Still in a cornfield! 

A different cornfield, though. Cornfields look much alike, but having been around them one's entire life it is often possible to pick out the subtle differences. Such as the unfamiliar blonde girl standing over him. 

"Are you okay?" 

"I- What the fuck just happened?"

Xan evaluates what the fuck has just happened. Snake: replaced by blonde. Corn: replaced by different corn. His clothes: not replaced by anything, he's naked in front of this girl he doesn't know and that's a proprietary mixture of "exciting" and "possible grounds for another misdemeanor arrest".

"Am I hallucinating?" he asks somewhat disjointedly. "There was a snake. And now there isn't. And the corn's different."

"Well, from my perspective, you just fell out of a random patch of thin air, and stuff that weird happens all the time in this town, so, I'm going to go with 'probably not.' Unless you have any enemies that would drug you right before random weird stuff happens so you'll rave like a madman and be discredited if you attempt to accuse them of things." 

"...no, no enemies like that, my enemies are dumb jocks and I can't see how they'd manage to drug me. Uh, nothing weird or interesting has ever happened in my town except for me existing at it, so I'm assuming I am no longer in Kansas. Either figuratively or literally."

"You're still in Kansas. Welcome to Smallville." 

"...I was just in Smallville. And I haven't seen you around before, which is weird because there are like fifty fucking people in Smallville. You wanna run that by me again?"

"...This is Smallville, Kansas, the weird an/or interesting capital of the state. I guess there must be another town named Smallville in Kansas because even if you managed to sleep through all the murder I think the meteor shower in 1989 would count." 

"1989. Alright." He exhales heavily.

"Did we ever get out of fucking Vietnam?"

"Yyyyyes, in the seventies. What year was it when the snake got you?"

"'68. What year is it now?"

"2004. Welcome to the future." 

"Yeah, I figured, s'why I asked about Vietnam - uh, let me see - I'd ask who's President but I wouldn't know him from Adam. Has moral decay eaten through the fabric of society yet, or do I need to help it along?"

"From a sixties perspective? Not all the way, we'd be glad of the help, but we've come a long way. The first legal same-sex marriage was performed in February." 

"Shit, nice! I didn't even think it'd be out of the DSM-whichever-you're-on-now, I was afraid to ask. Did all the Christians get raptured in the millennium flip or something?"

"Nah, they sorta split. There's the reasonable mainstream ones who mostly don't let it get in the way of being reasonable and there's the crazy wacko ones who think God faked the dinosaur bones or something." 

"Can't have everything, I guess. Uh, what else... how are the Amazons doing? Did Wonder Woman ever come back out of retirement?"

"Who the what now?"

"Wonder Woman? Fought Germany in the hilariously misnamed War to End All Wars, then fucked off back to her island paradise of immortal lesbians because she thought we were done killing each other?"

"I got good enough grades in History that I'm pretty sure I'd remember that."

"...huh. What about Green Lantern? Flash? Uh, Zatara?"

"Never heard of any of 'em." 

"...alright then. World without superheroes. I don't know how big you are on astronomy, but was there, at one point, a planet called Krypton?"

"...Not...that the public knows of...but...I did talk to Doctor Virgil Swann a few times, and, yes." 

Then where's your Superman, he doesn't ask.

"Well. Good to know. Um, not that I'm not enjoying the fresh air, but could I maybe impose on you for some overalls or something? If I'm going to be integrating into a world I never made, and all."

"Yeah, sure. You won't be the weirdest thing or person I've brought home. Uh, my parents'll believe you if you tell them what happened, and my brother and my close friends, but most of the town is still mostly in denial about the weird stuff that happens here." 

"Thanks. I could probably find my way to a national park and live off the land, but I'd rather have a roof over my head. At least some of the time. What's your actual name, by the way? I'm Xan."

"Clara Kent." 

"...huh, my legal surname's Kent too. Weird coincidence."

"Is your dad's name Hiram? That's my granddad's name, and who'd've been running the farm in 1968..."

"My adoptive father is- was named Jonathan."

"That is also my dad's name and I am also adopted." 

