Regardless of whether he can come up with an actual plan at some point, right now what he runs into is pandemonium.

The Watchtower, floating in its steady orbit around the Earth, seems to be going through a rough patch. There is a loud alarm blaring and red lights flashing; the room he finds himself in as he steps out of the teleporting mechanism is itself in disarray, with chairs fallen over (and one split in two), documents all over the floor, and one computer terminal is loudly on the fritz, sparks flying out and screen showing distorted broken images. Plausibly because of how it has a human-shaped dent on it.

On the bright(?) side, the automatic sliding door leading out to the hallway is also dented, badly enough that it cannot in fact close anymore, even though it is still trying its pathetic best to do it.

Exc- nothing about this is excellent. Conv- nothing about this is convenient either.

Fortuitous. It is fortuitous in the extreme that the space station he is currently in is being destroyed by a rampaging Kryptonian.

Think. What would constitute a good reason to have come here? He can often assume, even if his actions seem insane, that some part of his brain was working to produce them.

...the good reason to come here is that Batman, last he checked, was suffering from at least a few broken bones. And Batman always has a plan. If Batman is interrupted in the execution of such a plan, he will sometimes leave a way for some other intrepid soul to carry out the rest. (It's happened before. Not to Tintin, but it's happened.)

Tintin doesn't know where Batman would keep personal items like, for instance, half a pound of Kryptonite. What he does know is how to rapidly case an unfamiliar environment. After determining to his satisfaction that Batman's locker probably isn't here, he strides into the hall to seek his fortune elsewhere.

The hallway shows further signs of a rampaging Kryptonian, though its lack of furniture limits it to what multiple nigh-indestructible people fighting each other can do to the walls.

Also, under the alarms, Tintin can definitely hear noises that are compatible with a fight between several metahumans happening down that way. So now he has a choice: walk down the hall away from the fight or towards it.

Well.

First he's going to heave a very quiet sigh about how utterly bullshit it is for him to fight Superman now. He might actually be able to fight Superman in, say, twenty years, if he fought rather a lot of petty criminals and madmen with more engineering degrees than friends who thought that having a gun made out of an air conditioning unit made them immune to punching.

You know, if he doesn't turn out to have some kind of arbitrary level cap. Which, admittedly, is pretty likely. Probably he was never going to be able to fight Superman.

After briefly bemoaning his fate, yes, he is going to head towards the fight.

By the power of narrative just deserts, if the player character wants to run towards the horrible life-threatening danger the journey is bound to be short.

Multiple rooms he walks past show sign of Superman's erstwhile presence, but the damage there is nothing compared to what he finds when he finally gets to the room the fight is happening in. A command and meeting room of sorts, huge with computer screens covering one wall, a massive circular table with several comfortable-looking chairs, various individual holographic terminals as well as a control panel for the main screens, and tasteful decoration, is probably what the room used to look like. Now most of the screens have been destroyed, there are cables hanging from the ceiling down from where a large hole got made, the computers all around are various kinds of nonfunctional, the meeting table is lying in a corner in three pieces.

And Superman is kind of bullshit. The Flash is lying unconscious in a corner, the Martian Manhunter is trapped in another corner surrounded by a lot of fire and looking like he's trying his best to leave, and Wonder Woman plus two green lanterns are still up and losing a fight against the most powerful man on Earth turned evil.

Goddamn it.

...triage. He's no healer; the Flash can stay where he is. He's not punching Superman yet.

He sighs again, reaches into his undersized messenger bag, and removes a full-sized fire extinguisher, with which he begins ameliorating the Martian situation.

Well he will within a second or two find himself inside a closet. "I do not want to kill you so please take this as a warning: don't join that fight."

The closet door cannot be shut due to extensive structural damage but Superman hopes his point got across well enough.

And he vanishes.

Hey!

"Condescending American bastard," he grumbles. Might as well take a moment to reassess anyway, though.

What can he actually... do? He's obviously physically outclassed, here. He never saw the need to acquire any Kryptonite, not being in the habit of doing things that would piss off Superman.

He could execute a tactical retreat. He doesn't want to. That sounds terrible and boring and like a bad story.

...he has to pull out the big guns, here. Well, obviously. Evil Superman, big guns - like berries and cream, they go together.

He reaches into his bag and pulls out a flaming sword. Inhales deeply.

