.
The geographical map of the world didn't differ from the Earth familiar to me, but that's where the similarity to my familiar world ended. The political map was dotted with the names of unfamiliar countries; the ones I knew before had different borders, and some had disappeared altogether. The year on the calendar was 2005. The technological level of civilians and the military corresponded to the "classic" early 21st century in my understanding: cell phones were already widely available and not bricks, wireless networks, convenient laptops, flash drives, and other gadgets existed, but there was no talk of the smartphones I knew yet. At the same time, various examples of technologies at the level of "pocket teleporter" sometimes "surfaced," although such toys didn't reach the "people."
But what was much more important and... probably more surprising... although here it was closer to shock... In general, in this world, there was no Justice League. Neither the senior group nor the junior one, which included Superboy, who had kicked me into that thrice-cursed teleport.
I didn't notice this right away, but soon the fact revealed itself in full: there was Superman, there was Batman, there was the Flash—and that was it. Superman protected Metropolis, located near New York; Batman led his noir life in Gotham, which turned out to be the local Detroit, at least I didn't find the original Detroit on the map, but Gotham on the shore of the Great Lakes was discovered, being the largest center of the American automotive industry; the Flash heroically acted in some Star City, which, as I understood, was the local analogue of Silicon Valley, although for some reason it was located not in California, but under Chicago; plus, somewhere in the central plains, the Green Lantern wandered, occasionally scaring the Air Force and playing tag with them.
And that was really it.
No Wonder Woman, aka Vanderwoman, no Hawkgirl, no Martian Manhunter, no Doctor Fate, no Aquaman—none of the other most famous members of the Justice League seemed to exist. The same went for the younger generation: Robin appeared next to Batman, as did Batgirl, but there was no sign of the Young Titans or the Young Justice League, not even in embryo. Beast Boy, Cyborg, Starfire, Miss Martian, Artemis, Zatanna, Aqualad—none of them were in the news feeds, and the search engine didn't return anything.
True, there were a few lower-tier heroes, like Green Arrow, Black Canary, Red Tornado, and some other guys completely unknown to me, almost each of whom had their own zone of responsibility, or rather, habitat. And, of course, personal enemies, both with and without superpowers. Moreover, the enemies... were persistent. Regularly asking for a rematch, so to speak.
This was facilitated by the fact that the local Heroes were... softies. That is, really, after reading news articles about their deeds, it was as if I had opened a comic from the early to mid-nineties. The kind with a lot of nonsense, beating up bad guys, and packing them off to jail or the nuthouse. The same Joker had already escaped from the aforementioned nuthouse twice! And that was just in the last year! And each of his escapes was accompanied by at least half a million dollars in municipal property damage, a bunch of victims, and sometimes bodies, not to mention his "activities" while free.
It's not that the local Joker was a completely deranged psychopath from the wet dreams of fans of everything darker and more vomit-inducing, which began to influence his image in the industry of my native world somewhere in the early 21st century, but he wasn't a harmless clown either. Judging by the local press, the guy was an ordinary gangster, just with a special style of work, who didn't shy away from shooting, blowing things up, and the like, but did it not to show off, but in situations where any other gangster would. Of which there were plenty here.
Sometimes it seemed that in some cities, time had frozen somewhere in the twenties, during Prohibition and the wars of criminal syndicates. The main such city was, in particular, Gotham—the domain of the Joker, but similar things happened in other cities, including outright Western attempts to rob banks with a gang of revolvers. And, if you looked at it that way, the Joker even looked better than many, because against civilians he preferred to use non-lethal means, like laughing gases and other tricks, after which, of course, you sometimes had to lie in the hospital, but it was still better than shooting people with machine guns, which some other characters indulged in.
And this situation was universal. People in the villain community themselves didn't strive for the electric chair, so they either worked carefully to ensure that the most serious episodes couldn't be proven, or lived in states where the death penalty didn't exist. In my opinion, this still didn't justify the Heroes' persistent preservation of the lives of certain individuals instead of "accidentally" offing them "during arrest," but it was there, and even the local law enforcement system recognized all metahumans who had gone off the rails and gone berserk as mentally ill and sent them to a house with soft walls instead of the electric chair or a bullet in the back of the head. And, judging by some caveats from those in power, this was done out of considerations of preserving military potential, because any metahuman was a superhuman, almost a supersoldier, whom it wouldn't be bad to study and put at the service of the state, but since officially experimenting on people in this day and age was impossible, and unofficial attempts could provoke the wrath of one invulnerable guy capable of cutting an aircraft carrier in half with a glance and moving at several Mach speeds, the inadequate supers were simply kept for a rainy day, trying to straighten out their brains as much as possible, because metahumans were also born among neighbors around the globe, and these neighbors were also not idiots and understood the military potential of such citizens quite well.