"Maybe we're - alternate universe versions of each other - but neither of my birth parents was blonde, and it's recessive, though who knows if-"

He stops abruptly. "Lost my train of thought," he says belatedly.

"The fact that it's recessive means it is possible for non-blonde parents to produce a blonde child, but my birth mother was blonde." 

"Oh. I think I was, uh, reading, during that part of Bio."

"Fair enough. Anyway, I'm sure there's other differences, if you're from the sixties, but it does seem a bit odd to be a coincidence...hmm. How'd you know about Krypton?"

"...always used to tell people I was from there. Kids have a lot of imagination."

"Really? 'Cause I actually am." 

"Oh, thank fuck, lying is terrible. I'm Xan-El, the Last Son of Krypton, nice to meet you."

"My Kryptonian name is Aiza-El but honestly I prefer Clara. Nice to meet you. Last Daughter. I wonder what caused Krypton to blow up at such different times in two different timelines..."

"Could've been a question of fractional speed difference on the pod? Thirty years seems like a long time to us, but when you're talking about interstellar travel, it's the difference between 0.999C and 0.998C. Or 50C versus 49C, I guess, depending on how good Kryptonian spacecraft were."

"Reasonable. I'd ask Dr. Swann about it if he hadn't just died." 

"Sorry about that. You mentioned him - an astrophysicist?"

"Yeah. We weren't close or anything, but he picked up some transmissions from Krypton and contacted me after I accidentally burned a Kryptonian character into the side of the barn."

"...How'd you manage that? Some kind of - weirdly precise heat vision accident?"

"I think it was a side effect of having the Kryptonian language downloaded into my head all at once. But yeah." 

"Ah. Yeah, immediately after touching the memory crystal was a weird time. Managed to get through it without heat visioning anything I didn't want heat visioned, but it was a pretty close thing."

"Memory crystal?"

"-I should stop assuming parallels, they keep not being there. Jor-El put three things in the spacecraft that brought me to Earth: me, a blanket or possibly a flag with the sigil of House El, and a crystal containing information about Kryptonian civilization and House El specifically. A human, like Martha Kent, could unlock two documents: my - birth certificate, essentially - and a list of the powers I'd have under the light of a yellow sun. I unlocked an amount of data that couldn't be contained on a Cray supercomputer, and instead of letting it process over time, I decided my super-brain could handle it all at once. So I fell unconscious and woke up to Martha trying to slap me awake. She almost broke her hand."

"My ship had a copy of Jor-El's brain programmed into it. I don't know if the AI is an actual upload or not. I hope not, I'd hate to think that amount of asshole was lurking in my genome somewhere. He mostly tells me stuff, but sometimes I get information out of the Kawatche caves. Do you have Kawatche caves?"

"Never heard of them. Which doesn't necessarily mean they don't exist, but if they're significant somehow Jor-El never saw fit to mention them in the fucking tome he crammed into my head."

"So the Kawatche are the local Native Americans, and at some point in Earth's history some Kryptonian or other decided to put some kind of computer behind the cave walls that I can sort of access by putting the key to my ship in an indentation in the wall. It also had--hm, I think the speed differentials thing doesn't work, my Jor-El visited Earth in 1961. And then when he left he put a pendant with the memory of his stay into the wall."

"Huh. Yeah, if Jor-El was alive in '61 then that's a divergence, I was already on Earth and watching bad children's television by then. And our native tribe was the Potawatomi, and they weren't even originally from there in the first place so there's no way they'd have ancient ancestral caves anywhere near Smallville."

"Lotsa tribes got moved around, maybe in your timeline the Kawatche ware moved out and the Potowatomi were moved in. I can show you the place if you want, but be careful, I don't think you could break anything Kryptonian by accident but there is, also, a lot of Kawatche art and stuff in there." 

"Sure. Probably after I get some pants, though."

Giggle. "Yeah, I'm allowed in whenever but there are in fact guards at the entrance, that'd be hard to explain." Oh look here's a farm house. Clara bounds up to the door, opens it, and calls, "Mo~om, I met some kind of weird boy alternate version of me from another timeline where it's the past! He needs pants!" 

