Kara squinted her eye and moved her hand with extreme care, every movement precise and calculated. Slowly, she rotated the machine's arms and released another burst of radiation into the small piece of Kryptonite, it flashed with green light for a second and then started to vibrate, absorbing more and more radiation. With a loud ‘bang’, it exploded into hundreds of pieces which quickly lost their colors.

Taking her hands off the controls, Kara wiped her forehead and sighed. She wasn't stupid enough to experiment with the radioactive rocks while in the same room, but using remote control handles and cameras in a far away room worked, even if it still caused her some stress.

In truth, she knew she should really be working on a prosthetic eye, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. She was still hopeful her eye would start to grow back, despite the fact it was showing no signs of doing so.

Still, putting on a prosthetic could delay or even stop the re-growth. Perhaps her healing was prioritizing her internal organs and would shift back to her eye eventually? She had been feeling better lately.

Glancing aside, she saw her prosthetic leg was still only at 60% charge and sighed before also checking her robots on the computer.

Her mining robots were still working, they weren't very efficient, being just repurposed security and maintenance drones instead of specialized equipment, but they could still find precious metals inside the asteroids and bring them back to the ship fairly easily.

It wasn't a long term solution, but she wasn't looking to start a true mining operation anyway, and could still get a fortune before they broke down.

Catwoman had called her two days after their meeting in order to accept the job, but her asking price had been a little too large for what Kara had in hand. She hadn't thought she'd need 50 million in gold when she had first mined the asteroid belt with Kori.

Still, it wasn't all that hard to do, even with the technology she had at hand.

Finally, she looked at her data recovery program. The Psions had damaged the data crystals in her ship while trying to extract information from them, and it was taking a long time to get it all fixed.

Stretching her back, Kara yawned and went back to her experimentations. She had already managed to turn a tiny piece of kryptonite red by bombarding it with radiation and accelerating its half-cycle, but any more and the damned rock simply degraded too fast to be of use, quickly becoming inert.

As a Kryptonian, very few things threatened Kara, and she wanted to be ready whenever one of them showed up. Magic was already being dealt with by obtaining Nth metal, and it would even have the bonus of helping her finally heal, but there was always a chance of another Kryptonian showing up.

As far as she could find, her cousin hadn't dealt with general Zod yet, and an evil doppelganger was always a possibility in DC, what with alternate realities and mad scientists.

So, she was trying to find a way to deal with them, and she doubted Superman would let her use the more… permanent solutions. As a result, she was killing some time trying to create golden kryptonite, relatively harmless to her people, but able to reduce them to human level for a long period of time. Perfect for safe incarceration.

She wasn't having much luck.

"Damnit!" She cursed as another small piece of Kryptonite lost its color and stopped radiating any harmful waves. It hadn't exploded this time, but Kara finally decided that just radiation wouldn't be enough to create anything other than the red variety, and that one only drove Kryptonians mad with rage.

Changing her approach, Kara tried to increase the rock's half life instead, expending another hour and a half trying various ways of doing so until she finally got a nail sized piece of blue kryptonite on the table.

She memorized the precise method of fabrication before erasing it from the computer. Even if she lost two entire days of data gathering and studying, Kara wasn't willing to allow anyone even the slightest chance of getting their hands on Kryptonite research.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Sending a drone to put away both red and blue pieces of Kryptonite, she watched as they put them in small lead boxes. Kara checked the more long term experiments with pressure and chemical baths, making sure they were running correctly before pushing herself away from the chair and grabbing her prosthetic.

With a turn of the wrist, she locked it in place and wiggled her metal toes. The metal wasn't capable of transmitting sensations, but she always felt better when she had all her parts in place, almost like she was whole again.

Putting on her socks and boots, Kara dropped down on the floor and cracked her neck. How strange, in both her lives she had always wanted to fly and, now that she could, she had the odd desire to walk everywhere.

Looking over everything one last time, Kara made sure the mining process was automated and working as expected before grabbing her respirator and walking towards one of the ship's hatches, then she flew out into space picking up speed towards earth.

She didn't fly as fast as she could, or even constantly accelerate. She wanted to let herself rest since it was a much greater distance than just from the moon.

Still, since her mask allowed her to breathe easily, and there was no air resistance, her body moved with ease, picking up speed slowly but constantly, allowing her to finish the trip in less than two hours.

She had to bleed out some speed before reentry, lest she burn her new clothes but, in another twenty minutes, she was dropping down behind an alley in Fawcett City. The sun was still up in the sky, so she was a little early getting home and, since she hadn't eaten in a day and a half, decided a little ice cream wasn't too much.

