Positive

Two blue lines faded into view.

Lois Lane nearly dropped the stick. Something seemed to sink deep down inside of her, like a hole had opened in the center of her being and her heart had fallen through it. Her feet tingled as though she teetered on the edge of a bottomless abyss. She could taste bile in her mouth.

"Impossible," she whispered. "I can't be pregnant. I just...can't."

The reporter's mind raced, unable to sort through all the thoughts jamming into her head at once. Was it a mistake? She hadn't had sex with anybody! Could it be a trick? What was she going to tell her family? Had she been ****? What...

The idol. The gravid little chunk of stone. None of this had started until Lois had stolen the stupid thing.

She practically levitated off the toilet, test clutched in her hand, and stalked into the kitchen to stare at the thing. The shapeless lump of the head seemed to leer at her, the pendulous breasts resting on the gravid belly as if to mock her with her future.

"You did this to me!" she said angrily, shaking the test at the statue. "I don't fucking know how, but..."

She throttled a primal scream. Lois Lane wanted to take a hammer to it. Pick it up and dash it against the floor into a million pieces. The reporter took a step forward..and nearly folded in half as a sudden pain stabbed through her gut, like the worst pregnancy cramp in her life. Her hand immediately went to her gut...

...and she felt a hard mass there, beneath the soft skin, unyielding to the touch. Something more than bloating. Lois Lane looked down to stare at her stomach. If she were pregnant, she might think herself twelve weeks along.

Lois growled in the back of her throat. A part of her said that this was a mistake, that she should calm down and call for help...and another, angrier part of her said that this was proof that the statue was afraid, and that she should break it to bits.