[A Few Days Ago After the Incident~]
Inside Dr. Virgil Swann's mansion, it was… quiet. Uncomfortably so, but quiet all the same.
Elizabeth noticed it the second she stepped in. No voices. No footsteps. No guards doing their usual rounds, pretending not to watch while watching everything. The halls were wide and dim, lights either turned low or not bothering to turn on at all. The place felt less like a home and more like someone had pressed pause on it and forgotten to come back.
Her heels clicked against the polished floor, the sound carrying farther than it should have. She almost winced. Normally, this house swallowed noise whole.
Today, it echoed—long, lazy, and a little accusatory. She glanced around as she walked, taking in the familiar shapes: tall pillars, old paintings, doors that led to rooms filled with things most people weren't meant to see. Everything was still where it should be. Too still.
No staff passed by. No security presence in sight. Either they'd all been dismissed, or someone had decided they were unnecessary. Neither option sat particularly well with her.
Elizabeth adjusted her grip on her purse and kept moving, unhurried but alert. The mansion hadn't changed much, but the absence of life made it feel different—hollowed out, like a shell that had already given up whatever it was meant to protect.
If this was her father's idea of keeping things quiet, Elizabeth thought dryly, he had certainly succeeded.
Almost without thinking, her steps carried her down the familiar corridor toward his office. The path felt automatic, muscle memory guiding her past framed artifacts and shadowed alcoves she had memorized years ago. When she reached the door, she didn't hesitate. Her hand closed around the knob and turned.
The office greeted her with a low mechanical hum and a wash of pale, shifting light.
Just as she'd expected, her father was there.
Dr. Virgil Swann sat in his electric wheelchair, posture rigid but composed, his attention fixed on the massive screen dominating the far wall.
Kryptonian symbols pulsed across it in slow, deliberate patterns—alien letters blooming and fading like a language that refused to stay still. Their cold glow reflected faintly in his glasses, painting his face in shades of blue and white.
"Father," Elizabeth said, closing the door behind her.
The sound echoed softly in the room before settling. She crossed the floor and stopped beside him, close enough to hear the quiet whirr of the wheelchair and the steady rhythm of his breathing. Up close, she could see the familiar signs of exhaustion etched into his features—the lines that deepened whenever the universe reminded him how small humans truly were.
For a moment, she said nothing. Neither did he.
The screen continued its silent translation, ancient and patient, as if it truly had all the time in the world—and that was when Elizabeth noticed it.
The glyphs weren't cycling the same way anymore.
At first, she thought it was her imagination. The Kryptonian script had always been fluid, shifting slightly as if meaning itself refused to stay still. But this was different. The rhythm had changed. The pauses between symbols were longer. The sequence—no, the structure—was unfamiliar.
She leaned in, eyes narrowing. She was about to speak when her father beat her to it.
"It changed again," Dr. Swann said quietly, never taking his eyes off the screen. His voice carried the weight of both awe and fatigue. "That makes the third time since you arrived, Eli."
Elizabeth's lips parted. She turned fully back to the screen, the glow reflecting sharply in her eyes. "Again?" she murmured. "Who could it be this time, Father?"
Only then did Dr. Swann look up at her.
His gaze was steady, deliberate—far too knowing for comfort. "I believe," he said slowly, "you are the only one who could distinguish this person from the rest."
Elizabeth felt the familiar, uncomfortable tightening in her chest.
Elizabeth Patricia Swann. Or—elsewhere, in a far universe that still felt more real than this one—Margarette Magelan.
Three years ago, she had not arrived in Smallville. She had woken up in it. Unlike Lucinda, whose body had crossed worlds intact after being ran over by a meteorite, Margarette had opened her eyes to find herself inhabiting someone else's life, someone else's hands, someone else's name.
Elizabeth Swann's reflection had stared back at her from a mirror she had never owned but remembered clearly as she also had Elizabeth's memories.
And Dr. Virgil Swann had known right away. He hadn't needed proof. No tests. No explanations. The moment his eyes met hers, something behind them had broken—and then hardened. The message had already warned him. The screen had already spoken.
His daughter was gone. And someone else stood in her place.
Elizabeth—Margarette—had expected questions. Accusations. Grief that would turn to rage. Instead, Dr. Swann had accepted the truth with a quiet devastation that never quite left him. Whatever pain he carried about where his real daughter might be, or if she still existed at all, he buried it beneath purpose.
The message mattered more. And now, the message was changing again. They needed to find the third traveler. Immediately.
Elizabeth had taken to the task with ruthless efficiency. She scoured Metropolis street by street, event by event, face by face, committing names to memory, cataloging people with the quiet paranoia of someone who knew worlds could overlap at any moment.
She watched for tells—confusion that lingered too long, intelligence that didn't quite fit its surroundings, eyes that seemed to recognize things they shouldn't. But to no avail.
Then came the auction came. Wealth drew attention. Outsiders. People with the means to hide anomalies behind influence and money. It was a calculated gamble—hoping the third traveller would surface.
Fortunately… she appeared.
Unfortunately, she appeared at Lex Luthor's side.
Of all people. The son of Lionel Luthor—the very man Dr. Virgil Swann had warned her about repeatedly. A man who did not seek truth for understanding, but for leverage. A man who would see a miracle and ask only how to own it.
