Kara Zor-El was having a really bad day, which was great since last she remembered she had been poisoned with radiation and her body had started to cannibalize itself, she was in a terrifying amount of pain and certain she would die alone after her entire race was driven to extinction and her planet had exploded.
So, this day being only 'bad' was a huge improvement.
It didn't help that after waking up she remembered having lived a second life one where he was male, lived a relatively boring life in a primitive society and then had been hit by a huge truck, survived to go to the hospital and even woke up for a few hours, just enough to feel all the pain of his organs failing him as the damage he suffered proved to be too much even for 'modern' medicine.
So she was really confused, was she Kara Zor-El having a last minute hallucination of a previous life or was she Jace Brown having reincarnated? She supposed she was more Jace than Kara just because she had lived longer as Jace but she had a female body and calling herself Jace in it just seemed strange… then her mind started to get foggy and she passed out once again.
"It's a Kryptonian body, it's got to be valuable" said a harsh insectoid voice.
Waking up to hear someone discussing selling your still living body was not the most pleasant of experiences but since she hadn't been certain she would wake up at all was already great, and they had even taken the kryptonite meteorite away from her so that was great too.
"Who the hell would buy a body" came a male kryptonian voice, or human, probably human since kryptonians were gone "Nevermind lots of people buy bodies here"
"I got a contact amongst the psions who would pay a lot" said a third female voice "kryptonian bodies were always scarce but this one may be the last one ever recovered, its gonna cost a fortune"
"Sold a lot of kryptonians did you?" asked the insect before making a clicking noise
"Fuck no, never got close to those freaks but one sometimes sneaked out of their little self imposed prison and you hear things"
"Fine put it in the freezer so it doesn't spoil or something and lets finish harvesting the ship" the first voice continued "I don't know if their bodies have value but kryptonian technology certainly do"
Kara felt herself being moved but she just couldn't move, her entire body struggling to revive her from her hibernation but she was still too wounded and too close to kryptonite to resurrect herself.
Fuck she was in the DC universe, even if she did die there's a fair chance she would come back someday, then they left her in the freezer and her mind went blank again.
"Hmm, very interesting, it seems the specimen has similar traits to tamaraneans in the way it absorbs solar light" said a cold and calculating voice as Kara woke up to the feeling of something digging into her right arm.
"Its cells seem really resistant, it's been dead for at least three years and they are still reacting to light emanation" a second voice said and Kara felt something move inside her chest.
"Are you certain there is no brain activity?"
It took a few seconds but the answer came "Hmmm… there's a few strange electrical signals but they could be from some reaction of its cells absorbing light the machine doesn't indicate life"
Kara was feeling numb, despite the horror of having some bastard scientist playing around inside her body she was utterly paralized unable to even open her eyes, thankfully her nerves seemed to still be damaged so she wasn't feeling too much pain but it was increasing avery minute as the bastards bombarded her body with solar light to study its reactions, after what felt like an eternity one of the bastards took out one of her lungs, a kidney and some of her liver before they closed her chest.
"the subject seems to still show some cellular regeneration" Commented one of the mad scientists.
"Good, put it into a nutrient tank and bombard its body with solar light, if its healing we may be able to study it for much longer" he released an unsettling laugh "Perhaps we can even try and adapt some of what we learn for use on subjects 1926 and 1927"
"Their light absorption properties do seem similar I wonder if they had interbreed in the past"
Then one of the creatures put her inside a tank filled with liquid and carried her away from the experimental room, she felt her body being moved for almost ten minutes before she was put into a standing position inside the tub and she felt the invigorating sunlight hitting her naked and heavily damaged body, it felt absolutely divine to the point that she lost several hours just basking in the sensation of the sun hitting every piece of her body, knitting her flesh closed and, together with the fluid around her, starting to regenerate the damage done by starvation, exposition to kryptonite and a vivisection.
Then the light started healing her damaged nerves and she truly wished they had taken her heart not a lung, the pain was unbearable and she couldn't even scream, it must have lasted centuries getting worse and worse as her nerves became better and better, thank god her body could still shut down and return to hibernation.
Over the following weeks Kara learned to absolutely hate the Rao cursed psions, despite knowing from the books she had read as Jace that there are worst races out there in this universe she couldn't imagine a single one of them she wished had gone extinct more than the lizard like beings, the only good thing about them not being exterminated before is that she could do it herself once she recovered.
