This is an Elseworlds tale. What if Clark Kent wasn't an only child? What if the event which brought together the Kents and their little orphan from the stars was repeated not once but several times? Would there be a Superman?

Smallville, the Luthors, Superman (created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster), Power Girl, Supergirl, Jakita Wagner, John Cumberland, Apollo, Big Barda, Mr. Majestic, etc are the property of DC Comics.

I own nothing, except my imagination and how I use these fantastic characters and locations.

Thanks to Siegel and Shuster, those two young Jewish kids who wanted to change the world, and to Phillip Noa Wylie who marked the way of the modern comic book and graphic novel with his novel “Gladiator”.

Preface

The universe is vast, unimaginably so and, contrary to popular belief, it is almost always random and chaotic. This, would not be one of those times.

1969 was a good year for the town of Smallville, Kansas. The harvest had been exceptionally good and the local produce was being sold and shipped all over the country fetching a higher than average price. If that wasn't reason enough for its farmers and co-dependent residents to feel good about themselves, Luthor Corp had inaugurated a brand new agricultural research plant not ten months before and its dividends, as well as the first results of the lines of research being conducted there were beginning to be felt around both the county and the state. Life was good.

Which is why it should not have come as a surprise to all of those farming folks so fond of popular wisdom something terrible would follow such wealth and abundance. But abundance breeds complacency, and no one did see it coming.

On December 25^th, 1969, Smallville's subsidiary of Luthor Corp, its newfangled Agricultural Research Plant, was blown to kingdom come by what was later reported to be a failure in its power core, killing all 1500 employees and causing tremendous material damages to the whole of the town and most of the county's surrounding farms. No family was spared; everyone lost someone, however removed.

For a good long time, Christmas Day would not be the same in the town of Smallville, Kansas.

But, that selfsame popular wisdom farming folk are so fond of also states that every cloud has a silver lining. And for one family, hurt and bloodied by both nature and the “Smallville Catastrophe” (as it had been dubbed by the, oh so caring, people of the media), the aftermath of the disaster would mean a new beginning and the culmination of their yearnings for parenthood.

Chapter 1.

Everything within the universe (one could argue the whole of the universe) is constantly in motion. Every single item affects every other item surrounding it, whether it be on a quantum level or on a cosmic one, so one can imagine the effect an exotic explosion may have on the world which surrounds it or even, the fabric of reality.

The 1969 destruction of the Smallville Agricultural Research Facility was anything but ordinary. What everyone thought to be the United States' leading facility in agricultural research was in fact the pet project of Luthor Corp's CEO; Lionel Luthor's personal obsession.

Early in Luthor's career, some nineteen years before, he had been approached by three particularly eccentric yet brilliant scientists bent on pushing past the boundaries of accepted knowledge in regards to the world which surrounds us. Drs. Walter Bishop, William Bell and Robert Dowling presented Mr. Luthor with an alternate understanding of the reality within which we dwell. According to them, the universe was in truth a multiverse, "a theoretical snowflake existing in 196,833 dimensional space." If their theory proved to be correct, they posited the potential access to an equal or higher amount of parallel realities which would be available to be explored and from which unprecedented knowledge and technology could be retrieved.

By 1954, 27 year old Lionel Luthor had already established an economic empire worthy of the greatest moguls of his time, and had done so by eschewing such burdensome annoyances as morals or scruples. So when presented with the possibility of groundbreaking technology available only to him and those he chose to share it with if the purposed adventure into science fiction produced the results promised, he jumped at the chance, footing the bill for what would become the greatest scientific miracle brought along by accident in human history: Project Winter.

Allegedly a research facility tasked with countering a projected global warming, Project Winter sought to break the barriers which limited our reality in order to access its mirror images. Surprisingly enough, their endeavor was met with success, after a fashion. After managing to achieve a few glimpses across the dividing veil, the stress put upon the membranes between realms by the radically new supercomputer designed by the driving intellects behind Project Winter (namely Bell, Bishop and Dowling), caused a chain reaction of unforeseen proportions across all pressure nodes and although finally piercing the universal walls into the multiverse's circulatory system, it derived in a catastrophic explosion of the computer core (which, incidentally, was being powered by a new type of nuclear reactor), the result of which was the complete and total destruction of the Smallville Agricultural Research Facility and the demise of all personnel involved.

That was the end of Project Winter as far as the world was concerned.

However, there were a few items which were not reported as widely as the research facility's destruction, or at all, whether by design or ignorance.

One, none of the lead scientists involved in the project were actually in the facility at the time of the explosion.

Two, in one of those quirks which the universe seems to be so fond of, at the time of its most abject failure, Project Winter achieved a momentous breakthrough, quite different from the desired objective; it did in fact manage to break through the walls between realities but instead of opening a doorway into those other, parallel universes, it created a... nexus of sorts into our reality turning Smallville, Kansas, into Parallel Grand Central. Of course, amidst all the pain, chaos and mayhem caused by the fortuitous destruction of the facility in question, no one was the wiser about this teeny development.

That is, until things started to come through.