The Legacy of Krypton

[Felix80]

"Jack!"

He shook his head and looked up at his manager from the burger he was making. She was an older woman, in her late twenties/early thirties and Jack always found her sexy. Except when she was pissed off, which was most of the time.

"Someone destroyed the men's room, probably one of those worthless druggie bums I keep chasing out of here. I'll make burgers, you grab the mop and a bottle of bleach."

"C'mon," Jack protested, "I got the last one."

"Which is how I know you're good at it," his manager countered, "And wear gloves. You're going to want them."

That's where Jack was when he got the got the call about his mother, in the men's room of a Big Belly Burger, cleaning up someone else's refuse. Another glamourous adventure in the life of one of the planet's most powerful metahumans.

Jack was Superman's bastard son. He was sure of it. He had all the same powers as Big Blue; strength, speed, flight, x-ray vision, the works. If he wasn't Superman's kid, whose kid was he? He never knew his father and his mother, well, his mother used to be a whore. Literally. A street walker, a prostitute, a harlot if you're feeling archaic. At least she was until the life and the drugs made it hard for her to work.

His Mom was in the hospital. Again. From an overdose. Again. Jack was already on a payment plan with the hospital, trying to pay off her medical bills. The hospital couldn't afford to lend him anymore credit. He couldn't afford an increase in his debt load anyway. His paychecks from Big Belly Burger were already consumed by the rent from low income housing, food, electricity and Mom's hospital bills. He couldn't afford a cell phone, let alone internet. Somehow she'd managed to steal some money out of his wallet while he was sleeping to go buy more drugs. That just set him back even more.

Which was why he'd robbed an ATM. Wearing a balaclava and gloves he'd burned through the locking mechanism with his heat vision and taken the money inside. It had only been a few thousand dollars. That kept the hospital at bay for a little while, but he needed serious cash.

One big score. That's what he needed. One big score, get Mom squared away and move to some island in the Caribbean somewhere and let the rest of the world burn for all he cared. That was Jack's plan. And with his powers, he could pull it off, no problem. He lived in Crown City, so the Crown City Federal Bank looked like the best target.

Jack wasn't Superman's bastard son. Almost 20 years ago there was an incident with a group of Kryptonian criminals who escaped the Phantom Zone. It took Superman months to round them up. During that time the Kryptonians enjoyed their time on earth. Jack's father engaged Jack's mother's services in her professional capacity. The Kryptonian DNA bred true. And Jack wasn't the only bastard Kryptonian child in America.

 

[SeraphNocturne]

Lotus Amrani had not grown up in a particularly charmed life. From the very beginning both her mother and father were little less than fond figments of her imagination. She didn’t know anything about her father. She was told her mother, an eighteen year old high school student, had signed away her parental rights and gave her up as a ward of the state the day she was born, with no interest in ever reconnecting with her again.

She had grown up in the foster care system; bouncing from home to home and enduring all manner of mistreatment, until she was thirteen years old, at which point Farrah and Medhi Amrani took her into their home and welcomed her among their brood of five as if she was one of their own.

It seemed like a dream come true.

Lotus was older than her brothers and sisters by six years and as such she had her own room and spent ample time helping her adopted mother and looking after her siblings. Her parents were hard working immigrants, they owned a cluster of small convenience stores and worked every day to better the lives of their children… and she was ever eager to help herself.

She had always noticed she was different than other people, and it seemed especially prevalent when puberty was upon her. She never seemed to get sick. If she stared at things too hard for too long they burst into flames… and god forbid if she couldn’t hold a sneeze in until she got to the restroom—the ice sculptures her breath left behind from the act were always abstractly interesting at least.

Imagine Lotus’s absolute devastation when, not long after celebrating her eighteenth birthday, both of her parents were gunned down in cold blood at the shop just beneath their apartment. The men had been caught not four blocks away trying to pawn the electronic equipment they had taken but otherwise escaped with only eighty three dollars and a random assortment of goods.

It was the first time she had ever wanted to use her unnatural talents to hurt someone.

Her thirst for revenge has barely been contained. She was not the proprietor of her parents' businesses and had to not only figure out how to deal with those but also had the challenge of keeping her family together. Her siblings ranged from thirteen to nine… and the state truly questioned the abilities of providing for them from a teenager barely a woman.

