Epilogue: Lois Lane, One Hell of a Good Reporter

Lois Lane took a deep, calming breath. She felt her tail start to slide back and forth, and **** it to lie still. The smartphone was right in front of her, speaker mode engaged.

I'm not going to yell. I am not. I am a calm and rational adult person. Lois told herself.

"What do you mean," she said out loud. "That you can't turn me back?"

Static crackled on the phone.

"Sorr-zzz-ois," Zatanna's voice came back flustered. "We're in the mi-zzz-le of a Khund invas-zzzz-ion and it's all handzzzz deck. Gotta go!"

There was a sound that might have been an explosion. The call ended.

Zatanna had been the first, third, seventh, and twelfth call that the reporter had made this morning. Superman was off-planet. The Justice League was dealing with an alien invasion. The Titans weren't answering. Batman was supposedly dead again, and while Lois didn't believe that, she did know he wasn't answering his phone and neither were any of the rest of the Bat-family. In her desperation, Lois had emailed pretty much every other superhero she had any contact information for at all...and it had all come up the same. Either they couldn't help, or they were busy with more pressing matters.

There was no help for it. Lois was going to have to go to work like this.

She wore a hat, because it was sunny and windy, one of those broad-brimmed floppy things. Her horns weren't big enough to give her any real problem, and the sunglasses hid the fact that her eyes, now solid violet, had no pupils or irises. The white pants suit and covered her arms and legs tolerably well, and the tail could tuck itself over her cunny...but there was nothing Lois could do about her hands, or her face.

So there were stares, as she walked the streets of Metropolis. Little old ladies crossed themselves. A few people no doubt thought she was a cosplayer. A few men ogled her, but none made a pass at her, or tried to cop a feel.

Which was a pity. The mood Lois was in, she would have enjoyed feeding some groper his own fingers right about now.

People who knew her stared at the reporter as she entered the lobby of the Daily Planet. Cat Grant did a double-take as Lois stepped onto the elevator. Lois waited for her to say something snide... "Halloween come early this year, Lane?" ...but instead the Daily Planet's greatest gossip just sipped her latte.

"Not going to say anything?" Lois finally said out loud, just to break the ice.

"White after Labor Day, Pinkie?" Cat said with a smile. "Why should I say anything?"

Lois turned and stared at Grant...and her brow furrowed between her horns. Something was wrong here. It was a very Cat Grant comment, but...

The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and Cat stepped out with a smile, glad to get her little fashion zinger in. Lois stepped out and turned toward her office...and paused.

There were pictures framed along the hall to the office. Christmas party pictures, staff photos, a shot of Lois winning her Pulitzer...and the reporter stopped and stared.

It was her, on stage, accepting the reward. Except the Lois Lane on stage had bubblegum-pink skin, delicate little horns, and her pink tail was poking out from beneath her skirt. The reporter took a step to the left, to the Christmas party...and there she was, in the ugly green sweater her sister had given her, the green elf-hat bunched up around her horns...and stepped again, and saw that demonic face with a familiar Mona Lisa smile stared back at her from the staff photo.

With a deep breath, Lois walked into her office, sat down at her computer, and logged in. The background picture was of Lois and her sister. Lucy Lane was perfectly normal, perfectly human...but Lois Lane looked like a bubblegum demonette. Heart racing, Lois quickly did something she had sworn never to do: she googled herself.

DEMON BABY BORN

TEENAGE SUCCUBUS GOES TO PROM!

DAILY PLANET'S FIRST METAHUMAN EMPLOYEE

ONE HELL OF A REPORTER

"PINKIE" WINS PULITZER!

An hour of scrubbing the internet left Lois exhausted. She sat back in her chair, utterly dumbfounded.

It wasn't just that she was a demon...or half demon...Lois had always been a demon. No one remembered her as human. Nobody saw anything unusual about it. Everyone in the building, in the world, had only known Lois as "Pinkie"...and the more Lois looked, the more she saw there had been challenges...setbacks. Boycotts from Catholic groups. An Evangelist cult had kidnapped her until Superman had come to the rescue. A brief, fling with Blue Devil that had made the headlines...

Lois couldn't remember any of it. She stared down at her pink hands, the nails a little too dark, too hard, too sharp. Saw the scratches those nails had made on the keys...and on the arms of her chair.

"Who are you, Pinkie?" Lois whispered out loud.

In a way, it was freeing. Some things didn't change. All of her friends knew her. Jimmy Olsen smiled and waved, and she stepped up to him to fix his bow tie.

"I've got some crickets Miss Lane!" he beamed happily. Lois bared her teeth. It passed for a smile, and she kept doing it as he handed her a plastic cup with a lid. Full of live insects.

"Thank you, Jimmy," she said, hiding her confusion. "I appreciate that."

She took the crickets into the elevator with her as she left for the evening, not sure where the best place would be to get rid of them...and then, without even thinking about it, she found herself popping the tab up on the lid and placing her lips against the hole. It was like taking a deep breath...a sudden inhalation...and then her teeth were working, little bodies crunching beneath her sharp molars, tongue scraping the legs and antenna out from between her gums.

The empty cup went in the trash can. They didn't taste half-bad, actually.

Dusk was setting in as Lois went home. The night seemed brighter than she remembered...and the scents carried. Lois walked straight past her apartment building, nose twitching, stomach growling suddenly...she didn't know what she was smelling, but she found herself swallowing drool, shaking like a diabetic when their sugar crashed...and turned down an alley.

It should have been too dark to see in the alley, but Lois could easily read the biohazard sigils on the medical waste container. Someone had broken the lock on it, fetched out a bag, and left it strewn halfway across the alley. Lois Lane's nostrils flared as she picked up hauntingly familiar scents...and then she dropped into a squat, her pink hand darting forward into the mass of needles and used latex gloves and picked out her prize.

It was a specimen cup. A half-inch of white goo, yellow-white in the starlight. Lois brought it up to her face with the same instinct that had popped the cap on the crickets. Her inhumanly long tongue uncoiled and slurped the warm, slightly rancid semen into her mouth. It was like...it was salty, and bitter, but not unpleasant. Like the heady bouquet of a fine scotch, but thick as gravy. Lois gulped it down in seconds and was looking for more when she realized what she had just done...and sanity momentarily restored, made a quick and discreet exit from the alley behind the sperm bank.

Face it, Lane, Lois told herself as she made her way back to her apartment. You're not going to fix this with a phone call.