Previously in Wonder Woman…

There is an island in the Ionian Sea, named Themiscyra, that for countless centuries has remained hidden to the world at large through ancient magicks threaded into the very soil and rock and ocean of the Earth. In recent times, however, this mystic shield has begun to fracture, for reasons unknown.

Themiscyra is populated by a clan of warrior women known as Amazons. The Amazons – daughters and grand-daughters of the goddess Hera, molded from enchanted clay from the banks of the island’s sacred twin rivers – have been charged with protecting a dark secret at the heart of the island, the Gateway to Tartarus. Legend tells that should a man – anyman – ever set foot on Themiscyra then this Gateway will be irrevocably sundered, releasing the myriad fiends of Tartarus and bringing about the end of all life. To guard against this, a solitary Amazon has been dispatched to the world beyond the island to determine the cause of the failing shield, and to remedy it. This champion’s name is Diana…

…and she has departed Themiscyra in the knowledge that, regardless of whether she is successful in her mission, she can never return to the place of her birth.

Recently arriving in Greece, Diana has encountered another exiled Amazon, the ancient Ettahcandei. Ettah has gifted Diana with a sliver of knowledge from the all-seeing Eye of Graeae, leading Diana to experience strange visions of a location named The EDEN Foundation, in the distant Celestial City. It is here that Diana believes she will begin to unravel the mystery that plagues the magical island of her birth…

MAKE ME SOMEBODY THEY’RE GONNA REMEMBER

By Meriades Rai

The EDEN Foundation, Celestial City

“I need a status report, Bryce,” barked the only man in the lab who was wearing a khaki uniform rather than a white scientific technician’s coat. “How many potential casualties are we looking at here? Bryce…? Bryce, damn it, I said—”

“Your Air Force credentials don’t count for anything here, Colonel Trevor,” a woman’s voice snapped. “I’d appreciate it if you refrained from ordering my laboratory staff about so dramatically.”

Steve Trevor turned angrily towards the white-haired woman at the head of the stairs, his moustache bristling and his color high. He wasn’t used to being spoken to like a child – or at least he hadn’t been, not until he’d arrived at the EDEN Foundation research base in Celestial City some four weeks before and met Professor Julia Kapatelis, a deceptively spry seventy-eight-year-old scientist with a highly acidic tongue. Julia had taken exception to the Colonel’s presence in her institute, and to the busybody military’s agenda of interference on the whole, and wasn’t shy in making her feelings known.

Steve took the relentless defiance and humiliation poorly at the best of times, but today it was simply unacceptable.

“In case you were unaware, Professor, there’s been an accident on Kehler Wing,” Steve argued. “Hardly the occasion for petty aggrandizing, don’t you think? Perhaps we could bothjust agree to be civil…?”

Julia sniffed, descending the stairs quickly despite the fact she required the support of a cane and then brushing past the Colonel to approach a pallid, nervous-looking man seated at a semi-circular console. “What’s the prognosis, Bryce?” she asked, her voice tightening as her eyes flickered from one CCTV monitor to another and seeing only a strange greenish-black fog clogging each screen in turn. “Is anyone hurt, that you can tell?”

Bryce Callaghan paled still further, his hands trembling in his lap. Julia felt the weight of his hesitation and glanced at him sharply. “Bryce…?”

“All of them,” Bryce whispered. “Oh, good lord. Julia, it’s all of them…”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Bryce indicated a laptop screen away to his right, and the graphical data displayed there. “No life signs,” he croaked. “They were working in Kehler-B, on those specimens brought back from Sweden – you know, the new species from Tylöskog? Something happened. I heard someone scream, and there were raised voices. I looked at the screens immediately but the lab was already shrouded in this weird green mist and—”

“Is the lab sealed?” Steve snapped. “Have we got potential contamination? Do we need lockdown?”

Bryce flinched, his gaze flickering between the Colonel and the Professor. It was obvious he didn’t know the answer, but Julia stepped in and waved a hand dismissively.

“Our safety regulations are state-of-the-art,” she said, coldly. “Bryce, you said… you said no life signs? No readings at all on any heat signature scan? Christ, how many people werein there?”

“Eight, according to the data log. Botanists from all over the country. Phil Sylvian, Linden Thorne, Jason Woodrue, Samuel Smithers, Pamela Isley, Alec Holland—”

Bryce’s register call was interrupted by a sudden slap against the lens of one of the security cameras, causing the three occupants of the monitor room to jump. They all stared at the screen, eyes wide at the sight of fingers – long, green fingers – reaching through the eerie green fog to scrape slowly but insistently against the camera, as if intent on clawing their way through.