Her challenges aside, Lotus kept the convenience store below their apartment and promised her siblings she would do her best to keep them together. She picked up a jobs working a small cafe next to the city bank, and when she wasn’t there she was tending to the Amrani’s Cornerstone… and when she wasn’t there?

Her best friend told her she was insane, when she commissioned the suit. It wasn’t until she watched Lotus pull a bus off of the ledge of a city bridge that she really found support for her. Crown City had a new heroine to look up to all at sudden… and with much irony, a new vigilante. She abandoned her night school classes for trade work and took up instead an exciting and utmost satisfying habit of listening out for acts of violence and evil, and making short work of the petty thugs who dared to prey upon the weak and innocent. There came a point, rapidly, when Star Child was now a name to be feared among the gangs and criminals of Crown City.

 

[Felix80]

Once upon a time Crown City was one of the biggest, richest, and best cities in the world. Detroit, Pittsburgh and even Chicago weren't as glamourous as the 'Crown Jewel' of the steel belt. But that was a lifetime ago. Now the steel belt was called the rust belt. There were still steel mines in the rust belt, but none around Crown City. Manufactuiring, the life blood of the steel belt, had left to go over seas. Some blamed high taxes, mkaing the company owners look for cheaper places to manufacture. Some say it was the unions that made demands so high that the companies needed to find cheaper labor to mkae a profit, so they went overseas.

Jack understood that. He'd been budgetting before he even knew the word. Trying to make whatever money he could get, and the food stamps and the government assistance that the social workers could get for his mom, when she was sober enough to go to them, making it all work just enough for them to never get out of the hole they called their life. Jack watched every penny, squeezed it as hard as he could before they all slipped away. If he couldn't make ends meet his mother and him would lose their low income house but not before they missed a lot of meals.

Budgets couldn't be all that different for a household than a city. Crown City spent more than it brought in. They weren't making ends meet. The tax base was gone, shrunk from bad management and changing economics, but the city was still spending like the world depended on their manufacturing. The rich had fled to greener pastures. The middle class had moved on, chasing jobs. What was left were the poor. And in that squalor, crime. No one had much of anything, and they were killing each other over it or getting high to forget about it.

The Question had warned the city about that. Jack didn't know it, this had all happened long before he was born. One of the first masked crimefighters, the Question had crusaded against corruption in the city. Sure he fought street crime and broke up gangs, but he was famous for leaking evidence of corruption in city officials to the press. No one knew it but that was the original Question. He had died, poisoned while fighting the good fight. His mantle had been passed on but that Question wasn't in Crown City.

Jack did his best to not turn to crime. He did whatever jobs he could find. He learned how to fix things by watching Youtube videos at the library. He thought he finally had it made when he got the job at Big Belly Burger at 17. He never finished high school, a job at a fast food place meant steady work. But Mom managed to fuck that up. She was always fucking things up.

Jack sighed. He was in an alley near the bank. He had made sure there were no cameras nearby, security or otherwise. He put the balaclava on, then the gloves. He popped the hood on his hoodie up and over his head and started walking at a normal pace. He didn't get much attention in the street. Jeans and a hoodie were normal enough street attire. It was too warm for the balaclava he was wearing, but no one on the street seemed to care. Crown City, brken as it was, was still a city. Like in every city, to get the privacy they needed people ignored one another. But Jack knew he'd be on camera soon enough, and he didn't want the cops finding out who he was.

Jack wasn't worried about the cops hurting him. He was worried about his mother. It never occured to him that she would do better in prison than on the outside. No one ever wanted their loved ones to go to prison.

He stepped into the bank. No one reacted at first. His x-ray vision found the vault in a fraction of a second. He walked past the teller queue, moving directly for the back rooms. A guard saw him and stepped in his way. The guard put his hand out, signalling for Jack to stop. He looked Jack up and down, and Jack was only 6'1" but he was built like a professional wrestler. The guard put his hand on the butt of his pistol.

"Stop right there, you're going the wrong way."

