The Protagonist System

241 College Boy

Despite being so busy, I still interacted with my fellow children in town occasionally. It was enforced by my mom, too. Martha wanted me to be sociable with others my age, no matter how smart I was or thought I was. I didn't bother trying to convince her otherwise, for two reasons. One, it let me get out of the house and spend more time with her. Two, I spent more time hanging out with the other mothers.

Let me tell you something important right now. Women in the late 80s and early 90s were hot and sexy, even more so than anyone realizes. The casual tightness of their clothing, their almost easy way of flirting without trying, and their attitude, made them the epitome of confidence and determination. They knew what they wanted, knew how to get it, and had no problem telling you so.

They were also all married and completely off the market, which sucked. I was approaching ten years old and was still in the cute stage of my development, which meant I was looked at with affection and indulgence. I was really tempted to take as many hugs as possible from them, and maybe a cheek kiss or two, because I knew they would let me get away with it because I was a kid.

Martha always gave me a particular look every time I was near them, and I always refrained from doing anything, which usually made the other mothers ask my mom why I was always so hesitant to hold the hugs longer than was strictly necessary and why I sometimes had a red face.

“He's worried you'll get the wrong idea.” Martha would tell them. “Or he will if you don't object.”

Most of the women laughed it off, both flattered and accepting of that, except for Lana Lang's mother.

“Has he tried anything like that with you? You are his mother, after all.” Sarah Lang asked.

“What do you mean?” Martha asked back, a little defensive.

“They always say that the first woman a man ever falls in love with is his mother.” Sarah said with a wicked smile and Martha blushed. “With him out of school all day, he's spends a lot of time with you. If there was anyone around that he had feelings for, it's you.”

Martha looked at me and I looked right back at her. “Clark?”

“You're happily married, mom. I decided a long time ago that despite how awesome you are, you're dad's wife and I had no right to interfere with that.” I responded.

“A... a long time ago.” Martha whispered, as did a few of the other mothers.

I gave them all the best smile I could, Gilderoy Lockhart's, and a couple of them caught their breath. “I know I'm only a kid and will be for years, so I have to wait until I'm older before I can do anything to make a woman happy, in different ways than I already do.”

“Clark, you shouldn't say things like that.” Martha admonished me.

“It's okay, mom. No one here has any regrets about their choices and are happy with their lives and how they turned out, especially you.” I said and she nodded. “I just have to ask you one thing first.”

“Go ahead.” Martha said, even though her face was still red.

“When are you going to tell your friends you're pregnant?” I asked with a huge grin on my face. I had detected the life growing inside of her when I hugged her before breakfast.

“You're pregnant?” They all gasped.

“I'm pregnant?” Martha asked, shocked.

I realized then that I made a mistake revealing some of my power and needed to cover it up. “The doctor called this morning when you were in the bathroom.”

Martha was swarmed with hugs and congratulations from all of the other mothers, because they all knew how long she had been trying to have a baby. She accepted it all with a happy face and kept giving me worried glances. She assumed I had something to do with it, only I hadn't.

Healing her up and giving her body a tune-up, let her body get back to its normal rhythm. I was actually surprised it took this long for it to happen, with how much she and dad went at it all the time.

The rest of the visit went by fast after that and we were soon on our way home. Martha was quiet for a while and kept giving me those same worried glances.

I sighed after using a touch of telepathy on her to find out what was wrong. “Mom, I won't be jealous that you're going to have a baby, because this is the best thing to happen to you since I arrived here.”

Martha sighed as well. “You can't blame me for being worried about how you're going to react, Clark. You're my son, even if you're adopted, and you've always been the sole focus of our family.”

“I know you're not going to push me aside.” I responded an she gave me a surprised look. “You're going to need my help, actually.”

“Why?” Martha asked.

“You and dad aren't as young as you used to be...” I started to joke and she reached over and slapped the back of my head. I laughed and rubbed the spot. “I promise to be the best older brother on the planet. Scout's honor.”

Martha huffed. “They kicked you out of the Boy Scouts because you knew more than the scout troop's leader.”

I grinned at her. “It's not my fault I know more about roughing it than he did. He's a divorce lawyer and hasn't had any local work in years!”

Martha softly laughed and nodded. What I said about the mothers back at the meet and greet was true. They were all perfectly happy with settling down in Smallville with their husbands and they had the right number of kids, which pretty much filled their childhood dreams of a normal family life.