Colonel Trevor’s eyes narrowed. “If there are no human life signs in that room,” he asked, quietly, “then who in hell’s name does that hand belong to…?”

Gateway Park, Celestial City

“Man, can you believe this?” Mike Morrison cried, waving his newspaper in his girlfriend’s general direction. “They’re everywhere, Lauren! The country’s got a severe outbreak of costumed carnival dudes. First it’s that Vampire Bat-Man legend coming out of Gotham, now we’ve got a ‘Superman’ in Metropolis as well! See? Look here, it’s saying he flew – flew! – and rescued this airplane that was in distress…”

Mike persisted in offering up the latest edition of the Celestial City Herald but his girlfriend Lauren Hailey resolutely continued to ignore him, concentrating instead on painting her toes. “Superheroes and vigilantes are the new Bigfoot,” she murmured, squinting as she expertly dabbed at her nails with a deliciously lurid red that would totally have given her mother a heart-attack had she been around to pay witness. “You watch,” she said, “Senator Veitch will be wanting one of his own for us any day now. Maybe there’ll be a new live reality show. So You Think You Could Be Super?, how about that?”

“What, you’re not completely stoked by this?”

“It’s a hoax, sweetie. YouTube goat-on-a-rope, like those squirrels with lightsabres. Next you’ll be telling me that Dumbo’s real too.”

“Dumbo’s not real?”

Mike looked mock-aghast. Lauren giggled, then deepened her voice and broke into song. “Now I be done seen about ev’rythin’ when I see an elephant fly…”

“I’ve got special powers,” Mike said in a low voice, leaning forward with a lecherous expression. “X-ray vision. Honey, I can see all kinds of things you’ve got going on under those clothes.”

“That’s not super. That just means you’re perving up my skirt.”

“Oh, busted…”

Lauren giggled and wiggled her toes in her boyfriend’s face, causing him to make hungry wolf noises. Across the other side of the picnic table where the three of them had eaten lunch, Cassie Sandsmark – whose existence had apparently been utterly forgotten by her two friends, and not for the first time – looked on in utter dismay at the others’ blatant and distasteful flirting rituals.

“Um… hello? We’ve already got a superhero.”

Mike and Lauren glanced up, confused. Cassie – blonde and mousy in a pair of trainee-librarian-style spectacles – raised her hands and rolled her eyes. “Duh? Wonder Woman?” she said, indulgently. “Come on, you’ve heard that news too, right?”

“Wait. The Italian chick?”

“She’s Greek,” Cassie corrected. “Or at least, that’s where she turned up first. See, someone spotted her on this beach? As if she’d just walked out of the Mediterranean ocean, and she was dressed in all this cool, amazing armor. Like some kind of gladiator.”

“Yeah, I heard this. But there wasn’t any video footage,” Lauren said, primly, “so that’s just another hoax, like everything else that’s going around just now.”

Cassie scowled. “No, okay, there’s no footage. There were all these fishermen and they swear they took photos with their cell phones, but none of the pictures came out, it was all just some weird static or something. But, the sources quoted are supposed to be reliable. And that was, like, a week ago. Since then she’s apparently been seen all across Europe, and in Russia and Japan, and then yesterday there was a sighting here on the east coast too. It’s like she’s on some kind of pilgrimage.”

“Sounds like she’s lost to me.”

Cassie huffed. “Well, admittedly a lot of those sightings are probably junk, but—”

“What’s this got to do with us anyway?” Mike interrupted, cross that Cassie had jumped in on what he already considered to be his topic of expertise. “Why would Super Woman be interested in Celestial City, boredom capital of the US?”

“It’s Wonder Woman. Media alliteration, see? And… think about it. If she’s from under the sea, or from space, or from a different time, then she’s going to want to learn everything she can about us as a people and about the planet. Celestial City is education city, right? The universities, the galleries, the research institutes like EDEN—”

“God, you’ve really been thinking about this,” Lauren said, delightedly. “You are such a nerd, Cassandra.”

Cassie’s scowl deepened. “It’s common sense,” she persisted. “You’ll see. That newspaper? Yesterday’s news already, things are happening so fast. I bet tomorrow’s will be full of her, not this Metropolis guy.”

Mike and Lauren exchanged glances, then both smiled.