"He needs pants?" asks a surprisingly pretty red-haired woman, emerging from the kitchen. 

"He fell through some kind of snake-related hole in reality without 'em. Mom, this is Xan-El, Xan, this is my mom, Martha Kent." 

Xan, cupping himself considerately with one hand, waves with the other. "I was sunbathing at the time. Hello, you have a lovely home."

"Thank you. I'll go fetch something of Jonathan's," she says, and goes off to do that. 

Clara goes into the kitchen and comes out holding a toddler. 

"This is my baby brother William, Mom had him after my ship did something to fix whatever kept her from having biological children. My other brother Ryan seems to be out right now. We adopted him coming on three years ago after he ran away from his horrible stepfather." 

He nods seriously to the toddler. "Hi. I'm very glad to meet you while I don't have pants on, this is a positive development and I'm thrilled by it."

"Pfft, he's way too young to have any idea why that would matter. We have to keep him from running off outside after his bath before Mom and Dad have gotten clothes on him again." 

"I don't know much about kids." He lets the cupping hand drop, and offers the waving hand for William to shake. "Do you shake hands with them, or is that some kind of faux pas?"

William solemnly grasps his finger. 

"I don't think it's a faux pas, but the difference in hand size could make it difficult," Clara says. 

Martha returns with a shirt and a pair of pants. 

Xan dons the pants and, somewhat more reluctantly, the shirt. "Thanks, M- Mrs. Kent."

Too soft to be heard with non-super hearing, Clara asks, "Were you about to call her 'Mom' or 'Martha'?"

"The latter," he subvocalizes. "She's not my Martha, but there's... a resemblance."

"You call your parents by their first names a lot and you referred to your Jonathan as your 'adoptive' father even before it was established that we were both from Krypton, are you not close?"

"They weren't my parents. Neither were Jor-El and Lara, before you ask, this isn't some castle-on-a-cloud birth parents thing, just. Not my parents. I lived in their house, and they fed me, and they weren't my parents any more than your parents will be if I end up living here."

"--Okay. Sorry. I didn't know." 

At a more normal volume: "He's from the sixties but he wasn't adopted by Grandfather Hiram, he was taken in by people also named Jonathan and Martha Kent, you look kind of like his timeline's Martha but not entirely, it's a little weird." 

Again, subvocally: "I won't tell her or anyone anything personal that you haven't agreed to, but she's--a safe person to tell things to." 

"Thanks."

Aloud, he says "It's lovely to meet you, ma'am. If you need any help around the farm for putting me up, I can drive a tractor and lift well over a ton."

Martha laughs. "So can Clara. We're fine." 

"But if I ever burn something into the barn by accident again, you're welcome to paint over it while I'm still trying to get my eyes under control." 

Martha rolls her eyes fondly and ruffles her daughter's hair. 

Clara hands William to their mother. "Anyway, now that he's dressed, I told Xan I'd show him the Kawatche caves. His timeline doesn't have 'em, he had some stuff in his ship instead." 

"Alright. Have fun." 

Xan follows Clara out.

He exhales a bit shakily. "That went well."

"What are your Kents like?"

"...They care about a lot of things. Civil rights, mostly, various stripes; their shelves are all Communist literature and To Kill a Mockingbird. They're Evangelicals, and I don't think they buy everything Pastor Carmichael's selling but they still took me to church every week and on the holidays. They might've been hippies, if the movement came a couple decades earlier, but they're too set for that now."

He grits his teeth. "They think I'm... wrong. I said a lot of shit - did a lot of shit - as a kid before I knew what people are supposed to be like, and it scared the hell out of them."

"...Oh geez. I'm sorry." 

"Thanks. I'm well clear of them now, much good may it do us both."

"I've ever been inside a church building but pretty much everyone in my family is agnostic of some stripe and, like, my dad worries any about me hurting people but if I actually did I'm sure he'd lecture me a lot but he wouldn't think I was wrong. We argue a lot but it's--always from a place of mutual love and respect. I'm really sorry you didn't get to have that." 

