A cautious meeting

[reality_warper]

From Jeannie's perspective, it's been less than two weeks since she and Jack had met the Clark Luthor version of Ultraman in the Nexus. Give or take an unspecified amount of time, given all the weirdness of their current living situation. She'd honestly expected to get to this sooner, but Pamela's kids had been more of a handful than she could have predicted. Things had finally settled somewhat and she has a place all prepared... so its a matter now of sending a text message off via PINpoint and arranging to meet Mr. Luthor in the Nexus to do something about those scars.

Comments

[reality_warper]

"Ta-da! And there ya go."

[clark_luthor]

He examines his arm, frowning. "It's still there." He wasn't sure how effective he was expecting this to be, but he can't help but be a bit disgruntled that it wasn't a hundred percent.

[reality_warper]

Truth be told, Jeannie's a little disappointed it wasn't herself. But, "I guess I coulda tried harder... but you'd be more upset if I accidentally made your arm disappear. Raw chaos is funny stuff, y'know."

[clark_luthor]

He gives her a look, pretty much sure that she's not joking, but you never know. "If this is leading up to a 'disarming' joke, I'm going to be very disappointed in you."

[reality_warper]

And she laughs. "Much as I'm gonna kick myself for not thinking of that one before you did, no... I meant it. Working with chaos is a lot like... I don't know if you ever watched cartoons, but if you have, you know the chase scenes where someone runs off a cliff. And they're perfectly fine as long as they don't look down. You can do a lot... as long as you don't think too hard about how."

[clark_luthor]

Clark has never watched a cartoon in his life, nor has his pop culture knowledge been the greatest. He vaguely knows what she's talking about though. "I was under the impression that control, such as it is, came through greater concentration, not less."

[reality_warper]

"Most things, maybe. But that'd be logic, and logic and chaos are like oil and water. Think about it too much, and thinking just gets in the way of letting stuff happen." Luckily, she's an expert at doing things without thinking about them too much... maybe not a good thing in most cases.

[clark_luthor]

"I suppose I'll have to take your word for it." He's a meticulous planner, so the idea of letting chaos just... do things... is rather antithetical to that.

[reality_warper]

She just nods. She really hadn't expected anything else. It wasn't hard, in the whole scale of chaos to order, to peg him as being firmly on the order side. "I guess there were reasons why I usually only used to do it if I was... knocked out, or worse. Nothing to get in the way of instinct."

[clark_luthor]

"Instinct has its place. Survival is certainly one of the appropriate scenarios."

[reality_warper]

"Mmmhmm," Jeannie says with a nod. "Though, it's also why I said something last time about why I wouldn't show up as a meta as long as my family's having a nice, quiet, normal life... It didn't kick in until someone killed me as part of some whole scheme to blackmail my husband."

[clark_luthor]

He nods slightly, and rubs his fingers over his scar. If he pays attention, he can still feel the lines carved into his arm, though far less than he used to. It will certainly take some adjustment, but he certainly doesn't mind.

"So, do we need to discuss payment?"

[reality_warper]

Jeannie smiles, but doesn't bring up that, really, what could he offer that she can't do herself, at least for now. "Right now, we're more trying to get off on the right foot with people we bump into in the Nexus... 'specially with the reputations some of us have."

"Though... if you can maybe not tell Bruce Wayne about the Nexus, if he doesn't already know..." She sighs, "Running into you was just enough of a shock to get my husband over wondering when the other shoe was going to drop and how bad it'd be when it did. Running into Owlman, or Batman, or any variant thereof is something I don't think he's ready for. Not yet."

[clark_luthor]

Clark smiles slightly, like she's said something incredibly obvious. "And give up an advantage like this? I would never. It's like you don't know me at all." He might be joking a minuscule amount.

[reality_warper]

Jeannie laughs. "Well, of course we don't! We've met an Ultraman or two, as well as Superman and other variations. And we've met Luthors. But usually those things tend to be opposing in whichever timeline they're both in. Someone who's both? That's a whole new twist!"

[clark_luthor]

"I do have to wonder why that might be. The decision point between my universe and Kent's is clearly defined, after all."

[reality_warper]

Jeannie shrugs. "Who knows? Pod lands in pre-Second World War Germany, and eventually there's Übermaan... but the division between Superman and Ultraman wasn't as simple as the Nature Versus Nurture debate for our section of the multiverse." There may have been a bit of a joke in there, since the nature versus nurture debate is anything but simple. "Unless you apply it to the nature of the whole timeline... And even then, we may never know just which quantum butterfly got stepped on where."

[clark_luthor]

"If anyone was in a position to study such a thing, I believe it'd be you," he concedes. "And I suppose all the differences between my universe and Kent's can't be tied purely down to who found and raised me. I'm at a loss to explain why the color saturation of our worlds would differ at all, for instance."

[reality_warper]

She nods. "Or why one of the universes we knew with Ultraman had so many other things 'reversed'... down to the positions of people's internal organs. It's easy to 'blame it on the writers', but... I'd kinda hope there was some reason on our side of the Fourth Wall too." Because the thought of being toyed with like that makes all of them a little sick.

[clark_luthor]

He looks slightly amused by that. "My father attempted to impersonate his counterpart, and was caught because his fingerprints are reversed from the other Lionel's. So differences like that exist between my universe and Kent's, as well."

[reality_warper]

She nods. "A friend of ours... the same one with the chronic 'Ultraman uses heat vision on his face in more than one timeline' problem... a Supes figured out who he was and where from with the whole 'x-ray vision' trick. He wasn't really trying to impersonate another him, though, so it didn't really make much difference."

[clark_luthor]

"Strange. There should be no reason for such differences to exist, and yet they do."

[reality_warper]

"There was even a timeline where everyone's gender was flipped," she says with a shrug. "And then there's all the cases of people's hair or eye colors going wonky. Like getting a dyejob without the dye."

[clark_luthor]

He looks thoughtful for a moment. "Any instances of realities where no one has any special abilities at all?"

[reality_warper]

"If there was, would I have been there?" she half-jokes, before looking thoughtful. "That one Superboy I've been calling 'Superbrat' in my notes... he was supposed to be from a timeline where nobody had powers except him, but I don't know all the details yet. So... I guess it could be. And then I think there was one where everyone with powers suddenly lost 'em..."