“Cassie,” Lauren said, tenderly. “Honey. Don’t take this the wrong way, but… you really need to ditch your comic books and find yourself a boyfriend.”

Cassie flushed and jumped up from her seat, genuinely furious. She was about to say something more – likely something she’d come to regret – when the pleasant early afternoon that surrounded Celestial City’s Gateway Park was shattered by a sudden eruption of noise from the main street some hundred yards distant, hidden behind a row of immaculately kept maple trees. There was the shattering of glass and the crash of heavy metal, followed by screams and a scattering of raised voices… and then more screams, punctuated by bursts of automatic gunfire.

Cassie, Mike and Lauren all froze, turning pale in the afternoon sun.

“Jeepers,” Cassie breathed. “What the heck’s going on over there…?”

“Raise those hands to God’s bright blue heaven, ladies and gentlemen, else I swear by all that’s peachy keen you won’t see another day’s grace, y’all understand me?”

The rakish fellow in the charcoal suit and battered fedora stepped forward and pointed the snub of his drum-magazine Thompson submachine gun to the sky, a cigar clenched in the crook of his toothy smile. Behind him, sprawled languidly over the flat hood of a vintage, Cordoba-gray ’34 Ford Sedan, a lithe moll in a high-waisted tweed skirt, gray blazer and lemon silk scarf trailed smoke rings from her Camel cigarette, then extended one long leg, pointing the toe of her shoe to the clouds in imitation of her partner’s gun.

“You tell them straight, Mr Barrow,” the woman purred, palming a pistol of her own and running her free hand through her close-cropped blonde hair. The man turned to her and grinned, reaching out to run his fingers up and down the moll’s sheer nylon stockings where her skirt had slipped to mid-thigh.

“Why, Ms Parker, you look positively sinful this fine day!”

“Sweetness, I can show you sin the Devil himself hasn’t even thought of.”

“Oh, baby, of that I have no doubt…”

Clyde Barrow leaned in for a smoky kiss, discarding the stub of his own cigar, then whirled away from his lovely partner and advanced upon the armored car that was skewed across the road just beyond the Ford. There were two security guards already collapsed upon the asphalt, blood pooling from bullet wounds in their knees, but Barrow cared nothing for their misery and urgent need for medical attention. A third man, the driver, spilled from the armored truck and fumbled with his firearm as Barrow approached. The driver was fifty-six years old, twenty years on the job, and he’d never once been the victim of a heist; Celestial City just wasn’t that kind of place. Not usually. But the world was changing, and not for the better. For all the talk of supermen in the newspapers of late, there was also a dramatic rise in violent criminal activity and the dangerous men and women perpetrating it…

The guard whimpered as he felt the muzzle of the Tommy Gun press into the back of his skull. Barrow looked down, grinning.

“I hope you got a lotta bucks in the back of that carriage, sir,” he drawled. “Because the dame and me, we don’t like to get outta bed for less than half a mil, you catch me?”

Bonnie Parker slid from the hood of the Ford and slinked towards the truck, the tails of her scarf drifting beguilingly on the breeze, along with a hint of perfume. She aimed her pistol at the guard and inclined her head towards her beau, as if for a kiss.

“Innocent bystanders ahoy, Mr Barrow,” she murmured. “Let me chat to our friend here while you make an example of why it’s not good form to stand and gawp at armed and dangerous ne’er-do-wells as they go about their business, hm?”

Barrow turned and gazed across the street. It was deserted, save for three youths who had just emerged from a row of trees. Barrow clucked his tongue in his cheek. Teenagers today, they just didn’t have the brains they were born with; if these kids weren’t bright enough to run in the opposite direction as fast as they could when the bullets started flying, as everyone else in the vicinity had done a few minutes before, then they deserved everything that was coming to them.

Grinning, Barrow leveled his gun at his horrified audience and squeezed the trigger. The Tommy Gun chuntered and spat a hail of bullets…

…but in the following split second there was an unexpected flash of crimson, blue and gold, and then the bullets swerved in mid-flight and impacted with a staccato packa-tacka-tanga few feet to the right of where the kids were frozen in fear. Cassie, Mike and Lauren looked on, stunned. Clyde Barrow’s jaw went slack and his eyes widened beneath the brim of his hat.

Now standing between Barrow and his intended targets was a woman in a resplendent armored bodice, a golden belt about her waist and a golden circlet cresting her brow beneath a tumble of twilight-black curls. Her arms were crossed before her chest, ringed at the wrists with a pair of golden bracelets. The metal of these bracelets was smoking from where the bullets had struck, but were otherwise unmarked. The flattened bullets themselves were lying about the woman’s red boots, glittering in the sunlight.

