Scary chapter!
The other soldiers kept firing for a few moments, but the gunshots began to stutter and then die off. For a long moment the figure stood motionless, smoke rising from its right hand.
Then it stepped forward, moving directly toward the Burmese sergeant who just moments before had been refusing to give the MSNBC crew an interview. To the man’s credit, he rose stiffly and stood at attention as the garish figure stood less than three feet away from him.
For the first time it spoke. It spoke in Burmese for a moment and stared at the sergeant, who nodded.
It dropped the mass of metal in its hand to the ground and then took off, flying directly upward almost faster than the eye could see.
I have to say: this Burmese sergeant shows some courage! I hoped for something like this, a little bit of intimidation, but nothing violent. I actually had a knot in someone´s gun in mind...
“We’ve traced the first two incidents to trial runs for the project,” Agent White said. “The first trial was aborted after a period of several seconds, and the second lasted almost a minute. In neither case was the system fully operational. However, the system was not running during the last incident.”
So there has to be another trigger for this... or does someone start his hadron collider from the other side? Who? Wild guess: Lex Luthor!
It was the second explosion that caught the adults’ attention, followed by a third and a fourth.
The man in the red cape was walking through the forbidden fields staring at the ground in front of him. From time to time something exploded; sometimes so close to the man than it made the adults gasp.
At one point the man stood for a moment and then stomped slightly on the ground. The explosion was loud, but it didn’t seem to affect the man at all, although it set the hem of his cape on fire. The man didn’t seem to notice and the fire quickly went out, leaving only charred edges.
Clearing a mine field in Iran... how will the government there react? As we all know, the goverment there is
very fond of the United States and everything coming from there - and Superman isn´t exactly what I would call un-american...
“The correlation with the testing-" Dr. Ledderman began.
“Isn’t perfect,” Agent White said. “For all we know, they have an identical collider on the other side and the effects only happen when both are running at the same time.”
But didn´t the third time happen without the hadron collider on this side running....?
“Well, had any of the passengers ever heard of a Hadron collider?”
“No,” Agent White admitted.
“Clark is a reporter,” Lois said. “If anyone would know, he would.”
Not if Lex is really behind it. He would have kept the whole thing a secret, and Clark wasn´t suspicious of him - until he came to our world.
“I think so,” Lois said. Clark had never described exactly where he’d come through, but he’d certainly seemed to know where to look. “I think the passenger pigeons were coming through from the same place too.”
Didn´t Clark say somewhere in your story that there are no passenger pigeons in his world?
The man standing in the middle of the road ignored their shouted demands to surrender, and instead he kicked a box standing next to the road.
The explosion was hot enough to be felt even from a hundred feet away. They ducked and ran for cover, only to stop and stare. As the fires died away, the man in the Superman costume still stood in the same position, although the lower part of his cape had burned away.
He looked at the cape, sighed and then shot directly into the air.
The members of the crew stared at each other for a long moment before slowly filing back into the vehicle.
As Private Jacobson shifted gears, he saw that his hands were shaking.
He was suddenly glad that he wasn’t yet a sergeant. He wouldn’t want to figure out how to report this, or why.
I love the cape problem!
And Private Jacobson is another of your well described side characters, there are a lot of them in this chapter!
How can the plane passengers and Clark get back to their own world if they can´t trigger a new series of rifts? And they can´t because it could cause horrible damage, even complete destruction, to our world! Clark would never allow that... so what do you have in mind?
Agent White was gritting his teeth. “Your boy just caused six separate diplomatic incidents, including accusations by the Chinese and Russians that the United States is launching missiles toward Asia.”
He turned to her and said, “Since when did he think it was ok to start world war three?”
You told three of these incidents in your story, Burma, Iran and Iraq, or did you mean the six cargo container `missiles´? As far as I renember, Clark kept his trajectory well away from China and Russia, so why are they making such a fuss? The video footage from Burma shows clearly what really happened and that Clark isn´t a danger to anyone. Iran will probably tell a different story than what really happened to Hadi and his family, but who believes Ahmadinejad?
I like very much that you show Clark in such different environments, even countries that are clearly hostile against USA, helping the Burmese victims, clearing a minefield in Iran and rescuing US troops in Iraq. (By the way, a good way to get him supporting the troops without getting too much involved!) And he shows his neutrality by doing things like that!
And please, Agent White, stop blowing things up! China and Russia didn´t launch their own missiles, so they must have gotten it by now! There probably were some very urgent telephone calls between Moscow, Beijing and Washington, but there is enough trust (other than in the seventies and eighties) an every side, so that they will sit back by now and watch Superman´s show! I´s not like they would have another choice...
I hope Lois will straighten him out in the next chapter! Does he already know Lois in `Mad Dog Lane´ mode?
Please, next chapter, and don´t you dare to let me wait for such a long time again!
