Chapter 2: Spectrometer's Revelation
The geology lab after midnight was a cathedral of quiet clicks and humming machines. The main lights were off, but the glowing readouts of spectrometers, the power indicators on laser cutters, and the small task lamp over Lab Station 4 cast a cold, technical light. Marcus Chen’s shadow loomed large against the wall of mineral shelves, a moving puppet show of focused intent.
He had the rock secured in a vice-grip clamp, a laser scalpel poised above it. On a screen, a spectral analysis graph spiked and danced with alien geometries.“No known element,” he muttered to himself, fingers flying over a keyboard. “Refraction index is off the charts.Density is… weird. It’s like it wants to be heavy but isn’t.”
The door hissed open softly. He didn’t hear it over the hum of the spectrometer cooling fan.“Marcus.”
He jumped, spinning around. Professor Danvers stood just inside the doorway, her face pale in the electronic glow. She was dressed in dark jeans and a hoodie, her blonde hair tied back simply. She looked like she’d come from a late study session, not like someone who’d just flown across the city.“Professor? What are you doing here? The lab’s closed for undergrads after ten.” His voice was defensive, his body shifting subtly to block her view of the rock.“I know. I was working in my office. Saw the light.” She took a step forward, her movements cautious, as if approaching a live wire.Her eyes were locked on the pulsing green stone in the clamp. The ache in her temples sharpened into a stabbing pain. “You need to stop this right now, Marcus.”
“Why?” A challenge. He saw the intensity in her gaze, the fear she couldn’t quite mask.It fed his own suspicion.“It’s just a rock. A weird one.”
“It’s not just a rock.” Her voice was tight, straining for control. “It’s… hazardous. You have no idea what kind of energy signature you’re dealing with.You could be contaminating the entire lab. Please, just let me secure it properly.”
He shook his head, a slow, stubborn motion.“You said it might be fluorite. You were lying.You know what it is.” He turned back to the console, tapping a command. “I’m going to take a micro-fragment for mass spec. Then we’ll know.”
“NO!”
The raw panic in her voice made him flinch. She lunged forward, not with super-speed, but with a human’s desperate haste.It was a mistake. As she reached for the clamp, her hand passed through the beam of the spectrometer’s targeting laser—a beam that passed directly over the kryptonite.
A wave of nausea, profound and debilitating, slammed into her. It was as if all her strength, all the solar energy stored in her cells, was vacuumed out in an instant.Her muscles turned to water. Her vision tunneled, the green glow becoming the only thing in the universe. She stumbled, her hip crashing into the edge of the steel lab table. A choked gasp escaped her lips as her legs buckled, and she slid gracelessly to the cold linoleum floor.Silence, save for the hum of machines.
Marcus stared, his mind racing faster than any spectrometer. He looked from the slumped, trembling form of his professor to the rock, which seemed to pulse brighter in response to her proximity. The impossible pieces assembled in his head: her sudden, intense interest; her unnatural pallor now; the way she’d moved not with power, but with a clumsy weakness he’d never associated with the always-composed Professor Danvers.A slow, astonished smile spread across his face.
“Oh, my god,” he breathed.He walked over, crouching in front of her. She tried to push herself up, but her arms trembled violently, unable to bear even her own weight. He reached out and took her chin in his hand, forcing her to look at him. Her blue eyes were wide with terror and pain.“It hurts you. The rock hurts you.” He leaned closer, his voice a whisper of horrifying revelation. “You’re not human, are you, Professor?”
Kara tried to speak, to deny it, but another wave of sickening radiation washed over her, and she retched dryly.
Marcus stood up, his heart pounding with a terrifying cocktail of fear, triumph, and a sudden, absolute power.He picked the rock from the clamp. Its warmth was comforting in his hand. He walked back to her and placed it gently, deliberately, on the floor beside her head.She whimpered, turning her face away, but the effect was immediate. A full-body shudder wracked her frame, her back arching in involuntary agony.
He looked down at her, this woman who held cosmic secrets, who graded his papers and lectured about supernovas, now reduced to a quivering mess at his feet.The power was intoxicating. It erased boundaries, incinerated respect.“Get up,” he said, his voice calm.She couldn’t. He grabbed the front of her hoodie and hauled her upright. She was dead weight, her head lolling. He half-dragged, half-carried her the few feet to the main lab table, clearing a space with a violent sweep of his arm that sent petri dishes and beakers shattering to the floor. He bent her over the cold, hard surface, her cheek pressed against the stainless steel.
“Don’t… please…” she slurred, her consciousness fading in and out with each pulse from the stone he still held.
“Shut up,” he muttered, his hands fumbling with the waistband of her jeans. He yanked them down along with her underwear, exposing her.The clinical lab light bleached her skin pale. He unzipped his own jeans, his erection already hard, fueled by adrenaline and a cruel, consuming curiosity.This was the ultimate experiment. The ultimate discovery.He didn’t prepare her.He didn’t care. He positioned himself and drove into her in one brutal, tearing thrust.
Kara cried out, a shattered sound of pain and violation. The physical invasion was sharp and brutal, but it was secondary to the deeper violation radiating from the rock clenched in Marcus’s left hand, now pressed against the side of her throat. With each of his rough, frantic thrusts, he ground the stone into her skin. It was like being fucked and poisoned simultaneously.
“Feel that?” he grunted in her ear, his breath hot and ragged.“That’s your fucking kryptonite, isn’t it? That’s what they call it in the comics? Jesus Christ, you’re really one of them.”
Each stroke was a hammer blow of weakness.Her legendary strength was gone, leaving only the fragile human biology underneath. She was just a woman, pinned and helpless. Tears of shame and despair leaked from her eyes, mixing with the sweat on the steel table. The smell of ozone and chrysanthemums was suffocating.
He fucked her with the furious pace of his discovery, his hips slapping against her skin. The lab echoed with the sounds of it: his grunts, her stifled sobs, the rhythmic creak of the table. He kept the rock pressed hard to her neck, watching her reactions like data points.Her struggles grew weaker.Her cries softened to whimpers.
“You’re just a weak little alien now, aren’t you?” he sneered, his control absolute. “Supergirl.Fuck me. All this time.” The revelation spurred him on, adding a layer of vengeful excitement to his assault. He grabbed a fistful of her hair, yanking her head back to watch her pained expression as he pounded into her. “Come on, Professor.Teach me something.”
His climax approached, a tight, angry coil. With a final, deep snarl, he buried himself inside her and came, his body convulsing against hers. He held himself there for a moment, the kryptonite still burning her neck, before pulling out abruptly.
He stepped back, fastening his jeans, breathing heavily. Kara slid from the table onto the floor, a crumpled heap of trembling limbs and torn clothing.She couldn’t move. She could barely breathe.The world was a blur of pain and emerald light.
Marcus looked from her to the rock in his hand, now glowing with a steady, triumphant intensity.He felt like a god. He had uncovered the universe’s greatest secret and then dominated its most powerful avatar. He took out his phone and took a picture of her there, exposed and broken on the lab floor, the green rock beside her head.“Proof,” he whispered, a slow smile spreading. Then his eyes fell on the spectrometer screen, still displaying the impossible elemental analysis. His scientific mind, even in its corrupted state, began clicking forward.One sample had done this.What could more do?
He walked to the laser scalpel, a new, colder purpose settling over him. He ignored the soft, ragged weeping from the floor.He needed to extract a pure, concentrated fragment.To refine it. To weaponize it.
The hum of the laser charging filled the silence he had created.