Hoo, boy!  Starting to make some realistic predictions on the size of this monster, and I'm thinking it's going to be over 300 pages (it's now hovering around the 150 mark).  Don't know how I got to this from a story that had no plot six weeks ago, but I guess this was one of those plot bunnies that looks all small and harmless and boring and turns out to be pregant with 60549840 more bunnylets.

This is just a short jot, today, but I'm writing some more tonight and will have a longer piece for tomorrow with any luck.

Rating: NC-17
Characters: Clark, Lex, Jonathan, Whitney, Lana, Gabe Sullivan, plus one.
Summary: The most heroic thing Clark did on a regular basis was to stitch up Taber’s right side whenever he needed it.
A/N: Remember how in the last part, there was a Justin who was an artist and had an injury to his hands?  Yeah, that was from SV!  *g*  Not QaF.  I'm sorry that I couldn't resist a QaF shout-out in the form of naming Justin Gaines' Obi-Wan after QaF's Brian, but really, no crossover was intended.  I was talking about Adam Brody's character, Justin Gaines, from 'Crush' (1.19).  Maybe with a bit of Seth Cohen from the OC tossed in.  I hope you still like him even if he's not QaF Justin, because -- well.  He's gonna be back.  *eg*

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Lex knew he’d made progress in earning Gabe’s trust when Gabe took him into the Wall of Weird room and left him alone there for over an hour.  Lex spent the first few minutes in the same overwhelmed state that had paralyzed him on his first visit, but eventually he managed to snap out of it and begin to go after the sort of things that he couldn’t find in his pilfered WoW binder.

There was new data, for one thing.  Chloe had been in the Smallville High class of 2005, departing for Columbia the next fall.  After that, any new discoveries appeared in a different hand, collected and noted by Gabe.  Lex couldn’t tell if Chloe had lost interest or simply didn’t have time to contribute, but he couldn’t ask Gabe since the man had yet to admit his daughter’s involvement in the project.

In that first heady hour alone, Lex read and studied and cross-referenced until his brain felt like it was about to grind to a halt, overloaded with new knowledge.  Fifteen minutes away from Level Three, Lex doubted he could recall more than two sentences of everything he’d examined.  But as the day wore on, Lex’s mind began to integrate the facts, stringing patterns together like this was a giant code Lex wanted to crack.  But it wasn’t until midnight that he uncovered a fundamental truth about the Wall of Weird – every shred of evidence spawned another question.  For each story Lex had read, his brain was pointing out myriad blank places, spots where the details became blurry, where fact melded messily with theory.  Lex wrote all the thoughts down as they occurred to him, then committed the words to memory and lit a fire using the notepad as tinder.

Two days later, Lex convinced Gabe to give him more time – three hours, now, with a halfway point visit from Gabe.  Lex barely noticed when Gabe came in, only blinking out of his thoughtful daze when Gabe released a low whistle.

“You’re trashing the joint,” Gabe said, glancing around.  Lex was sitting on the floor in the middle of several stacks of paper, every drawer open and half of the Wall itself untacked.

Lex patted the stack nearest him.  “You think that all of these manifestations are LuthorCorp’s experiments gone awry?”  Two hundred and seventy-four documented instances, at Lex’s last count.  Another few dozen speculative or undocumented cases.  “Because I can’t see my father funding all these experiments.  Not all of them have any practical application, and he’s not one to pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”

Gabe frowned.  “We’ve wondered about that, too.  In many cases, the origin of the mutations appears to be completely accidental – a lightning strike or an explosion, that sort of thing.  It seems difficult to explain in terms of LuthorCorp involvement.  The meteor rocks don’t even seem to be involved, most of the time, especially in more recent years.  They’re just – unexplained weirdness.”

Lex tugged at a sheaf of paper he’d brought in with him.  “I have my theories about that.”  He handed Gabe a newspaper article clipped from the Ledger, dated late 2000.  It was second page news, but Lex had remembered it because it had seemed like such a strange acquisition for his father.  It had been a quick search online to find the relevant archive on the local paper’s website.

“Philip Industries buy out Lowell County utilities,” Gabe read, then continued silently.  “What does this have to do with –”

“Phillip Industries is a side project of my father’s,” Lex said.  “A subsidiary of LuthorCorp, actually, but mostly invested in technology, electronics, that sort of thing.  I never understood why he diversified to rural utilities, until now.”

Gabe stared at the article, confusion in his expression.

“He’s been poisoning the whole town,” Lex said, feeling unreal just stating it.  “The water treatment plant is listed as a storage site in the meteor clean-up operation.”

“The drinking water?” said Gabe, paling.

“Just trace amounts, I imagine,” Lex said, unfolding his legs and standing up.  “Barely detectable by government testing standards, probably just a bit over what might be expected given the meteor contamination of the town anyway… but if the meteors react to biological amplification, like DDT or mercury, then levels of the meteor in a person’s system would increase gradually over time.  And if the person is consuming contaminated beef, vegetables, milk, anything produced or grown in the Smallville area using Smallville water and soil…”

“Then every person in Smallville is a meteor mutant waiting to happen,” Gabe finished, shaking his head.

“The theory, as I understand it, is that a traumatic event precipitates the mutation – and in the early years, during the meteor shower and before the bulk of the clean-up, mere proximity to the meteor rocks could effect the change.  But nowadays… anyone who drinks the water around here and undergoes some sort of physical trauma is playing Russian roulette with their genome.”  It was masterful, in a twisted way.  Lionel had created his very own test population, some twenty-seven thousand strong, and was relying on the vagaries of fate to produce mutations.  It was like forced evolution, like Darwin condensed.  And all Lionel had to do was – what?  Watch for irregularities?  Monitor for oddities?

Or, Lex supposed, spying an old copy of the Torch by his foot, read the local high school paper.  Maybe that was why Chloe had stopped publishing the stories back in 2002 – maybe she’d realized she was only pointing LuthorCorp’s gun at each mutant in turn.

“What happens to them?” Lex asked, looking back up to see Gabe touching his own hands lightly.  “To the mutants.”

Gabe dropped his fingers, giving up on searching for traces of the meteor molecules that must be coursing through him.  “Well, a lot of them have died,” Gabe said.  “But more of them were institutionalized after the fact.”

“And?” Lex prompted.

“And,” Gabe repeated, helplessly, “I guess that’s all we know.”

“Then that’s where we start,” Lex said.  “LuthorCorp has got to be picking up the pieces of their little endeavor somewhere along the way.  We’ve got to find out where, and how.”