Yue

 28th January

08:53 GMT -5

Barely visible beams of red trace lines through the air, each one striking the centre of one of my target constructs.

"Hah!" Kara slows her flight, smiling as her eyes simmer down. "I hit every one this time!"

I shake my head. "No, you didn't. Also-."

The rock-crusher construct I've had chasing her finally catches-

"Huh?"

-up with her, momentarily enveloping her feet before trying to crush the rest of her and decaying to orange mist as it fails against kryptonian resilience. She watches the mist decay for a moment until she's sure that it's not about to reform, then returns her attention to me.

"You stopped moving again."

"What do you mean? I hit-."

I extend my left arm sideways and make a beckoning motion, reeling in the target I generated a couple of miles away. She frowns as she focuses on it.

"You missed this one."

"How was I supposed to see-? Oh."

"You now have the ability-."

"I know, Kal explained it. Microscopic vision, telescopic vision and heat vision."

"And you can see a wider part of the electromagnetic spectrum. As a civilian, you could probably live your entire life without needing heat vision. But unless you spend the rest of your life with a blindfold, you do need to learn how to focus on things, and how to do so without incinerating them unless-"

She nods. "Unless I mean to."

"-you mean to, yes." I generate a dozen targets around me. "Ready to try again?"

"Can we do it without the rock crusher this time?"

"That was just to give it a sense of urgency, but… Alright."

I send the target constructs out in all directions, making sure that they end up at different elevations and directions. I also alter their sizes in an attempt to throw off her ability to judge the distances a little. Kara's eyes dart around as she tries to follow them, then she squeezes them shut with a wince.

"Problem?"

She opens them again, blinking, and I notice that her pupils appear to be slightly dilated. She blinks again and… No change.

"I think I'm stuck."

"Stuck?"

She holds up her right hand in front of her face, then moves it in and out. "I can't change my focus. I can see things a couple of miles away as if I'm standing next to them, but anything closer or further away and it's just a blur."

"Okay. Um." I fly up to her, looking into her eyes as I do so. This never happened to Kon. Of course, his magnification isn't anything like as good as that of a full-blooded kryptonian, and he hasn't been dosing himself with gold kryptonite on a regular basis... "Okay. Shouldn't be permanent, but I'm going to try scan-"

There's a flicker of red.

"-ning-."

I can smell the burning just as I get my construct shield up, the laser from her eyes deflecting up into the sky!

Kara squeezes her eyes shut. "Sorry! Sorry." … "Are you okay?"

"Yes. May I ask why you just tried to incinerate-?"

"It was an accident! I was just trying to-. Unstick my eyes and I-. Pushed the wrong button!"

Ring scans don't detect any unusual escaping heat from around her eyelids. "Is it off now?"

She tilts her head back and opens her eyes, twin beams of ruby red failing to burst forth from her pupils. She gives it a moment and then tilts her head back down to look at me, her pupils moving normally.

"Okay, let's just assume that was a minor cramp thing and move onto a different exercise." I dismiss my target constructs and generate a brightly glowing punching bag construct, a pale construct bunch of flowers and a construct vase. "For your next test-"

She nods. "Hit the bag really hard, then move a flower into the vase without crushing it."

"-you have to hit the bag really hard, then move a flower into the vase without crushing it." She rolls her eyes, nodding. "I've reinforced the bag so that it should be able to survive a couple of hits. Begin when ready."

"Did-" The bag bends as her right fist hits home before I see her move. "-Kal-" She moves to the flower and barely gets it out of the bunch before it falls apart under her fingers. "-ever do-" She grimaces and hits the bag again. "-things like-" She slows down, gently lifting the flower and nearly getting it into the vase before snapping it in half. "-this?"

"I don't actually know Kal-El that well. Certainly not well enough to share childhood stories."

The next hit is weaker, but the flower makes it safely into the vase.

"I'm a little surprised that you haven't asked him."

"I wasn't that worried about it. I mean, I was, but with everything else… Then… I.. just.. had an off switch. And.. then-."

"Then I pointed out that it was killing you."

She looks awkwardly away. "Then you took me to Thanagar and I killed someone."

"You mean the Man-Hawk?" She gives her head a small nod. "No, you broke its back. The patrol killed it. And given what we-."

She jerks her head back towards me. "They did?"

"Yes. Do you.. want to see a recording-?"

"Great Krypton, no. But.. you're sure?"

I nod. "I watched them do it. The Man-Hawk you punched wouldn't have survived even if you hadn't hit it; one of us would have downed it and the patrol would have finished it off. The only difference would have been that someone on our side might have gotten injured. Kara, have you been… Worried about that-?"

"I felt its bones break under my fist!" I just look at her-. "It really.. doesn't bother you at all, does it?"

"Violence?"

"Killing."

"Wasteful killing bothers me. Senseless killing bothers me. Accidental killing bothers me. Ending the life of someone I have decided to kill?" I shake my head. "No, that doesn't bother me."

"You're a soldier." She nods. "I'm not. I was a mathematics undergraduate. The closest I came to that sort of violence on Krypton was.. walking past a small student demonstration. I'm doing this training so I can learn not to… Break people's spines by accident, not because I want to become a soldier myself."

"A lot of the time, proper training means that you don’t have to lead with your most powerful attacks. If you learned to grapple or strike with lower levels of force -like Kal-El does- then you could avoid doing that even if you were fighting."

She doesn't look convinced.

"But your goal is a reasonable one. Shall we continue?"