Kicks open the door and flashes forward, faster than the human eye can see, swinging the blade at Superman's shoulder -

The main effect this has is surprising Superman for long enough that one of the green lanterns manages to land a solid hit and send him flying to the wall. The effect this does not have is actually injuring Superman in any way.

The heroes glance at Tintin. Superman glances up at Tintin as he gets up.

And then Tintin is dead.

Zher-El has probably seen as many as several people die in his time spent as a superhero and his significantly less time spent as a supervillain.

As a rule, they do not explode into Canadian legal tender. Tintin may very well be the only exception to this rule that he will ever encounter. A sizable collection of coinage - Loonies, Toonies, a surprising number of fifty-cent pieces given their relative scarcity - rattles to the floor.

Tintin wakes up naked on his couch.

"Agh," he groans. "Putain de merde de bordel, fuck, Scheiße, and more fuck."

There's a bottle of Tylenol on the coffee table. He put it there last time. He rattles three into his palm and stumbles to the kitchen and slams them into his mouth and gets a mouthful from the faucet. Swallows the pills. Retches into the trash, despite his best efforts. Sighs, goes back to the coffee table, gets some more pills, washes them down. Doesn't throw them up this time.

"Finally, a win," he mutters.

He throws an arm over his eyes and sits back on the couch. It's seen worse than his geometrically perfect ass.

Objectively, it was incredibly stupid. Everything he did today was incredibly stupid.

Was it worth it, in the name of letting whichever Lantern that was get in a good hit?

Of fucking course not! He's been holding on to that life since he graduated high school! God damn it.

Maybe he'll get another one if he goes back to uni.

Maybe he can take up self-flagellation and become a monk, since he's considering going back to uni.

Okay. What now. He's not going to stop the rampaging Kryptonian, obviously. He... probably shouldn't stay in Metropolis, honestly. The deposit on this place isn't much, especially compared to the EV of not being vaporized by Superman again if he recognizes the idiot who tried to stab him.

Maybe he'll just... wander for a while again. That was alright. Going where subspace takes him. Until he finds somewhere he belongs.

He looks up. There's a door, with the star blazoned on the front. "Oh, don't push me," he groans, pulling on some jeans and swinging his bag over his bare shoulder. "You know I'm coming."

He decides against a shirt. Maybe he'll land in Mallorca, or something. Warm weather might be nice. He doesn't actually think that subspace responds to factors like whether he's shirtless, but. Who cares. It's not like he doesn't have clothes in the bag. He'll adjust when he gets where he's going.

What was it he said earlier? Running away sounds like a bad story?

Sure. Maybe. Whatever. Give him a bad story on a beach, he thinks as he pushes the door open and walks through.

The other door turns out to be about half a mile away. It's a nice bit of exercise. Clears his head a little.

He opens the door when he comes to it. How's the weather? Balmy?

Hahahahahaha.

No.

Tintin doubles over as the wind hits his body, like it was a physical blow. A physical blow from someone strong - not Superman-strong, obviously, but maybe... who's strong, Clayface? Maybe Clayface.

The door closes behind him and vanishes, even though he knows perfectly well he was behind it. Thanks, subspace.

He clenches his teeth and reaches into the bag. There's a parka in there somewhere, rated for Labrador if not the actual Goddamn north pole. He pulls it out and wraps it around his torso. Now his legs are worse off than his nipples, which is a better state of being than - oh, shit.

He looks down at his bare feet in the snow.

He looks up at what could not be more clearly the Fortress of Solitude.

Swearing fluently under his breath, he trudges towards the crystalline edifice. Hopes to God it's got central heating. He'll deal with the angry Kryptonian when he doesn't have to worry about his toes falling off.

The fortress looms. And looms. It is actually unreasonably tall, he was farther from it than the thought he had been.

Thankfully for him, he walks right into an invisible wall and just a second later the man himself is there, in all his spandex-clad glory.

"...I killed you," is the first thing he says, floating half a foot above the snow with his arms crossed.

"Yes, kudos on that," Tintin grunts. "How much did I drop - not actually important. Do you feel like killing me again, perhaps by exposure, or may I entrez."

Hmm.

"Please."

Actually what's going to happen instead is tightly and carefully controlled heat vision that does not hurt Tintin at all but does entirely negate the cold and bring him to a comfortably warm temperature.

"Eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents. Canadian dollars.

"I had never before gotten loot for killing someone. What the fuck."

