Play Date update (Patreon)

How did you say no to Superman? Peter wasn’t finding out anytime soon. After a quick consult with Mary Jane—“He’s freaking Superman, of course!”—they were at the Fortress of Solitude. All the Parkers were in costume. The Super-wife went by LL, and had a damn good sense of disguise, because even with the little tip-off Lois had left for her at the shop, Mary Jane barely recognized her. Blonde wig, veiled hat, dark sunglasses, and strong make-up.

They talked shop, of course. Kal, as he asked to be called while among friends, had fixed a traditional Kryptonian meal for them. After a suggestion that Jon show Annie—or rather, Spiderling—around the Fortress, the adults settled in to eat.

Clark gave Peter a signal watch, in case he ever needed the cavalry. Peter submitted one of his web cartridges to the little museum Clark kept of his life on Earth. Lois envied that Mary Jane actually got to go into action with her loved ones—as well as how her ass looked after at least one kid. Mary Jane, meanwhile, envied that everyone… positively everyone… took Lois seriously. And the way she pulled off a pantsuit.

The subject changed to how Peter and his family trained and they were forced to admit it was pretty much by going after bad guys and hoping they weren’t too much of a threat. A halfway-viable strategy when you had fought the Walrus and Humbug multiple times. Clark offered them the use of the Fortress’s holographic simulator, Peter wanted to know how it worked, and they were off to the races.

As much as Lois and Mary Jane both loathed the cliché of the ladies excusing themselves for some girltalk—like Peter and Clark were about to light some cigars and pour themselves some brandy—Lois did have a reporter’s curiosity about what it was like to be husband-and-wife superheroes. And holy crap, did Mary Jane want to know what it was like being married to Superman.

Even with their identities still kept hidden from each other, the four were hard-pressed to come up with many friends that could emphasize with both parts of their lives: familial and super. With that much in common, the ice was quickly broken and the conversation left the topics that’d be covered at any Avengers or Justice League mixer to touch on Robert Altman, the newspaper industry, mutants, aliens, and who their least favorite billionaire was.

It was the kind of thing Jon and Annie would find unspeakably boring; even with super-hearing, Jon didn’t listen to it. It was way more fun finally having someone to show off all the Fortress’s cool stuff to.

***

Even Clark called it the Holodeck at times. It could simulate any environment, but usually it was left on Kryptonopolis, The alien cityscape was at once familiar and foreign. Familiar because it was all towering skyscrapers, roadways, built to accommodate bodies very much like humans and please eyes very much like humans. And foreign because the culture that produced it had never touched, never even imagined anything that any human had ever thought or seen.

The buildings spiraled, shimmied, sloped in ways that no architect on Earth would think to. The roads—if they could still be called that, when they carried vehicles nothing at all like cars—careened through the sky with odd, geometric angles and turns. There were no power lines, no gas stations, no cell phone towers: a million little things, noticeable only by their absence, made it clear this was no futuristic city, not “New York City but more.” It was parallel evolution. An utterly different take on an utterly everydayconcept.

Annie loved it. She wasn’t bored with New York, but she knew what to expect—she’d swung almost everywhere there was to swing. And it wasn’t like she was going to get to go to Los Angeles anytime soon. Even if she did, it would just be more city. Krypton was something else. Half playground, half sightseeing.

“What’s that?”

Jon tried to keep up with her, frustrated by how his speed and flying didn’t seem to give him an edge on her agile maneuverability. He couldn’t outpace her without flying through the buildings she was swinging on. That seemed disrespectful somehow. “It’s a plasma conduit. They used to charge people’s gadgets and cars and stuff, if you stood near them a while.”

“There are a lot of them!”

“People didn’t like standing near them, so they put in a lot of them, so that, uh, you could move around and first one would charge you, then the next would charge you… you could get one charging you wherever you went.”

“Cool!”

Jon shrugged. “My dad says it incent… incenta… made people not want to leave the cities.”