At least twice a week the psions would take her out of her tub and experiment on her, sometimes it was vivisection again, sometimes they just exposed her to kryptonite to watch her reaction but they also pumped her veins full of some strange substance and watched as her cells fought it off or tried to transplant strange organs inside her and make them integrate with her anatomy and she felt Every. Single. Cut.
She also learned why she hadn't snapped out of her hibernation despite constant exposure to sunlight, the kryptonite that hit her ship had been absorbed by her body poisoning her cells and, now that she wasn't next to a house sized piece of it, her body had been slowly expelling it every day, it wasn't enough to kill her outright but it did stop her from gaining any of the strength and resistance kryptonians were known for, though the psions did have to start using better tools two weeks after she had first woken up because her skin had become tough enough to dull their blades.
Kara's mind was still mostly unconscious a lot of the time but the pain of every experiment never failed to bring her out of it but everyday she felt more of the poison expelled from her veins and the psions had even started her body on dialysis, eager to start experimenting with a fully empowered kryptonian body since their devices still indicated she was brain dead, they didn't know what was waiting for them.
At least the time she wasn't getting tortured was used to come to terms with her new life, In a way both Kara Zor-El and Jace Brown were trully dead, as far as she could figure out she had been Jace Brown, had lived to the age of 28 in an earth without aliens or superheroes, had read a lot about the DC universe and then he had died and been reincarnated as Kara Zor-El but, like every soul that reincarnates Jace had been a blank slate when he became Kara, Kara had parents she regarded as her own, she had a childhood, friends, family just like Jace, and then she had remenbered Jace's entire life.
It was complicated, she didn't remember Jace's life as a stranger or in glimpses she HAD BEEN Jace and Jace had became her, their souls were the same, now she was an odd mixture of the two, in a way she was probably more Jace than Kara simply by virtue of Jace having lived longer and having more experience but it didn't feel wrong to be a woman and she felt no particular need to regain her male body, she wouldn't complain if she did receive a male body but it wasn't something she felt the need to seek out.
She also still loved her family even if the new set of memories made their loss easier, having already experienced the like once, and she still felt the need to fulfill her uncle's last request and verify how her little cousin was doing.
It took her another week to start gaining strength again but her plan to get out turned out to have a problem, once her body became strong enough they started exposing her to kryptonite so they could continue to cut her up and so she was never fully able to come out of hibernation, it was infuriating to the point she was left ragging for hours locked inside her own unresponsive body.
Kara started to lose hope, all the pain and horror of being opened alive and having her own flesh and blood taken as the mad scientists experimented on her started to pile up where all she could think was that she wanted to die, she wanted it all to end and, thankfully, their experiments finally started to overcome even the healing effects of kryptonian hibernation, she went from being awake most of the day to only six hours, then three and then only once every few days as the scientists learned more about her biology, she knew she should have been afraid, she was terrified when she died the first time and she had been afraid when she was dying locked inside her escape ship with a literal ton of kryptonite but now all she could feel was relief and every time she closed her eyes she prayed to Rao, to God, to death herself that she wouldn't wake up again.
At first Kara was equal parts angry and terrified when she did wake up feeling better than she had in a long time, it meant she wasn't immediately in pain but also that it was unlikely she would die soon and the monsters would continue using her as a test subject, then she started hearing the blaring sound of sirens all over the facility she was in and her eye opened wide at the realization the damn psions were having problems.
Wait, she opened her eye! Her body responded!
Immediately Kara started struggling with everything she had, one of her toes moved first, then her fingers, then her entire body started recovering as the rejuvenating sunlight continued to bombard her flesh, her arms started tingling and then her right leg as they came alive and finally, after what must have been years upon years, she felt her body come fully under her control, then she waited, absorbing more and more sunlight gathering her strength and power, she knew she wouldn't get a third chance, if she failed now they would know she was alive and from what she had gathered from the psions talking things would only get worse.
Staying still inside her pod as she heard the commotions around her was one of the hardest things she had ever done but she spent the time familiarizing herself with what remained of her body, she knew she must have been inside the healing tank for a long time to have recovered so much so her organs were probably whole once again but she was clearly missing her left eye and leg for who knows what reason, she also felt her recovery was getting faster and faster as every cell in her body seemed to be absorbing light better than ever before.
