With a small 'click', the mechanical arm opened up revealing a myriad of blades. A razor sharp scalpel extending from the mass and cut through the man's skin to expose flesh and muscles, the unfeeling machine then used small pincers to dig through the flesh, carefully separating nerves and veins while keeping the bleeding to a minimum.
Blood loss was not a real problem, but it was preferable not to cause a mess.
"Ah… hmmm…. haaa," came the trembling voice from behind the protection glass, the man desperately trying to remain calm, he failed. "Fuck! Ahhhhhhh! Get it off! GET IT OFF!"
With another 'click' the mechanical arm stopped, pulling back from the man strapped to the operating table and returning to a resting position.
With a sigh, Kara looked up from her holographic screen and glared at her patient. "Kite-Man, for Rao's sake, man up."
The minor villain was inside a sterile room, a meter thick glass wall letting Kara watch the surgery from a comfortable sitting position in the medical bay.
"... Sorry," the man swallowed hard, eyes nervously going from the stump of his arm to the medical robot. "I know it doesn't hurt but… well…"
"Look, either turn your head away or accept the general anesthesia, but let the damn AI continue the transplant already."
"You sure it's… capable?"
"For the last time, yes, I'm sure!" Stopping, Kara pinched the bridge of her nose and took a second to calm herself. "Sorry about that. Look, I programmed the surgery myself and, even if there's a problem, it operates at a slow enough pace that I can interfere at any moment, everything will be perfectly fine."
Kara had yet to acquire a full copy of Kal's Fortress medical AI for her Lunar base for various reasons. And truthfully, it could be done easily enough but her paranoia hadn't let her install an AI she hadn't programmed herself, or at least gone over extensively.
So, she had taken the most basic parts, those she had already reviewed, —metahumans aside, humanity was biologically simple. The basics were more than enough— then she created the program for both Kite-Man and Selina's transplants.
Unfortunately, that meant understanding enough of medicine to actually perform the procedure herself.
Reading 62 dry, boring and full of technical terms books with enough attention to not only remember them, but also understand their content was easier said than done, even for a kryptonian.
Well, to be honest, she could understand them well enough, and her kryptonian coordination meant she didn't really need to practice more than once. Still…
In the end, Kara hadn't quite reached the level of a human medical expert, not on any other aspect, but these two procedures she could do with her eyes closed.
It was just… The subject really didn't interest her and, while reading at superspeed looked convenient as hell from the outside, she perceived that time at a normal pace while doing so.
To say Kara was feeling grumpy would be an understatement, she felt like she had just spent three months studying twelve hours a day, and Kite-Man's whining wasn't helping.
"I… yeah, I think I'll take the general anesthetic after all."
Finally! She regretted giving him the option to watch in the first place but, with her tech, blocking his pain receptors was simpler than putting him under.
With a single touch, Kara knocked the man out and let the AI continue the transplant, trusting it to warn her if anything went wrong, it would take him longer to wake up and leave her base, but at least he wouldn't be interrupting things.
Now, to study the data from Poison Ivy's chamber.
Accelerating her thoughts again, Kara turned to her holographic display and watched the recordings of the villainess' body growing rigid, her skin gaining a brownish tint before, slowly, cracking open to reveal roots that pierced through the glass of her healing pod and reached towards the floor, starting to draw nutrients from the soil while also seeming to filter the Blockbuster out of her system.
Thankfully, at Selina's suggestion, Kara had relocated the villainess into a larger room at the very edge of her compound and ordered her Karabots to turn it into a small garden.
Putting the villainess so close to something her power could manipulate was a risk to be sure, but relocating Poison Ivy closer to what little nature was available seemed to have drastically accelerated her recovery… and Kara could collapse the ceiling in less than a second, crushing anything inside, or incinerate, implode, explode, teleport away and otherwise destroy the room in seven other ways.
At an alarming pace, Poison Ivy's feet turned into a flower stalk, a green bud covering her entire body, Kara estimated only another two or three days before the woman fully bloomed. All the while, her monitoring devices were gathering data.
Kara was neither a biologist nor a botanist so most of the information was of little interest to her, but Dubbilex would certainly find a use for it. More important was the magical data she was collecting.
No matter how strong, Poison Ivy's roots simply couldn't draw enough nutrients and energy from the available soil to fuel her current transformation, instead, they seemed to be drawing on a different source, something outside their current dimension.