"In fairness I was a pretty fucking awful kid. How are we getting to these caves, anyway? Walking, driving, flying?"

"I like running for getting places people are liable to spot a flyer." 

"Cool. I'll follow when you're ready."

She grins at him, and then she is a blur in the general direction of the caves. 

As is he, a fraction of a second after.

Running is fun, even if it isn't as much fun as flying. Pity it's over so quickly.

Yep. 

She stops just past the entrance, out of sight of the guards: they'd probably let her bring a guest, but why risk it? 

The caves are...cavelike. There's art on the walls, and Kryptonian writing. 

The writing on the walls tells of a "warrior from the stars" who had the strength of ten men and could start fires with his eyes, who saved the tribe from some kind of terrible peril and promised that one day his descendant, "Naman," would return to the Earth. 

"...How did your Jor-El know he was going to send you away and still not have time to go with you? Or are they talking about some other descendant?"

"I'm not sure about the exact details but I'm pretty sure this is a more distant ancestor than Jor-El, considering that Jor-El was youngish in 1961 and these are way pre white dudes. And I think visiting Earth might have been some kind of...family tradition? I don't know what the whole Naman thing was originally alluding to for sure, but you know what, I'm here on Earth, I'm friends with any Kawatche, Naman is me even if it wasn't supposed to be."

"Ah, I was confused about the timeline. If visiting Earth was a family tradition it makes sense that Jor-El would want to send you here, higher chance of a positive reception. I think in my timeline he did it because - reading between the lines of what Green Lantern says, my Earth is kind of a galactic backwater? Somewhere nothing happens, so his kid would have a chance to grow up without too many alien troublemakers."

"Makes sense, I guess. Also we look very human! That's probably not that common. Two species on unrelated planets that look identical is weird enough. And my boyfriend is a biology nerd slash doctor-to-be and let me tell you, on the chemical level we're very different, but on the macro level? You can get very thorough and not find a difference." 

"I've never had any complaints either. What's your boyfriend like? Besides thorough."

"He's sweet. And he gets so enthusiastic about medicine, it's a joy to watch. And he's so smart, and he's incredibly loyal to the people he loves. And he's thoughtful, and he's sincere, and he's usually really bad at lying but he's very good at keeping secrets." 

"That's sweet. I've never had anybody last longer than me sucking him off under the bleachers, but maybe I'll have better luck in the twenty-first century."

"No idea. He's the only boyfriend I've ever had, and I wasn't exactly looking when I found him, so I don't really know how one goes about acquiring a significant other on purpose. I had a crush on a girl once, but she was tragically straight." 

"Girls are complicated. I always wanted to try, but they talk shit behind your back instead of to your face, so I never had a plausibly deniable opening."

"Also there's all these obnoxious social scripts that praises guys for having lots of sex and shames girls. Makes it a lot more--threatening--to proposition one out of nowhere."

"Oh, nobody got praised for having sex with me. S'why it was always plausibly deniable and under the bleachers."

"Yeah, but--as a girl, even in this comparatively enlightened day and age, if I am approached by a boy I don't know very well and he asks me for sex, especially if he has a reputation for being trouble, before I can even think of how I want to respond I have to weigh the possibility that if I say no he might try to rape me. One in three women experience sexual assault at some point in their lives. Now, me in particular, I don't so much have to worry about that, on account of being a Kryptonian surrounded by squishy humans. But, uh, it's been tried. Admittedly also in the other direction--there was this woman this one time who mind controlled guys, it wasn't pretty--but, yeah." 

"Huh. Well, I didn't have those statistics or that perspective, but since for unrelated reasons I never approached any women I guess I can give myself a cookie for never having accidentally threatened to rape them either."

"Most girls don't think it through this far, they'd just react. But here," she says, miming handing him a cookie.

"Thanks."

He examines the wall paintings. "Anything else to check out in here? Hidden Kryptonian supercomputer, or something?"

"There's...some stuff...but I can't control it, I'm pretty sure the Jor-El AI is controlling it and, uh, fuck that." 

"Yeah, reasonable. Let's get out of here, then."

"Sure. Anywhere in particular you wanna go next?"