Then she heard the sounds of battle and knew it was time, She had never killed anyone before as Kara or Jace but she didn't think she would have any problems splattering a few psions around the walls, when she had been Jace she had always felt most Heroes caused a lot of trouble for themselves by sparing their enemies, Kara refused to make those mistakes.
Gathering her will Kara started experimenting, it took her a few minutes but she managed to control her flight ability enough to simply push her body out of tank she had been kept into, then she finally took a deep breath after what must have been years, the feeling the air fill her lungs after so long was heavenly.
She promptly lost concentration of her flight and went tumbling through the air to bounce of a metal wall and fall down on her ass, frowning it took her another three tries to bring herself back into a hovering position in the air even if it bobbed around unstably going up and down as she breathed, she knew she should have been moving and not letting the psions have time to make a plan against her but she wouldn't make for a very imposing or maneuverable figure hopping around on one leg.
Just the thought of everything the bastards had taken from her caused her flight to grow more erratic, her fists closing tightly at her sides and a strange feeling of head starting to gather at her sole remaining eye, then she released a wave off heat that melted a hole twice her own size in the steel wall, she looked at the hole and then thought of the psions waiting for her all over the place and a wide grim filled her face.
Moving while flying turned out to be easier than hovering in place, Kara seemed to have an instinctive affinity for the flying much like an animal can walk a few minutes after being born, not to say her flight was elegant or she immediately started floating with her fist extended like she saw her cousin do in the comics, no she bounced around the place as if drunk and moved mostly in an upright position but the advantage of being kryptonian was that she left dents in the walls instead of collecting bruises from doing so, the one time she tried to fly like superman she had lost her sense of direction and control being left spinning in place like a pinwheel for a few seconds before falling on her side but she did manage to move almost as fast as a normal human could run through the corridors of the building.
Then she heard the sound of weapons firing coming from her side and turned, squinting she gathered heat to her eyes and blasted the wall as hard as she could with her heat vision melting a hole through it… and the next wall… she blasted a hole through what must have been nine walls to reveal the darkness of space looking back at her.
For a second Kara was left paralised as she stared at the destruction and then the vacuum started dragging everything around her towards the hole including herself, she saw armed psions and robots flying through the air as well as two bizarre beasts with too many tentacles for her liking trying to keep themselves in place by grabbing at everything on sight, Kara herself was dragged through four openings before snapping out of it and making herself stop, looking around she saw the walls around the opening starting to seal the corridors of the ship and flew through the one to her right before it could finish closing off the breach.
Taking stock of her situation she noticed a minimal but noticeable drop on her stamina from using her vision and resolved herself to train with the ability a little more before using it again at full power, the fighting had briefly stopped after her attack but it returned with renewed vigor and she could hear a female voice screaming with fury only two corridors away from her, this time she just flew through the walls lowering her head and driving her body shoulder first at the metal, the metal gave way.
She burst into what looked like a war from one side of the place a naked, hot orange girl was releasing bolts of green energy from her hands which blasted psions in full armor and on the other side there were psions and robots with energy weapons shooting at pretty much everything, their aim was terrible but there were so many that the girl was getting hit as often as she shoot and every shot left ugly burns on her skin and caused her to lose control of her own flight, some of the shoots even hit Kara as she stood there but felt like hard pokes, annoying but not very painful.
Hmmm… psychopathic sadistic psions or hot orange girl who was probably Koriand'r?
Grabbing the closest robot Kara twisted its head off its shoulders and then threw it through the body of a psion before screaming in rage and using the rest of the body as a makeshift weapon to bat psions and robots aside, she attacked the two dozen psions without rest, ignoring every shot that hit her releasing all her anger and hate, all her fear, when the robot she was using was reduced to a few pieces of scrap she threw it aside and grabbed a psion himself to continue her massacre at one point she had started to cry and her screams had turned from roars of rage to those of pain and frustration but she continued, she continued even when they started running away she continued even when every single one of the monsters was dead and she was left reducing one of their bodies into so much paste.