Jack ignored the guard's warning and kept walking. The guard was just getting his pistol unsnapped from its holster when Jack reached him. His right hand grabbed the guard by the front of his shirt, lifting him easily with one hand. His left hand slapped the guard's hand off his gun, and took the gun for himself, then tossed the guard casually to the floor. Jack wasn'ttrying to hurt the guard. He only wanted cash.

That was probably about the time someone hit the silent alarm.

There were two guards in the lobby. Jack was through the door to the back before the other guard could react. He heard them calling out after him. Stop! We're calling the police! and the like. Jack ignored them and made his way directly to the vault.

They must of radioed ahead because there was a third guard there. She had closed the vault door and was standing in front of it with her gun drawn and was sweating visibly. Jack stood in the doorway. He was holding the gun he had taken from the first guard by the top of the gun, not the handle. He lifted it up to one side, clearly not pointing it at her or anyone else. His fingers couldn't pull the trigger without repositioning the entire gun. He waited for her to see it. The guard didn't say anything. She was sweating visibly. Then Jack closed his left hand.

The gun crunched in his gloved hand, the metal shearing and a few of the bullets exploding in his hand. The guard stared and slowly lowered her weapon.

"Shit," she said, "A meta."

Jack stepped forward to the vault and she scattered away from him. As he ripped the vault door open he heard her key the mic and say, "He's a meta."

"He's what?"

"A meta. A metahuman."

"Wait. Like Superman?"

"Yeah, but a criminal. Like Blockbuster or Solomon Grundy. Bullets aren't going to stop him."

"We'll let the police know. He's their problem now."

Jack was staring at the vault. It wasn't full, less than half full, but there was more money in there than he had ever seen in his entire life. He stood there taking it all in. Shit. As much as he knew that he was going to succeed there was a part of him that didn't really believe it. He had done it. All his troubles would be gone.

Fuck.

He needed a bag.

 

[SeraphNocturne]

It had been hard for Lotus to picture a happy time, for the longest time after her parents' murders. Responsibility had piled on one after the other, and the court system looked to the young woman with scrutiny when it came to assuming the guardianship role over several much younger children… but she was fortunate. She had help. Her aunt and uncle had gotten their visas and moved into the small apartment just above theirs at the Amrani’s building… and as they fell into routine, Lotus had more time to dedicate to herself and felt less pressure of being a surrogate mother and father.

She had done well though. Her Uncle and eldest brothers had taken great care in catering to the Amrani’s only remaining convenience store and so she had taken a job at a small cafe, just aside Crown City’s bank in the busy hub of the downtown area… and this was precisely where she was when the hurrying citizens crowding the streets began to stir in panic.

A sweet smile curled over the golden skinned woman’s lips as she passed a latte off to one of her regulars, that was, until the people inside began to notice the unfolding pandemonium outside. She blinked, her deep hazel eyes shifting to the wide bay windows of the quaint cafe, dark neatly groomed brows furrowing. What could possibly have everyone so unsettled in the middle of a workday? Before long however, the screeching sound of the alarms going off in the building just beside her assaulted her tender hearing and she found herself tearing off the black half apron with an apologetic smile to the next customer.

“Ahhh.. I’m… SO sorry! It’s time for me to take my break! Justin will be right with you–” She hurried to the back despite the protest of the customer, and her manager, who followed her with questions and concerns as she rushed into the small back room and snagged her backpack.

“Hey look, I’m sorry Justin–I just got a call and I forgot I needed to pick up by little brother from school and… and–”

“You’re not gonna get paid if you’re longer than thirty minutes Lotus…”

“It’s cool–just clock me out really quick, okay? Bye!”

She bolted out the back door, her manager shaking his head in quiet disapproval. No, it wasn’t like Lotus to rush out for anything, especially during the middle of a shift. But once she was free of the cafe and in the back alley, she tore open the zipper of her backpack, her eyes settling upon the finely tailored suit within’. Her best friend had constructed the thing for her… of course, she hadn't anticipated Lotus’s needs for the thing, she just as well assumed she was cosplaying or something of that sort, not that she was moonlighting as a vigilante beating the brakes off of any filthy low-lives who dared to terrorize the citizens of struggling Crown City.