However, personally for me, this situation was more of a plus than a minus, because they wouldn't behead me if something happened, and we could have ended up in a world of radical superheroes. At least in "Injustice," where Superman lost his wife, unborn child, and to top it off, his beloved city of Metropolis, burned in nuclear fire because of the Joker, after which he seriously reconsidered his views on giving criminals second chances, and in some cases, the right to life.
I was also immeasurably pleased by the absence of universal tolerance and humanists. No, they were here too, but they sat relatively quietly and didn't buzz. Why? Well... I had a suspicion that it was for the same reason why the government didn't rush, biting the bit, to lay any metahuman on the dissection table to learn how to churn out the same. It was all because the most powerful being on this planet (at least among those known to the general public) was raised in a traditional patriarchal farming family. And in one of the interviews, he once disapproved of all these "newfangled trends." It didn't take even the most hardened idiots to accuse Superman of sexism and homophobia, although perhaps their outbursts were simply not allowed into the information space by smarter people, especially since this world had already had a run-in with Darkseid once. Who, by the way, also didn't approve of such hobbies. Not that anyone asked him, but his stone face made everything clear. Plus, even without Vanderwoman, there were quite stern ladies with superpowers here, from good girls like Black Canary to very bad ones like Poison Ivy, who perfectly managed to dispel any disdain for the female sex in the population, but at the same time almost universally embodied the ideal of female beauty and femininity in general. And promoting ideas of body positivity and "changing beauty" with such a vivid example was, to put it mildly, difficult. As was taking on the role of the mouthpiece of feminism. Superheroines (and supervillainesses) were generally simple ladies: if they didn't like something, they wouldn't hesitate to object on camera and personally "talk" to the opponent—in a female way, and to test the strength of the arguments of truly strong and independent women, especially on themselves, there were no volunteers in the public field. Well, I can't say that this doesn't please me.
But what didn't please me was the fact that we had clearly ended up not in the past of that world from which I was teleported to Hell and where my body was created, but in some parallel dimension. Proof of this was the photos of Lex Luthor that I found on the local internet.
In my memories, Luthor was usually depicted in cartoons as a not very pleasant-looking person. Sometimes they'd give him thick Negro lips, sometimes a vulture's beak instead of a nose, sometimes eyebrow ridges like some orc, or even turn him into a choleric maniac, as in the movie where the original owner of my new name debuted as Superman. In short, they did everything to make the kids immediately understand that the guy was bad. However, my creator evoked associations more with a young Charles Xavier—the bald hero of another comic universe, distinguished by high moral ideals, wisdom, and actually commanding respect not with loud nobility expressed in deeds, not slogans. And although it's hard for me to judge such things, in principle, calling that Lex handsome would be quite correct. He wasn't a screaming sex symbol like Superman or a courteous charmer from the ranks of actors, but a certain strict beauty of a serious person was very much present in him.
Here, Lex was different! With powerful eyebrow ridges, a slightly hooked nose like a vulture, and literally with his whole facial expression screaming: "I'm an asshole! Asshole! ASSHOLE!" Not that this was a direct guarantee that we wouldn't become friends, but the desire to go and introduce myself to "Dad" without preparation and reconnaissance finally waved a handkerchief at me and rolled into unknown distances.
And I could have reasoned about what needed to be done for this very preparation, and perhaps even started doing "something," but then Raven came out of the bath, and my brain didn't exactly shut down, but... yes, there was "grab," "squeeze," and a new round of debauchery. And then a joint shower and a continuation of the debauchery, yes. But then, when the sorceress relaxed back onto the pillows and fell asleep, I was able to return to work. Not that I didn't want to lounge in bed next to a gorgeous girl, but my Sense of Duty prevailed. This time. Even if not immediately.
It took about a week to more or less understand the local society's setup, during which we changed three hotels, and then I got tired of it and visited one of the drug dens—fortunately, finding such "goods" in any more or less large city wasn't difficult. Nor was it difficult to take all the cash at superspeed, including what was in the stash—thanks to X-ray vision for our happy childhood. Well, and with fifteen thousand dollars in cash, you could calmly rent a "legal" room. Of course, not in a cool hotel from a pompous chain where they require if not a pedigree, then at least an ID, but roadside motels in the local USA were, in principle, not bad—like a studio apartment. Not very big, but quite livable. And most importantly—no questions about cash and no demands for real documents—just introduce yourself and sign in an ancient-looking "guest book."
The motel was run by a couple of elderly spouses who happily rented a room to a young couple of students who wanted to "travel the country." Maybe they were surprised by the lack of a car, but we looked decent, clean and solid—I in jeans and a T-shirt, which my suit morphed into by default, Raven—under an illusion, so the surprise didn't turn into awkward questions.
