Powers Heat Vision

Once upon a time, Kara Zor-El melted the toaster.

She had not meant to. She was standing in the kitchen on an ordinary Tuesday morning, still in her pajamas, her hair not yet brushed, thinking about how very hungry she was and looking vaguely at the toaster.

And then — ZZAP — two red beams of heat energy shot from her eyes, and the toaster became a glowing puddle on the kitchen counter.

Kara stood very still. She looked at the puddle. The puddle glowed back at her, cooling at the edges.

She decided she had better learn to control this.

That afternoon, she called Superman, because he was the only other person in the world who fully understood the problem.

He explained it patiently. Earth's yellow sun charged Kryptonian cells constantly, he said, like a battery that never stopped filling. Different powers drew from different parts of that charge. Heat vision was tied to concentration and emotion — the stronger the feeling, the hotter and more powerful the beam. Left uncontrolled, it fired whenever she felt something intensely. Even hunger, apparently.

Freeze breath was the opposite: a controlled exhalation that drew the heat out of the air in front of her, dropping the temperature in a precise zone dramatically quickly. It required a different kind of focus — not intensity, but calm. The steadier the breath, the more precise the cold.

"Both take time," Superman said.

Then he told her about the lake in Manitoba.

He had been twelve years old, hiking alone in Canada, when something startled him — a rabbit, as it turned out — and he had exhaled sharply, and a small lake had frozen solid in approximately four seconds.

A ranger had found it the next morning and filed a very confused weather report.

Kara felt enormously better about the toaster.

She set up a training area at the Midvale salvage yard, where the Danvers family had arranged access through a friend who worked there. The salvage yard was full of old cars and steel beams and oil barrels and things that Kara could practice on without worrying about causing any harm.

She started heat vision with tin cans.

Her first attempts were either not enough — a warm tin can — or far too much — a crater where a tin can used to be. She practiced every afternoon for two weeks, learning the small differences: the concentration behind her eyes that produced warmth versus the sharper focus that produced a cutting beam. She discovered she could vary the width of the beam, from a broad wash like a heat lamp to a line so narrow it could engrave letters on metal.

She wrote her name on a steel panel in Kryptonian script. The letters came out clean and precise, the angular characters of her home language pressed permanently into the steel.

Then, below them, she wrote it in English.

She looked at both names for a moment — the one she had been born with, and the one she was learning to carry on this new world — and thought they both looked right.

For freeze breath she practiced on barrels of water, starting by trying to freeze the entire surface and usually managing to freeze an uneven blob on one side. Gradually she found the control. A long, steady exhale — FWOOOOSH — that moved the cold in a flat plane across the surface. She learned to coat things in ice without shattering them, to cool one specific object without the adjacent ones even feeling a chill.

The day it really mattered was a Tuesday in late November.

The call came in as a chemical fire at the Midvale Harbor freight terminal. Kara arrived in forty seconds and landed fifty feet from the blaze, eyes scanning the scene rapidly. The fire department was there, but the fire had spread to three sections of the terminal. Two sections were burning chemical freight — oil drums and cleaning agents and paint cans — and one section was electrical.

Ordinary water would make the chemical fire worse.

Kara took three seconds to think.

Then she moved.

She stepped to the first chemical section and blew a long, controlled breath — FWOOOOSH — a precise cold sheet that settled over the flames and smothered them, cutting off the oxygen without scattering burning material in every direction. The fire guttered. Then out.

Second chemical section. FWOOOOSH. Done.

She turned to the electrical section. She narrowed her eyes, found the fuel source in the wiring, and used heat vision at the absolute minimum setting — a pinpoint beam — to burn out the faulty cables cleanly before the fire could spread to the chemical freight just ten feet away.

ZZZAP. Clean cut. Fire out.

Four minutes. All three sections. Safe.

She stood in the steam and ash afterward, listening to the freight terminal creak and settle around her. The fire department's hoses stopped running. People put down equipment. Voices replaced alarms.

The fire chief walked up to her through the steam. He was a tall woman in a yellow helmet with a gold badge on the front, and she looked at Kara with an expression of genuine wonder.

"That was the most precise fire suppression I have ever witnessed," she said. "In twenty years."

Kara thanked her.

Then, without quite meaning to, she mentioned the toaster.

The fire chief looked at her with polite puzzlement.

Kara decided not to explain. Some origins are best kept private.

She flew home quietly through the November sky, trailing a thin wake of steam from her cape.

She was still learning. She would always be learning. But her father had always said that learning never stopped, and tonight she thought that was one of the finest things about being alive.

Even on a planet where she had once melted the toaster.