Panting hard she released everything and laid down on the ground crying, her arms hugging her body as it all finally hit her, she was free, she was free and she was going to stay that way no matter what
Kara Zor-El was having a really bad day, which was great since last she remembered she had been poisoned with radiation and her body had started to cannibalize itself, she was in a terrifying amount of pain and certain she would die alone after her entire race was driven to extinction and her planet had exploded.
So, this day being only 'bad' was a huge improvement.
It didn't help that after waking up she remembered having lived a second life one where he was male, lived a relatively boring life in a primitive society and then had been hit by a huge truck, survived to go to the hospital and even woke up for a few hours, just enough to feel all the pain of his organs failing him as the damage he suffered proved to be too much even for 'modern' medicine.
So she was really confused, was she Kara Zor-El having a last minute hallucination of a previous life or was she Jace Brown having reincarnated? She supposed she was more Jace than Kara just because she had lived longer as Jace but she had a female body and calling herself Jace in it just seemed strange… then her mind started to get foggy and she passed out once again.
"It's a Kryptonian body, it's got to be valuable" said a harsh insectoid voice.
Waking up to hear someone discussing selling your still living body was not the most pleasant of experiences but since she hadn't been certain she would wake up at all was already great, and they had even taken the kryptonite meteorite away from her so that was great too.
"Who the hell would buy a body" came a male kryptonian voice, or human, probably human since kryptonians were gone "Nevermind lots of people buy bodies here"
"I got a contact amongst the psions who would pay a lot" said a third female voice "kryptonian bodies were always scarce but this one may be the last one ever recovered, its gonna cost a fortune"
"Sold a lot of kryptonians did you?" asked the insect before making a clicking noise
"Fuck no, never got close to those freaks but one sometimes sneaked out of their little self imposed prison and you hear things"
"Fine put it in the freezer so it doesn't spoil or something and lets finish harvesting the ship" the first voice continued "I don't know if their bodies have value but kryptonian technology certainly do"
Kara felt herself being moved but she just couldn't move, her entire body struggling to revive her from her hibernation but she was still too wounded and too close to kryptonite to resurrect herself.
Fuck she was in the DC universe, even if she did die there's a fair chance she would come back someday, then they left her in the freezer and her mind went blank again.
"Hmm, very interesting, it seems the specimen has similar traits to tamaraneans in the way it absorbs solar light" said a cold and calculating voice as Kara woke up to the feeling of something digging into her right arm.
"Its cells seem really resistant, it's been dead for at least three years and they are still reacting to light emanation" a second voice said and Kara felt something move inside her chest.
"Are you certain there is no brain activity?"
It took a few seconds but the answer came "Hmmm… there's a few strange electrical signals but they could be from some reaction of its cells absorbing light the machine doesn't indicate life"
Kara was feeling numb, despite the horror of having some bastard scientist playing around inside her body she was utterly paralized unable to even open her eyes, thankfully her nerves seemed to still be damaged so she wasn't feeling too much pain but it was increasing avery minute as the bastards bombarded her body with solar light to study its reactions, after what felt like an eternity one of the bastards took out one of her lungs, a kidney and some of her liver before they closed her chest.
"the subject seems to still show some cellular regeneration" Commented one of the mad scientists.
"Good, put it into a nutrient tank and bombard its body with solar light, if its healing we may be able to study it for much longer" he released an unsettling laugh "Perhaps we can even try and adapt some of what we learn for use on subjects 1926 and 1927"
"Their light absorption properties do seem similar I wonder if they had interbreed in the past"
Then one of the creatures put her inside a tank filled with liquid and carried her away from the experimental room, she felt her body being moved for almost ten minutes before she was put into a standing position inside the tub and she felt the invigorating sunlight hitting her naked and heavily damaged body, it felt absolutely divine to the point that she lost several hours just basking in the sensation of the sun hitting every piece of her body, knitting her flesh closed and, together with the fluid around her, starting to regenerate the damage done by starvation, exposition to kryptonite and a vivisection.
Then the light started healing her damaged nerves and she truly wished they had taken her heart not a lung, the pain was unbearable and she couldn't even scream, it must have lasted centuries getting worse and worse as her nerves became better and better, thank god her body could still shut down and return to hibernation.
Over the following weeks Kara learned to absolutely hate the Rao cursed psions, despite knowing from the books she had read as Jace that there are worst races out there in this universe she couldn't imagine a single one of them she wished had gone extinct more than the lizard like beings, the only good thing about them not being exterminated before is that she could do it herself once she recovered.