It wasn’t fortune or luck that she hadn’t damaged the fragile material of the form fitting suit yet, but Cassidy had promised her to revise the suit later on with far more sturdy material once she had saved up the money for it… flame-retardant lightweight armor that operated like a very secure second skin. For now, she was stuck with spandex and cosmetic jewelry, and while she did look positively badass, she didn’t doubt if she ever faced off with a proper foe the delicate outfit would take one hell of a beating. She hurriedly suited up, tying her long, thick dark hair up and away from her face before fitting the mask around her nose and lips, leaving only her golden-green eyes visible beyond it.

With a deep breath, she felt the world around her shrink away as she looked skyward, rising into the air with effortless ability, and clearing the bank to land at the marble steps, her eyes narrowing as the workers rushed out in a panic.

“Who is that?!”

“Star Child! It’s Star Child!”

“Is she going to stop the robber?!”

She moved to the revolving doors with tense resolve, pushing inside effortlessly, the heels of her emerald boots clicking with each step. The confidence she emitted was almost infectious… the citizens of the bank who had clustered in fear seemed lesser at her presence, and the armed guards within’ had moved well out of her way as she approached the plated glass windows, her eyes glowing red hot. She cut a quick hole in the material as if it was nothing with her heat vision, reaching within’ to grasp the incredibly heavy bank till, the hushed and panicked whispers of confusion from behind her doing little to dissuade her as she carried the immensely heavy item as if it were nothing more than a bag of groceries, starting down the hall and toward the vault.

And there he stood. She drew a deep breath, and with no warning, and the thief in her sights, hurled the heavy till with all her might at his back.

 

[Felix80]

The till should have sent Jack sprawling. It should have done him serious damage. It should have easily knocked him unconscious. If he was human. But Jack was Kryptonian, mostly, so the till shattered into a billion pieces with coins and bills filling the vault room. The bills fluttered to the floor giving a sureal air to a sureal situation.

What the hell was that? he wondered as he turned around.

Then he saw the girl. She was hot, smoking hot really. Green piercing eyes, and a fantastic body barely contained by a costume that looked like it came straight off the set of Game of Thrones. Sexy. Maybe it came off like in Game of Thrones too...

"Fuck you look good." Jack couldn't help himself. Normally he wouldn't say anything. He was too busy trying to stay ahead of the bill collectors to go chasing after women. And he wasn't sure he could actually be with a woman, you know, sexually, without hurting them. Super strength had it's disadvantages. But his x-ray vision worked great.

Fuck. She did look good. And her muscular density was pretty good too. From the way she had tossed that till all the way from the doorway to where he stood meant she had some super strength herself. Probably not as much as he did, he was the bastard son of Superman after all, but maybe enough to fool around with. His mind started to flood with images of what he'd like to do with her. Her luscious red lips wrapped around his cock. The shaft stuck between her ample tits. Oh, he could fuck them titties all day long. Well, probably. He certainly wanted to try. And that's before he even got to her pussy. He didn't know if he would like the taste of pussy, but Jack was eager to find out. He knew where the G-spot was and the shape of the clitoris. And he had some idea of how to use his super powers in the sack.

Except she was a hero and he was a villain. And he was giving up the life after this job. So they would probably never meet again.

Heh. They'd always have Paris.

Jack looked from right to left. "Hey listen Sexy, you don't see a sack or a book bag around here. I left mine at home. I need something to carry home all this cash in, you know how it is."

 

[SeraphNocturne]

Well… nothing at all thus far had gone the way she anticipated. For starters, the guy was still standing when he should be doubled over on the ground howling in pain with the heavy possibility of a few fractured vertebrae. He had barely even flinched when the heavy hunk of metal collided with his back, shattering into what seemed to be a million little pieces. It looked like something out of an action movie… only well, it wasn’t. Fuck… he’s not human.

He’d be the very first inhuman crook she’d come up against yet. Oftentimes, Star Child had to remind herself that she didn’t know her own strength… oftentimes she didn’t particularly care if she happened to put a few pieces of shit in the hospital, especially if there were innocent lives involved. But this was going to make things a bit more challenging. As her new foe turned to face her, he seemed perhaps just as taken aback as she was, because the very first thing out of his mouth was:

"Fuck you look good."

