TOC Part 19 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
JOURNAL ENTRY #20
JANUARY - EARLY JUNE, 1997
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Before Hawk Master could start spying for us, of course, she needed a lot of training. A lot of coaxing and convincing, too. Phillip and the kids worked with her, teaching her to go where directed, to really look around, to notice things from a more human perspective, to report it all in a way that could be understood. Along the way, they had to keep assuring her that it was important, as important as keeping the hawk population in check. It took months.
In the meantime, life went on more or less as normal for me. Gina and I had settled into a good routine. She'd really come to accept the Shadows... what we meant and what we did. She still worked as a waitress, but she'd cut back her hours to spend more time with us (me, the kids, and, to a lesser degree, the rest of the Shadows). It was good that she had work, and good, too, that she was more a part of our lives.
In late January, a reporter caught Lois apparently cheating on her husband with Superman. Luckily, the shot hadn't come out, but things didn't look good. Wells's database assured us that things would turn out okay, but we were still worried. So, I had a little chat with Samantha, the reporter who had broken the story. Don't worry. I didn't get violent. I just convinced her that it was best to drop the matter. Not that she had much credibility, anyway. Not after she'd taken part in a plan to blow up a building filled with the leaders of two countries in the middle of crucial peace talks, a fact we were sure to let the press know, even if Lois and Clark hadn't bothered to do so themselves.
After that, John Doe showed up out of nowhere, running for president. He would have made it, too. Superman stopped him, though. A Superman, anyway. I think there was a parallel universe or something mentioned. Anyway, John Doe turned out to be a villain named Tempus (we hadn't heard of him before, but apparently Lois and Clark had). He'd brainwashed the country with some kind of electronic device. Strangely, Wells showed up to take care of that himself. Tempus was taken to prison, never to be heard from again. It was too bad, really. He'd seemed like a darned nice guy.
A couple of weeks later, Penny Barnes showed up. She thought Jimmy was Superman, but otherwise seemed like a good kid. She'd clung to her theory of an alternate identity for Superman despite everything, and she'd gotten pretty close, too. We recruited her to act as an extra pair of eyes and ears.
There was some kind of mess in April with another one of Luthor's sons. He started buying up pieces of his father's old empire (Cadmus and Intergang, the former owners, didn't really care at that point, and may well have been happy to have a buyer), kidnapped Lois, and was busy hatching more evil schemes. Lois and Clark took care of most of that, fortunately, since we'd finally gotten Hawk Master to start scouting around Cadmus HQ for us and were focusing on that. We did get some interesting bits of robotic technology, though, from the Vixen robot. We didn't have much use for them as yet, but we filed the notes and blueprints and such under "R" for "robots" and gave copies to Hamilton and Alan, to see if they could develop some further upgrades for my arms.
Oh, the filing system. I guess I forgot to mention that. As you've seen, we'd come across quite a few gizmos, devices, and innovations over the years. Some of them proved to be very useful, sometimes immediately, sometimes far down the road. To help keep track of them, Phillip had created a system of archives, both on the computer and in hard copy. The computerized database was easily searchable, but the hard copies were kept in strict alphabetical order. We simply couldn't come up with a better system. There were histories and case files, too, but those tended to be dry, bare bones reports.
By June, we had enough information to really start planning our raid on Cadmus HQ. We knew, too, just why it was so important that we get in to do it. Three years previously, Dr. Fabian Leek had worked for Lex Luthor. He had tried to clone Superman, but the clone had turned out to be unstable. Cadmus had recruited him to continue the work, but he hadn't made much headway. Kryptonians were just too difficult to clone, especially given that human medicine had relatively little knowledge of alien DNA.
Dr. Mamba had helped change that. He'd had some success in creating clones by splicing together DNA from different species. In his case, he'd used frog DNA to help stabilize human clones. Sent to work with Dr. Leek, he'd proposed trying something similar with Superman. A human-kryptonian hybrid clone might be more stable, he thought, than a pure clone from either species. That was much easier said than done, of course, but it looked like they were getting pretty close.
That was something we couldn't allow to happen. With one or more kryptonians on their side (grown and raised for their purposes), Cadmus would become all but unstoppable. No doubt their first task would be to finish the job they'd been trying to do since the beginning — destroying Superman. After that, they could go on to do just about anything they wanted. It was no wonder they'd dedicated so much of their resources to the project.
We were making plans when something else happened. An insane former toymaker started kidnapping children. Superman took care of him, and we cleaned up. Standard operation in a way, but we gained something very important. The Toyman had taken the kids to his hideout with a teleporter. We were very quick to pick up that little bit of technology (and file it under "T" for future reference). It became the final part of our plan.
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