Reincarnated as Supergirl (YJ / DC)

With a small ‘click’, the mechanical arm opened up revealing a myriad of blades. A razor sharp scalpel extending from the mass and cut through the man’s skin to expose flesh and muscles, the unfeeling machine then used small pincers to dig through the flesh, carefully separating nerves and veins while keeping the bleeding to a minimum.

 

Blood loss was not a real problem, but it was preferable not to cause a mess.

 

“Ah… hmmm…. haaa,” came the trembling voice from behind the protection glass, the man desperately trying to remain calm, he failed. “Fuck! Ahhhhhhh! Get it off! GET IT OFF!”

 

With another ‘click’ the mechanical arm stopped, pulling back from the man strapped to the operating table and returning to a resting position. 

 

With a sigh, Kara looked up from her holographic screen and glared at her patient. “Kite-Man, for Rao’s sake, man up.”

 

The minor villain was inside a sterile room, a meter thick glass wall letting Kara watch the surgery from a comfortable sitting position in the medical bay.

 

“... Sorry,” the man swallowed hard, eyes nervously going from the stump of his arm to the medical robot. “I know it doesn’t hurt but… well…”

 

“Look, either turn your head away or accept the general anesthesia, but let the damn AI continue the transplant already.”

 

“You sure it’s… capable?”

 

“For the last time, yes, I’m sure!” Stopping, Kara pinched the bridge of her nose and took a second to calm herself. “Sorry about that. Look, I programmed the surgery myself and, even if there’s a problem, it operates at a slow enough pace that I can interfere at any moment, everything will be perfectly fine.”

 

Kara had yet to acquire a full copy of Kal’s Fortress medical AI for her Lunar base for various reasons. And truthfully, it could be done easily enough but her paranoia hadn’t let her install an AI she hadn’t programmed herself, or at least gone over extensively.

 

So, she had taken the most basic parts, those she had already reviewed, —metahumans aside, humanity was biologically simple. The basics were more than enough— then she created the program for both Kite-Man and Selina’s transplants. 

 

Unfortunately, that meant understanding enough of medicine to actually perform the procedure herself.

 

Reading 62 dry, boring and full of technical terms books with enough attention to not only remember them, but also understand their content was easier said than done, even for a kryptonian.  

 

Well, to be honest, she could understand them well enough, and her kryptonian coordination meant she didn’t really need to practice more than once. Still… 

 

In the end, Kara hadn’t quite reached the level of a human medical expert, not on any other aspect, but these two procedures she could do with her eyes closed. 

 

It was just… The subject really didn’t interest her and, while reading at superspeed looked convenient as hell from the outside, she perceived that time at a normal pace while doing so.

 

To say Kara was feeling grumpy would be an understatement, she felt like she had just spent three months studying twelve hours a day, and Kite-Man’s whining wasn’t helping.

 

“I… yeah, I think I’ll take the general anesthetic after all.”

 

Finally! She regretted giving him the option to watch in the first place but, with her tech, blocking his pain receptors was simpler than putting him under.

 

With a single touch, Kara knocked the man out and let the AI continue the transplant, trusting it to warn her if anything went wrong, it would take him longer to wake up and leave her base, but at least he wouldn’t be interrupting things. 

 

Now, to study the data from Poison Ivy’s chamber.

 

Accelerating her thoughts again, Kara turned to her holographic display and watched the recordings of the villainess’ body growing rigid, her skin gaining a brownish tint before, slowly, cracking open to reveal roots that pierced through the glass of her healing pod and reached towards the floor, starting to draw nutrients from the soil while also seeming to filter the Blockbuster out of her system.

 

Thankfully, at Selina’s suggestion, Kara had relocated the villainess into a larger room at the very edge of her compound and ordered her Karabots to turn it into a small garden. 

 

Putting the villainess so close to something her power could manipulate was a risk to be sure, but relocating Poison Ivy closer to what little nature was available seemed to have drastically accelerated her recovery… and Kara could collapse the ceiling in less than a second, crushing anything inside, or incinerate, implode, explode, teleport away and otherwise destroy the room in seven other ways.

 

At an alarming pace, Poison Ivy’s feet turned into a flower stalk, a green bud covering her entire body, Kara estimated only another two or three days before the woman fully bloomed. All the while, her monitoring devices were gathering data.

