"Lex Luthor is many things, but boring isn't one of them."

"Good, good. Let me see how trashy romantic fiction has evolved since my day, and we can get going."

He goes through a couple of Harlequins and puts them back with a sigh. "How is it that no one in almost a century has outdone Memoirs of a Young Rakehell? You weren't kidding about this country's moral decay needing to be helped along."

"Are you looking for literary quality or sex, because they mostly keep the porn online." 

"The latter. I'm glad it's somewhere."

There's a certain spring in Xan's step as they exit the library.

"The internet is definitely good for a lot of different things, but there's still an aphorism that what it's for is porn." 

"God, I love humans. I had a Wonder Woman Tijuana Bible under my bed back home - a woman literally vested by the gods of antiquity with powers beyond the ken of mortals, and their first thought was to write about her getting railed."

"Can't say I'm surprised. Anything about Kryptonian porn on that memory crystal of yours?"

"Nope. There was a modicum of sex ed, but it was vague and clinical - I think he was expecting me to get the crystal when I was closer to six than fourteen, didn't want to risk corrupting my innocent mind."

"And/or it would have been weird getting porn for his own kid. Did it have any other Kryptonian literature?"

"Did it ever. He threw in a couple of bricks that I assume must have been their equivalent to War and Peace and Anna Karenina, a couple of tedious fantasy novels he liked, and a religious text called the Book of Rao. Fun fact, the Kryptonian Bible is not substantially more interesting than the human one."

"Isn't Rao the Kryptonian sun? Why would they worship it when it is the kind of star that does not give them awesome powers." 

"It kept them alive for millennia before they had space travel; the religion was established before they knew about the yellow-sun effect, and it stuck around out of inertia as far as I can tell. What I don't know is why anyone stayed on Krypton. Even if it was their homeworld, if they left they could fly."

"I know, right. If I'd been raised on Krypton I'd've talked all my friends into bouncing with me for some unoccupied yellow-star planet. Maybe Earth instead if I couldn't find a good unoccupied one but definitely yellow-star." 

"It feels like some kind of belabored metaphor for how people could do great things but usually don't bother. Maybe Krypton's just a setpiece in some college kid's postmodern one-act."

"Pfsh. Nah, they're our backstory, the backstory is always more boring than the actual plot."

"Naturally. We're the Übermenschen rising from the Kryptonian masses, because we were raised without Rao's damping influence. Our hypothetical playwright must be a Nietzschean."

"...I don't know a lot about Nietzche but none of it is good." 

"Oh, he was an asshole, but he had some good stuff to say about how we don't need God, which was very comforting in my angsty adolescence. I was going to call myself Superman when I started heroing, sort of in his honor."

"Yeah, growing up queer and inhuman in the sixties I can see how that would have helped. I don't have a name picked out or anything, myself. Meteor, maybe, but that might be too on the nose." 

"Maybe 'Meteorite' - you did land intact, after all." 

"I did, but a whoooole lot of boulders of Kryptonite didn't. Remember when I mentioned the meteor shower of 1989? I was, uh, accompanied, in landing on Earth."

"Kryptonite?"

"So it turns out we're not the only thing from Krypton that changes under a yellow sun. Kryptonite is these crystals that on Earth start glowing different colors--mostly green, but there's a few red ones--and they, uh, have effects. On us, the effects are that green kryptonite fucks with our bodies and red kryptonite fucks with our heads, but on humans, exposure to kryptonite...sometimes it gives you superpowers and sometimes it gives you seizures or does really scary things to your metabolism, or, or, or, I don't think we've seen all the possible side effects."

"I am absolutely thrilled to hear it. Is the fucking-with-Kryptonians more predictable, at least?"

"Oh, yeah, green kryptonite takes away our powers and makes us really weak, and red kryptonite takes away your inhibitions. I've been on red kryptonite, like, twice, neither time was a disaster but the second time came kinda close."