It wasn't exactly magic, not of any kind Kara had encountered, but the devices she made to study Captain Marvel, coupled with the Amazo scanner she had captured, were still able to monitor it.
"Interesting…" She mumbled, opening another screen with her readings of Captain Marvel's transformation, comparing them, a vicious smile forming on her face. "Very interesting."
Leaning forward on her chair, Kara steepled her fingers, she could use this. Oh yes, she could make great use of this indeed.
If she had to guess, Ivy was drawing on the energies of the Green to fuel her recovery. Kara wasn't exactly an expert on the subject, but the Green —not to be confused with the Green Light of Will— was an elemental force, one that had its own dimension and connected all plant life not only on Earth, but in the entire DC universe.
Yeah, Kara had no interest in touching something as powerful as that, not yet, particularly because such things tended to have at least some form of sapience, but the connection itself greatly interested her.
With a command, the kryptonian had one of her bots connect a magical draining device to the flower stalk. Immediately, the monitoring equipment registered a stop on the flow of energy, but the draining device was barely filling up.
So, the connection itself was magic, but the energies of the Green were a different source, perhaps a different wavelength?… Or they could also be shielded from her devices in a way Black Adam's power hadn't been.
Could she block that connection from a distance? Could she replicate it aimed at a different source?
Opening yet another holographic window to the side, Kara made sure to keep an eye on Kite-man's operation and started designing a new sunstone equipment, attempting to adapt her magic draining device into something that would block such connections.
In front of her, thousands of small pieces started forming on the hologram, numbers filling the screen as she calculated the best proportions for every single part of her new invention.
It would require an initial charge of magic, which could be a problem, but she still had more than enough power stored on the draining device to fuel a hundred experiments, and she could always ask Billy to recharge it later.
Eventually, a sunstone pillar rose from the ground, a new device starting to grow right in front of her even as one of her Karabots brought her a tray containing some gold, silver and aluminum ingots, it also had a box with the recycled Nth metal bullets she'd used during the Injustice assault.
It had been a pain to locate them after the fight, particularly with the League there watching, but she wasn't about to lose such precious resources.
Earlier experiments had revealed that pure silver was the best magical conductor Kara had available, gold coming in close second, but able to channel a bigger charge. Aluminum, on the other hand, was an effective magical insulant.
Amusingly enough, it was also somewhat effective at blocking psionic emanations, not very effective, nowhere even close to the devices she used, but it was better than nothing. That "tin foil" was a misnomer for aluminum foil and "hats" made thereof happened to be demonstrably good at blocking mind jacking weirdness wasn't lost on Kara's sense of irony.
With some simple commands, a cloud of her nanomachines rose from a hole in the ground, quickly enveloping the available metals before taking the shape of a 3D printer. A second later, Kara shared a couple of blueprints for the device to fabricate, things that couldn't be made with sunstone.
Concentrating, she squinted her eyes, using her super-vision to verify there were no imperfections in her design without the need of any equipment. She then started to assemble the new prototype, The Fog really had been a great acquisition.
The cloud of nanomachines moved, forming hundreds of precise tools so small a human would need a microscope to see, then they moved, carefully manipulating the prototype's pieces in front of her, connecting hundreds of silver wires to several golden nodes, all of which surrounded a millimeter wide core of Nth metal.
With absolute control, Kara guided each piece into place as they were produced, she still had to discard three or four pieces when she noticed some mistakes but, finally, she encased everything in a shell of sunstone that immediately started absorbing energy.
Carefully, Kara laid the first prototype aside and stretched her arms, a small smile on her face. From behind, one of the Karabots handed her a mug of freshly brewed coffee that she eagerly started sipping, eyes closing in bliss.
Laying the mug atop a drone floating steadily at her side, Kara took a deep breath and went back to her projects, starting to design a prototype for another hypothesis. A few meters in front of her, the medical AI continued to work, delicate tools starting the long process of connecting every vein and nerve on Kite-Man's new arm.
Three hours later, Kara had five new prototypes for testing, Kite-Man was back on Earth with a perfectly good arm and Selina's own operation had finished, the cat burglar slowly opening her eyes.
"How do you feel?"
"Hmmm, like I'm having the worst hangover of my life," Selina whispered, a shaky hand massaging her temple.
"Don't worry, it will pass in a minute or two. Your body shouldn't hurt, nothing worse than a flu at least. You'll be able to do pretty much everything normally soon enough, just avoid any exertion for the next two days and you'll probably be weak for a month or so."