At least twice a week the psions would take her out of her tub and experiment on her, sometimes it was vivisection again, sometimes they just exposed her to kryptonite to watch her reaction but they also pumped her veins full of some strange substance and watched as her cells fought it off or tried to transplant strange organs inside her and make them integrate with her anatomy and she felt Every. Single. Cut.
She also learned why she hadn't snapped out of her hibernation despite constant exposure to sunlight, the kryptonite that hit her ship had been absorbed by her body poisoning her cells and, now that she wasn't next to a house sized piece of it, her body had been slowly expelling it every day, it wasn't enough to kill her outright but it did stop her from gaining any of the strength and resistance kryptonians were known for, though the psions did have to start using better tools two weeks after she had first woken up because her skin had become tough enough to dull their blades.
Kara's mind was still mostly unconscious a lot of the time but the pain of every experiment never failed to bring her out of it but everyday she felt more of the poison expelled from her veins and the psions had even started her body on dialysis, eager to start experimenting with a fully empowered kryptonian body since their devices still indicated she was brain dead, they didn't know what was waiting for them.
At least the time she wasn't getting tortured was used to come to terms with her new life, In a way both Kara Zor-El and Jace Brown were trully dead, as far as she could figure out she had been Jace Brown, had lived to the age of 28 in an earth without aliens or superheroes, had read a lot about the DC universe and then he had died and been reincarnated as Kara Zor-El but, like every soul that reincarnates Jace had been a blank slate when he became Kara, Kara had parents she regarded as her own, she had a childhood, friends, family just like Jace, and then she had remenbered Jace's entire life.
It was complicated, she didn't remember Jace's life as a stranger or in glimpses she HAD BEEN Jace and Jace had became her, their souls were the same, now she was an odd mixture of the two, in a way she was probably more Jace than Kara simply by virtue of Jace having lived longer and having more experience but it didn't feel wrong to be a woman and she felt no particular need to regain her male body, she wouldn't complain if she did receive a male body but it wasn't something she felt the need to seek out.
She also still loved her family even if the new set of memories made their loss easier, having already experienced the like once, and she still felt the need to fulfill her uncle's last request and verify how her little cousin was doing.
It took her another week to start gaining strength again but her plan to get out turned out to have a problem, once her body became strong enough they started exposing her to kryptonite so they could continue to cut her up and so she was never fully able to come out of hibernation, it was infuriating to the point she was left ragging for hours locked inside her own unresponsive body.
Kara started to lose hope, all the pain and horror of being opened alive and having her own flesh and blood taken as the mad scientists experimented on her started to pile up where all she could think was that she wanted to die, she wanted it all to end and, thankfully, their experiments finally started to overcome even the healing effects of kryptonian hibernation, she went from being awake most of the day to only six hours, then three and then only once every few days as the scientists learned more about her biology, she knew she should have been afraid, she was terrified when she died the first time and she had been afraid when she was dying locked inside her escape ship with a literal ton of kryptonite but now all she could feel was relief and every time she closed her eyes she prayed to Rao, to God, to death herself that she wouldn't wake up again.
At first Kara was equal parts angry and terrified when she did wake up feeling better than she had in a long time, it meant she wasn't immediately in pain but also that it was unlikely she would die soon and the monsters would continue using her as a test subject, then she started hearing the blaring sound of sirens all over the facility she was in and her eye opened wide at the realization the damn psions were having problems.
Wait, she opened her eye! Her body responded!
Immediately Kara started struggling with everything she had, one of her toes moved first, then her fingers, then her entire body started recovering as the rejuvenating sunlight continued to bombard her flesh, her arms started tingling and then her right leg as they came alive and finally, after what must have been years upon years, she felt her body come fully under her control, then she waited, absorbing more and more sunlight gathering her strength and power, she knew she wouldn't get a third chance, if she failed now they would know she was alive and from what she had gathered from the psions talking things would only get worse.
Staying still inside her pod as she heard the commotions around her was one of the hardest things she had ever done but she spent the time familiarizing herself with what remained of her body, she knew she must have been inside the healing tank for a long time to have recovered so much so her organs were probably whole once again but she was clearly missing her left eye and leg for who knows what reason, she also felt her recovery was getting faster and faster as every cell in her body seemed to be absorbing light better than ever before.