 

Kara was neither a biologist nor a botanist so most of the information was of little interest to her, but Dubbilex would certainly find a use for it. More important was the magical data she was collecting.

 

No matter how strong, Poison Ivy’s roots simply couldn’t draw enough nutrients and energy from the available soil to fuel her current transformation, instead, they seemed to be drawing on a different source, something outside their current dimension.

 

It wasn’t exactly magic, not of any kind Kara had encountered, but the devices she made to study Captain Marvel, coupled with the Amazo scanner she had captured, were still able to monitor it.

 

“Interesting…” She mumbled, opening another screen with her readings of Captain Marvel’s transformation, comparing them, a vicious smile forming on her face. “Very interesting.”

 

Leaning forward on her chair, Kara steepled her fingers, she could use this. Oh yes, she could make great use of this indeed.

 

If she had to guess, Ivy was drawing on the energies of the Green to fuel her recovery. Kara wasn’t exactly an expert on the subject, but the Green —not to be confused with the Green Light of Will— was an elemental force, one that had its own dimension and connected all plant life not only on Earth, but in the entire DC universe.

 

Yeah, Kara had no interest in touching something as powerful as that, not yet, particularly because such things tended to have at least some form of sapience, but the connection itself greatly interested her.

 

With a command, the kryptonian had one of her bots connect a magical draining device to the flower stalk. Immediately, the monitoring equipment registered a stop on the flow of energy, but the draining device was barely filling up. 

 

So, the connection itself was magic, but the energies of the Green were a different source, perhaps a different wavelength?… Or they could also be shielded from her devices in a way Black Adam’s power hadn’t been.

 

Could she block that connection from a distance? Could she replicate it aimed at a different source?

 

Opening yet another holographic window to the side, Kara made sure to keep an eye on Kite-man’s operation and started designing a new sunstone equipment, attempting to adapt her magic draining device into something that would block such connections.

 

In front of her, thousands of small pieces started forming on the hologram, numbers filling the screen as she calculated the best proportions for every single part of her new invention.

 

It would require an initial charge of magic, which could be a problem, but she still had more than enough power stored on the draining device to fuel a hundred experiments, and she could always ask Billy to recharge it later.

 

Eventually, a sunstone pillar rose from the ground, a new device starting to grow right in front of her even as one of her Karabots brought her a tray containing some gold, silver and aluminum ingots, it also had a box with the recycled Nth metal bullets she’d used during the Injustice assault.

 

It had been a pain to locate them after the fight, particularly with the League there watching, but she wasn’t about to lose such precious resources. 

 

Earlier experiments had revealed that pure silver was the best magical conductor Kara had available, gold coming in close second, but able to channel a bigger charge. Aluminum, on the other hand, was an effective magical insulant. 

 

Amusingly enough, it was also somewhat effective at blocking psionic emanations, not very effective, nowhere even close to the devices she used, but it was better than nothing. That “tin foil” was a misnomer for aluminum foil and “hats” made thereof happened to be demonstrably good at blocking mind jacking weirdness wasn’t lost on Kara’s sense of irony.

 

With some simple commands, a cloud of her nanomachines rose from a hole in the ground, quickly enveloping the available metals before taking the shape of a 3D printer. A second later, Kara shared a couple of blueprints for the device to fabricate, things that couldn’t be made with sunstone.

 

Concentrating, she squinted her eyes, using her super-vision to verify there were no imperfections in her design without the need of any equipment. She then started to assemble the new prototype, The Fog really had been a great acquisition.

 

The cloud of nanomachines moved, forming hundreds of precise tools so small a human would need a microscope to see, then they moved, carefully manipulating the prototype’s pieces in front of her, connecting hundreds of silver wires to several golden nodes, all of which surrounded a millimeter wide core of Nth metal.

 

With absolute control, Kara guided each piece into place as they were produced, she still had to discard three or four pieces when she noticed some mistakes but, finally, she encased everything in a shell of sunstone that immediately started absorbing energy.

 

Carefully, Kara laid the first prototype aside and stretched her arms, a small smile on her face. From behind, one of the Karabots handed her a mug of freshly brewed coffee that she eagerly started sipping, eyes closing in bliss.

 

Laying the mug atop a drone floating steadily at her side, Kara took a deep breath and went back to her projects, starting to design a prototype for another hypothesis. A few meters in front of her, the medical AI continued to work, delicate tools starting the long process of connecting every vein and nerve on Kite-Man’s new arm.