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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-01-31 09:50 am (UTC)(link)
The batjet wins out, partially because Clark wants to go for a ride. He will ride his bike to work and take the ferry to Gotham and call down an Uber and it's not all just to act like Clark Kent, because in a lot of the ways it matters, he is Clark Kent.

That said, there's no sense of grounding or anything very sentimental in selecting this particular mode of transport. Like any regular person, he would just like a go in the cool stealth plane. He even waits until halfway there to get antsy at the pace.

Of course, the North Pole itself is ocean, and Clark was not feeling so petulant or adventurous as to land the thing submerged, beneath the sea ice. The rocky island that is home to the scout ship is snow-crusted and home only to Kryptonians and neighbouring polar bears, and at this time of year, they are in the depths of months-long darkness. Navigational tools do the work but Clark directs Bruce to a hangar entrance, a broad doorway opening slickly and swiftly to permit them entry.

And they can see. Lightsources unknown paint cool illumination over the broad curvatures of the interior. It is still extremely cold, inside, breaths leaving them as thick clouds of fog, but nothing like the outside blizzards.

There's a slight crinkle sound. Clark retrieving a sandwich wrapped in wax paper.
Edited (crucial word change) 2021-01-31 09:55 (UTC)
solarcore: <user name="oslo" site="insanejournal.com"> (136)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-01-31 10:58 am (UTC)(link)
"I figured you might be hungry."

Which doesn't prevent Clark from taking a corner bite. Tuna salad. He was being considerate about the close confines of the jet after thinking about them nonstop since take off, give him a break.

And he is not quite as wrapped up, but does where his own fur-lined hooded jacket, open over his winter things. Better for a brisk midwest winter than the Arctic Circle, but a gesture towards his capacity to be effected by anything. That he might prefer to rug up against a snowy night and also meditate in the vacuum of space speaks to something about the worlds he moves through.

Speaking of worlds.

"You'd want the bridge, I guess we'd call it. I guess you know the way." Which doesn't stop Clark from walking up alongside, roaming a fraction ahead. As they walk, the air begins to warm. They cross through a chamber that had once been the final resting place to mummified Kryptonians, long since laid to rest somewhere more appropriate even before Zod had commandeered the ship for his invasion. In that time, the temperature hikes up, comfortably gradual, but soon stifling in big coats.

Aside, "Told you I fixed the thermostat," and pleased with himself about it, like maybe he's talking about the radiator in his Metropolis apartment, and had promised Lo he'd make an attempt.
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-01-31 11:53 am (UTC)(link)
Clark shrugs out of his coat as Bruce speaks, the last of the (first) sandwich seized between his teeth as he does so. He hangs his coat on the edge of what looks like a captain's chair, eats that last corner of sandwich, and scans his eyes over the strange organic structures that imply themselves as some kind of interface.

He touches a raised, palm-sized protrusion, the key already settled in the lock.

"Set main computer language recognition to Kryptonian, exclusively," he says, and the burbled voice of the computer echoes around them.

It will take a moment, to reshape one's brain around theory and practical application when it comes to language, but the reply is straight forward enough, the sibilant, complex patterns of Kryptonian syllables affirming this new setting. The sideglance to Bruce is not self-conscious, but,

well maybe a little. Still, Clark clears his throat, and requests, "Run through the Kryptonian letter-system," in what is probably not entirely grammatically sound fragments, but enough to have the computer obey, patiently naming each letter while the symbol attached to it bristles across the silver panel, three-dimensional and topographical.

"We should come up with a song."
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-02-05 10:45 am (UTC)(link)
"Mm," echoed.

Clark has not deliberately separated the two spheres of his personal life and this reclusive place, nothing like the considered hard divide of public appearances, but standing here and watching Bruce voice commands in the gentle-sounding structures of Kryptonian demonstrates that he, well. Has. Maybe subconsciously, old habits tamping down alien aspects even amongst those who know better—and Martha knows even less, about all this.

After his father told him that he was from some other world, he'd imagined what that would be like. Not just how it would feel, but concrete things, like it would be a place he could visit, and people he could be friends with, and that whether he wanted them to or not, all those things kept hidden would spill out into the open.

And some of it has. But it's not the same.

So it's a little like Bruce is standing in some corner of his own subconscious, poking around in there and not a computer. It's not all bad. It's certainly less lonely.

"There's some—" Clark's brows draw together. "I guess educational programming. For children. It's not a class, or. Sesame Street, or even a guide. I think it's supposed to be a kind of... subliminal... immersive experience."

He is trying not to say brainwashing.

"It wasn't comprehensible to me, anyway, but maybe we could pull it apart."
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-02-06 11:07 am (UTC)(link)
Clark knows Bruce knows he's talking about brainwashing small alien children, and Bruce knows Clark knows that Bruce knows, but it's very good of Bruce not to say it out loud as Clark tips him a rueful half-smile and nods. In his hesitant but not halting Kryptonian, he directs the computer to pull data from the modules.

There's a lot to clean out. They don't, for instance, need quite this much repetition, and they don't need it delivered pitched at certain kinds of frequencies ostensibly to better implant these lessons in their brains. There is a visual component that they don't have access to, standing on the bridge, that appears to use abstract visual input as more of a hypnotic tool than an education one, but.

There's an alphabet in there somewhere.

They discover, quickly, that more advanced modules begin to differentiate between specialised streams of learning. Different language paths between soldiers, artists, engineers, doctors, architects. Farmers. Not wholly separate lexicons, but different emphases, alternate jargon and concepts relevant to profession. It's disquieting enough that Clark becomes quiet as they work, quiet between issued commands to the computer, suggestions around means of compilation.

