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[center][Color=ff6565][INDENT][B][SUP][SUB][H3]A R T I C[/H3][/SUB][/SUP][/B][/INDENT][hr][INDENT][sup][COLOR=SILVER] May 16th, 2019 - Morning | The Fortress of Solitude [/COLOR][/sup][/INDENT][/COLOR][/center]

[i]Sanctuary, start log.[/i]

"It has a name: The Fortress of Solitude. Kal had set up some rudimentary security and DNA recognition. The door just let me right in. Wouldn't have mattered, the moment I saw Kryptonian architecture peeking out of an incredible mass of ice was my first moment of pure joy on this planet so far. I'm still smiling; my cheeks hurt. It's...it's like finding a single shelter in a storm that's taken everything else."

The sudden, jarring, jerk from happiness to tears in her eyes was short. Lose everything else in your life but yourself and an A.I. and a ship, a bitter thought from a bitter girl. She was trained for this. She knew better than to wallow. She never slept. When she did, she dreamt of home. When she woke, all she could do was curl up and cry. It was dizzying. Everything become nothing. She had begged him to make the make the dreams go away. He couldn't imagine the pain, she would think, but somehow even that fell flat at the sight of the pale...thing. He wasn't human. He called himself a god. 

Kara didn't believe in gods. She could never become a god. 

It was no small blessing she arrived late only to find Kal dead. Had she found him self-proclaimed and all powerful, she would have had to save him. Or kill him. It was the mission; she wasn't a baby. She was a fully mature, fully trained Kryptonian scientist. Her parents and aunt and uncle had spared her nothing. Ever. She couldn't let emotion keep her from her sparing any Kryptonian survivors. That humans seemed to believe Kal and she the only Kryptonian survivors, and her family all seemed to agree there would be more than just the two of them, something had to give. 

"When I walked in I had Superman come to greet me. Pretty shocking to see him as he was when he died, as an adult. Kal clearly got his hands on some Kryptonian tech, but our 'memory' tech? That was something of a surprise. It was considered cutting edge even towards the end. We played around with it, but really it was much more Jor-El's thing. More like a hobby than a full time pursuit. But there he was, in full form and talking to me. Turns out Kal-El discovered in a log of his ship that his ship was in communication with another Kryptonian vessel. The wormhole that swallowed my ship whole was registered on his vessel's long range scanners, such as they were. For the last twelve years of his life he was watching for me. Waiting for me."

There was no chair in the main chamber. Kal-El grew up without the need to rest, but Kara was always rather fond of curling up in a big chair and doing work there. "Sanctuary and I will start working soon enough. I'll probably leave Sanctuary here, at least the core. Someone has an insanely large antenna aimed at this location: like they expect Kryptonian technology to work on the same primitive radio waves of Earth. As charming as it is naive." Kara chuckled into the log; something of a no-no in log taking etiquette. If her old Professors wanted to come scold her for the chuckle, they were welcome to. 

"Superman's memory was very kind, and gave me a tour before beginning to glitch. Kal was no technician, I was more surprised his memory functioned at all. I don't think the core seals were ever removed--I don't think Kal knew that there were cores in all this 'crystal' structure. So I popped the seals and peeked in the housing. There's damage to the Kryptonian cores. Crystal cores, fancy stuff, but I can make repairs. I might need some materials, and that's where this all gets wildly interesting."

She turned on her heel, coming face to face with the biggest shock in the Fortress. "The capital of Krypton was thought destroyed. It happened in the early stages of our annihilation; no one away from the capital knew what happened, or how. Now I find the capital of Kandor in some sort of...bottle. I thought it was a model, but further study proves that's very much not the case. Sanctuary tells me it has it's own atmosphere, including it's own mini-red sun. The technology required for this is astounding, and far beyond what Kal was capable of. So how did it get in the bottle? Who/what took it from Krypton before destruction? I spent two years in Kandor while attending classes. Do I have friends in there? Old professors? It offers only questions, no answers. There's a device that allowed Superman to shrink down and enter the city; that's great, and all, but it won't work for my genetic sequencing. Not yet, at least. That's another thing on my 'to-do' list, and a pretty big one. So is the question of whether or not to tell the Kandorians what they're into. Think the Batman knew Kal was keeping about six million Kryptonians in a bottle in his frozen crystal fortress? I'm guessing not, considering how freaked out the guy was just to find out I was a reality."

