The bass thumped through Meteor Bar's sound system as Chad Thunderstroke flexed his way through the crowd. At six-foot-three with a jawline that could cut gss and abs that looked airbrushed, he was the kind of guy who made women turn their heads and men unconsciously suck in their stomachs.

  "Hey there, beautiful," he said, sliding up to the bar next to a woman with striking features and intelligent eyes behind trendy gsses. She wore a trench coat over a surprisingly form-fitting dress. "I'm—"

  "Some dude," she finished, not looking up from her tablet where she was running complex calcutions.

  "Yeah! How'd you know?"

  Dr. Elena Vasquez gnced up, took in his perfectly sculpted face and the way his shirt seemed painted onto his muscur frame, and felt her scientific objectivity take a brief vacation. "Lucky guess," she said with a smile. "I'm Elena."

  "Elena," he repeated, leaning closer with a grin that had unched a thousand Instagram followers. "So what do you do when you're not looking absolutely incredible?"

  Despite herself, Elena ughed. The line was terrible, but his delivery was so earnestly confident that it somehow worked. "I'm a theoretical physicist. I study dimensional barriers and quantum tunneling."

  Chad nodded sagely, having understood maybe three words. "That's so hot. Smart girls drive me crazy."

  Two hours and several drinks ter, Elena found herself writing her address on a napkin. Her colleagues would be horrified—she was giving her number to a man who'd asked if "quantum" was a type of protein powder. But God help her, he was gorgeous, surprisingly sweet, and she hadn't gotten id in eight months.

  "Come by around nine," she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "I'll be in my... b."

  Chad's eyes lit up like Christmas morning. "Your b? Kinky. I love a woman with hobbies."

  ---

  At 9:15 PM, Some Dude stood outside Elena's house—a modest two-story with an unusual amount of electrical cables running to the basement. He'd spent forty-five minutes perfecting his hair and choosing the tank top that best showcased his arms.

  The front door was unlocked. He let himself in, calling out, "Elena? Babe? Ready for some... experimentation?"

  Her voice echoed from somewhere below: "Down here! Just... give me five minutes to finish the final calcutions!"

  Chad wandered through her living room, noting the framed diplomas, scientific journals, and what looked like a Nobel Prize sitting on her bookshelf like a paperweight. Smart girls were so mysterious.

  Following the sound of humming machinery, he found a staircase leading to the basement. The walls were lined with equipment that looked like it belonged in a sci-fi movie—banks of computers, cables thick as his wrist, and in the center of it all, a circur ptform surrounded by a ring of metal that crackled with energy.

  "Whoa," he breathed, moving closer to the glowing portal. The air around it shimmered like heat waves. "Elena, this setup is wild. Very... atmospheric."

  "Almost ready!" her voice called from behind a bank of computers. "Just don't touch anything!"

  But Some Dude was already reaching toward the portal, mesmerized by the swirling light. It looked warm, inviting, like the world's most expensive mood lighting. Maybe this was her thing—some kind of eborate rolepy setup. He'd dated a girl once who was really into costumes.

  "Here goes nothing," he said with a grin, and stepped into the light.

  The world exploded into sensation—colors that didn't have names, sounds that weren't quite sounds, and the strangest feeling of being stretched like taffy across impossible distances. Then everything went bck.

  Behind her computer array, Elena looked up at her readings and frowned. The dimensional barrier was fluctuating wildly, and her sensors were detecting some kind of massive gravitational anomaly. That was impossible—her experiment was designed to create a tiny, stable viewing portal to observe parallel dimensions, not...

  Her screens went white. Every arm in the b started screaming at once. And somewhere in the chaos of sound and light, she heard the one thing that would haunt her for the rest of her short life: the deep, geographical rumble of a pnet about to explode.

  ---

  Chad woke up face-down on what looked like purple sand under a red sun. His head felt like someone had used it as a basketball, but otherwise, he felt... amazing. Better than amazing. He felt like he could bench press a building.

  He pushed himself up with one hand and accidentally unched himself fifteen feet into the air.

  "Okay," he said, nding gracefully despite having no idea how. "That's new."

  The ndscape around him was alien but beautiful—crystalline formations jutting from vender pins under a crimson sky. In the distance, he could see a city that looked like it was made of gss and silver. "Elena?" he called out, looking around. "Babe? Where did you go? This is next-level kinky, but I'm into it!"

  A shadow fell over him. He looked up to see three figures standing on a flying ptform descending from the sky—tall, pale people in flowing robes, their expressions a mixture of curiosity and concern.

  "Greetings, stranger," one of them said in accented English. "I am Zara-El of the House of El. You appear to be... not of Krypton. From where do you come?"

  Chad gave his most winning smile. "Earth! Though honestly, I'm not really sure how I got here. I was supposed to be hooking up with this scientist chick, and next thing I know..." He gestured at the alien ndscape.

  The three Kryptonians exchanged gnces. "Earth," Zara-El repeated slowly. "I am... afraid I have troubling news about your home pnet."

  "Oh yeah?"

  "Our long-range sensors detected a massive gravitational colpse in your system approximately one hour ago. Earth has been... destroyed."

  Some Dude blinked. "Destroyed? Like, the whole thing?"

  "I am sorry. You appear to be the st of your kind."

  There was a moment of silence as this information sank in. Then he shrugged. "Well, that sucks. But hey, this pce seems pretty cool! And I'm feeling fantastic. Must be the change of scenery."

  The Kryptonians stared at him. Clearly, grief affected different species in different ways.

  "What should we call you?" Zara-El asked gently.

  Chad thought about it.

  "You know what? Just call me Some Dude. That's what everyone says when they see me anyway—'some dude just saved my cat' or 'some dude helped me move my couch.' It works."

  And so it was that Some Dude became the first and st son of Earth on Krypton, completely unaware that his casual hookup had accidentally destroyed his entire pnet—and completely unbothered by his pnetary orphan status, because there were so many attractive Kryptonian women around and he could apparently fly now.

  The red sun, it turned out, had some very interesting effects on human physiology.