Then she heard the sounds of battle and knew it was time, She had never killed anyone before as Kara or Jace but she didn't think she would have any problems splattering a few psions around the walls, when she had been Jace she had always felt most Heroes caused a lot of trouble for themselves by sparing their enemies, Kara refused to make those mistakes.
Gathering her will Kara started experimenting, it took her a few minutes but she managed to control her flight ability enough to simply push her body out of tank she had been kept into, then she finally took a deep breath after what must have been years, the feeling the air fill her lungs after so long was heavenly.
She promptly lost concentration of her flight and went tumbling through the air to bounce of a metal wall and fall down on her ass, frowning it took her another three tries to bring herself back into a hovering position in the air even if it bobbed around unstably going up and down as she breathed, she knew she should have been moving and not letting the psions have time to make a plan against her but she wouldn't make for a very imposing or maneuverable figure hopping around on one leg.
Just the thought of everything the bastards had taken from her caused her flight to grow more erratic, her fists closing tightly at her sides and a strange feeling of head starting to gather at her sole remaining eye, then she released a wave off heat that melted a hole twice her own size in the steel wall, she looked at the hole and then thought of the psions waiting for her all over the place and a wide grim filled her face.
Moving while flying turned out to be easier than hovering in place, Kara seemed to have an instinctive affinity for the flying much like an animal can walk a few minutes after being born, not to say her flight was elegant or she immediately started floating with her fist extended like she saw her cousin do in the comics, no she bounced around the place as if drunk and moved mostly in an upright position but the advantage of being kryptonian was that she left dents in the walls instead of collecting bruises from doing so, the one time she tried to fly like superman she had lost her sense of direction and control being left spinning in place like a pinwheel for a few seconds before falling on her side but she did manage to move almost as fast as a normal human could run through the corridors of the building.
Then she heard the sound of weapons firing coming from her side and turned, squinting she gathered heat to her eyes and blasted the wall as hard as she could with her heat vision melting a hole through it… and the next wall… she blasted a hole through what must have been nine walls to reveal the darkness of space looking back at her.
For a second Kara was left paralised as she stared at the destruction and then the vacuum started dragging everything around her towards the hole including herself, she saw armed psions and robots flying through the air as well as two bizarre beasts with too many tentacles for her liking trying to keep themselves in place by grabbing at everything on sight, Kara herself was dragged through four openings before snapping out of it and making herself stop, looking around she saw the walls around the opening starting to seal the corridors of the ship and flew through the one to her right before it could finish closing off the breach.
Taking stock of her situation she noticed a minimal but noticeable drop on her stamina from using her vision and resolved herself to train with the ability a little more before using it again at full power, the fighting had briefly stopped after her attack but it returned with renewed vigor and she could hear a female voice screaming with fury only two corridors away from her, this time she just flew through the walls lowering her head and driving her body shoulder first at the metal, the metal gave way.
She burst into what looked like a war from one side of the place a naked, hot orange girl was releasing bolts of green energy from her hands which blasted psions in full armor and on the other side there were psions and robots with energy weapons shooting at pretty much everything, their aim was terrible but there were so many that the girl was getting hit as often as she shoot and every shot left ugly burns on her skin and caused her to lose control of her own flight, some of the shoots even hit Kara as she stood there but felt like hard pokes, annoying but not very painful.
Hmmm… psychopathic sadistic psions or hot orange girl who was probably Koriand'r?
Grabbing the closest robot Kara twisted its head off its shoulders and then threw it through the body of a psion before screaming in rage and using the rest of the body as a makeshift weapon to bat psions and robots aside, she attacked the two dozen psions without rest, ignoring every shot that hit her releasing all her anger and hate, all her fear, when the robot she was using was reduced to a few pieces of scrap she threw it aside and grabbed a psion himself to continue her massacre at one point she had started to cry and her screams had turned from roars of rage to those of pain and frustration but she continued, she continued even when they started running away she continued even when every single one of the monsters was dead and she was left reducing one of their bodies into so much paste.
Panting hard she released everything and laid down on the ground crying, her arms hugging her body as it all finally hit her, she was free, she was free and she was going to stay that way no matter what
