"One disaster per day. No minor incidents. Only major and catastrophic." Jude looked at his laptop screen. "This is what a T0 city looks like."
In the video, Superman's figure rose through the Metropolis skyline and flew straight into the churning energy storm above. Jude watched him disappear into it without particular worry — if Superman died in that cloud, the news would have led with something considerably more final than a follow-up report about reconstruction.
For the citizens of Metropolis, the storm had arrived without context. No warning, no explanation, no identifiable cause. Just the sky changing colour and a sound like the atmosphere being rearranged by something that hadn't asked permission.
In their newly rented suburban apartment, Drake and Camilla sat on their couch and watched the dark clouds spread overhead through their window.
"I thought the suburbs would be safer," Camilla said.
"Statistically, if the city centre is ground zero," Drake said, with the tone of someone working very hard to find a reassuring angle, "we're more likely to be in the outer ring of a disaster than the epicentre."
"That's not actually comforting."
"No," Drake agreed. "It's not."
Superman was inside the storm for somewhere between twenty and thirty hours. The middle portion of the event was sparsely documented — the cloud coverage had disrupted most recording equipment, and what remained was fragmentary. Citizens had accounts.
"It was louder than thunder," a woman with dreadlocks told the interviewer, very seriously. "Much louder. It felt like he was fighting something up there."
"I was hoping Superman would win," a middle-aged man in a suit said. He looked slightly haunted. "Then he did win, and I thought I could relax. I relaxed too soon."
"It was like a super giant bomb," a student said into the microphone, clutching a textbook. "Maybe comparable to a nuclear explosion — I'm guessing. After the explosion, the sky went back to normal. Some debris fell out of the clouds, really large pieces, material I didn't recognise. But they all disappeared before they hit the ground."
Jude read the subsequent report twice.
A mage named Alasazar — female, staff-wielding, unknown origin — had constructed a vast magical array above the city and used it to drain Superman's abilities directly. She'd been building her own palace in the sky with the extracted energy, which was an audacious use of stolen Kryptonian power. Superman had nearly been emptied completely before he found an opening, smashed the staff, and cut off the process. Without that, Metropolis would, according to the report, have been relocated.
Physically. To somewhere else.
"Relocated," Jude repeated. He looked at the word on the screen.
"Where does a city go when it's relocated?" He shook his head. "And where did she come from? I've never heard of Alasazar. Not in any version, any continuity, anywhere." He scrolled through the report again. "Superman being weak to magic is canonical, but this weak? An unknown mage nearly draining him completely in one engagement?"
He filed it under this universe has its own internal logic and moved on.
The second incident had apparently happened the day after the first resolved, which, on reflection, made Drake's decision to leave entirely understandable.
If it were me, Jude thought, I would have been on a plane before the sky had finished clearing.
He clicked on the third day's report.
EARTH TITAN APPROACHES METROPOLIS — MASSIVE TORNADO THREATENS CITY
He scrolled to the video. Then he smiled, which surprised him slightly.
The footage came from a helicopter — shaky, shot through the windscreen, a distant shot of the outskirts of Metropolis. A tornado moved toward the city from the open land to the west. Not a natural formation: this one stretched from ground to sky with a kind of structural intention, sweeping everything in its path — earth, grass, fencing, several cows — into its column as it moved. At its peak, visible when the camera caught the right angle, a face had formed from compacted mud and boulders. It was large. It was angry. And it was growing — each few metres of forward movement pulling more earth into the mass, the whole thing expanding like something learning that it could.
Drake and Camilla were in the frame.
They'd apparently rented somewhere right in the projected path. They stood on the grass outside their new suburban property, staring at the horizon, at the Earth Titan that was currently the approximate size of several stacked Godzillas, in complete silence.
Drake spoke first.
"What's happening."
"I want to move."
"Get the tickets. Leave the luggage."
They ran into the house. They came out forty-five seconds later with their wallets, cards, and one bag. They got in the car. They drove in the opposite direction without looking back, with the unified conviction of two people who have made a decision that cannot be revisited.
Jude watched them go with enormous affection.
Then the shot cut back to the helicopter feed, and the reporter — a Metropolis local, clearly, someone who had grown up with this — actually cheered.
"It's Superman! Ladies and gentlemen — Superman is here!"
The reporter jumped. In the helicopter. While filming. Jude paused the video at the exact moment to appreciate the energy of someone whose genuine response to a city-sized tornado monster was finally, the good part.
He let it play.
Superman hit the Titan with everything sequentially and visibly: the red beams of heat vision carving through the earthen mass, the white blast of ice breath hardening sections of it, the impact craters from direct strikes. The giant absorbed damage, reformed, and hit back — an actual fist, which meant it had intent, which meant it was more than weather.
Superman dodged, came back, dodged again, and shouted something at the sky.
"It has a mind! I can't kill it! Stranger!"
Jude paused the video.
He looked at every corner of the frame. Superman, the Titan, the helicopter, a subway entrance, an elderly man staring at his phone.
Stranger.
"Is that a name?" He leaned forward. "Is he calling someone?"
He thought about it. Someone on the mystical side. Someone Superman would call specifically when a monster turned out to have an inhabiting soul. Someone whose name was — or whose title was — Stranger.
He opened his Heavenly Eye and looked at the screen again.
The paused frame shifted. In a corner of the image that normal vision had registered as background — the shadow between two buildings — a shape clarified into presence. A figure in a dark blue cloak, hood up, entirely still, watching the fight from street level with the patience of someone who had been watching things much longer than any of this.
Jude unpaused the video.
The figure spoke.
"No, Superman." The Stranger's voice was quiet and final. "Don't."
A pause.
"There are no living beings in that creature." His hood moved slightly, as if he were looking up at the vast, roaring face of compressed earth above the city. "Only the souls of the dead."