"Oh fuck, thank you," Tintin says. It could be called a moan, actually. The removal of negative stimuli is a positive stimulus and at the high end positive stimuli kind of bleed together and also he's not wearing underwear and Superman just consciously didn't kill him and - it's a lot, okay, he's not just moaning out of nowhere. Except from Superman's perspective.

"Well," he says after collecting himself, "I am Canadian. Quebecois, even. I'm not going to drop your change."

"Of course. How did I not think of that.

"Now the next surprising fact is that you showed up barefoot by my fortress, which I should inform you the Justice League has made sure is impossible to spot with satellites and whose coordinates are a closely-guarded secret. This could be grounds for killing you if I were some other kind of person. And also it would get tedious to keep getting so much Canadian money."

"- oh, goddamn it."

Tintin is not, strictly speaking, stupid, but he does occasionally miss the blindingly obvious. Like the fact that subspace is, as one might expect, subconsciously directed. And the fact that after being murdered by Superman, one might expect his mind to wander back to Superman shortly after, no matter how much he might consciously like to have a nice tropical vacation. Superman is, in fact, sort of a gravity well in his mind right now. If he got another door now, he bets it'd take him to the Rao system, or wherever the man crashlanded on this planet, or, hell, maybe he'd just get an exit door into the man's unsurprisingly muscular arms.

"I do apologize," he says, sounding more irritated than sorry. "It is almost entirely my fault, and the bit that isn't is the bit about you murdering me and I certainly can't say you didn't warn me."

Superman tilts his head with a bemused smile. "Yes, one would expect that except in cases of kidnapping it would in fact be your fault that your ended up any particular place. I got to give it to you, these are some steel guts. I guess being immortal gives one those."

"I am almost certainly not immortal, for the record. Just having a shit day."

...likelihood that this is a warning of impending bodily harm: high. Amount he actually cares about keeping this secret from Superman, who could certainly torture it out of him if he wanted: nil.

"Ugh. Fine. You know how you have powers? I have powers. I can go places. Not consistently, rarely of my own expressed volition. I can... do things with space? You've seen the bag. I can fight like humans can't. A couple of other things, few of them useful. I am not immortal, I just get to cheat a couple of times - one less, now. Again, can't say I wasn't warned, but for the record, thanks. And if you want an explanation, sorry, I didn't get a manual."

His smile has been getting wider as Tintin talks. "Well, I guess I should play a better host, then. Want the Superman-style lift to my secret lair where absolutely no one will be able to come to your rescue no matter what I decide to do to you?"

Oh, this is going to get worse. Well. Maybe at some point he'll end up in negative integer overflow land with 2³² minus 1... happiness units, whatever.

Happiness probably isn't a discrete unsigned integer, but hey, hope springs eternal, and he likes to pretend he didn't take that programming class for no reason.

He comes back to reality and gives Superman a look. "How could I possibly refuse?"

Oh he looks fun.

So Tintin finds himself being bridal-carried to the top of the fortress where part of the wall parts into a square hole they can fly into. For the two seconds he's in the air for he feels cold again, but as soon as they're in it is comfortably toasty.

Also, the inside is pretty. Though the inner walls and floor seem to all be made from the same crystalline material as the outside, the place is set up almost as a mansion of sorts: the hallway they arrive into has a nice sea-green carpet and a door leading to something like a living room, furnished with a sofa, a flatscreen TV (and video game consoles), a piano, a few paintings, and a large bookshelf covering half of one of the walls. There's a door—transparent, but not glass—that leads to a balcony outside with a view of the Arctic sea, and another door (this one opaque and shut) in addition to the one they came through, and next to this latter door there's a staircase leading down along the wall.

Superman sets him down and says, "We actually never introduced ourselves. I'm Clark Kent, or Zher-El, whichever you prefer."

"Florian Saint-Martin. Tintin, to my friends, and I'm sure you'll choose whichever seems funnier to you."

Tintin looks around. Is reluctantly impressed; somewhere, under the spandex, this man has taste.

"You know, in my day job I'm a journalist," he says. An apparent non sequitur. "I've done articles on you, though I can't imagine you read all the news with your name in it. You'd need a lot of eyes."

"Not every patrol is intensely entertaining, and reading some of those whiles my time away. I typically ignore the tabloids unless I'm feeling in particular need of a laugh.