"Not sure, honestly, my Smallville really did have nothing to do. Did we get a halfway respectable library at some point in the last forty years? If so I could sit down with the Britannica and flip through for some planetary context."

"We have a halfway respectable library! Its selection is, well, it's still a small town, but you can order books from Metropolis and pick 'em up there, and it's better than the Communist Manifesto and To Kill a Mockingbird, and they have at least one encyclopedia."

"Miracles do happen. Let's go there, I guess, and I'll flip through what they've got and see what's changed."

"Sure!" 

She zips out of the cave and through the streets of Smallville, stopping in an unobserved spot near the front of the Smallville Public Library. 

Xan follows, and follows her into the library itself.

What does the illustrious Smallville Public Library have to offer in the way of a reference section?

It has, in fact, two encyclopedias, the Britannica and the World Book. There are also about a dozen shelves of miscellaneous informative nonfiction on various subjects. 

Between the door and the reference section is a long table up against the wall with four computers on it. 

Wow, computers got almost usable. From Jor-El's crystal he knows they've got a ways to go, but this is some pretty serious progress from the machine language monstrosities he'd have had to work with back in the sixties.

He goes through the Britannica not at top speed but at a clip such that anyone looking on would think he was just looking at the pictures. The World Book follows.

"We've got an Internet now?" he asks Clara, sotto voce. "Or, well, a planetary intranet. But still!"

"Oh, yeah, that super didn't exist in the sixties. We do!" 

"It still sounds pretty primitive compared to some of the specs in the crystal..." He goes over to one of the computers and logs in with the guest password taped to the monitor. Within a minute or so, he's on Ask Jeeves looking up circuit board diagrams and Moore's Law.

He whistles quietly. "This is some good stuff. If Krypton still existed I'd have a hell of a routine for the comedy clubs."

Pout. "Unfair. The Jor-El AI never gave me an engineering education." 

"Maybe yours wasn't as interested in having you conquer the planet. Or maybe the AI got corrupted and didn't want to make you capable of replacing it. Or maybe he just didn't think girls could code."

"Oh, I'm pretty sure he wants me to conquer the planet. No, it's probably just that he's a cryptic stingy bastard and doesn't think I need it yet." 

"Well, his loss, now I get to teach you instead. -I do wish I had the memory crystal, the direct transfer is easier, but I can probably get most of it across in plain Kryptonian."

"Cool. --Actually, hey, my boyfriend's brother owns, like, an actual company, with scientists and an R&D budget, how do you feel about catapulting Earth's tech level forward and also getting rich." 

"-Positively! Jor-El would hate it, but that's a plus, honestly, fuck that guy. I don't think I ever got your boyfriend's name?"

"Julian Luthor. His brother's name is Lex." 

"Ah, that's a name you can trust. Now, if he called himself 'Alex' I'd be headed for the hills."

"Hm?"

"Oh, it's- my Kents put 'Alexander' on my birth certificate, and I came up with 'Xan' as a nickname before they ever told me about my real name. 'Lex' is another way to creatively chop up 'Alexander', and indicates that this guy is a man with taste. But 'Alex' would be boring, and I don't do well with boring."

"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." 

"...how much inhibition? Are we talking 'happy drunk' or 'putting your fist through a brick wall'?"

"I dunno, I mean, drunkenness is pretty different for different people, it's the closest metaphor I've been able to come up with but I honestly don't know how to generalize from just my example. The first time someone had used it as a stone in a ring and I didn't realize it was kryptonite 'cause I'd only seen the green stuff before, I put the ring on and mostly cut class and made out with my boyfriend until the ring came off, but the second time my friends had gotten infected with this horrible adrenaline-seeking mindfucking kryptonian parasite and one of them slipped a red rock in my pocket so's I'd enable their stupidity and I, uh, did, I'm very lucky I took my jacket off before someone died because of it." 

"So, it turns you into me. I'll try to stay clear, I'm me enough already."

"If someone says, 'hey, I know, let's drive a car off a cliff' are you going to think that's a good idea?"