He saw an opening. One of the towers ahead was bifurcated, not a single sweep of concrete and glass like a human would make, but two parallel halves linked together by various bridges, some slanting at an angle from one floor to a different floor. He’d asked about it once and his dad had said it was so various castes and guilds could keep separate, but still work together, without having to get any closer than necessary.

That sounded bad to him. But it was going to come in real handy. Annie’d had a great idea to borrow him a webshooter; she’d begged her parents for an extra one and her mom had given Annie one of hers. Now Jon wore it and as Annie continued her loping course around the tower, Jon darted between the bridging struts. When Annie emerged from around the side, Jon fired a webline at her.

She juked in mid-air like a gymnast in the middle of a routine, contorting her body around the webline so it didn’t hit her, then firing off another webline to whip her in a new direction. Jon flew after her, trying to tag her with blast after blast of webbing, but he’d missed his best chance at a hit. Annie was able to keep clear of his shots without even dodging.

“Hey, how’d you do that? No fair!”

“Fair? You’re the one with laser eyes!”

“I’m not using my laser eyes!” Jon double-tapped the trigger-mechanism on the heel of his hand and instead of firing, the webshooter just made a psssft sound like an aerosol bottle on its last legs. “Hey, it’s out of juice!” He looked up from examining the webshooter to see a webline thwipping in, hitting his chest like so much Silly String. “So not fair!”

“That’s what losers always say!” Annie crowed, coming out of an arc to land in a neat crouch on a rooftop. What passed for a rooftop on Krypton. “And don’t say it has juice, that’s gross.”

“Well, it’s outta web stuff!”

“C’mere, you can borrow one of my cartridges. I’ll show you how to reload it.”

Jon floated in, sneakers scuffing on the ground beside Annie. “I can figure out how to reload it. Your dad does it…”

“My dad had to invent all his stuff. He didn’t get all his powers just from getting a tan!”

Jon burst out laughing at that, finding it too funny to take offense. “We’re in my dad’s Holodeck.”

Annie’s brow furrowed. “Yeah… I guess…”

She wordlessly handed him a web-cartridge, raised an eyebrow when he fit it seamlessly into the webshooter. (Jon didn’t give away that he’d examined the ‘shooter at superspeed, making it appear he just instinctively knew its inner workings.)

Annie took a moment to look out at the strange city, drinking it in instead of ducking and weaving through it. “So, this is where you’re from?”

“No. My dad’s from here. Kinda.”

“Kinda? How can you kinda be from somewhere?”

“It’s techy… techni… he was born here, but he only spent a day on the planet before they sent him to Earth. So it’s not like he remembers it or anything.”

“Then it sounds like this place shouldn’t be such a big deal… to him, I mean.”

Jon blew air through pursed lips. “I guess. I don’t know. Sometimes he acts like he misses being here. It makes me wish I could miss it too, but it’s really just some weird place. I know it’s important, but I don’t know how. And so much bad stuff came from here. Zod and Doomsday and Faora. I told my mom that, but she said not to say that to Dad.”

“Yeah.” Annie nodded decisively. “Adults get weird about this sorta thing. But my dad really misses the old days.”

“In New York? That didn’t blow up!”

“But there were all these people he knew. The Avengers and the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. He tells me stories about them all the time. But they’re not around anymore. Or they don’t want to see him. The way he tells it, it used to be he could just walk up to them and get their help with something, or hang out with them while they did whatever they were doing. So he wasn’t ever really alone the way we are. I mean, except for each other. Not that my parents count really—I bet the Fantastic Four never made him do his homework before he could go on patrol…”

“If you ever come up to the Fortress, you can hang out with me and my folks, no matter what we’re doing.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean, you couldn’t get here, you’d need there to be like a billion buildings between New York and here, but if a plane crashes…”

“Hey, I can get here without a plane crashing!”

“Uh-huh? How?”