Rising above the ice, the crystalline Fortress openly declared its alien origin. It gave off a glow independent of the sunlight reflecting off of it. When Clark recovered from staring at it in awe, he flew down to the entrance.

It was the same as the Fortress of Solitude on Earth. One enormous hall inside a dome. There were regions where the crystal extruded to make platforms and walls, but otherwise it was mostly bare.

"Welcome, Kal-El." Jor-El actually spoke rather than contacting Clark through his mind. There didn't seem to be a source of the voice though, it came from all directions at equal intensity. Even his super-hearing couldn't pick up a deviation in it.

"Why didn't you tell me you could remake the Fortress?" Clark asked.

"Because it holds dangerous knowledge and if you had known that it was available, the phantom would have threatened you to access it. With the Kryptonian technology and science stored here, he could eventually sterilize an arm of a galaxy. If he threatened the near-certain death of a village, it was clear that you would choose to save it rather than prevent a far larger catastrophe that may seem easier to avert."

Clark didn't respond, because Jor-El was right. The phantom had been able to push him around just by holding Arthur's life over his head, using a village or town would have been a lot worse.

"Fine. Jor-El, you said it wasn't possible to go home with the crystal. Is that still the case now that the Fortress has been built here too?"

"No, at least not at this time. If you had data on your arrival into this section of the multiverse, then perhaps, but likely little of it remains for instruments to read. The crystal's own data is corrupted by kryptonite interference."

Clark bit his lip. "But what about the Phantom Zone? I was able to send the phantoms to it with the crystal. Could I go through the zone to get to Earth?"

"No. The connection to the zone has been lost as well as any to Earth. The phantoms are stored in the crystal shield, they have not been transported to the zone."

"So." Clark looked around in unease. "I'm stuck here."

"Not necessarily. After studying Kryptonian physics, you may discover a way to return. In fact, that is only one of many subjects that you should start learning. And with this first step in your education, a change of attire is appropriate."

To Clark's right, a section of the floor pushed up. It was a display case, and inside was a blue suit with the shield-shaped symbol of El on its chest. It was lined in red with a gold background. Attached to the shoulders was a red cape flowing down the back. On the hip was a red belt. For the feet, red boots. The case opened up for him.

"You're giving me a change of clothes?"

"Yes. It is for reasons both ceremonial and practical."

Clark took it out of the case. "Why did you choose this design? It looks a bit like the Kryptonian clothes I saw, but the colors and the cape don't look familiar."

"It was woven by the Fortress' technology and guided by your unconscious thoughts. In a way, this conspicuous and colorful set of clothing is what you wanted."

"Red and blue, probably because I still consider myself an American. A cape though . . . well I guess if Qrow and Ruby look fine with one, I can too." He changed into the suit. After putting it on, he marveled at how well it fitted him. It didn't resist at all unless he stretched as far out as he could.

In fact, the clothing putting up meaningful resistance against him was incredible as well. He pinched the fabric and pulled up, and to his surprise it took a noticeable amount of effort for him to pull it half an inch up.

"Wow." Was all he had to say.

"It is very durable. Almost as much as you. That will prove very useful as you properly learn about your abilities." Above Clark's head a hole in the ceiling opened up. "Are you ready?"

"I am." Clark pointed his arms up. He wasn't sure why, it just felt natural. With the motion, he flew up out of the Fortress and the hole closed behind him. In a rush of motion, the clouds dropped under him and he was alone in the clear blue sky.

'First, it would be wise to store the phantom securely inside the Fortress,' Jor-El's voice had returned to purely mental communication. 'Experiment along the way if you wish. Feel for the movements which make flying easier. Test the mental images of yourself which work the best.'

Clark did. The first thing he tried was changing speed as he flew in a straight line. He went from walking speed, to a jogging pace, to running. His running speed, to be exact, which meant that with a normal rate of perception the land under him transformed from ice to green forests and blue ocean in a matter of seconds.

Then, he went even faster. His first instinct when he'd been going at high speeds was to point his arms forward, but he found that if he focused, he could go just as fast even if he kept his arms at his sides. He tried changing speeds, going faster and slower and repeating the process a few times to make sure he had it under control.

It was freeing. Exhilarating.

He arrived back at the mountain where he'd buried the phantom. He didn't bother going through the trouble of digging him back up, instead Clark just dove into the ground. The dirt was shoved aside by the force of his body and when he reached the phantom's crystal, he grabbed hold of it and forced them out of the ground.

In another few moments, he brought the prisoner back to the Fortress. Inside, a portion of the floor opened up, and when Clark put the phantom down the Fortress extended beams of crystal that attached to the phantom's containment and held it in place.

Clark flew out again, continuing with his flying practice. He aimed more towards the west than before and tried steadily increasing his speed. Then, at a certain point something strange happened. He stopped accelerating. It was still possible to push himself further, but for some reason he felt like he shouldn't.

