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Life on Krypton was Dullsville. People forget that if everybody has super powers, nobody has them. Even Super Dog found nothing special in fetching a stick thrown halfway around the planet. The second most exciting thing that had ever happened was when Krypton exploded. Unfortunately that occurred just as Supergirl was preparing for her first date, which was to be the most exciting thing. Teased at school because of her frustrating inability to even leap over bungalows in a single bound, it had taken forever to convince Super Bobby to think it was his idea to ask her out. As he was ringing the doorbell her father hustled her off in an escape pod. She’d thought it was because he couldn’t stand to see his little girl growing up, and pouted all the way to Earth. When she later learned the truth she was still slightly miffed.
Her dating prospects were no better on her new home planet. Even as her powers matured, her potential dating pool diminished. Only when she set aside her father’s advice to “never put out until there’s a ring on your finger” did she find men willing to take out a woman who could not only beat them at arm wrestling but examine the total package using her xray vision.
Inevitably they would disappoint; if not as lovers, then as fighters. Because if there’s one thing Supergirl liked almost as much as romantic evenings by a fire she had started by rubbing two trees together, it was a good scrap. “My little feisty one,” her mother had called her just before tucking her into the pod and being obliterated. “Your father forgets that I didn’t have a ring when he took my virginity the first three times. I know you’re impatient, but watch your temper. It’s not your most attractive quality.”
Supergirl usually kept her aggression in check by a good workout at the gym when she didn’t have any dates lined up. It was there that she ran into her cousin Superman, bench pressing well below his personal best, Clark Kent eyeglasses cracked from a recent run-in with a parking meter maid he could have stuffed through the coin slot if he had any balls. As a teenager she’d gone out with him a few times on ‘trial dates’ arranged by her father that both had found awkward and, needless to say, romantically unfulfilling by design.
They’d had lunch, caught up on gossip (“Everything back home is still obliterated”), then gone their separate ways – though not before ‘Clark’, as he really did wetly prefer to be called, left her with some advice: “Choose your battles. You can’t fight the whole world.” Also “Don’t bother, I’m wearing lead underwear.”
Amongst her superpowers, one of the most useful, passed down from her uncle “Hands” (like calling someone who is tall Shorty, thanks to Supergirl after one free-ranging hug too many) was the ability to turn people to stone, and not just with a look surpassing icy. It had gotten her out of many a tight spot, such as when cabbies insisted on being paid. There was an entire gallery at the Metropolis Museum of Modern Art filled with her “Rocky Relationships” installation, the provenance of which she naturally kept from the curator to avoid sticky questions.
It took a blind date with what turned out to be the son of a preacher man to get her to realise the wisdom of Clark’s advice.