"Well, I've certainly had worse recovery periods. Still, being unable to practice will be a pain."
"You'll manage," Kara helped her friend into a hover chair —a modified drone, really— then started walking away from the medical bay, the chair floating after her. "Now, come on, let's get out of here."
"Hmm… That eager to see me out of your lair again?" Selina said in a teasing voice as she stretched on the chair. "A girl could start to feel offended."
"Kinda," Kara confessed with a shrug. "It's more that Kori and I have just finished moving and there'll be a barbecue and I don't want to be late. You're invited by the way."
"What, like this?" Selina waved a hand over her body indicating her civilian clothing with a raised eyebrow.
"Why not? It's not like you need your costume. You don't really have a secret identity, Selina."
The Bat, and the League after him, had known Catwoman's civilian identity for a while now, but she was just too damn good at her job. They could try to arrest her, sure, but the lack of evidence left behind meant no accusation would stick unless she was caught in the act.
"True, but I look so good in leather, and it's amusing to tease the heroes when I catch them staring."
"Somehow, I doubt you need your costume to make a man stare," Kara snorted as they finally stepped on the teleportation platform. "Come on, Robin will be there and it will be easier to convince the Bat if his protegee sees you like this."
"I guess I do make for quite the damsel in distress right now," Selina said in a teasing tone, already planning on ways to use her condition to tease the Bat. "Are you sure I don't need help taking a bath, for example?"
"Quite sure, as I keep reminding people, transplanting human material is simple and there's no chance of rejection with cloned organs."
"No matter, I'm sure I can convince the Bat to help anyway."
Kara snorted, activating the platform and disappearing from her Lunar base. In a flash of light, they reappeared inside a bare white circular room, a dozen laser cannons aimed at their location before the sensors verified their identity and they retreated back into the walls.
Kara's newest underground lab was far from finished, but at least a few security measures were already installed. With a 'hiss' the doors snapped open and the duo moved out into a long corridor.
"By the way, you saw the state Poison Ivy was in, any idea what she's gonna be like when she comes out of it?"
"Ah… about that," Selina said, her eyes shifting away from Kara's. "It may be best if you can keep her contained for a while, at least until she's had a few sessions with that psychologist I told you about."
Kara lifted an eyebrow at the thief's actions, making a mental note to further increase her security measures on Poison Ivy's before the villainess' flower bloomed.
Seeing her questioning look, Selina sighed. "Look, I love Ivy as a friend but, well, she can be volatile, particularly after she's heavily damaged or something triggers her traumas. Being kidnapped, used and experimented on by the Joker certainly does that."
"How volatile?"
"When she's doing well she can be fun, loyal and even kind, particularly to children… When she's having an episode she varies between degrees of narcissistic sociopath and utterly genocidal."
"Ugh," great, that's just great, she was gonna have to keep the villainess on her moon base for a while, wasn't she? "Selinaaa, I agreed to help rescue Ivy as payment, not act as her recovery clinic!"
Really, Kara could somewhat relate to the woman, according to the League's information, Pamela Isley had always been an environmentalist but being seduced, painfully experimented on and nearly killed by her professor broke her, turning her into the eco-terrorist she was today.
The kryptonian had dealt with her own contact with 'human' experimentation in a far healthier manner, at least she thought so, but she did have Kori to help with that, and even she would react badly if someone managed to capture her again.
Reaching the elevator, Kara let Selina's chair enter first before stepping inside and sending a command for the ground floor.
"Please, you're not going to get another job out of me," the recovering woman said in amusement. "You may not be as heroically inclined as Big Blue, but we both know you're not going to let Ivy leave your custody before making sure she's safe."
"Fine, I'll take care of her," Kara eventually said. "But you're gonna have to help look after her once you're back on your feet. Ivy is NOT staying in my base for longer than absolutely necessary."
Perhaps Kara could have the eco-terrorist stay in one of her sunstone ships in the middle of space? That way she'd be away from both the moon base and Earth itself, unable to hurt anyone but herself.
"Thanks," Selina smiled, adjusting her seating on the floating chair. "You know, you and Ivy are quite similar in some ways, I'm sure you're gonna get along great once she's better."
Honestly, Kara would like to think she had nothing in common with someone who started her career as a villain by threatening to commit genocide with an airborne fungus but, well, considering the way she was still planning to murder every single Psion in existance, she wasn't that much of an hypocrite.
