My Brother's Keeper (a Superman story)

Chapter 11: Loss of Control

Laurel was still reeling from finding out she had powers, but not just any power. She could scream at high frequencies, making even a person land on their ass, several feet away.

            I knew she had no idea why she had these powers and I knew I had to tell her the truth, especially because she was freaking out, badly.

            "Laurel, you need to calm down" I urged.

            "How can I calm down? Am I a meta-human now?"

            "I know why you have these powers" I finally said.

            "What? How can you even know?"

            I sighed, realizing there was no easy way to break this news to her.

            "Because I'm also a meta-human but I am yet to show signs of powers" I finally said.

            "How did you find out?"

            "Superman took me to his fortress and his AI father told me he sensed I had dark matter and X-K in my system and somehow, he knew it was because of the COVID-19 vaccine that L-Corp produced."

            "In other words, that scumbag Lex Luthor did this to us?!" she angrily asked.

            "Yes, unfortunately."

            "Okay, this is too weird."

            "But look at the bright side, you're not defenseless when we go out at night, doing our usual sweeps."

            "That's not the point. We've been highly trained for this. To protect this town from these gangsters trying to intimidate our people."

            "I get it Laurel, but I told you because while I have a feeling Superman might be mad at me for revealing where I got this information from..." I realized my brother would likely become upset but at the same time, I was unable to keep this from her when she had every right to know why this was happening to her. "...I also cannot keep this from you."

            "I get it but...oh my god, I can't deal with this right now" she started crying.

            "It's going to be okay."

            "How do you know? I got this scary new power and all because of a vaccine that we all had no choice but to take because of how badly this coronavirus pandemic turned out!"

            "Look, either way, I don't regret taking the vaccine. The pandemic got bad and I caught it twice, as did my parents."

            "I know but...how many people were affected by this?"

            "I don't know. It's hard to say."

            "Should we tell Oliver and Sara? They too took the vaccine."

            "Maybe we should wait until we know more. I mean, this revelation will really shake them, and...maybe we should tell them about this" I ended up realizing halfway through my sentence that this was something they too needed to know.

            "Wait, but you said Superman took you to his fortress. I'm sure he's not going to take all of us there to get checked out. It'd be too risky and there's no other way to explain how you know this."

            "Unless someone else is displaying powers and starts to question Lex's vaccine, maybe we should keep this under wraps until we learn" I went back to my original idea.