"I do recognise your name, though. On the subject of yours truly I think I've read, what, fifteen of your pieces? Maybe sixteen?" It was sixteen. "Although most of those were about my little friend group in general, I think it was six about me individually."

...that is, actually, a somewhat charming way of saying that he does in fact read everything that mentions his name. "Then I guess you haven't missed much. And I can't imagine you missed that I've never gotten a one-on-one interview with you - you've always been a busy man, and my talents are not... widely recognized."

He raises one eyebrow and curls a corner of his lips in a way that manages to unambiguously convey that he is thinking impure thoughts about that statement.

Tintin manages to unambiguously convey that he is unimpressed. Something about the way he's pursing his lips like there's a small freshwater amphibian in his mouth.

"So, unless you had plans that you really don't want to postpone, I was wondering if we might pass the time with a chat, on the record. If I leave here alive it'd be a feather in my cap, it'd get out a message very neatly, and you seem like the kind of person who likes the back-and-forth."

"You're ballsy, I'll give you that. Want anything to eat or drink?"

And he disappears before hearing the answer but he's Superman so he'll obviously still be able to hear the answer.

"...you know, I've always wanted to try caviar? Just to see if there's anything to it. If that's not on offer, feel free to surprise me."

It's most certainly on offer; he returns momentarily to relocate Tintin to a smaller sitting room with nice sofas and a center table. He's served a platter of cold cuts and cheeses as well as some sushi and, yes, caviar, plus toast, soy sauce, nori, and crackers. There's also an open bottle of Riesling and two glasses already served waiting for him there.

Tintin gazes upon the platter with undisguised delight, mingled with very slight confusion.

"- I have a question not entirely unrelated to that interview you haven't yet confirmed or denied, and this makes it a touch awkward to ask either on or off the record."

"Oh I really do not give a fuck about the record. Ask away." Zher takes his seat and serves himself some caviar on toast.

Tintin clicks a button on a small recording device he was not holding a moment ago and speaks the current date aloud. "Interview with Evil Zher-El. May be renamed if Evil Zher-El finds nickname prejudicial, but it seems good to specify somehow, and even odds he thinks it's funny. He states, for the record, that he 'really does not give a fuck about the record'."

He tries a piece of sushi first. "Good lord. My question was previously 'are you secretly a sushi chef', but it has become obvious that the answer is yes, and so my question becomes: How long have you been waiting for the opportunity to surprise someone with your skills as a sushi chef?"

He quirks an eyebrow. "I'd rather go with Evil Zher, it rolls off the tongue more easily. Or just Evil Superman, God knows Luthor has been talking about the subject a lot. And while you may perhaps be the cutest boy I've had over for dinner you are most certainly not the first one I've made sushi for. Is the ice sufficiently broken now, can we get to the more interesting parts?"

"Ah, you do know my job. Not unexpected for a man with so many interviews under his belt, but worth checking. Naturally we can get to the good parts; would you prefer to start with what caused this precipitous shift, from the pure-hearted Man of Steel to, well, Evil Superman? I know that when someone has an epiphany, it is often at the front of their mind."

"Oh it was a ray gun of some kind. Pretty sure it was Luthor's fault."

"A ray gun."

"A ray gun! That'll teach me to assume I'm immune to anything that doesn't have any kinds of kryptonite in it."

"I... don't know that I follow fully. You were struck by a ray gun, which... caused you to lose your appreciation for the value of human life? You are not, for instance, ongoingly under the control of some party who may or may not be currently hiding in her bunker on the Moon?"

"I don't know if it did something that makes sense in terms of, like, neurology, but the practical effects is that I don't care about," vague handwave, "people in the abstract, anymore."

"...I'm sorry that happened to him," Tintin says quietly. "And... I'm sorry that it happened to you."

Zher laughs a very genuine-sounding laugh. "Oh, chin up, I'm sure the Justice League will figure out how to bring him back sooner or later."

"Perhaps so. And then I'll be sorry that happened to you, and sorry that it happened to him. I'm sure it hasn't escaped you that this is a complicated situation!"

He waves a hand vaguely again. "Complicated's with the other guy. I am just going to have fun until Batman figures out how to undo it."

"Fun... I can see that. What does the New Man of Steel do for fun? You seemed to enjoy fighting your erstwhile compatriots... and, mostly irrelevantly, me... but I don't imagine you'll find a similar challenge elsewhere on Earth."