And there, having settled in properly, we could start thinking about comfort and a permanent place in the sun. Which again brought us back to Lex, who was Luthor. And my reluctance to expose Raven to him—one, and to go without checking myself for Kryptonite resistance—two. Apparently, they "vaccinated" me with the appropriate stuff; perhaps that Lex considered the option where I would beat Clark with a Kryptonite club, but that was "that Lex" and "that Kryptonite." In general, a check was needed. And I knew how to organize it.
A Little Later. Somewhere in Kansas.
"Smallville," Raven said. "The city's founder had a tough time with a sense of humor—naming the small town he was founding 'Small Town.'" Yes, we were in Superman's hometown, and the name of this village could indeed be interpreted that way, as the sorceress said.
"Well," I shrugged, "why not? Okay, let's get to work, and then we can have a cup of coffee at the 'Talons'"—after all, even if I'm not a raving fan, I know a bit about Supes' history. And there was the Talon, where Clark once worked as a waiter. How could we not go into such a place?
As for our goal... we visited the local history museum. There used to be a "Meteorite Museum," but thirty years had passed since the meteor shower, the hype had long since died down, and so keeping an entire museum for an "unpopular" event had become economically unprofitable. As a result, most of the exhibits were either thrown away or stuffed into some deep storage, where they were safely forgotten, and the most interesting specimens were moved to the museum dedicated specifically to the town and the entire region. But in reality, we were in for a disappointment: if Kryptonite had ever been here, it had long since been removed, quite possibly by Lex himself, so the green "pebbles" turned out to be just pieces of plastic and glass and were worth slightly less than "nothing."
"Hmm, bummer... Any other ideas?"
"M-m-m, you mentioned that it fell on a cornfield," Raven recalled. "Let's try looking there. Given the force of the impacts, some grains must have gone deep into the ground, and even if someone later collected meteorite fragments, they probably couldn't reach all of them."
"Makes sense," I agreed with the girl's reasoning. "Let's fly."
An old mustachioed man pointed us to the right field, lamenting that in his youth, there was no end to journalists and various ufologists, but now only college students like us were interested. And yes, we were taken for students, apparently journalism students, who were unlucky enough to get an "editorial assignment" to write an article about this meteorite. Every couple of years, a couple of unlucky students were sent with such a task. In general, the man was ready to tell us a lot more, but we managed to escape in time! And in general, let's get back to the search. Finding the fragments turned out to be surprisingly easy. Yes, they were buried in the ground at a depth of a good four meters, but they were clearly visible. And I'm not just talking about X-ray vision, in which Kryptonite glowed with natural green "embers," but also about magical perception! These fragments "radiated" so much that it would have been very, very difficult to miss them.
"Are these pieces of the Philosopher's Stone?" Raven raised her eyebrows in surprise.
"No, that's the very Kryptonite, although..." I recalled all the strange nonsense that various characters did with it. "I wouldn't be surprised if it was at the level of some cool magical metal. Shall we dig?"
"Let's dig!"
So we started digging. Or rather, how "we"? Raven waved her hand, the ground was covered with a dark film of magic—and several cubic meters of soil soared into the air to settle a little to the side. Then came a very careful but reliable experiment, when a teenager with superpowers, very carefully, half a step at a time, under the attentive supervision of a powerful sorceress, spent a whole hour sneaking up to the right place, waiting to see at what distance he would be overcome by weakness and darkening in his eyes.
And he sneaked up.
After which he realized that it didn't happen. At all.
The radiation of the green fragment of Superman's home planet acted strangely on the aura, as if trying to blur it, dirty it... I don't know... introduce interference in its work? But however it was, despite the fact that it felt the effect and even trembled slightly, like water under a gust of wind, it didn't intend to collapse or crack. On the contrary, after a couple of minutes of contact, when I was so bold as to take a handful of small "emeralds" in my palm, it even began to absorb part of the Kryptonite's radiation, the one that had a magical nature, and did so just as calmly as it absorbed the solar one. Yes, the sunlight falling from the sky and the magical component of Kryptonite's radiation were felt by the aura very differently. The closest analogy was different air temperatures. But at the same time, both were quite assimilated, and I didn't even feel like farting from such a neighborhood... Well, since I started drawing analogies, why not remember salted cucumbers with milk or pea soup?
True, magic was only a small part of the content of the crystals—a kind of impurity, and a rather chaotic one at that, without a hint of a meaningful structure of a "enchanted" object. The main spectrum of radiation, even without it, tried to have a negative effect, and this effect was felt. Of course, if you looked closely and concentrated on your feelings, but magical practices had taught me to concentrate quite well.
