13759/Welcome to the Fortress

Welcome to the Fortress
Date of Scene:	06 January 2023
Location:	Entrance Hall - Fortress of Solitude
Synopsis:	Kal shows Alura around the Fortress of Solitude. Kandor is explained and the search for the Sanctuary and a way to unbottle the city begins.
Cast of Characters:	Clark Kent, Alura In-Ze

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Clark Kent has posed:
    Kal had Alura meet him in Metropolis, then both took to the skies as he led her on a flight to the Fortress. For them it was not a terribly long one, but for normal humans, if they even knew where to look, it would be quite a trek through the Arctic. Landing at the entrance, he leads her through the atrium, past the statues of his parents and into the Fortress proper.

    "I've managed to get a pretty large facility set up here." Stepping out into one of the largest areas of the Fortress, he waves a hand at all the enclosures. "These are all creatures I hope to reintroduce to their natural habitats someday, if the people of Earth manage to figure out how not to destroy it. For now, they live here."

    He points out another large sunstone door, looking almost like a vault door. "Through there is item storage. Some of it is quite dangerous, others are relics of Krypton, items associated with people or things that mean something to me, and some things that others simply wanted kept somewhere safe."

    "There are also quarters here for the others when they want to get away for a while. You can pick out one of the empty ones for your own so you have a place here."

Alura In-Ze has posed:
It's strange how the poles of Earth feel so familiar. Perhaps most habitable worlds made for people like Kryptonians, like Humans, have such a climate at its tips. Not that it was any less hospitable on Krypton but the isolation keeps prying eyes away.

The last Sunstone build structures she saw were in the aethyr, the phantom zone, and it is beautiful to see them now with light shining in to them, giving them shape and structure and hinting at possibilities.

How do you warn Alura she'd be walking in to a room with two giant statues of her brother in law and sister in law. Jor and Lara standing tall. She stares up at them with mouth agape as she walks by with Kal. "They remind me of the nine, standing so majestic and proud." The nine to which she refers being the old gods of Krypton. "The high council gallery in Kryptonopolis had their statues lining the entry way. They were said to be replicas of Kandor's."

Opening out in to the gallery itself she feels a shiver of excitement run up and down her spine. "This is ... what you made of a little piece of home. You've turned it in to something magnificent."

A wall nearby Alura lights up with Kryptonian symbols and a voice unheard of in these halls before speaks 'Welcome Administrator.

Alura turns in surprise and shakes her head, then looks at Kal. "Jor..." not that it's his voice, "List Administrators."

'Jor-El, Zor-El, Lara Lor-Van, Alura In-Ze, Kal-El, Kara Zor-El' the voice replies.

She shakes her head again, "Sorry, that's.. I had no idea Jor would have done that." It seems there is etiquette about having access within someone elses home on Krypton without permission. "You can remove me if it bothers you," she offers apologetically.

Clark Kent has posed:

    Kal shakes his head, "It doesn't bother me. You are family, after all. I think I can trust you not to mess around with the automated systems that care for the animals or the failsafes for the labs. Other than that there isn't really much that access would allow you to harm. The critical systems all need two Kryptonians to access if it isn't me giving the command. I made sure of that after the first time Dru-Zod arrived on Earth since he would have as easy a time getting here as we do."

    Kal doesn't mention the one most dangerous item kept in the Fortress, or rather below it. Not appearing in any system and accessed through a panel hidden in his personal living quarters is a tube leading down to the ocean floor. A large lead box there holds something he hopes is never needed because of who it would be used against - kryptonite.

    He leads her through the enclosure area and through a hallway running off of it into the living area. There's a large common room with attached kitchen where more conventional flooring is laid down, the walls covered with wood paneling and artwork. Comfortable chairs and couches are set up to allow easy conversation as well as watch a large display screen on one wall.

    "This is the general common room. There's offices and conference rooms elsewhere, but this is for relaxing with each other or guests. Quarters are down that hallway, and as I said, one of them is yours, fill it with whatever you like."

