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Typing like a dervish, redoubling her speed, Lois responded, with tight-lipped irritation, "Oh, Perry wants this story on the corruption in the city’s Planning and Construction division, by three o’clock," she said, referring to their boss, the Planet’s tough and formidable editor-in-chief, Perry White. "He wants to run it in the morning edition, tomorrow; three is the latest I can have it in, and I still have a few things to add, and then I have to edit it down to fifteen hundred words."

Lois Lane truly was an ‘old-school’ crusading, hard-boiled, big city reporter, and passionate about what she did. In this, she was every bit the match of her boss, Perry White, which was exactly why they so often butted heads.

She disdained the use of the internet as often as possible, for her research. She distrusted the sources, she said, preferring to use the paper’s solid, tangible archives down in the catacombs of the Planet building’s basement, which were filled with numbers untold of labelled, shelved banker’s boxes and metal file cabinets, containing numbers untold of documents and back issues of the Planet and other papers and newsmagazines. Fairly-recently added was an extensive A/V section, with recorded interviews on file--digitized, much to her frustrated chagrin.

Kent bent slightly and looked at the monitor screen, where the article ran on for several pages, single-spaced. "Maybe you should order in," he advised sagely, straightening, with a sardonic smile.

Baring her teeth humorlessly, Lois smiled back,.

"I’ll see if Jimmy wants to go," Kent said. "All-you-can-eat ribs at Malloy’s Place," he told her in a gently-chiding manner, and she grimaced at him, clearly facing a moment of great temptation and indecision. She loved Malloy’s ribs. At length, and with some clear effort, she shook her head.

"No, you go ahead. I have to do this; I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it. Jerk."

Kent laughed and went out into the busy office newsroom, in search of young Jimmy Olsen, staff photographer.

Minutes later, as Kent and Olsen left for lunch, a staff reporter ran in; "the cops are evacuating the waterfront!" he said.

The creature made landfall, rising out of Metropolis Harbor, at 1:23pm. It set foot on dry land, at the docks area, at 1:26. It was quite a sight to see. And hear.

It soon came under fire by National Guard helicopters.

The area was, by then at least, all but empty. It emptied completely, not long after.

Gazing outward from the Daily Planet’s rooftop, Perry White, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and dozens of other staff stood facing the harbor, nearly two miles across town from the building. Their expressions were much like those of the crew of the FULL CAPACITY, a week earlier. Olsen raised his camera and focused. He reflexively snapped off a few shots of the gigantic beast, and then slowly lowered the camera, mesmerized.

Lois Lane was scribbling, like a woman possessed, in a notepad.

"Uh....um...." young Olsen stammered, licking his dry lips; "I’m not sure, but isn’t that the...whatever it is...they called...Godzilla?"

It was, indeed, the creature called Godzilla, the creature which had wrecked San Francisco three years earlier, fighting other large creatures. The rebuilding was still ongoing.

White yelled to the others, ordering the group to vacate the building, and quickly join the certain to be increasingly-large exodus from the city.

"Where’s Clark?" Lois asked, looking around at the rubbernecking group.

"There goes Superman!" someone shouted hopefully, pointing to the red-and-blue figure, bolting across the sky, toward the waterfront.

"And...where’s Clark?" Lois Lane asked again, somewhat more softly.

As the huge creature waded toward shore, rapidly closing the distance, the National Guard tanks and artillery pieces opened fire, raining hellfire down on its rough, thick hide.

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