The sun over the Mojave was a welcome friend, a torrent of pure, golden energy that soaked into my skin and made the cells of my body sing. Down below, the mirrored arrays of the Sol-Gen Alpha facility spread for miles, a glittering testament to human ingenuity. It was a place of power, a symbol of a brighter future. Today, it was a ticking time bomb.

My uniform felt like a second skin, the tough, flexible Kryptonian weave moving with me as I flew. The red of my cape snapped smartly in the wind, a vibrant banner against the endless blue sky. On my chest, the sigil of the House of El felt warm, a familiar weight of promise and duty. It was a good day to save the world.

The call had been frantic. A feedback loop in the primary collection tower, a core overload, a potential detonation that would vaporize half of Nevada and blot out the sun with radioactive dust. A job for me.

I landed softly on the platform ringing the central tower, the heat wash from the structure making the air shimmer. Inside, through reinforced plasteel, I could see the core: a miniature sun, blazing with furious, unstable energy. My senses, a billion times sharper than any human’s, confirmed the diagnosis. The containment fields were fluctuating wildly.

“Don’t worry,” I said into my comms unit, my voice calm and reassuring. “I’ve got this.”

My body was a conduit of stellar power. I braced myself, feeling the limitless strength in my limbs, and pressed my hands against the vibrating outer casing of the containment vessel. My plan was simple: physically reinforce the failing fields while using my own body to absorb and safely vent the excess solar radiation. I was a living battery, and this was a storm I was built to weather.

The energy poured into me, a familiar, exhilarating rush. I could feel the pressure on the fields stabilizing under the unyielding strength of my arms. My heat vision, focused to a pencil-thin beam, began to carefully weld a fractured conduit back together. Everything was proceeding as planned.

That’s when I felt the first subtle shift.

It wasn’t a sudden change, but a slow, creeping alteration in the quality of the light. The brilliant, life-giving gold of the core began to feel… different. Harsher. The energy I was absorbing no longer felt like pure power; it had a strange, discordant resonance, like a beautiful song played subtly out of tune. A wave of unusual fatigue, alien and unwelcome, washed through me. My heat vision flickered for a nanosecond.

I pushed the feeling aside, attributing it to the sheer scale of the energy I was channeling. But the feeling grew. The light from the core was shifting, a barely perceptible drift down the spectrum. My skin, which always craved the sun, began to feel prickly and raw, as if suffering from a strange, internal sunburn. A cold dread, something I hadn’t felt since I first saw a green Kryptonite meteor, began to coil in my stomach.

The vibrant blue of my uniform seemed to darken in the strange new light. The ‘S’ on my chest, usually a source of comfort, suddenly felt heavy, like a tombstone. My strength, my boundless Kryptonian strength, was becoming… finite. The immense pressure I was holding back was no longer effortless to contain. My muscles began to ache with a deep, burning strain. My bones, which could withstand the pressure of a deep-sea trench, felt dense and brittle.

The light was no longer gold. It was a sickening, angry red.

The truth hit me with the force of a physical blow. This wasn’t an accident. It was a trap. The facility wasn’t a power plant; it was a weapon. A Red Sun weapon.

Before I could even try to fly, to escape, the second stage of the trap sprung. With a deafening groan of tortured metal, the floor beneath my feet glowed with a grid of energy lines. An immense, invisible weight slammed down on me, buckling my knees and driving me to the ground with shocking force. Gravity plating. Dialed to a level that would crush a tank into a dinner plate.

My cape billowed once before being pinned uselessly beneath me. My face was pressed against the hot, grimy metal floor. Every ounce of my rapidly fading strength was focused on simply not being crushed into paste. A pained grunt was torn from my throat. My body, once a paradigm of invulnerability, was screaming in agony. I could feel the crushing pressure on my spine, the strain on my joints.

A hologram flickered to life in front of me, projecting the image of a calm, unassuming man in a tailored suit. He looked at my prone, struggling form with the dispassionate air of a scientist observing a specimen.

“Kara Zor-El,” he said, his voice smooth and cold. “They call me the Architect. Welcome to my laboratory.”

Panic, raw and desperate, flooded me. I tried to push myself up, my hands scraping against the floor. It was like trying to lift a mountain.

“Please don’t strain yourself,” the Architect continued, a cruel hint of pity in his voice. “The gravity is precisely calibrated to your diminishing strength profile. The Red Sun radiation flooding this chamber is, I’m afraid, quite thorough. You are, for all intents and purposes, merely human now. A very strong human, perhaps, but a fragile one nonetheless.”

“Who… why…?” I gasped out, the words crushed by the pressure on my lungs.

“Why?” He smiled faintly. “Because symbols of hope are a fascinating thing to deconstruct. And because your predecessor was so very… profitable.”

The holographic image shifted. For a single, soul-shattering second, it showed a live feed of a darkened cell. In it was a woman, broken and hollow-eyed, chained to a wall. Her face was a ruin of scar tissue, but there was no mistaking the regal structure of her bones, the dark hair, the bearing of a warrior, even in defeat. Diana.

My blood ran cold. The stories, the rumors of her disappearance… they were true. This man… he…

The Architect’s image returned. “She funded your capture, you see. Her suffering built this cage. A cage I assure you, you will come to know even more intimately than she knows hers.”

I lay pinned under the weight of a synthetic world, bathed in the light of a dying star, my body screaming, my hope shattering. The vibrant colors of my uniform were now muted with grime and shadow. The proud ‘S’ on my chest was pressed into the dirt. I was a daughter of the House of El, a champion of Earth, and I had flown into a cage made of physics and cruelty, a cage built from the bones of another hero’s suffering. And as the gravity intensified just a little more, I knew this was only the beginning.