We pulled into the driveway at the farmhouse and Martha parked the truck. We sat there in silence for several minutes before she spoke.

“I don't know how I'm going to tell your dad.” Martha said.

“How about we make a bet on how long it'll be before he notices.” I suggested.

Martha softly chuckled and shook her head. “I can't sucker you into another easy bet.”

I chuckled, too. “Isn't that half the fun?”

Martha nodded and reached over to pet my head. “Let's go inside and surprise him.”

“I'm not catching him if he faints.” I warned her and she laughed.

We went inside the house and ambushed Johnathan coming out of the fruit cellar. He actually did faint when he learned he was going to be a father again, technically for the first time, and I didn't catch him. Martha rolled her eyes at me sticking to my vow to not reveal my powers to my dad and went to get an ice pack for the growing bump on his head.

*

Over the next couple of years, I kept my word and was the best older brother to my baby sister that I could be. I also kept checking on a few of the villains that would show up later to cause a lot of trouble. I also practised a lot with apparition to get the sound back down to almost nothing. Moving around almost silently was the best thing to keep myself from being caught.

The most innocuous villain I checked on was Mr. Freeze, or the man who would eventually become him after being caught in a failed experiment trying to save his wife from a debilitating disease. It took barely a moment to heal the teenage girl that would grow up to become the wife of Victor Fries.

Gorilla Grodd was only just starting his scientific pursuits in Gorilla City, so a quick stab with a blade made of disintegration magic through a hand-sized portal solved that future problem.

I didn't check on Darkseid, because I was somehow sure that he would be able to sense me using my clairvoyance power to look at him. His annoying Omega Beams were weird like that and might even possibly hit me through my vision, despite how impossible that seemed.

The biggest threat I could find was Ra's al Ghul, the immortal man running the League of Assassins. He had already had his two daughters, Nyssa and Talia, so I wasn't going to mess things up too much by sealing off the Lazarus Pits from the main fount of the planet and transfiguring the fluid into slightly diluted hydrochloric acid.

They were going to be quite surprised the next time anyone took a long dip in the sacred pools and they waited for them to resurrect. Left inside an acid bath for three days should ensure that there was nothing left for them to lift out afterwards.

I checked in on the Penguin and saw a sad little boy being ostracized by his parents and even the staff of their mansion. I healed him and transfigured his flippered hands and feet into looking normal, reduced his nose to a normal size, and changed his slightly rotund stature into a normal one. The change should be noticeable enough to make them all see he was no longer the freak they thought he was. I would need to check on him more than anyone else, too.

Black Adam was still trapped in his magical cage, the one the old wizard named Shazam tricked him into, so a single fingertip with Black Hole solved that problem. My few Karma Points were a small price to pay for the bonuses absorbing Black Adam's powers gave me, which included boosting my own slowly developing powers.

The problem I now had was a lot of the future villains were just teenagers or even kids. Did I have the right to end them long before they became villains? Should I take on that responsibility? It was a difficult decision, especially knowing what some of them were going to become if they were left to develop.

I had a long talk with my mom about my existential crisis of conscience and she told me she loved me even more, because I was actually considering all of the factors and not just arbitrarily using my powers to remove them as a first option.

After we talked for a long time about everything I've done up to that point, Martha convinced me that my work with the Penguin should become the benchmark I needed to set as my standard procedure. I would do what I could to change the circumstances that created those villains, and if that didn't work, I could remove them when it was time.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

So, that's what I did. The smallest impact with that strategy was on my work with Lex Luthor, whom was nearly seven years my senior. His father was also a bastard that treated Lex like garbage and would eventually form him into the ruthless businessman he would grow into.

Lex had learned a lot from his father, like hating anything that wasn't normal or fit into his world view, which meant Superman's debut with supernatural powers and being revealed as an alien was against everything he believed in.

Not surprisingly, he was just as stubborn as my dad. If Lex didn't work for it and achieved it for himself, it was worthless and considered charity if you tried to give it to him. Again, it was frustrating to have to deal with another person with that mindset and there was absolutely no way to convince him to see things differently.

There were a few smaller villains that I also handled, like Toyman, Livewire, Killer Croc, Clayface, Eclipso, Doctor Light, Polaris, Neutron, King Shark, Hugo Strange, Deathstroke, and a few others. The one I impacted the most was Catwoman, or the teenage girl that would become a minor villain later, Selena Kyle.