Briefly, Clark boosted himself to see what would happen. There didn't seem to be any change. Below him the ice returned, and he realized he'd already traversed half of Remnant to its Antarctic.

'Stop, Kal-El, and turn back to see what you have done. Or more precisely, hear it.' Jor-El's voice interrupted.

Worried, Clark came to an immediate halt with ease. He looked back with a worried face. However, there didn't seem to be anything wrong, and he wondered what Jor-El meant.

Then, the sonic boom reached him. His eyes widened. 'That's never happened before.'

'Has it not? Perhaps not exactly, but a more destructive effect was present during your most recent fight with the phantom.'

Clark realized. That desperate dodge of the phantom, the air detonating as they both tore through it. That single movement had devastated the area.

'But why? I know enough about physics to know that something like that should happen at the speeds I normally go at, but it usually doesn't. Why is it happening now?'

'The explanation lies with the nature of your powers. Your movement is not like the firing of a bullet or the flight of a rocket, you fold and warp space to reach such high speeds even when your feet stay on the ground. The altered space affects the fluid matter within it, dragging it in a certain sense so that your disruption is minimal. A more exact description requires physics and mathematics beyond both Earth and Remnant, but at the moment such rigor is unnecessary. What is important is that there is a limit to how effectively matter is dragged, most solid material will not give way as gases or liquids do, and at a certain speed, no matter can be dragged quickly enough to minimize disruptions fully. At some point, sonic booms will manifest, then the air itself will batter against your body and heat up.'

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

'Huh, so if I really want to push my speed, I guess there's only one place to do it.' Clark looked up. He positioned his feet and kicked off into the sky.

'Kick' wasn't the right word, because his feet didn't push off anything, but the thought felt right for a sudden jump in speed.

This course of flight felt different, better. It wasn't until now that he realized that he'd felt restrained while flying over the ground, and he knew why. At the distances he'd flown, he'd gone partway in an enormous circle. Flying in a straight line was a lot easier.

In a moment, the blue dome darkened and widened into a black curtain with stars studded in it. Clark looked down, Remnant shrank from a world covering half of his reality to a great ball under his feet.

Then he caught the sight of the broken moon, and he had a crazy thought. He laughed. Which was weird with no air, his body just shook.

'Why limit yourself?' Jor-El's voice asked. 'Attempt the feat, test your capabilities.'

Clark stopped himself. Could he do it?

He turned his eyes once again to that shining cluster of fragments. Why not?

His arms reached out, his hands surrounding the image of the moon, framing it as his goal. Little by little, the moon grew and more details appeared in unaided vision. Craters, cracks in the surface, tiny fragments that hadn't been visible from Remnant. It wasn't like telescopic vision, which magnified everything in the spot he was looking at. The moon got bigger, but the distant stars behind it had no visible change.

Clark's eyes widened as he approached. The moon wasn't a faraway object anymore, it was rapidly becoming a world of its own. Soon it covered his view just as Remnant had, taking up half the universe. He stopped at a point a few hundred feet above a gray plain on the largest lunar fragment and looked around. Its curve was nearly hidden by the horizon, and everything was clear. No air or clouds to obscure his unaided vision.

He looked back up, marveling at the sight of Remnant. From his perspective, it was a moon of its own. The swirling white clouds, the mountains of Vale, the yellow deserts of Vacuo, and part of the white snowscape of Atlas were visible from here. The sharp line separating the day and night sides of Remnant was somewhere in the middle of the ocean.

'Jor-El? How long did it take me to get here?'

'118 seconds.'

It had felt short, but really? Not even two minutes?

'If you're interested, that was an average speed of just slightly over one percent the speed of light. Would you like to test how fast you are truly capable of going?'

Clark nodded.

'Then fly. In any direction you wish.'

He did. He picked a random star and hurled himself towards it as fast as he could. 'One one thousand two one thousand three one thousand . . . '

His view of the universe shifted as he did. The visible light from the stars turned into ultraviolet and then X-ray. He glanced briefly behind him, and the opposite effect had taken place. The wavelengths of the light coming from behind him had lengthened and gone far into the infrared.

When he counted to ten, he came to a stop. Actually, the definition of stopping was a bit complicated in space, so he just shifted to a speed where the stars looked normal. He turned back and faced Remnant.

The planet was the size of a pea, and the Moon beside it a small white dot with dust sprinkled around it. The Sun hadn't changed size though, which comforted him somewhat.

'How fast was that?' he asked.

'Ninety-five percent the speed of light.'

Clark would have whistled if there were air. He could explore a solar system in a matter of hours if he wanted to.

'Alright, that's good to know. I'm going to head back to Remnant.'

'Before you do that, however, it would be wise to test your reflexes with your new speed. This Moon is convenient for that. See if you can safely navigate through the debris there.'

"Okay." Clark said. He flew towards the moon and it grew at an enormous rate until he enhanced his senses.

