Costume Design

"Was he lying?"

She asked Lin Mo.

"A faster heartbeat doesn't necessarily mean someone is lying."

Lin Mo corrected her at once.

"They might be nervous, scared, or feeling sick."

"You have to consider a lot of things."

Joanna nodded, though she only half understood.

She hadn't truly grasped how to judge all of it.

But she remembered one thing.

What people said could differ from how their bodies reacted. Vought's logo could appear on a screen, and a spokesperson could announce a hero's death in a sorrowful voice.

Researchers could also tell her without a flicker of expression that every experiment was for her own good. But there was more information than their voices alone.

Once doubt took root, it was hard to erase completely.

In the Game Room, Joanna was still holding Lin Mo's wrist.

Looking at the dark screen, Joanna suddenly asked, "If Vought lies, do I have to listen to them?"

Lin Mo paused.

"That's up to you. Take Soldier Boy on TV, for example. You don't know whether he really died. You can choose to look for the answer yourself. An answer you find on your own will give you more peace of mind than one someone else gives you."

It was the safest answer Lin Mo could give her for now.

Joanna nodded softly.

"I understand."

She said,

"I'll watch to see if they're scared, or if they're lying."

Lin Mo looked at her and said nothing more.

Vought's logo remained at the center of the screen, its blue letters neat and steady, symbolizing the order and reliability the company wanted everyone to see.

Time was hard to perceive in the underground facility, especially for Joanna.

She could not sense the changing seasons or the passage from day to night. The lights always came on according to a preset schedule, food arrived on time, and experiments repeated according to the charts.

Only her growing body and the year markers occasionally changed on the walls proved that time had not stopped.

1990.

Lin Mo was ten.

Six years had passed since Soldier Boy's heroic sacrifice in Vought's news reports.

The child who had once needed to stand on tiptoe to reach the bottom edge of a control panel could now look straight across most research equipment.

His physical development far outstripped that of ordinary children his age. He was growing quickly, and Lin Mo sometimes sneaked a look at the researchers' reports. He was nearly 1.7 meters tall, far taller than Joanna.

His strength, durability, and ability to recover were also steadily improving.

Yet Vought still couldn't accurately determine the limits of his abilities. In fact, they had largely left him alone for years, drastically reducing even routine experiments, samples, and data collection.

His ten-year-old body was still young, but he had already begun to unlock Kryptonian abilities, including Heat Vision and flight.

He had never shown those abilities to Vought, of course. That would only bring him a heap of trouble.

The only pity was that his Bioelectric Field had yet to awaken. But by Lin Mo's calculations, a few more years in the sun should be enough to awaken nearly all his abilities.

He was especially eager for the Bioelectric Field. It was the fundamental difference between his abilities and Joanna's.

Joanna, whom Lin Mo had quietly been training, was growing stronger too. But she still couldn't keep up with his rate of growth. In terms of strength, she was no longer his match.

The way Kryptonians grew stronger by soaking up sunlight really was absurdly powerful.

After all, Joanna had an upper limit to her growth. By adulthood, she would be roughly as strong as the Homelander from the original story, but improving beyond that would be difficult.

Her Heat Vision could now reliably melt through composite alloys, and clear signs of flight were beginning to emerge. There was a fundamental difference between a superhuman who could fly and one who couldn't.

During low-gravity training and high-speed movement tests, she often left the ground for brief moments.

He wondered whether she would ever pull off a Getsuga Tensho.

But her understanding of the outside world was still immature.

Joanna knew what cities, countries, stores, and schools were, but she had never truly lived among them.

The original Homelander had possessed a standardized smile, flawless camera presence, and a carefully crafted patriotic image.

But now Joanna was the one in that position.

She was nothing like the Homelander Lin Mo remembered.

Her gender was different, her upbringing was different, and her trust in Vought was different too.

The original Homelander had craved love from the company and the public.

But Joanna had always needed only one person.

Lin Mo.

Vought knew this as well, so the company had not tried to sever their connection completely.

Instead, they were preparing to incorporate Lin Mo into Joanna's training program.

When Joanna refused to attend a lesson, they had Lin Mo sit beside her. When she struggled with facial-expression training for the camera, they asked him to evaluate her.

When she seemed too cold during public-speaking practice, the instructor even told her to imagine Lin Mo in the audience.

It worked remarkably well. Whatever else happened, Joanna didn't want to disappoint Lin Mo, so she studied hard and improved quickly.

But Vought clearly had no intention of waiting until Joanna reached adulthood to start shaping her public image.

First, they would film material for internal use, test audience reactions, and arrange limited contact with the government.

Then they would put her in front of cameras little by little, shaping the image of a perfect Homelander one step at a time.

His time in the sun was over for the day. Humming a tune, Lin Mo prepared to return to the Bunker's seventh underground level to find Joanna. At this hour, she should be learning about the country and proper etiquette.

As Joanna grew older, the researchers had no choice but to loosen their control over her. She was no longer a little child; their old methods of controlling her thinking would no longer work. She had begun to form her own judgments, and if they kept treating her as they had before, things might not end well for them.

In the original story, Vogelbaum had said that Homelander had long been strong enough to leave the research Bunker. He stayed only because he still thought of its researchers as something like family.

The metal elevator descended smoothly to the seventh underground level. A clear chime sounded, and its heavy doors slid slowly apart, releasing a damp, cool current of subterranean air.

Lin Mo had spent years here and knew every corner by heart. Without stopping, he headed straight for Joanna's small classroom, just as they had agreed.

Otherwise, he might as well have gone back to his little room for a nap.

He walked down the long, narrow corridor under cold white lights. Before he had gone far, two voices speaking through the walls passed clearly through the thick concrete and alloy and reached his ears.

His Super Hearing had begun to take shape. In fact, he could listen in on the entire Bunker.

The voices came from the nearby Research Center, where two staff members were speaking quietly.

"Add public-speaking lessons starting tomorrow."

"The image team has arrived."

"What about the costume design?"

"They're still revising it."

"The Board of Directors wants it to look distinctly American. Red, blue, and gold."

"Are we keeping the cape?"

"Of course."

They're designing Joanna's image already? I'm actually looking forward to seeing it. Lin Mo stopped and peered through several walls at the two researchers in the Research Center. One of them was Vogelbaum.

After listening for a while, Lin Mo grew bored. He looked away, clicked his tongue softly, and stopped paying attention to their conversation.

The rest would just be costume requirements for Joanna. Better to go find her first, or she might get a little sulky if he kept her waiting.

At her age, Joanna was approaching adolescence—or perhaps her rebellious phase—and she had grown even more attached to him. There was no helping it. He was the one who had taken on this mess and said he would raise Joanna. Now he knew just how exhausting it was to look after a child.