Growing Pains

What were you supposed to do when you found yourself on top of a building with a nosy reporter and a clone of her superpowered boyfriend?

My first instinct was to fight the clone, because that seemed to be how it always worked out.

Some scientist made a clone and it either turned out evil or was supposed to be evil in the first place, they got in a fight with either the original or their friends, and then they either stayed evil or joined the good guys depending on how things worked out.

Or they died.

I didn’t really know what to do when the clone just asked for help without threatening anyone. I mean, I wanted to fight him. But doing that when he just asked for help sounded like a jerk move.

Maybe I could help him out and get a fight out of it as a reward for helping?

While I was distracted with my thoughts Lois took charge. “Who are you? What are you? And why do you think I could help?”

…probably not the best way to talk to someone obviously unstable without being tough enough for it not to matter, but I guess she hadn’t gotten to where she had by being afraid to ask tough questions.

Though considering where she was, was on top of a skyscraper staring down a possibly evil clone of Superman with only an alien teenager as backup…maybe she should learn time and place better.

“Me AM Superman!” Bizzaro protested, angrily taking a few steps forward, incidentally making Lois tak a few back. Only a few inches from where the roof sloped down to a drop off the whole building. Crap, I should do something about that so the squishy human doesn’t fall off.

Right, control the situation now, figure out how to get Bizzaro to fight me later.

“Hey, focus! What did you need help with?” I said, flying between the two.

The clone scowled at me…I think - it was kinda hard to tell with how messed up his face was. “Memory is…wrong. Me am wrong. Lois smart, Lois can help.”

I nodded. “Right, not sure how much help she can really be, but she can probably call the–” I quickly stopped myself from saying real because that wouldn’t help anyone, “–other Superman and we can all–”

“Me am Superman! Me no need help from imposter!” I realized I had still made a mistake when there was a flash of white and purple out of the corner of my eye and I was suddenly backhanded into the Daily Planet globe.

Note to self: Real Superman is a hot button for Bizzaro. Also he really doesn’t hold back and hits really really hard, ow.

I wiggled a bit to free myself from the indent I had made in the giant stone ball and looked out only to see the real Superman had shown up and was now facing off against Bizzaro.

That could only end well.

I focused on wriggling some more, pausing when I felt the rock groan around me. Normally I would just break the whole thing and not care, but Lois was currently stuck on the edge of a roof with two Superpeople about to go at it and couldn’t fly. Since I liked her for not making a huge deal out of my amateur kidnapping job in the interview she published, I would at least try not scaring her into accidentally walking off a building.

I had just freed myself when I heard a thunderclap followed by a scream.

I looked up just in time to see Superman flying backwards towards me before he collided with my nose and drove me back into the crater I just escaped from. That proved too much for the stand holding up the Daily Planet globe. I felt more than heard the base snap off followed by the eventual feeling of falling through the air.

Superman recovered first from our crash and quickly flew out to catch the giant falling rock while I took the opportunity to just get out of the way. I wasn’t getting stuck in that stupid rock a third time!

While the actual hero was doing damage control, I was looking around for Lois and Bizzaro. Just like I expected, though, neither were anywhere to be seen.

I guess Lois got kidnapped again. The good news is that I was no longer going to be the worst kidnapper she dealt with.

“Alright, I think it’s about time I got some answers.” Superman said next to me, apparently having already fixed the globe. “Who was that and what did he want with Lois?”

“Botched clone of you.” I said casually. “Said he was having memory problems and thought Lois could help.”

“A clone?” I saw a bunch of emotions run over the Kryptonian’s face, few of them remotely positive. But I could guess that someone trying to make another ‘him’ in a lab wasn’t exactly something he was okay with. Before I could comment though, he refocused on Lois. “Help how?”

I shrugged. “I don’t actually know. We didn’t get that far before I got smacked into a building.”

“Then we need to find them before she gets hurt. Can you sense either one?”