Elizabeth noticed the traveler almost immediately. There was a subtle dissonance about her, the same quiet fracture Elizabeth had learned to recognize in herself.
The way her eyes lingered a second too long on unfamiliar things. The way she carried herself like someone constantly adjusting to the rules of a world that wasn't quite hers.
Their encounter was brief—and tragic.
Elizabeth barely had time to register the distortion before the woman faltered. Pain overtook her suddenly, violently, as if her body had struck an invisible fault line. The traveler doubled over, breath shallow, color draining from her face in a way no ordinary illness could explain.
She wanted to say anything. Ask her about how she was able to travel, but the woman was in too much pain and Lex Luthor was there.
His reaction was immediate, unguarded. Panic flickered across his carefully maintained composure as he caught the woman, his voice sharp with concern as he ushered her away from the crowd after competing the purchase.
Whatever he had bid on, he paid for it without hesitation, without negotiation. Elizabeth noted the sum and narrowed her eyes. Lex Luthor did not spend that kind of money on impulse. The item mattered. Whether as leverage, protection, or bait, she could not yet tell—but it was important.
Later, Elizabeth learned the woman's name. Lucy Bryce. Lex Luthor's housemaid—officially.
She was always nearby. Always overlooked. And yet she had crossed the invisible threshold into Lex Luthor's inner orbit. Elizabeth did not miss the significance of that. Lex did not panic for acquaintances. He did not reveal concern unless something—or someone—had already embedded itself into his life.
That alone made Lucy Bryce dangerous.
Elizabeth initiated a background check the moment she returned home. Records, databases, municipal registries—she searched methodically, peeling back layers the way she had learned to do since arriving in this world.
And she found nothing.
No birth certificate that held under scrutiny. No childhood history that extended far enough back. No medical records consistent with a lifetime in Smallville. Lucy Bryce existed only in fragments, as if the name had been dropped into the world fully formed, without roots.
Which meant only one thing. Lucy Bryce had not displaced anyone. She had not awakened in another body the way Elizabeth had. There was no prior owner. No erased identity. The name itself had been given. Constructed. Likely by Lex.
Elizabeth leaned back in her chair, the glow of her computer screen casting long shadows across the room. Slowly, she raised a hand to her mouth, fingers pressing against her lips as the implications aligned with terrifying clarity.
"Lucy Bryce…" Elizabeth murmured, the name tasting heavier now that it carried meaning. "She is the same as the second traveler."
She had intended to speak to Lucy the very next day. The timing seemed almost merciful—Lucy had been hospitalized, contained in one place, vulnerable but alive.
A controlled setting. A chance to confirm everything Elizabeth suspected before Lex Luthor complicated matters further.
Instead, the world greeted her with ice.
Elizabeth arrived at Smallville Medical Center in her sleek black car, already rehearsing what she would say, what not to say. The moment she stepped out, instinct screamed at her to stop.
Everything was frozen... literally.
People stood locked in place outside the entrance—mid-step, mid-breath—faces pale, skin rimmed with frost. A man's coffee had crystallized in his hand, steam arrested in a delicate, impossible spiral.
Even the wind felt wrong, thick and unmoving, as though time itself had been flash-frozen. The hospital location was in a remote area. People do not have the luxury to casually walk around there, so no one was able to call for help yet.
She reached for her phone, fingers already tightening as she prepared to call for help—federal, private, anything—when a blade of cold air brushed against her cheek. Elizabeth turned sharply only to see Clark Kent stood near the hospital entrance, his expression a mirror of her own shock and confusion.
Frost dusted his jacket, but he didn't seem affected the way he should have been. His eyes scanned the frozen figures, the doors, the unnatural stillness—processing faster than any ordinary person could.
And then, without hesitation, he went inside.
Elizabeth groaned softly and lowered her phone. Of course he did. He's Clark Kent.
Calling for help now would be catastrophic. If authorities arrived while Clark was inside—if they saw what he could do under pressure—there would be no undoing it. Protecting Clark's identity had always been part of the unspoken contract Elizabeth kept with herself.
She had come from the real world a year before the second and third travelers ever surfaced. Long enough to understand the rules. Long enough to know which lines could never be crossed.
Margarette Magelan had been a fan of Smallville once. Passionate. Obsessive, even. She knew the beats, the sacrifices, the fragile balance that kept the story intact. That was precisely why she had never told Dr. Virgil Swann the truth—that she had known about Clark Kent from the very beginning.
She had sworn never to tamper with the plot completely. Never to become the reason something broke. But now there's another traveler and Elizabeth doubt that there could be more hiding in plain sight.
Lucy Bryce was dangerously close to both Lex Luthor and the Kents. She was woven into the narrative in ways Elizabeth had never anticipated, her presence rippling outward, destabilizing things that were never meant to change this early.
Elizabeth's jaw tightened as the thought settled.
When travelers appeared, the story changes itself. It always did. She for one had displaced the real Elizabeth Patricia Swann, although she tried to much to keep the plot together, change was inevitable.
The second traveler didn't change anything much. His character was not connected to the Luthors, the Kents, or any of the main characters. Thus, he vanished.
In this case—however Lucy Bryce chose—or was forced—to act, the cost would not be abstract.
It would be a name.
Lana Lang.
Chloe Sullivan.
Lois Lane.