Even then, this level of speed was hard to manage in such an environment. He zipped by enormous lunar debris and curved around them, their surfaces rushing by dangerously quick. Make tight turns wasn't hard though, that was good.

He swerved around a rock that must have been dozens of miles across.

"Whoah!"

It would have been a shout if there was air to carry sound. There was another one behind it, and he forced himself to the side in order to dodge it.

He didn't make it all the way. The rock clipped his foot and pain shot through his leg. The hit sent him spinning end over end, the stars a backdrop of blurred dots shooting by. With a force of will he steadied himself and the universe stopped spinning.

'Look to Remnant. You must stop the debris from hitting populated regions of the planet.' Jor-El said it so quickly that Clark had to maintain his high perception to understand it.

Clark did and his jaw dropped. Even when he pushed his perception to its limit, the moon rocks were still hurtling towards Remnant. At least they were easy to spot with his enhanced vision with their glow. The largest pieces were bright red but much of the smaller ones lit up in shorter wavelengths, ultraviolet and X-ray.

Fortunately, he was still able to catch up to them. The debris was spread out, none of it very large, but Jor-El said that even a pebble at these speeds could destroy a city. It was up to Clark to break them apart into pieces too small to do much damage.

His heat vision vaporized the lunar projectiles into dust which would quickly slow down and bleed away their terrible energy into Remnant's atmosphere. Even with his speed, the fragments travelled thousands of miles towards Remnant before he reached them all. It was only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of miles between Remnant and the moon, but Clark still shuddered at the thought of the destruction which would have occurred if he'd made the same mistake on the planet.

He'd learned his lesson. Keep his speed manageable when planetside.

Clark faced Remnant and dove down to its North Pole, returning to the Fortress. A few hundred miles up, he started to feel like he should slow down again, so he did. That final portion of the flight ended up taking just as long as the entire trip down from the moon.

Before he reached his Fortress, Clark tested his maneuverability. He turned, spun, flew backwards and sideways. Sometimes he imagined himself as a screw or a drill, spinning in the sky. When he made tight turns, it helped to imagine himself being pulled along a curved path rather than pushing himself in another direction. He didn't seem any slower flying sideways, at least not until he got into dangerous speeds, at which point Jor-El explained that the differences in speed were because of how much cross-sectional area he presented.

Clark entered the Fortress' front entrance, which closed behind him with a deep formidable ringing of crystal and metal.

Jor-El's voice surrounded him again. "There is also much for you to learn about the Fortress' operations. It is capable of accessing this world's communications. You can monitor its feed and respond to any situations which requires your help. Eventually you will learn how to operate the Fortress to find specific channels and personalize the display as you wish, but for now it will respond to general directions and work on reasonable assumptions of what you mean."

A shard of crystal with a flat hexagonal shape grew out of the ground in front of Clark, just at the height of his hips. He placed his hand on it, and in front of him in a show of light were images of news stations from all over the planet. Vale, Vacuo, Atlas, Mistral, even some signals from Menagerie. They all played simultaneously in a mix of noise.

Remembering the three crucial components for a mindset suitable for operating Kryptonian technology, Clark focused on changing the display. One rectangular view, showing a station from Mistral that was running a story on the destruction at Haven Academy, grew larger and the other stations became muted.

The male anchor was saying, "The destruction of the academy also revealed an enormous underground chamber, and there are reports of an ancient vault inside which may have tremendous archaeological value."

Clark shut it off and tried to access Remnant's internet. The Fortress complied, and a view of a standard webpage browser appeared in front of him. Along with that was a QWERTY keyboard at chest height.

He poked it, but his finger went straight through, and it didn't type anything. However, when he deliberately wanted to type something, letters appeared in the address bar just like he wanted. He quickly typed out the address for a news website he liked to visit, and the webpage loaded faster than it ever had on his scroll.

That gave him a thought. He replaced the webpage with a blank screen with the blinking writing line on the top left. With a bit of flourish, Clark raced his fingers over the keyboard.

It could actually keep up with him. Even at his fastest, when he wasn't even thinking of words to type and instead copying an article he'd found, the Fortress could read his typing. It was only when he started running his fingers over random letters that it started having trouble. From his quickened perception there would be half-second delays before the screen would spit out the gibberish his fingers had made.

Suddenly, the screen vanished and Jor-El spoke. "There is time for amusement later. For now, there are more important topics to concentrate on."

In front of Clark appeared symbols, written Kryptonian, he realized.

"I understand the importance of preserving Kryptonian culture, but should I really learn the language first?" he asked.

"In Kryptonian, it is possible to describe concepts that neither Remnant nor Earth have equivalent terms for and with a precision that no language from either planet can match. It will be vital not only in using the Fortress properly, but also studying your powers and returning home."

"Alright then." Clark leaned forward, copying the symbols to memory.