Who: Mr. Suit What: Reveal Where: Wouldn't you like to know? Warnings: None.
The evening confused him, as it no doubt confused others, but he felt it to be a focused problem, a subjective issue. His problem and his problem alone. He didn't know why his unique attributes had gone haywire, but he imagined it to be a result of whatever had changed his attire and moved him without his understanding to the Opera House. It wasn't until the effect was abruptly gone, the fraying threads of moth-gnawed material reassembling into his usual cheap suitcoat and farm-worn jeans, that he realized there had been an effect at all. He'd said some strange things, felt a sardonic grimness that he normal kept at bay, and--and this was the real concern--he had not been the only thing affected.
Clark saw many different wavelengths of light, and from his experimentation, his eyes didn't just detect environmental changes, they also emitted rays from up and down the known spectrum and beyond. It had only been strange to him that he couldn't turn it off, that he'd seen every skeleton, every movement of bone and sinew in everyone he saw, including himself. Now he realized the effect had not just been in his vision, that the musty suit and the muddy shoes had been corpse-like in their character. Other people had seen a skeleton too, and it wasn't with his gray sight.
Again in the cold of his private retreat, Clark tried to understand why. It was obvious that some thing or someone had cast some kind of spell over the party, and even called him to it, but that didn't explain why he, unique, had been in a graveyard suit with only bones for company. He recalled seeing contraptions of aviary and canine construction, even distinctly nonhuman skull structure, cold veins and empty chests. What was the significance of the clothing for him?
Then, of course, it hit him. He'd just been a suit.
That was it. A little twist that was his own private observation of a world that now would never really accept him for what he was; he thought it all the time, silent to himself, even among his few dear friends: I'm just a handy suit to have around. Even now he wasn't really Clark and he wasn't really Superman, he was a fairy tale, an American fairy tale in primary colors.
It turned him cold on the inside to think of someone else hearing such private thoughts, a cold that was nothing of ice and snow but much deeper. He wondered if whoever was responsible for the Opera knew, or if, judging from his reporter's notebook, the effect had simply been an automatic projection of his psyche. He wanted to be angry, but there was no one to be angry at, no real target. The evening hadn't even debilitated him, which he assumed such schemes were meant to do, and so all he could do was stare at the journal and hope no one else understood what he had become--and why.