Nevertheless, the statement of that scientist, Dr. Donovan, about the resistance of my body to Kryptonite could be considered confirmed. It wasn't entirely clear how "resistant" this resistance was—after all, a few small grains were not the same as a huge piece of Kryptonite the size of a fist or some Kryptonite laser that would burn through five centimeters of steel with the intensity of its radiation—but the fact that I wouldn't fall paralyzed from any amount of green substance was a fact. And that couldn't help but please.
The next item on the agenda was to test the effect of the "red sun," which, in theory, affects Superman not like Kryptonite (which turns him into an invalid), but rather quickly "washes out" his strength, reducing the almost God to the parameters of an ordinary mortal. But there was one little nuance here. I had no idea what this "red sun" actually was. What were its parameters? What was its exact radiation spectrum? What about alpha, beta, and gamma waves in its composition? Ultraviolet level? All this was a complete "dark forest" to me. So the only thing I could do was sneak into one of the local college's laboratories and poke around with a laser setup.
And no, this wasn't some fancy high-tech college that could afford an industrial laser that cut through rock; this was essentially a regular "school lab," where a "laser" was de facto a super-powerful flashlight. All it could do was slightly heat the surface it irradiated; even an ordinary person would have a hard time getting a burn. This thing was used for practical experiments on diffraction, interference, and a visual example of how light filters and various lenses worked. In short, regular optics labs. That's why I was able to quickly figure out the setup—it was designed for schoolchildren and first-year students; all instructions and operating rules were written in manuals and lab journals. So at night, I calmly flew in through the window, turned on the device, and irradiated myself with various things for a couple of hours. There was no effect. Sometimes I felt that this particular radiation wasn't very suitable for me, but it was like being offered a couple of sandwiches to "tighten up" instead of a "luxurious three-course dinner with a heap"—also food, and you could even get full, but the first option was more satisfying.
"Well, suppose," Raven gave her expert opinion after all possible tests. "However, judging by how you're preparing for the conversation, this guy... to put it mildly, doesn't inspire trust at all... So I have a question: do we even need this meeting?"
"Hmm," I stroked my chin, "not really. Luthor can greatly simplify our lives, but this is far from the only option. However, I still want to resolve the issue with him. A person with such resources can become a good ally, including in terms of accessing all kinds of mysticism, and in the event of a real threat of Trigon's invasion, he can mobilize the planet's defense forces much more effectively and quickly than we can."
"Okay," the girl pursed her lips, "but I have an idea. And until I implement it, you're not going anywhere!"
"What idea?" I asked.
"In case something goes wrong. We can try to embed something like a beacon in the medallion," she poked at the stone she had once made for me and enchanted for concealment. "Better yet, a portal to a safe place right away, but I can't do that yet, but a precise beacon, so that if something happens, I can open a portal right under you..."
"Okay," I agreed, "we wanted to improve the communication spell anyway, and if telepathic communication is still tolerable (after all, I don't plan to constantly fly around space or plow the underwater expanses), then GPS and the ability to open an evacuation portal—that's good, that's necessary. For you too."
"Uh-huh," the sorceress didn't argue. "Although you still need to learn to open a portal with your own strength, not a ritual."
"Well, I can barely manage it with a ritual," what can I say, unlike purely "physical" disciplines, honing magical skills was many times longer, more tiring, and more difficult. And if there were no problems with theory and my memory already stored at least as much knowledge as Raven herself knew, then practice was much harder—there you needed to develop the skill. And if in ritualism everything depended, for the most part, on the accuracy of the ritual and the components used, then direct manipulation was direct manipulation, and beyond the conditional "Spear of Darkness" and "Wall of Darkness," I hadn't progressed—it was too difficult to hold more sophisticated constructs.
"You've only been practicing magic for a couple of years. And for that time, you have excellent results," the witch encouraged me. "Well, now let's go improve the artifact," after which she proceeded to female domination and bossing around, yes.
We perfected the "emergency escape portal" for another week, but the result was worth it: the upgraded amulet provided stable two-way communication within the world, even without telepathy, but that would be "in the next patch." The range of the portal was much smaller, but "much smaller" relative to "within the planet" meant that the girl could urgently pull me out from "only" a thousand kilometers away. Of course, this was under ideal conditions, without any magical barriers, interference, or being locked in other dimensions, but still, very, very good.
And so, having prepared thoroughly, I went to meet one of the most powerful people in the world—and perhaps the most ambiguous of them. In the sense that, depending on the universe, Lex Luthor could be either almost a saintly ascetic or a complete and broken psychopathic scumbag. Unfortunately, the latter was described much more often than the former, and the appearance of this particular, local Luthor also indirectly hinted at his tendency toward such a type, but appearances can be deceiving, so I continued to harbor a faint hope.