Alura In-Ze has posed:
Alura smiles as she is invited to not just be here, but live here. She places a hand to her heart and nods her head to him, "Thank you Kal." She follows after him in to the living space and asks, "Dru.. how did he seem?" A complicated history she has with that man.

"And that's a good security measure," she adds. Like picking out pieces of furniture from a Macy's catalogue, it feels almost like an eclectic collection of Earth and Kryptonian items and furniture. A truly bizarre sight for her eyes.

She lets a hand rest upon the items one by one as she passes them by and has a look of peace. The idea was to give their children a home away from home and now she knows it was the best call they could possibly have made.

She settles down on a couch and runs her hands over its surface. "Kal. You wanted to know about your parents. Well, it's a broad topic so - so ask questions and I'll answer you honestly. It's hard to sum up a persons life."

Clark Kent has posed:
    Sitting down on the couch as well, Kal thinks for a moment. "Well, I have a number of holograms of them, both interactive and for display, so I know a good deal about them in the same way that I know about people in Earth history. I know what they've done, and public stances they took, that sort of thing. But that doesn't let you know the person, just what they did."

    He shrugs a little, adding "I can list all the accolades and degrees my mother and father received, but not what kind of food they liked best, or what they did for fun when they weren't working. What were my parents like when they weren't in public, when they were just Jor and Lara?"

Alura In-Ze has posed:
Alura nods her head and thinks for a moment. "Ah," she says and looks around the room. "If you don't mind..." she looks at the screen. It simply won't do. She taps on her bracer and accesses her personal files. A small smile growing as she looks over the memories stored there. "Here.."

She touches the floating hologram and the room fills with an almost pinkish light. One of the walls has large windows looking out over a vast city inside a gigantic dome. But the focii of the memory is a day of celebration.

"Wait," says a familiar voice. The voice of Jor-El. He holds out his hand and his fingers touch the tips of a woman. Lara Lor-Van. She turns toward Jor and with raised eyebrows and a smile on her face, "What?"

Jor's face lights up with joy and he turns Lara's shoulders toward a corner in the room. There a young girl is sitting on a couch with a baby in her arms. It's Kara and that baby.. is Kal. Kara keeps looking over at the hologram of Alura herself as if checking to make sure she's doing it right. Alura gives an encouraging nod to her daughter.

Lara wraps her arm behind Jor and she bumps shoulders with him. "Look at that..." Jor nods in response and repeats what she says, "Look at that." It is that that moment that Zor-El enters the picture from another room not recorded, "Are we all ready for the meteor shower?"

Alura places a hand to her lips as the hologram-Alura of her says, "It's going to be spectacular this year." Alura repeats the words. This was clearly a memory she had replayed plenty of times.

"Oh, I'll get the telescope," Jor says and Lara calls to him as he leaves the holographic replay, "It's on the top shelf in the study." He returns and sets it up at the window. It's not quite like Earth telescopes. It has a screen and a digital camera of sorts.

What was daytime begins to darken as millions of meteors fill the sky. Only a scant percentage burn up in the atmosphere but the violets and blues on the red hued sky is quite a sight to see. The video pauses at this point, with all the holograms frozen in place.

Clark Kent has posed:

    Kal smiles as the scene plays out, giving rapt attention to everyone and everything in the scene. Most of Krypton that he's seen are laboratories or offices that his mother or father were recording some important facts from. This look into a casual moment recorded simply as a memory instead of something that was deemed important to save is a new thing.

    "They all look so happy. So different from when they're being scientists, which are the recordings they felt needed to be included here." He looks over at Alura and asks, "If you have more of these recordings, could I possibly ask you to copy them into the systems here? Then I can watch them whenever there's time, instead of asking you to play hologram projector all night." He smiles, alight with the chance to finally get to know his family when they are being themselves.

    "Oh, and sorry, you asked about Dru-Zod. How would I describe him, let me think. Intense, driven, angry, I think those make up a large part of him these days. Honorable is another though, we have been able to see eye to eye and come to a truce at times. I don't think he himself knows all the things he's angry about, but somehow I can't picture him talking out his problems with anyone who could help him gain some closure."