Sure, Psions were, without exceptions, amoral monsters that deserved to die in a fire, so committing genocide against them was far more acceptable than against humanity, but Kara wasn't sure everyone would see it her way.
The elevator's doors snapped open and they finally stepped through the secret wall to reveal Kara's new house, Selina's chair almost hitting Captain Marvel as he carried two stacks of boxes into the house.
With lightning fast reflexes, the hero gently caught the boxes as they were about to fall before turning to the side. Smiling wide, his eyes only briefly glancing at Selina before understanding the situation.
"Oh, hello Miss Kara, Miss Kyle. Miss Kori asked me to help move things."
"I can see that, thanks Marvel. Are the others outside?"
"Yes, Kid Flash is lighting the fire on the grill."
Looking through the walls, Kara saw the teenaged hero struggling to fan the fire without using too much speed and blowing it out. With an amused laugh, her cousin decided to give the boy a hand and blasted the firewood with his heat vision.
She also noticed nobody had brought the food. "Right, you guys can get outside while I grab things from the kitchen."
Grabbing several plates of seasoned meat from the fridge, Kara saw Dexter's hesitant head peeking at her from under the sofa, his ears flickering at every noise before he hissed at the door and fled towards her room as fast as he could. Even now, months later, the cat really didn't like people.
Slender arms wrapped themselves around Kara's neck from behind in a death grip before Kori pushed her chest against the Kryptonian's back, head coming to rest at her right shoulder. "Welcome home."
"Hey, sorry I was late, had to use the general anesthesia on Kite-Man after all."
Turning around, Kara noticed Kori was barefoot, her toes floating a few centimeters above the ground, they traded a quick kiss before the Tamaranean floated back and started to help gather the food.
Adjusting a stray lock of hair on Kori's face, Kara asked. "So, did you have any trouble setting the holographic projector around the house?"
"We did not, friend Conor was most helpful in positioning the projectors."
Kara had made several sunstone devices to cover the area around their new house, once activated, they'd cover her entire property and project false images capable of fooling even her own senses, if she wasn't focusing on it. Unfortunately, she hadn't had the time to install them before leaving for the Moon base.
Still, considering Kori herself had helped with some calculations for the devices, Kara had felt fine leaving her in charge of their installation. "Only Kon-El?"
"Indeed," Kori said, giving Kara a look at her use of Conor's kryptonian name when the boy preferred his human one. "Mayhaps you should make such devices more easily operated? The Titans are most intelligent, but they are not used to such a level of technology, yes?"
"Right, keep forgetting about that," the Titans weren't exactly strangers to alien technology, and both Miss Martian and Aqualad came from advanced civilizations, but none of them were even close to Kryptonian tech. "Anyway, did you finish your presentation?"
"I did not, I was hoping our crystal ships would be finalized before meeting with the League of Justice."
"Oh, you're already making battle plans then?" Kara asked with interest, she had thought Kori was still trying to convince the League to help with her home planet but, if she was already planning the campaign… "Well, the ships are almost finished growing, but why wait until they're ready? It's not like I'm gonna stop if they tell me to."
"The Treaty of Outer Space," Kori said, shaking her head. "Military activities are forbidden on the Moon, The League of Justice would be forced to intervene if they were informed."
"Huh," Kara hadn't actually read the laws regarding settlement on the Moon before making her base, seeing as it was, well, secret. She'd have to fix that later. "Well, I'll see if I can accelerate their growth then."
"Joy!" Kori exclaimed, then she booped Kara on the head and opened the door, floating out into the garden. "Now, enough work, the garden celebrations are to be relaxing!"
Out on the grass, a frisbee flew, its speed barely under the sound barrier, Krypto flying after it like a dog shaped missile, both Kon-El and Kid Flash laughing from the edge of the yard.
Sitting at a table, Miss Martian and Selina were absentmindedly cutting a few leaves and pushing them through the bars of a small, heavily reinforced cage containing a pair of cute rabbits, the Martian's eyes following Kon-El's movements with appreciation before blushing when Selina teased her about it.
By the grill, Kal-El, wearing his Superman costume with a stupid barbecue apron on top, was talking with Aqualad before noticing her and waving, a huge smile on his face.
"Fine," Kara laughed, following after her girlfriend. "But I'm manning the grill."