Kara sighed at the bottled city, but the sigh wasn't all trauma and sadness. Wistful, half-hopeful, even. Suddenly Kara didn't feel alone. She wasn't. Six million was a proper re-settlement campaign. Kryptonians weren't destroyed. Kandor could be a seed to plant. On Earth? It seemed unlikely, to say nothing of highly against Kryptonian ethics, a thought that only frustrated her as she moved out of the vault and into a smaller chamber. It held a chair, closer to a crystalline throne, and giant tablets of an extremely heavy metal with Kryptonian writing seared into the otherwise smooth, shiny surface. "I found Kal's log, although it reads more like a personal journal. I've had Sanctuary download his voice from his 'memory', and the journal entries: I'll listen to them in his own voice. He didn't realize he was about to die."

Kara felt hot. A neat trick in a Fortress that would give Queen Elsa envy issues, but Kara knew exactly why: Kal's death. That thought led to the end of her own personal log, "Kandor changes everything. My mission, my intentions, but Sanctuary will need time. I believe we have a lead on where Kal got it, but we'll need time to follow up, maybe even have to 'borrow' a human satellite. One of the long range telescopes. So that becomes my second priority, while maybe illogical and unethical, my first priority becomes how Kal was murdered. I have to make sure what murdered him was murdered right back. My parents would gasp at hearing me say those words, but it's amazing how violent I feel at seeing the human video records of my baby cousin being beaten to death. If it was murdered back, I have to make sure there are no remains. Nothing to come back and haunt the universe ever again...luckily I have something of a lead there, too. Kal's records indicate a break-in of his Fortress. Given the feeble security here, I'm not shocked, but the trail leads back to a LexCorp. It happened after Kal's death, and they tried to tamper with Kryptonian records. They tried to alter his early reflections on the creature that would be his murderer. Delete the record? Maybe? It's hard to say, they did such a bad job with Kryptonian programming."

It was when she passed on to the last room that Kara re-discovered her smile, her fingertips delicately petting the metallic surface of the little robot. "I found Kelek. How Jor-El's pet robot got here...I can't wait to ask it. When it saw me it started giving off an alarm, the same proximity alarm Jor-El programmed into Kelek after I tampered with it for fun, so that I was never able to get close to Kelek unsupervised again." A memory that both made her laugh, and roll her ice-blue eyes. "Kelek only stopped when I told him Jor-El was gone. It was like the little thing forgot, and suddenly remembered. Kelek was pretty heavily damaged, I'm guessing he was always corrupted since the trip to Earth, but there's...damage on his exterior." 

Her fingertips passed over dings and burn marks on his casing. "Weapons fire. This 'LexCorp', I am thinking. I can fix Kelek. It'll be good to have the extra help when Sanctuary and I start really digging into the reconstruction of this Fortress...this is my home on Earth. Everything else will be a satellite: I turned in my keys to the Boston apartment. Sanctuary purchased me a 'flat' in Metropolis, and now I'm headed out to the west coast of this human nation Kal lived in. Sanctuary found evidence on the planet's data networks of LexCorp files regarding Kryptonians, and it's a good place to start, since apparently Sanctuary can't actually hack LexCorp without setting off alarms. Pretty impressive, for humans. Sanctuary can find ways around the security on LexCorp's system, but we don't have the time. I need Sanctuary putting the majority of it's power into the Kandor problems, and into shoring up this Fortress, in preparing the upgrades. So that means me doing more fieldwork. Wish me luck. Kar'a Zor-El, head of House El, end log three."