I had already been trying. The problem was, trying to find a normal human like Lois in a city full of other normal humans was like looking for a specific needle in a pile of needles. And Superman and Bizzaro had Ki signatures so identical I couldn’t tell them apart, not helped by the fact Superman was right next to me making it hard to focus on the him that was not him somewhere else…

…Did that even make sense?

I shook my head to clear my thoughts. “Doesn’t look like it. Unless you want to fly out of the city and let me look again? Wait, no, that won’t work cause once you get close I won’t be able to tell if he moved. And since he’s probably as fast as you…”

“We’d just end up chasing our tails.” Superman finished.

As the only one that actually had a tail I narrowed my eyes at him. Only to be ignored as he flew off into the city looking for his girlfriend.

Not to be left behind, I chased after him.

Afterall, Bizzaro hit me first. I had dibs on any fights!

-o-

As it turned out, it didn’t take too long to pick up Bizzaro’s trail.

And the moment we did my pride was getting a thorough pounding. Why? Because when I kidnapped Lois Lane, I took her to the cave I kept my stuff, gave her a few snacks I had lying around, and gave her an interview because she asked.

When Bizzaro kidnapped her? He took her to a fancy restaurant, gave her a quick interview, and then apparently took her home to some kind of hidden lab outside the city.

Literally the only thing I did better than a defective clone was making sure she didn’t forget her notes. Bizzaro had apparently rushed them off before Lois could pick up her recording device where it was left on a table. Good for us figuring out where they went. Bad for my self esteem.

Superman helped the police for a bit and asked some questions while I mostly finished off a few of the abandoned plates of food left behind when the diners ran away from Bizzaro.

But eventually we got pointed in the right direction and flew off to look for them.

Thankfully that part didn’t take long.

Once we left the city and the thousands of Ki signatures, it wasn’t all that hard for me to pick out a few of them out in the wilderness. We had a few false starts - campers out in the hills and a few photographers doing nighttime photoshoots - but we didn’t exactly need to get close to realize they weren’t what we were looking for and move on to the next group.

It got really obvious when we found a random white building semi-hidden on a cliff that just screamed ‘hidden lab’. We didn’t even need to guess who was behind it either with the Lexcorp branded helicopter parked right outside.

“Luthor. Of course he is behind this.” Superman said with an edge to his voice.

“I mean, he is kinda obsessed with you.” I pointed out. “At least you get to put him in jail for a bit for illegal cloning or something, right?” I had absolutely zero faith that any rich person with as many political connections as Lex Luthor would face real consequences, but having to deal with the law would at least annoy him for a while, right?

“I don’t know about that.” Superman said bitterly. “I’d have to check but I don’t think there are any laws against cloning anything not human.”

“Oh.”

I guess that was another reason he was pissed about the Bizzaro situation. Not only had someone tried making another him for probably not good reasons, it was also a metaphorical yank of the tail that he wasn’t considered part of the world he protected so often to get the same protections others got just by being human.

And I guess that meant I should expect to run into a clone of myself at some point too. The people that had the tech and knowledge to work with alien DNA were probably tied up with trying to crack Kryptonian DNA, but I was pretty sure Saiyan DNA was a lot simpler to work with.

If they ever switched tracks I could soon find myself fighting my…sister? I wasn’t sure how to think about that.

Before this, the thought of fighting another Saiyan would have just excited me. But thinking about what it would be like to fight a clone of me being used as a disposable weapon for some scientist?

I still didn’t know what to feel about a clone version of me - and I would do the mature thing and repress thinking about it until I couldn’t do that anymore - but I did know that any scientist that cloned me would lose their ‘working legs’ privileges at least.

“Well, I guess we should go grab Lois then?” I said instead, just to move us past this conversation.

Superman sighed. “Yeah, we should go get her before she ends up blowing up the lab somehow.”

The sound of an explosion drew our attention back to the lab just in time for me to see the windows light up from flames dancing inside the building and what looked like a computer terminal crashing through a skylight.

“Huh, I thought that was supposed to be a joke.”

“It was.” Superman deadpanned.