Eventually, "You'd have liked my father," a little wry, a little intended to talk around something, away from something. "Or the digitally rendered consciousness of him. I did."
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-02-07 09:16 am (UTC)(link)
It's probably a little careless, talking of fathers without specificity, and it's the kind of care he takes around his mother, for instance, for all that their conversations around such things tend to lack in details anyway. Sometimes he calls the smear of drifting spacedust that was Krypton his home, and he means no disrespect to Smallville either.

His attention tracks to Bruce when he says that name, nodding.

"I think he was a good man," he says. "By anyone's standard, not just Earth's, Krypton's. I don't know how he felt about here, not exactly—whether he chose Earth for me, or me for it. But I think he really wanted something better for it, than what happened to Krypton."

It should feel odder than it is, to talk about these things. They're big things. Titanic, in the scheme of it all. Cosmic. But it comes with the territory of what he shares with Bruce Wayne—someone with the same big picture capacity as Jor-El, and Lois Lane, and himself.

"The last thing he said to me," is a little fond, even, "was that I could save everyone."

Not just one person, not just some people, but a whole planet's worth of human beings, and Clark had believed him. Sitting here in a ship, silent as a mausoleum, reminds him of the everyone that Jor-El had tried to save himself.
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-02-07 10:45 am (UTC)(link)
It does all seem extremely unlikely, this moment, this conversation. And it's probably true that if Clark thought Superman could literally do it all, he'd have no need for Clark Kent at all. It's also true he died once. True he doesn't blame Bruce for that either.

He'd been sitting crossed legged on the smooth ground but now gets up, a human awkwardness to the motion despite everything. It's an increasingly common move, to step up behind where Bruce is stationed and sitting at the terminal, as if he were at his own work stations back home, and cup his shoulders in his hands and then bury a kiss in his hair, on the top of his head.

Sometimes an excuse just to smell the fancy hair whatever Bruce puts in there, but most times that's a happy bonus.

"He was hopeful," Clark says, after, looking at the screen over top of Bruce's head. "In a way I hadn't been before. Even if he was wrong, that's something."
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-02-07 10:54 pm (UTC)(link)
Clark's hands smooth inwards, to conform where Bruce's shoulders curve to his neck. The sweep of his thumbs against the back of it. Not designed to transmit any other message than warmth, acknowledgment.

"Some things," he says, voice quiet where it originates above Bruce's head. "He was a scientist. An advisor to whatever governance existed. They both were, he and—his wife, my mother. Lana Lor-Van."

The information feels thin on the ground, as he says it. The projection of Jor-El had its priorities, but had been equally amenable to the questions Clark had asked too. They'd been preliminary questions, with the presumption he'd be able to ask more of them. Important things, stupid things.

"They broke the laws of their people to have me. But the way he talked about it felt deeper than that, like doing something like that went against something innate. Or—the other way around. But it was like he could see where Krypton had gone wrong, and he could see how much a part of it he was, despite everything."
solarcore: <user name="oslo" site="insanejournal.com"> (216)

[personal profile] solarcore 2021-02-08 09:31 am (UTC)(link)
Clark's hand arcs a little into Bruce's, ever receptive.

"There's nothing romantic about their reproduction," he agrees, a little wry.

A little sheepish, on behalf of however many billions of dead Kryptonians, and their hollowed planet. Production and evolution, all without purpose. He remembers Zod's sense of superiority, and he remembers thinking: why? To what end?

They haven't even talked about the Codex.

And Clark doesn't want to. He rests his chin on Bruce's head because he's pretty sure he can get away with being annoying today, which does make it awkward to say anything, but says anyway, "How's the song going?"
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-02-08 10:48 am (UTC)(link)
It makes Clark laugh, just a little, enough for Bruce to feel as much as hear the thrum of it.

"They do have music, actually," he says. "It's a little—well."

He straightens up, relieving the weight of his skull off of Bruce's skull, but arms now draped on broad batshoulders. "Computer, play Threnody-72 of Zistra Va-Rel, please."

And there is music. Long mournful sounding notes from alien instruments—string based, maybe—and the recording of a female voice. Vocalisations are mixed with coherent words, and words are even broken into parts, scattered, ordered. This one is pretty in spite of the strangeness, which might explain why Clark remembers it.
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-02-15 08:42 am (UTC)(link)
Mm, says Clark. They are standing in a ship that is thousands of years old and still runs the same edition of intergalactic Windows that Krypton had going before it exploded. Bruce isn't wrong, in that the answer to rhetorical question would be: no one.

"You'd get bored," he says, after a beat, giving Bruce a squeeze with that arm before finally leaving him in some peace. The squeeze indicates that the figurative you is also you, Bruce.

No one who'd want to and no one who could, anyway.

Anyway. It's still all new and exciting to a Kryptonian raised in Kansas, who posits that maybe there's something useful in the way their songs are written, and volunteers himself into pulling out mathematically quantified sequences with a generous amount of help lent to him by the computer itself. Book smart he is not, but he is quick, given to absorbing and retaining information, sensitively attuned to things like frequency and resonance.

He gets into the second set of sandwiches once he's set the computer on the task of rendering that data down into something Bruce's laptop can crunch, and says, "Is there anything on earth that can do what you want to do? With the atmospheric conditions."
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[personal profile] solarcore 2021-02-23 08:21 am (UTC)(link)
Clark nods.

He doesn't know, after all. Sure, he's done some more general homework, some scouting around the corners of the globe to see if another Lex Luthor (or another Bruce Wayne) is out there plotting how to make a god die (ergh), but this wasn't something he'd considered until today. There's no anxiousness or fear in his expression, just alert curiousity.

Intrigue, too. Building something new, potentially. "Not specifically Kyrptonian," he adds. "But anything with that potential?"

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