A few mental prods and suggestions, a few 'found' items of value, and some judicious advice, had her off the streets and well away from any crimes she might consider doing, like prostitution and petty theft. She was also a lot more observant than anyone else and knew someone was helping her.

“Thank you, whoever you are.” Selena said when she picked up the large pack of food stamps her intuition helped her find. Since I didn't want her to think she was going crazy, I opened a tiny portal above her and tossed through a piece of paper. She caught it and smiled. “When you're taking care of cats, you can only give them as much attention as they'll let you give them.”

With a soft laugh, she tucked the note and the food vouchers into her jacket pocket and walked out of the alley. I may have also watched her cute denim-covered ass swaying as she walked away and I had the distinct impression that she knew I was staring at her and didn't mind in the least.

*

When I was fourteen and started my growth spurt, letting me pass for a few years older, my mom had the brilliant idea to put my sister into Preschool and audit several of the classes at Kansas State A&M University. It was an agricultural college as well and the classes were huge, so after paying a nominal fee to let mom sit in on classes, barely anyone gave us second looks as we attended a few lectures and classes for the first few days.

Once we established ourselves as part of the student body and everyone ignored us, just as they mostly ignored everyone else, Martha attended what she wanted and I stayed in the library. I did attend some of the larger lectures with her and it was great, because I managed to see how others reacted when my mom showed off how intelligent she was. Martha had been helping keep my own studying on track since I was five and a lot of it rubbed off on her.

By the end of the school year, after studying my ass off in the college's library every day, I paid the fees to write the college accreditation exams for everything I could and passed with flying colors. They weren't the highest marks that the college review board had seen in years, so my graduation wasn't even noticed.

Luckily, they didn't notice I had left my age blank when I had filed the paperwork to take the exams and handed over my diploma without question. Martha hung it beside my high school diploma on the living room wall with a sigh.

“I'm sorry you had to wait so many years before you were tall enough to pull that trick off.” Martha said. I was now fifteen and was only an inch shy of six feet. I was also fairly muscular, which had let me fit in with the other students without standing out too much.

“It was only fair that you wanted me to be old enough to not look like a kid among the adults.” I said and hugged her from behind and rested my chin on the top of her head.

Martha chuckled. “How many times did you turn down the football coach anyway?”

I barked a laugh. “At least once a week and twice on Saturdays when they had practice. The poor guy always looked like I had kicked his puppy every time.”

Martha patted my arms and I eased my hold on her. She turned around and hugged me as she looked up at my face. “Someone was bound to notice how big you are. You're growing like a weed that's had lots of fertilizer.”

I grinned at her choice of words. “Excuse me, did you just say that I'm full of shit?”

“Clark!” Martha gasped at my cursing and then realized what I said and laughed. “I guess I did.”

Johnathan came into the living room with his daughter Emma hanging on his back in a piggy-back ride. He had a huge smile on his face, too. “It's about time you two got back. Emma's been teaching me how to farm properly and we absolutely had to tell you as soon as she heard the truck pull in.”

That made Martha and I laugh and we rushed over to hug her and kiss her cheeks, making her giggle happily. She immediately started to babble all about her day and how she set her dad straight on the right way to farm. The three of us listened to the adorable little girl and Emma basked in the extra attention.

We moved into the kitchen and I helped mom make supper while Emma kept talking, pretty much non-stop, and repeated herself a few times. None of us minded, because she was the best thing to happen to the Kent family since my own appearance fifteen years ago. She was loved and well protected, just like I had been, and we would do anything to make her happy.

Now that I was a college graduate, I could do anything I wanted. I mean, I did that anyway; but, with a college diploma under my belt, I had nothing academically that was going to hold me back. To me, that meant I could buy the next farm and could do all the things my dad wouldn't let me do to make more money.

With a legal source of income, I could then branch out with all of the other things I could make. Also, since this was a super-science world, the tinkertech I could create wouldn't stand out. Well, not too much, anyway. It was still only 1996, so any massive innovations would have to be tempered with both public perception and cost effectiveness.

I wouldn't worry about that for a while, anyway. I needed that land to build what I wanted first and I just had to go to the bank to try and get a loan. Would they take a chance on a 15 year old farm boy college graduate? I could only hope... and maybe use a few compulsion and confusion charms, just in case.