"Depends on who's asking. If it was Gary Sawyer from my bio class, I'd love the chance for a front-row seat."

"Someone you would prefer not die." 

"...you're also invulnerable."

Giggle. "Someone who owes you money you won't be able to collect from their corpse and their next of kin won't cough up." 

"Oh, sure, I'd stop them then."

"Then you might have a little more self-control than me on red kryptonite! I still really don't recommend it, though. And stay well away from the green stuff if you can, that's just not a fun time at all."

"Yeah, being weak sounds like no fun at all."

"And sick, and...bleah. Also! I don't know if you know what pain feels like, but it turns out, getting shot is incredibly not fun when the psycho figures out your weakness and decides to make kryptonite bullets."

"I've always wondered... but I'd rather not have that stuff inside me. Sounds lethal."

"I have enough people I trust that they managed to get the bullet out before it could do any lasting damage, since it only hit me in the shoulder, but it could've been a lot worse. If you wanna know what pain feels like we can spar, it turns out that our invulnerability only goes so far when we're up against people as strong as we are. And I'll be honest, getting shot is a lot worse than getting punched in the face."

"I'll have to take you up on that at some point, all my fighting came from the crystal and I never got to practice any of it. Right now, let's not get distracted from... going... where are we going, actually?"

"The Luthor mansion."

"Good, good. You can tell a lot about a person from their house. For example, if it's a mansion? Rich person, probably."

"Yes, that happens when you own a multimillion-dollar corporation." 

"My deductive skills are unrivaled."

"It used to be Lionel Luthor's, but he was a shitty dad, so Lex proved that he had killed his own parents and now he's in jail and Lex has control of the company."

Xan nods. "Good on him. What about Julian, is he involved with the company at all?"

"Nah, he wants to be a doctor. This was a point of contention between him and Lionel but jail has effectively ended that struggle. Not that Julian was ever in any danger of losing." 

"Good on him too, then. It's nice when things work out."

"They tend to do that when you're stubborn enough!"

"Good to know."

"Admittedly knowing that if push came to shove he had my backing probably helped." 

"Yeah." He looks pensive. "You... like people, huh."

"...Mostly, yeah. Not, like, all of them, but in general, yeah."

"That sounds like a nightmare, to me. Liking that many people."

"Because they're not Kryptonian, and can get hurt?"

"What? I- I guess, but also just... you'd have to care. About practically everybody. Couldn't hurt them, couldn't hurt anyone they liked, not even by accident, or you'd just be hurting yourself."

"Oh. Yeah, that's...I mean, it's not really hard not to hurt people. I mean, not physically at least, but I don't like people so much that if people decide to get offended by me I can't brush it off as their problem. But as long as I don't use my powers on them...the world's set up to make accidental harm harder. Sure, there have been a few close calls where I threw something and it almost hit someone half a mile away, but hey, it got that one guy to give up drinking when a tractor crashed out of the clear blue sky next to him, so no harm no foul. Um. This isn't helping, is it. I don't...it really mostly isn't hard for me to not hurt people. You're right about how it would be hurting myself if I did, but--you know that thing where it's hard to bite your own tongue hard enough to hurt, on purpose? I get a little bit of that towards other people." 

"I don't think I have that."

"Then it might make caring about people harder. And I...caring about people isn't without its hardships for me. But the people I love, they make me really happy. So it's worth it. Not everyone is like me, I'm an unusually friendly person." 

"...I guess what I'm trying to say is that you seem like a good person. And it's nice to know that you exist."

"Oh. Thank you."

"How much longer to the mansion?"

"Ah, sorry, we were talking..." zip. 

Zip!

"Lex! Julian!" she calls, stepping into the foyer. "You'll never believe what happened!" 

"I sincerely doubt that," a man with an unusually high baldness to age ratio says. "Who's this?" 

"This is Xan-El, he's from another timeline where lesbian superheroes won World War I and Krypton blew up several decades earlier! His birth parents' names match mine but he got a memory crystal instead of an asshole AI. It's 1968 in his timeline." 

"...Well, I wasn't expecting that. But I believe you." He stands up and offers his hand to Xan. "Lex Luthor. Pleased to meet you." 

