Drake had heard the word "Titans" from a few Metropolis residents during their first week back — a hero team, apparently, younger than the Justice League, operating without the brand recognition. He'd filed it away without much thought. Most of the heroes seemed to be teenagers, and he hadn't been expecting them to be relevant to anything happening to him personally.
He revised that assessment while watching Cyborg limp back to his feet.
The half-human, half-machine figure didn't look old in his human portions. But he carried himself like someone who'd stopped being surprised by anything.
"So," Cyborg said, looking at the bound, trembling figure on the street. "Who exactly is in there?"
In the basement of a Metropolis research facility, a man in a rumpled lab coat sat on the floor with his back against a support column, his crutches just out of reach. His arms were bound with cable ties that had been improvised from equipment nearby. He'd been working on the lock for four hours.
He'd stopped when he heard the lock click open from the other side.
The man who stepped through the door was Clark Kent — or rather, Clark Kent's face on a body that moved with the unhurried, slightly unfamiliar ease of someone still getting used to the proportions.
"David," Superman said. Not angry. Resigned, mostly. "I picked the lock."
David Ganderson looked at him for a moment. "I designed that lock myself."
"I know. It took a while." Superman crouched down to his level. "It's over, David."
Back on the street, the explanation came out in pieces.
The man on crutches — Clark, now in his own body, the soul-swap reversed the moment he'd gotten free and found the machine — walked Cyborg through it with the particular patience of someone who has had to explain something mortifying and has made peace with it.
"He called himself a scientist. Said he was close to a clean energy breakthrough and needed some assistance from someone with Kryptonian capabilities. I went to his house." A pause. "I saw the crutches and the mobility aids and I — lowered my guard. Completely."
"The machine wasn't a clean energy device."
"No."
"It swapped your souls."
"He locked me in the basement afterward. He didn't kill me because he wasn't certain what that would do to the exchange while it was active. In his own way, he's genuinely brilliant." Clark looked at the damage to the surrounding blocks. "Also clearly suffering from something that curdled into this a long time ago."
Cyborg surveyed the devastated street — craters, structural damage, smoke rising from two buildings, the Metropolitan citizens cautiously emerging now that the threat had gone horizontal and bound.
"I wouldn't call it 'cynical,'" he said. "This is terrorism. You're going to have to explain it to people. Whether they believe you is a separate problem."
"The machine can be used once more to confirm the reversal is clean, and then destroyed." Superman glanced toward where the Titans were handling the bound figure — his body, wearing someone else. "He didn't know how to use the Frost Breath. Hadn't worked out the biofield. I think he was wearing earplugs to manage the sensory sensitivity — my hearing is a lot to take in all at once. Which is probably why the ambush worked in the first place."
"Okay." Cyborg held up a hand. "We deal with containment first. He cannot go to the military — those people cannot be trusted with this technology."
Superman nodded. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with physical exertion.
From the doorway, Drake let out a breath that felt like it had been held for the better part of an afternoon.
"I think it's over," he said.
Camilla watched as Cyborg and the real Superman were guided away by two of the Titans, the bound body accompanying them. "I think so."
"Good." Drake processed this for a moment. "Those young heroes were actually — pretty effective."
"Drake." Camilla's voice had shifted into the register she used for logistical conversations. "This will be news tomorrow. Superman's reputation might survive if the story holds — but our apartment is uninhabitable. We've moved twice in eight months."
"Third time, we choose somewhere in the suburbs. Away from city centre. Outside the blast radius of the next superhuman incident."
"That's not cheap."
"We have insurance. 'Superhuman damage' is a covered category." He paused. "I checked after the first time."
Camilla looked at him. "You checked."
"I learned things in Gotham."
Back in his cabin, Jude had been watching the same clip for twenty minutes.
He had the news article about the soul swap open in one tab — SUPERMAN INNOCENT: MIND-TRANSFER SCIENTIST RESPONSIBLE FOR METROPOLIS CHAOS, TITANS CONTAIN THREAT — and the video on loop in another, and the piece from the Daily Planet about Jericho's ability open in a third.
"Which universe is this," he said to his laptop.
The DC continuity he knew had its internal logic, its reference points, its stable cast. David Ganderson didn't appear anywhere in that catalogue. A human scientist developing technology capable of swapping souls with a Kryptonian, deploying it successfully, and then running around in Superman's body for three days without anyone catching on — that was a threat profile well above anything you'd expect from a "frail scientist with mobility issues." It required the kind of genius that shouldn't go unnoticed.
"Cyborg's Justice League in the movies," Jude muttered. "But here he's with the Titans. Beast Boy, Wonder Girl, Jericho who can puppet Kryptonians—" He rubbed his eyes. "Is this early Silver Age? Is this some adjacent continuity? What is happening?"
The main concern, he decided, was containment. If Ganderson or his machine ended up in military hands — and the military's appetite for superman-adjacent technology was well-documented across every continuity — the next crisis would be considerably worse than this one.
But that's not my problem right now, he thought. Titans have it. The real Superman is back in his own body. Drake and Camilla are fine.
He went to close the tabs and noticed, below the two main articles, a third item. Smaller. Dated two days before the soul swap incident.
STRANGE CELESTIAL PHENOMENON OVER METROPOLIS — MASSIVE EXPLOSION REPORTED
Jude stared at it.
Two days before.
He clicked through.
The clip was from a morning news broadcast. The host — mid-sentence, bright professional smile, introducing reconstruction progress from the previous day's disaster — stopped.
Looked up.
Went silent for three full seconds.
The camera followed his gaze and found the sky.
Above the Metropolis skyline, in the gap between skyscrapers still trailing construction equipment, the atmosphere had changed. A bank of unnatural cloud had arrived without warning, dense and dark and structured in a way that weather didn't produce naturally. Energy rings pulsed outward from a central point, crackling with light, their reach expanding with each pulse. The sound that came with it — even through the video's tinny speakers — was the kind of sound that makes people look for the exits.
Jude watched the sky turn from blue to dark in about four seconds and said nothing for a moment.
That, he thought, is not a soul-swapping scientist.
That is a portal.
He leaned closer to the screen.
"Is this not the Chitauri invasion?" he said slowly, to no one. "Am I watching a Marvel event in a DC universe?" He sat back. "Why does this feel like a fever dream?"
He looked at the date stamp again.
Two days before the Superman incident. Which Drake's letter hadn't mentioned at all — they'd written about the soul swap in detail, had clearly been frightened by it, but hadn't said a word about whatever had opened in the sky two days prior.
Either they hadn't seen it. Or they'd already stopped being surprised.
Metropolis is crazier than Gotham right now, Drake had written.
Jude was beginning to understand this at a more granular level than he'd initially managed.
He made more tea and opened a new search tab.