She read the words on the screen over and over again. It was one thing to find out that she had a comic book alter ego who took over her body and her life one week out of each month (and that was something that she was only beginning to wrap her head around). It was something else completely to find out that she was becoming that comic book alter ego. Though she had been told that there were others like them who co-mingled and coexisted all the time, every day, every week out of the month, what the implied and what it meant hadn't really sunk in until now.

She was becoming an alien.

There were no obvious changes. She still looked like herself. It wasn't like her skin had started to turn green or some other weird color and she hadn't sprouted another head or grown any extra limbs. She didn't have any antennae protruding from her skull and she looked nothing like E.T. or Marvin the Martian. She looked exactly like herself, a human being. But then there was that one thing.

It wasn't a sudden change. Or was it? According to her notes, Kara had been an intrusive part of her life since September. If anything had changed about her since then, Nora liked to think that she would have taken notice. The only changes that she had noted were things that she could attribute or explain away with sound reason and logic. Her running times had improved, though it wasn't as if her speed had increased to something superhuman. She could run for longer periods of time without feeling like she was about to keel over, but she had figured that her improved stamina was just because of proper, dedicated training. She didn't tire as easily over the course of the day, and she didn't seem as exhausted as she used to be after being on call all night, but running and the dietary changes that came with it meant that she was probably healthier than she had ever been. She had made a conscious effort to stay hydrated and to eat better, to fuel her body to run long distances and push herself physically harder than she ever had before. There wasn't anything strange about any of that, and maybe her efforts were being rewarded in other parts of her life, too.

Her training diet also meant that she was drinking less alcohol, though that wasn't to say that she had stopped indulging altogether. And since she wasn't drinking as much, she didn't really have many opportunities to stop and realize that she couldn't even do so much as carry a buzz anymore. But it had been a long week, both at work and personally, and the drink that she had ordered along with her late dinner with a friend one evening had turned into four drinks and three more shots. She was still stone cold sober by the time she had left the restaurant, and it wasn't until then that she realized something was wrong. She had tested out her theory again a few days later with her cousin and came to the same conclusion, though she didn't quite understand why. She wasn't quite ready to connect the dots, and yet there they were, right in front of her, staring her in the face.

She was becoming an alien.

All it took was one conversation to confirm her suspicions. Kara Zor-El's Kryptonian physiology made it impossible for her to get drunk, and now, Kara Zor-El's Kryptonian physiology had made it impossible for Nora to get drunk. It was information that she probably could have sought out herself, but asking a friend who knew far more about all of this stuff than she did seemed like a better way to find out. Somehow, it seemed like hearing it from someone she trusted rather than reading it online or in a comic book would soften the blow, but like most things that had happened to her over the past few months, there was no way that she could ever be ready for this.

She was becoming an alien.

She let herself reel. She asked herself the same questions that she had sought answers for over the past few months. How was any of this happening? How was it even possible? Why was it happening? And who was responsible for all of it? Who had decided that it would be fun to inject comic book characters into other people's brains and have them take over once a month? She paced around the hotel room with her thoughts going a mile a minute, though she didn't dare utter them out loud for fear of someone else overhearing her. It would have been one thing if her cousin was the only person on this trip with her, but she had other friends there too, and they didn't need to know about any of this unless they were enduring the same unbelievable, incredible, horrifying experience as well.

How could she even being to handle this bizarre existential crisis that was quite literally out of this world? What did it mean to be Kryptonian? How else had her body changed, and what else could she expect? Did she still have the same organs? What would happen if she ever needed any sort of imaging done? What would happen if she crawled into an MRI machine at work one day? What would she see on the screen? She had been working so hard over the past few months, running several miles a day, four times a week, making sure she was in the gym if she wasn't on the trails. And now she had to wonder, had all of her hard work been for naught? Had she improved because of the hours of work that she had put in, or was it because of Supergirl? Nora was pacing back and forth so much that she swore she could see herself making a path in the hotel's carpet. She stopped and sat down on the bed, but her mind was still going. No amount of puzzling or rephrasing or repetition could change this new reality.

She was an alien.