"Papers?" It took Lois a few minutes to think about what she'd left where. "Oh!" Nearly tripping over her feet as she ran to the living room, hairbrush in one hand and wrapping a towel around herself as she went, she ran into Clark in the bedroom doorway.
She hadn't really meant him to see her notes until after she'd had a chance to cross-reference them with her new information and then consolidate further, but there was no time like the present. "You remember that feature I was working on about two years ago, on the Mutant community? I interviewed a lot of people expressing the X-Gene and did a piece on them?" It wasn't really the type of work she normally did, more Human Interest, than front page news, but she'd felt pretty strongly about getting Mutants some positive recognition.
"I heard a lot of them talk about this program - Weapon Plus. From what I could gather at the time, it sounded like some nightmarish lab where they either experimented on Mutants, or they tried to create something that would destroy them. I thought it had to be some sort of Mutant boogy man, you know? To scare the kids into behaving? But then I started checking on the names I'd heard mentioned - I wrote them down-" Lois reached over Clark's arm to direct him back to some of the earlier pages of her notes. "And I found them. They're real people."
Clark read fast, but she stopped and gave him a second to catch up. She wasn't even certain if he was reading her notes. "When I interviewed Steve Rogers, he told me the name of the Captain America plan was Project: Rebirth., also known as Project I. Weapon Plus supposedly names their projects that way. Furthermore, he told me that the man who created the serum was called Abraham Erskine. I did some research and found out that his name was really Joseph Reinstein - one of the names on my Weapon Plus list.
"But the trail kind of ended there." And for two years, she'd had nothing to go on, and even asking her dad had proven futile. In fact, he'd ordered her to stay away from it. "Until the other night, when I was watching Fox at the bar. I met this guy, and he started talking about his time in the service - and then just opened up about being in Weapon Plus, and how he escaped, and what they'd done to him, and how." Normally she would have been skeptical, except it meshed so well with all she knew.
"Clark, can you imagine? Some secret organization is experimenting on Mutants, and who knows what else - practically torturing them - and this guy knows where they are! It's not just a story, it's justice."