Alura In-Ze has posed:
Alura wipes a happy tear from her eye and nods her head to Kal, "Of course. This is about you too, not just me. Though, there's a lot more memories of Kara there than of your parents. It had never occurred to me that one day these might be the only scraps left that remain of the time before it all ended."

She takes in a deep breath and the hologram disappears with a wave of her hand over her bracer. "There's one in there of your father and my husband building a hover disc together. I think you'll love it. Oh.. Oh and one Cycle Night. Ah. New Years.. Lara wrote a poem that I think you'll find very entertaining."

She makes a swishing motion from her bracer to a crystal console. One of the crystals glows as it receives the records. The discussion of Dru makes her nod her head, "Ah. I see. Yes - that's how he was in the last weeks of Krypton too, when he lead a rebellion against the high council. He, like many others, believed if the council had been more open about what was going on then our world could have been saved."

Her lips twitch a little, "I sympathise with that - I don't know if he was really right or not, but I still believed we needed to work together, not fight each other, if we were going to survive. I joined the civil protection corps to fight back against his insurrection. The last time I saw him was when I caught him with my unit."

Clark Kent has posed:
    Nodding, Kal replies "Yes, that's one of the things he told me about. And it might be possible that he was right, who knows what some random scientist working on the problem could have come up with? But it's all conjecture at this point. The fact is, Krypton's star collapsed into a supernova, and I can't think of even the most intelligent people I know coming up with a way to prevent that in a year."

    He pauses for a moment as a thought strikes him. "I know you were told about Argo city, but has anyone mentioned anything about Kandor to you?" He looks just a touch worried about the reaction to this, but he is a superhero after all, so must hold up bravely in these situations.

    Hopefully she won't blast off through the ceiling in search of Zod after this talk.

Alura In-Ze has posed:
Alura raises an eyebrow, "Kandor is not exactly new news.. is it?" Perhaps Jor never included the story of Kandor. But she can set that right now. "An AGI named Brainiac, some sin from an age long before, came back to Krypton and stole our capital city. Shrunk it down and flew away never to be seen again leaving only a giant hole."

She frowns a touch. "I never knew much about the Ca-Luan but I can't imagine what it must have been like for our ancestors to witness a genocide of their creation, by one rogue AGI like that."

As far as she knows, Brainiac being Ca-Luan, committed genocide against his own kind and went insane. Thus ending artificial Kryptonian life once and for all. The societal wound was never healed, only softened by the passage of time.

Clark Kent has posed:
    "That's correct, as far as it goes. However, Brainiac still exists and attacked Earth a couple years ago. During the battles, his ship was invaded. He still had Kandor in it's shrunken state, people and all. We took it away from him before he escaped to the stars again." He watches her to see how she's taking the news.

    "Some of those extremely intelligent friends I mentioned tried to figure out a way to restore it to normal, but all failed. We didn't dare to experiment on Kandor of course, so they were working with what they could find out about it."

    "When all was said and done, there was nothing we could do to restore it." He looks at her directly as he says "I ended up entrusting it to Dru-Zod. I could not think of a better protector of the remaining Kryptonians, and as he is out there" he motions upwards to indicate space "It is possible he could find the answer from other races that have fought Brainiac in the past."

Alura In-Ze has posed:
Alura's eyes widen. The sin of Krypton's past made it all the way to Earth. Countless other worlds no doubt too. She sits back down on the couch and stares in disbelief. "I'm so sorry. That thing is ... well, if Earth can fight back against it then that's a good sign."

But then he mentions Zod being the new custodian of Kandor and a flash of conflicting emotions rushes across her face. "That..." she pauses and thinks. "If he's of right mind then perhaps you did the right thing. It is the duty of the fighters guild to defend Kryptonians. But I'm concerned he's not of a right mind."

She summises from the way Kal describes it that Zod is not on Earth, "And you don't know where he is or how to contact him." Still it looks as if gears are turning in her mind. She touches her bracer and the holographic interface appears once more.

"Unlock High Council File - Brainiac. What was its purpose," she says.

The bracer responds in that same genetic voice the wall had a moment ago. "Authorisation for Krypton Locked Historical Files requires High Council override."

