Wow, the legal headache of being a superhero in the real world these days!!!
First of all there's the business of paying your attorney...
“I can recover ghost pots in Alaska, I guess,” he said. “I paid for college working on a crab boat, and there were times where you'd lose the crab traps. There was a program to recover the traps in my world where they'd pay you fifteen dollars for each one you recovered.”
“Don't those things weigh like eight hundred pounds apiece?” Susan had watched enough episodes of Deadliest Catch with her husband to know a little of what he was talking about.
He shrugged. “I can probably collect several hundred of them, if I can get someone to pay for them without identification. Those ghost traps keep killing crabs, which damages the crab industry. It'd be a public service.”
Hmmm, yes. Good idea. And this is another testimony to how much research has gone into this story.
“Do you have a dollar…a real, United States dollar?”
He was silent for a moment, then reached into his boot, pulling out several crumpled bills. He handed her one.
I had to laugh at this! What a wonderful mental image!
Susan smiled slightly. “What do you want to accomplish?”
“There's a good chance that we may never be able to get home,” he said. “If it means endangering this world, I'm not willing to try to reopen a rift home. If we can't go home, I want those people to receive status as American citizens, and to have a chance to make some sort of life here without being prisoners.”
“Was everyone on the plane American?” Susan asked.
“Um…I'm not sure,” he said. “Then they should get asylum here if their country of origin don't want them.”
“And for yourself?”
“I can't do what I do alone,” he said. “I want to help the people of Myanmar, but unless charities are willing to work with me, I won't have anything to take to those people. If I were to try to stop crime, the police could refuse to hold anyone I captured.”
I love what he wants to accomplish. Only a truly, truly good guy would honestly want all of those things, and mostly just those things.
But the nit-picky details you have to think about when carrying out your superheroics....
“There are some serious legal issues related to stopping crime,” Susan said. “Ones we'll need to go over. Even though you aren't a citizen, you could make citizen's arrests in every state except North Carolina. There you can only detain someone, but you can't transport them.”
“You make it sound like I shouldn't even try,” he said. He was silent for a long moment. “I can't do that. I can't see people hurting and not do everything I can to help. Not anymore.”
That's wonderful! It's crazy, but I feel proud of Clark. As if I had anything to do with him!
Susan nodded approvingly. “You wouldn't be who you are if you did anything different. You just have to get the best legal protection you can get and hope for the best.”
I love Susan's comment, too.
He sighed and nodded soberly. “So what's the game plan?”
“I'd like to get Lois out first,” Susan said. “She's already my client, and the rules applying to her are going to be different from those applying to the rest of you.”
Yes, please! Do get Lois involved! She and Clark should be a team,
at least as much as Batman and Robin are a team.
The one thing he was certain of was that he wasn't going to be able to blow any but the smallest tornados off course.
But tornadoes were constructs of heat and cold, and those were things Clark had some power over. It wasn't something he'd tried before, and he ran the risk of making the problem worse, but he had to do something more than just try to dig survivors out.
Wonderful! Wonderful! Clark is going to try to do something to the
cause of tornadoes!
![[Linked Image]](http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/primer/tornado/images/tor_alley_lg.gif)
Tornadoes happen when cold and warm air meet and clash, usually over the Midwestern plains. Could Clark do something to change the temperature of that air?
They didn't crash at all. After several moments she opened her eyes. The ground was no longer rising up at them. Instead all she saw was blue sky.
It took her several moments to understand. They weren't falling; they were flying. She wondered if perhaps they had died and she simply didn't remember the crash. Perhaps they were heading to heaven together.
If they were heading for heaven, her neck wouldn't hurt this much.
I love this, a religious woman trying to figure out if she is going to heaven or not. Well, her neck says she isn't!
Her daughter was staring out the window. “I'm ok,” she said. She was silent for a long moment. “I thought you said Superman wasn't real.”
“He's not,” Mary-Lou said.
At this age Suzy sometimes had trouble distinguishing reality from fiction.
“Then who's flying the car?”
Well, out of the mouths of babes...
In his time as a paramedic, Thomas had seen everything.
Everything but a man in a Superman outfit flying, carrying a car over his head in a pose that reminded Thomas a little of the cover of Action Comics number one.
![[Linked Image]](http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/action-comics/1-1.jpg)
Clark would be flying this car instead of smashing it... but I love the Action Comics #1 comparison, nonetheless!
Thomas blinked as he saw what was on the horizon.
“Move, move, move!” he screamed, gesturing toward the other paramedics who were standing around staring.
Three tornadoes were visible and they were headed directly for town.
Against them stood a lone figure floating in the air.
Oh, wow! Oh, wow!
Well, one thing is certain: If Clark stops those tornadoes,
after flying those heavy containers to Myanmar and rescuing the Russian space shuttle, any person who still hasn't got a clue that Superman has come to this world should be regarded as almost criminally ignorant!
Please come back soon with more!
Ann