Fawcett City in the afternoon was beautiful. It had a peaceful feeling Kara had only ever felt in Kandor when the military was away from the city, a sense that no matter what happened, everything was gonna be alright. People walked the streets and just felt…safe, Captain Marvel was doing a good job.

"Whoa!" Screamed a teenager as he almost hit her with his bicycle while she was waiting in line for an ice cream.

"Watch it, you punk!" Shouted a man from behind her. He put a hand on her shoulder and tried to support her and stop her from falling. It was completely unnecessary, but Kara appreciated the thought. "You alright miss?"

"I'm fine, thanks." She gave him a wide smile before noticing the little girl hiding behind his leg and holding one of his hands. "And who's this?"

"Anna." The little brunette squeaked from behind her father, hiding her face on his pants and causing Kara to laugh out loud.

Kara really couldn't see herself raising a kid like that, no matter how cute she seemed. Perhaps it had been for the best that Kal El had found such caring parents as the Kent's.

The young father lifted the girl up into his arms and kissed her on the cheek before smiling at Kara. "Come on, honey, say hi to the nice lady."

"Hello." The little girl said and then buried her face on her fathers' neck while mumbling something.

"Nice to meet you too, Anna." Kara couldn't help messing with the kid’s hair. "Heh, cute kid."

"Thanks," Said the proud father. "I've never seen you here before, are you new here?"

"Yep, just moved into the city a couple of weeks ago."

"Really, hope you like it here then."

They continued to make small talk as the line advanced, Kara asking about what to look out for in the city, and him kind of bragging about his daughter. It wasn't anything important, but she found it nice to be able to have a simple, normal conversation.

"Hey, I think it's your turn." The father pointed and Kara saw he was right.

"Thanks, nice to meet you." She waved the little girl goodbye before approaching the ice cream truck and passing the attendant a bill. "Get me a vanilla cone."

"Right away Miss."

"Hi honey, did you wait too long?" Said a female voice from behind her.

Turning around, Kara saw what was probably the girls' mother joining them to wait in line. Getting her cone, Kara waved back one last time and left.

"Hi mommy, daddy was flirting with the pretty lady!"

Kara almost spit her ice cream as she heard the eager little girl tattling to her mother. Lowering her head, she increased her walking speed while snickering at the flustered man's response.

Kara should have known things were going too well. Her experiments were going well, all her projects were working as expected, she should have known something was gonna go wrong.

Looking up, she saw Captain Marvel flying towards a tall building before being hit by a huge lightning bolt and losing control, falling heavily into the asphalt only four blocks to her right.

Damn, was Livewire or Weather Wizard in the city?

Using her X-ray vision, Kara found the Captain already recovering before a second discharge of electricity passed through the cables in the street, hitting the Hero in the chest, driving him back into the ground and revealing a blond teenager sparkling with electricity, her boot on his chest.

"Well, well, well, looks like you're not so marvelous after all!" The girl, who couldn't be older than fourteen, gloated before the Captain recovered and tried to grab her. With a flash and a few bolts of electricity, she disappeared, only to appear on the sidewalk. "Ha! He did say it wasn't going to be easy."

Seeing the girl lift her hands in the air and they starting to gather another electric discharge, the hero dodged.

"Sha… darn it!" He started to say, but cut himself off, clearly not knowing how resistant the girl was, and unwilling to really hurt her. Kara noticed the hero seemed to be holding back a lot, even avoiding causing damage to his surroundings despite the battle.

Kara kept an eye on the fight and started walking towards them. She wasn't actually worried, Captain Marvel was about even with her cousin in power, but it wouldn't hurt to be close by, just in case of any accidents… Plus, it was her first superhero fight, she didn't want to miss it by getting distracted.

Both fighters started playing a kind of keep away game, with the super powered teenager flashing away every time the Captain got close, and he enduring her electrical discharges while grunting and grimacing.

Fortunately, the girl didn't seem able to actually hurt him, even when her revealing outfit started helping, shining with orange light as it channeled her power.

Noticing it, the Captain started aiming for her suit, managing to damage it without hurting the girl inside and causing her teleports to become erratic.

One of said teleports fell short, leaving the girl just a little too close to the hero, he managed to use his speed to grab her before she could reorient herself, destroying the electronic devices in her suit and causing her to scream in frustration.

She beat her fists at his arms fruitlessly, her hair floating up as her electrical discharges became weaker and less controlled.

The fight seemed to be over when the girl grabbed at the captain's arms and they both flashed with electricity, causing every lamp in three blocks to blow up, and one of the generators in the closest lamppost to explode in a shower of sparks.

A thunderbolt hit them from above, causing the closest windows to explode, when Kara's vision finally cleared, she saw five stunned kids in the place where the two had fought.