Alura motions with her hand, "Given."

"Authorisation for Krypton Locked Historical Files in the presence of non-High Council Member Kal-El requires High Council override."

Alura frowns and motions again, "Given."

"Project P718, Krypton Preservation of Life Samples in Seed Vault. AGI P718 was designed to seek out remaining life outside of Krypton's domed cities and preserve it for historical and scientific study. Project P718 achieved sentience year L17721, but aberrations were detected in its morality. Project P718 attacked fellow AGI collective at Historical Preservation Vault. Project P718 ordered for psychiatric evaluation. Project P718 commits genocide against all Krypton AGI. Project P718 leaves Krypton. L17783 Project P718, identifying itself as Brainiac, returns to Krypton and enacts preservation upon Kandor. Last known locked record."

Alura looks at Kal with concerned eyes, "Brainiac is still doing what he was designed to do - preserve life outside Krypton's domed cities. But that's... everywhere. He won't stop - ever."

Clark Kent has posed:
    Kal shakes his head as Brainiac's origin is explained. "Well, that at least explains why he does what he does. Apparently his programmer didn't think of restricting him to one planet, or that part of his programming got corrupted. I can sort of understand it, most human programmers creating something worldwide wouldn't think to add 'but only on this planet' to the instructions."

    He broods over that for a moment, then blinks and looks up at her. "But that means Brainiac's preservation machinery is Kryptonian technology. Our technology... Do you happen to have access to the technology used by that project? We just might be able to figure out how to reverse the process if we know how it's done!" The symbol on his chest is completely appropriate as hope shines through his expression over the chance to restore what remains of Krypton.

    "I'm sure we could find a good place for it if we can unshrink it, either on Earth or another planet. It would have to be somewhere that there would be enough food to support that many people. And come to think of it, another solar system might be best. I don't mean to insult them, but I don't know that I want every citizen in Kandor to be under a yellow sun. Our history is not a very good one, I'm afraid."

Alura In-Ze has posed:
Alura smiles a moment as Kal comes up with a plan of action. She rests a hand on his shoulder and nods her head, "The logic tracks, but I've never heard of a shrink or unshrink ray before. That means the technology was classified. Or perhaps Brainiac erased the designs when he coopted it."

"But, that shouldn't stop us from trying. A set back, sure, but as you say it came from Krypton. We can figure it out if we have access to it and time. And a way of contacting Zod. Krypton once upon a time used zeta-waves for communication with its space colonies but that technology is ancient forgotten too. Give me some time and I'll figure something out."

A smile stretches across her face no matter how she wants to feel about it. One smart part of Krypton has survived and there's a possibility they can bring it back to life. "There's a planet we were headed to in Argo-City. It would be an ideal location for .. a New Krypton."

Clark Kent has posed:
    "Well, all the archives and laboratories here are at your disposal. If you need something we don't have here, let me know and I'll find it. I'm sure the others will be just as willing to help out with whatever you need. I can also put you in touch with some of Earth's best minds, you'd be surprised at some of the things they've come up with."

    He speaks to the Fortress' computer system in Kryptonian "<Display Tony Stark and Reed Richards.>" Pictures of the two man appear on the large screen, their accomplishments scrolling below them. "These are the first two I would suggest. Tony can be a bit much to handle though, he's a bit of a narcissist. Still, he puts himself on the line as Iron Man, so he's a good person. I suppose we all have our problems, after all, and he's been though a lot so you kind of have to make allowances for him."

    He adds, "Kara can probably put you in touch with the group of female scientists who call themselves GIRL, they are quite accomplished as well. I believe they recently designed, built and flew their own space vehicle. I think that the more people we have on this, the more likely we are to find an answer."

Alura In-Ze has posed:
Alura looks over at the pictures of Kal's chosen science heroes of Earth. "Thank you Kal. I appreciate it. I need to launch satellites to zero in on the location of the Sanctuary. When we sent you and Kara to Earth we didn't just send one home away from home. We sent the Fortress, and the Sanctuary. The Sanctuary is somewhere on Earth but where is unclear - the habitat has lost power. We'll need the combined resources of both if we're to solve this one."

