Luthor family’s new world order

chapter 1: a star is born

“It really is beautiful, isn’t it?” Jeremiah Danvers asked dreamily as he, his wife, and his young daughter all gazed up into the starry night sky in the little town of Midvale on that warm night of July 15, 2004. Their daughter, Alex, seemed to be the most excited out of the trio.
“I hope I see a shooting star!” she murmured eagerly, narrowing her eyes as she peered up into the heavens.
“I don’t know about that, darling,” her mother replied with a tender laugh.
“Oh, Eliza, don’t crush the poor girl’s hopes and dreams,” Jeremiah elbowed her playfully and she rolled her eyes right back at him. Alex, meanwhile, pretended to side with her father.
“Yeah, Mom!” she joked. “Let me have a little fun!” then, with the little telescope that Jeremiah had given her for her previous birthday, she continued to look upward, into the vast and glorious reaches of space…
“Holy cow!” Alex dropped her telescope in surprise, startling both of her parents out of their reverie.
“What! What is it? What’s wrong?” they asked, suddenly brought to the alert by Alex’s cry of shock, but Alex found herself mute, able only to point upward. Eliza and Jeremiah looked up then, narrowing their eyes. For a moment, they could see nothing. But then…
“Wait! Is that a-?” Jeremiah began, standing on tiptoe to try and get a better look. Eliza wordlessly handed him the telescope Alex had dropped. It was a crummy little thing, functional but not very good or high tech, but Jeremiah didn’t care. He took it gratefully from his wife before continuing to squint upward.
“It is! A shooting star!” Alex gasped as the star got steadily larger, coming into view.
“That’s no shooting star!” Jeremiah replied with a gasp of his own. “Shooting stars aren’t that big, or that perfectly oval and smooth!” He was dimly aware of Eliza clutching his arm worriedly. Since she could not see as well as her other two family members, she had no idea what they were looking at.
“Should we go inside, honey?” she asked fretfully, one hand clinging to his arm while the other wrapped protectively around her daughter. But for a moment, Jeremiah ignored her, far too entranced with the unidentified flying object to be aware of anything other than it.
“Honey?” Eliza repeated a few seconds later when Jeremiah made no move to answer her.
“No, no, wait a minute,” he muttered.
“Here! Let me see it again!” Alex pleaded, tugging on his shirt and trying to get the telescope back from him, but once again, he seemed to have gone selectively deaf, ignoring her and Eliza to continue staring at the shining orb shooting down to them from the sky.
“There it goes!” he gasped at last, then without another word, he took off running.
“Jeremiah!” Eliza shrieked, both annoyed and concerned by her husband’s sudden fascination with this new and mysterious star. Then she went running after him.
“Dad!” Alex echoed her mother, excited and scared as she took off running after both of her parents. Tonight’s little family bonding time via stargazing had suddenly become a lot more interesting…
For the next few minutes, the trio continued to sprint after Jeremiah. He, meanwhile, kept his eyes upward. The star was getting ever bigger and ever brighter.
“You aren’t worried about that thing causing a minor explosion when it lands?!” Eliza shouted as she ran after her husband, Alex only a few paces behind.
“We need to see what it is!” Jeremiah replied urgently, but when both Eliza and Alex tried to ask him why he cared so much about this little star, he refused to answer. Instead, he only kept on running.
In the end, Eliza proved correct. There was finally a loud crash as the meteor made impact with the Earth, but from the sound of the collision, the rock had struck water instead of earth. That was a small comfort to Eliza, since she knew that the water would’ve buffered some of the blow and taken some of the energy from the collision. It would still, no doubt, have totally leveled the surrounding area, but the release of energy wouldn’t have been quite as terrible since the meteor had struck water instead of land.
“Hey! Wait a minute! That’s no star or meteor!” even though Alex had been last in line in the little Danvers family midnight marathon, she was the first to realize that the meteor was not exactly a meteor. She proved correct when, just a few seconds later, the trio finally reached the site of the crash. Sure enough, what lay on the edge of the lake, looked like a tiny spaceship, a pod.
“Oh my god!” Eliza breathed, stopping mid-stride to stare in awe and fear at the little metal vehicle. Jeremiah, meanwhile, did not stop running until he was knee-deep in water, close enough to touch the pod. Alex followed in after him. Eliza reached out to try and stop Alex, but Alex easily sidestepped her hand and kept on running after her father until she too was submerged in the lake.
A few seconds later, after Jeremiah first touched the pod, the large window on its front began to open.
“Get back!” he muttered quickly, shoving Alex behind him. They all waited and watched anxiously at the pod window continued to open slowly, like a door. What was inside? A bomb? A weapon? Treasure? Information? No! It was… a girl!!! A child! One frightened look from her and one stunned look from the Danvers was all it took before all four of them knew that none of their lives would ever be the same again.
In that one simple moment, the entire universe had changed forever. In that one quiet, peaceful, normal summer night, quite literally, a star was born, and now, she had found her place, her foundation, her home, her upbringing, her future, her life with the Danvers family.