Xan shakes Lex's hand. "Xan; I don't usually tack on the El. Similarly pleased to meet you. I'm told you have an R&D budget!"

"I do have an R&D budget. What are we proposing I do with my R&D budget?" 

“The answer is not ‘give it all to me’, you can relax. I have Kryptonian tech schematics in my head, courtesy of Jor-El’s memory crystal. Back home, I resigned myself to having to reinvent the wheel until I could build myself a computer that didn’t look like a Model T engine, but you have people. People who do this for a living, and more importantly, aren’t working out of an elderly couple’s barn. I’m not going to pretend I’m not a little self-interested; I want to get my hands on some of this tech, and I don’t want to have to solder all the chips into place with my own heat vision. But my self-interest is to your benefit.”

"...I didn't think you were going to try to extort me," he says, amused, "Clara wouldn't cooperate with that. 'You have the schematics for Kryptonian tech in your head' is the answer to the question I was asking. And is a very good answer."

“You didn’t think I was going to try to extort you, but the idea that I was going to scam you can’t have been far from your mind; you’re a businessman, and I opened with ‘I’ve got a brilliant way to make you some money.’ At any rate, yes, Kryptonian tech. A lot of the really interesting stuff depends on island of stability elements, but until they exist I can at least give you a massively unfair advantage in the field of consumer electronics."

"If you were going to try to scam me, you were hardly going to say so up front." 

Xan nods. "Anyway, I can talk to your people whenever, or if you'd like I can give you an overview in person first. I'm kind of excited about all this!"

"I would love an overview." 

Xan launches into an explanation of the basics of Kryptonian technology!

As he mentioned earlier, they relied heavily on island of stability elements for power and exotic effects. Krypton had deposits natively, but with a sufficiently powerful particle accelerator they can be home-grown. There are other potential power sources, though, from other galactic civilizations Jor-El had observed, some of which have less onerous requirements; they won't be making a Body-Mold or a stasis chamber any time soon, since those need the island of stability's weirder properties, but they can make some very nice things.

Kryptonian consumer electronics often had a holographic (or, in the higher-end cases, telepathic) interface, and served many functions. There's one device Xan is particularly excited to see implemented, which sounds like a cross between a phone, a personal computer, and a 3D printer. It straps to the user's off-hand, and projects a sort of holographic glove as its command interface.

As Xan expounds, Lex's face grows more and more interested. 

"I'm glad your Jor-El was more forthcoming than ours," he says when Xan's finished. "I can get a team of engineers ready within the hour. How do you want to tell them you know all this?"

"I can pretend to be an unreasonably lucky human," he says. "Touched a mysterious crystal, schematics seared themselves into my brain, the crystal broke? A Kryptonian-oriented telepathic interface presented with a human nervous system might actually do that, oversell the data and fry itself. It'd probably overwrite half of the human's episodic memory in the process, but they don't need to know that."

"Wouldn't be the first time something wacky happened to someone who came in contact with--well, something weird, they don't know about Krypton qua Krypton." 

"That... is good to know. Should they continue not knowing about Krypton, in particular as the source of this tech."

"It'd probably be fine, previously the only way to explain that Krypton existed would have ended with 'and I know this because I am a space alien' but if we're blaming it on a rock then that doesn't out anyone."

"Cool, I can say things like 'Kryptonian neurostructure' instead of 'the neurostructure of whatever strange alien race produced this miraculous technology,' that would get old fast."

"Do we actually have significantly different neurostructure?"

"Oh, sure. For one thing the solar energy accumulator organelles are woven in there, we get a surprising amount of feedback - that's why I sunbathe so much. For another thing, we've got more space - but humans have more flexibility, more redundancy, more adaptability. Some of the things you can do to a human brain and leave it still basically functional are horrifying. You ever hear about Phineas Gage?"

"The name sounds familiar..."

"19th century railway foreman, dynamited a rock and accidentally sent a railroad spike straight through his own head. Lost almost his entire frontal lobe. Lived for twelve more years, having suffered some personality changes but otherwise remained fully functional."