Dear Lex,

I heard you were going to Princeton to study biochemical engineering. Congratulations! That's really exciting. I'm just finishing up my freshman year of high school, but I'm starting to look into colleges. I'm considering going into law.

Right now, I'm taking a college-level course in biochemistry to try to earn credits (we're on the road a lot), and it has me thinking about those werewolves we saw back in Smallville. Now that I'm learning about how mutations occur, I don't think I understand what happened with the werewolves or how it could be possible. How could a rock affect someone's genetic makeup?

Hope things are going well for you. I'm sending this letter from my school. Can you send the reply back to my school, too? I told my English teacher I was writing to a Princeton student, and we worked out a deal so I can get the letters. Otherwise, my dad would read them. The address on the envelope should be good for a few weeks—I'll write again when we move on.

Sincerely,

Sam Winchester

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Dear Sam,

It's good to hear from you. Thinking about going into law, huh? Have you considered Harvard? I have some connections, I might be able to pull some strings for you.

I'm looking forward to starting school, and I'm applying for research programs. As soon as I get lab access, I'm going to swing by Smallville and pick up some meteor rock samples. There are a few tests I'm considering—I'd like to see if the glowing effect we sometimes see is caused by some kind of bioluminescence. Organic materials in the rocks would make a lot of sense, and the implications would be revolutionary. It would mean some kind of alien life arrived with the meteor shower. The other possibility is that the meteor rocks have some kind of radioactive materials, which can alter DNA (though generally not in a good way).

I've got to be honest, though: from a biological standpoint, I don't understand how werewolves exist in the first place, let alone Djinn or anything else you guys hunt.

Wish I could answer your questions better. I'd like to pick up a geology or mineralogy minor, and I'd love to spend more time doing personal research. but my old man's giving me less than three years to graduate. As soon as I hit 21, I have to take a role at Luthor Corp, and if I don't have my degree by then, the only way I'm getting it is by running away from him and paying my own way—which will be pretty tough considering he'll have cut me off.

Stay safe out there,

Lex

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Dear Lex,

Thanks for the offer about Harvard, but I'd like to earn my way into college. I'm thinking about Stanford. I like the weather in California.

Alien life in the meteor rocks? Sounds kind of science fiction to me, but I'll be curious to see what you find.

Wow, graduating from Princeton in under three years! Good luck. Do you think you can do it? I hear it's sometimes hard to get the classes you need. Sorry your dad is being such a hard ass. I know what that's like.

Sincerely,

Sam

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Dear Sam,

Sorry it's been so long since I've written. I'm having to take 26 units this semester to stay on track to graduate by my father's deadline. I can make it, though—the scheduling office is surprisingly easy to bribe.

I wanted to send you an update about the question you asked last spring. I managed to get some meteor rock samples run at the bioengineering lab at Princeton. Sorry to disappoint, but there's no alien life in it. Nothing organic at all, actually. It has some radioactive properties, but it's not radiation like anyone at the lab had seen, and some of the elements didn't match as anything the mass spectrometers or electron microscopes had ever seen. The grad students and post docs thought I was playing some kind of joke on them.

I wish I could look into this further, but for now, I need to focus on getting through my classes. They're pretty easy, but some of them have sadistically long problem sets and projects. Working at LuthorCorp should be easier; I'll pick back up the project then, and I'll keep you in the loop.

Sorry to disappoint,

Lex