She couldn’t help the absolutely surprised snickering chuckle that escaped before she regained her very solid and less than friendly composure. She crossed her arms over her chest, the skin-tight material of the intricate evergreen hued bodice only accenting those beautifully full globes perched upon her chest, and she shook her head with a dramatic roll of her eyes.

“You just gonna stand there eye fucking me, or are we going to get this over with, scum?” The low, husky tone of voice differed greatly from her usually cheery and sunny, slightly accented tone she carried on with in her day-to-day life. Oh… well, it certainly looked like this one was going to keep on with the eye-fucking, which gave her a good few moments to look around for something fresh to pitch at his head in hopes of potentially knocking him out as she had intended. He had yet to realize that there was something very unusual about Star Child, beyond the fact that she had super strength. When he finally seemed to have regained his senses and perhaps took a few mental snapshots of the heroine in her most impressive and endlessly sexy disguise, he opened his mouth again, and once again she found herself choking back laughter.

“Are you fucking serious right now? What kind of bank robber are you?! And why in the hell do you think I would ever HELP you?” She lifted off the ground effortlessly, and shot across the distance between them, her eyes glowing red hot again as she took aim at the balaclava, hoping to burn the fucking mask clean off his face as she aimed to fly straight into his chest with enough force to, hopefully, knock him clean through the wall. Oh, she had never really had to worry about property damage before, she hadn’t had to fight anyone who had much more than guns and a lot of empty death threats… but she was almost certain busting a hole through the wall and dragging the crook out into the streets would be much better than letting him steal anything, and it wouldn’t take the bank too long to repair it, right?

 

[Felix80]

“You just gonna stand there eye fucking me, or are we going to get this over with, scum?”

Jack smiled at the question she had fired off at him in response to his own 'Fuck you look good." The answer was that he was going to stand there and eye fuck her. Which he proceeded to do.

He didn't expect the heat vision, but superspeed was a wonderful thing. He got his hands up in front of his face so fast he managed to salvage the mask. Which was good because he didn't need the bother of cops coming after him in normal life. It was also bad because he didn't see the ramming attack at all.

She hit him full on in the chest and Jack smashed through the bank wall and into the alley outside. It actualy hurt. Not smashing through the wall; the drywall, two-by-fours, and plywood of the wall may as well have been paper against his Kryptonian body. No, the hit from the girl hurt. That was different.

Jack knew what pain was. His powers had come in slowly. He didn't know at the time that absorbing solar radiation fueled his powers. He would figure that out from reading interviews with Superman after he realized who he was. But his super strength, and flight and what all came to him slowly, starting around the same time puberty did. He always had supervision, x-ray, telescopic, microscopic, etc, absorbing energy didn't change the shape of his eyes. But yeah, Jack knew what pain was.

This wasn't much pain. It was more pain than he'd felt in a few years, true, but when you've felt zero pain, a little bit of pain is shocking.

What really had him thinking though was the sexy babe's heat vision and flight. Was she a kryptonian too? How many bastard children did Superman have? And worse, if they were siblings, what he had just been thinking about was incesst, and that killed his libido. But maybe not, maybe she was just a meta with a few similar powers. Like Mary Marvel.

Jack stood up and walked to the hole in the bank wall. He grinned at the stone cold fox in the ren faire cosplay. He forced himself not to think about how hot she was, especially in that suit that put her massive, beautiful tits on display. He shifted to X-ray and macroscopic vision as he spoke.

"We need some ground rules, sexy. I've been playing nice with you. You want to fight, and tussle, and try to foil my dastardly plans, that's fine. But you stay away from the mask. You reveal my identity and the kids gloves come off. You're not going to like that."

Fuck. Her DNA was definitely significantly more complex than a normal person. Same number of base pairs as he had. But wait a second.

Jack lifted up his hand in a 'stop' motion. He was comparing his DNA to hers. He covered this action with a bit of conversation.

"Look, maybe we can work something out. I want cash. What do you want Beautiful?"

Their DNA was similar enough to be the same species, but different enough to not be remotely related. How the hell did two Kryptonians, not related to Superman, get to Earth? Superman stressed in his interviews that Krypton was destroyed. Had he been lying abut that? Why?

Maybe it was time for Jack to take a quick run to Metropolis and see if he was related to Superman at all.