She looks at the pictures pondering. "This planet is not at all what I expected. Well, I never expected to come here at all. But Jor either didn't know or left out some important things. Tony Stark - a man named Bruce Banner mentioned him when talking to an AI called Jarvis. He's developed a rudimentary programmable matter called Nanites."

She looks back to Kal and says, "It's not entirely out of the question that we might not be able to figure out a way to ... okay that was wordy, sorry. Create new Sunstone. We could potentially create new Sunstone."

Clark Kent has posed:
    "It may be possible, but I think restoring Kandor would have to be the more important project. And besides, Kandor may hold information on creating Sunstone since it is an entire Kryptonian city."

    He hmms, then adds "The biggest problem I see in restoring Kandor is it's current guardian. I fear Zod may expect to lead it, or attempt to install himself as leader if he is denied the position."

    He considers a moment then adds "I didn't really look into the economics or trade information about Krypton, were the cities independent or did they trade for supplies each needed? If they were independent, they would almost certainly have a sunstone facility."

Alura In-Ze has posed:
Alura nods, "Though we may need to make some to restore Kandor. It might be a matter of chicken and egg. I won't conjecture on it until we know for sure what is needed."

She presses her lips together and chuckles, "Well he'll have to answer to me on that then." She taps her bracer, "On here is the proceedings of his trial where he was found guilty. The high council of Kandor will have to make up their own mind but I doubt they're going to yield to his desire to rule. Even if he paints himself the hero."

"But whose to say what did and did not survive Kandor's abduction. If we're lucky the people are fine - everything else can be rebuilt. The megacities of Krypton were as self sufficient as they could be. Our planet had gone through multiple ecological collapses in its time - life outside the domes was all but impossible for anything but the hardiest of creatures."

Clark Kent has posed:
    "That's true, we don't know what sort of shape things are in. I would imagine that it's a form of stasis though, so as to actually preserve whatever was collected. And I'm less worried about Kandor making Zod their leader than I am about Zod, his followers and his battlecruiser not giving them the choice. Either way, you're right, that's a worry for the future if we succeed in unbottling them to begin with."

    Flipping gears back to an earlier part of the conversation, he says "I had no idea there was a second facility like the Fortress on Earth. Perhaps the Fortress' systems can find it, I have access to a number of satellites, both Kryptonian that I launched and various Earth based ones. We can certainly put them to work searching for any traces of Sunstone and see what we come up with."

    He looks excited at the prospects suddenly before them. It's not often he can let cracks show in the shell that is "The Man of Steel", but this is one of those times.

Alura In-Ze has posed:
Alura looks delighted and surprised at the same time. "You're a step ahead of me Kal. That's wonderful. It was meant to be for Kara - so I'd like to include her in the search. The three of us can find it and restore power to it. Where-ever it is."

"I suppose I need to talk to this other Kara. If my daughter were lost to me, I'd want another me to care for them. In whatever capacity that might be...," she nods to herself, "Well. It seems we have a lot of work today." She claps her hands together and rubs them, "Let's get to it."

Clark Kent has posed:
    Kal replies "Most certainly we can include Kara. Unless you have any objections I'd say we can get all of our little extended family involved, since one way or another this will affect all of us. You can use the systems here to send out a general call to all of us if you want to set up a meeting or brainstorming session. We all tend to be on different schedules depending on where we choose to live and how much we do the secret ID thing and so have to work."

    He chuckles and adds, "I know masquerading as a reporter might seem a little strange, but it's hard to make friends and have any sort of normal social interaction as Superman. It's a little easier now that there are a few of us here, but I got into the habit early, the Kents explained why it would be best not to show off my abilities at school and such."

    Standing up, he points out the hallway the labs are down. "There's an interface into my satellite network to the left of the second lab door, you can explain what you want it to look for." He pauses a moment, almost as if listening for something. "And for now, I'm afraid I have to go be Superman. Welcome to home, as it were. I'll be back."

    With that, he suddenly blurs into a high speed exit of the Fortress, blasting into the sky and vanishing as soon as he's outside.