Barrow cocked his head slowly. “Now then, what in the deuce…?”

The woman was beautiful, tall and statuesque with sleek, olive skin, and quite alarming violet eyes – but those eyes narrowed now, and her mouth curled in a snarl that left no doubt that she wasn’t impressed by the actions of the man who’d just opened fire on three innocent youngsters. She stepped forward, and Barrow immediately set his weapon and squeezed the trigger again…

…and once more the trajectory of the bullets veered, attracted directly towards the woman’s bracelets as if magnetized and then falling harmlessly away after impact without even the slightest risk of ricochet. The warm air reeked of smoke and hot metal. It was more than uncanny, it was impossible… but Barrow couldn’t deny the evidence of his own eyes.

The gunman swore beneath his breath and took a hesitant step backwards. Abruptly Bonnie Parker was at his side, aiming her pistol and letting off three shots. Ptang-ptang-ptang, each bullet was intercepted with ridiculous ease, swerving in mid-air regardless of initial angle and velocity; the woman with the bracelets didn’t even have to move her arms.

The blonde moll gritted her teeth and rested a nervous hand on her beau’s shoulder. “Mr Barrow,” she breathed, “I believe a strategic withdrawal may be best advised under the circumstances…”

“Music to my ears, sugah-cane.”

Barrow and Parker both turned to run, but in their hearts they knew their unexpected disadvantage was grave indeed. What they didn’t expect was for the woman behind them to scupper their retreat in the most bizarre fashion: with a glowing golden lariat.

The swirling noose of the lasso curled about them like something alive, snaking this way and that before tightening and dragging them bodily to the ground. Parker squealed and Barrow grunted, his hat spinning away upon its brim as the pair of them fell. When they looked up they saw the shadow of the woman fall across them – and in the next moment they felt a curious and discomforting prickling of the brain, as if spectral fingers were reaching into each of their skulls in turn and twisting their thoughts.

Diana, Amazon Princess of Themiscyra, leaned in close with eyes hot as cinder. “Tell me,” she hissed, “just who do you think you are?”

The response to that question was immediate, as Barrow and Parker both jolted as if receiving a mild electric shock from the glowing rope that was binding them, then began confessing simultaneously, the words spilling uncontrollably from their mouths.

“I’m John Cotter from Arkansas—”

“I’m Tracy Ann Presley from Tennessee—”

“—but I call myself Clyde Barrow—”

“—but I’m the blessed reincarnation of Bonnie Parker—”

“Stop!” Diana commanded. The confessions ceased instantly, both captives flinching and snapping their jaws shut. Wide-eyed, they looked on in alarm. Diana grimaced and tugged on her lasso.

“Okay,” she murmured, ruefully. “Really have to get used to this whole empathic link, word-of-truth process…”

Gasping like a fish out of water, Parker flexed her right arm and attempted to bring her pistol to bear on her enemy. Diana instinctively flicked out her foot and trod down on the other woman’s arm, causing her to cry out in pain. Barrow then tried something similar and Diana quelled his resistance with a fist to the face, pulverizing his nose and snapping his head back on his neck. The gunman spluttered, choking on his own blood as he started to beg for his life. Diana scowled down at him, unrepentant.

“You’ve wounded innocent men here today,” she snapped, genuinely aghast. “And turned your weapons on children. Why should I show you any mercy?”

“Because you’re not like them. Because you’re a hero… aren’t you?”

Diana turned at the sound of a voice at her shoulder and found herself looking upon the bespectacled face of one of the three youths who’d come so close to perishing in a hail of bullets. A girl, with short, scruffy blonde hair and freckles, and behind those glasses, sad, serious eyes. Nervous, but brave nonetheless. The girl met Diana’s gaze without baulking.

“You’re her,” Cassie Sandsmark said, reverently. “The one the newspapers are calling Wonder Woman. I knew you were real. And I knew you were one of the good guys… well, gals. You… you’re not going to kill him, right? The cops will be all over you, you hear those sirens? And that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to show compassion.”

Compassion. A word her mother might have used, or Ettahcandei, the ancient Amazon Diana had recently encountered in Greece. And this girl?

A girl with blonde hair and sad, serious eyes…

Diana gasped, and reached a hand to the circlet at her forehead. “I had a vision of you,” she breathed, staring at Cassie so intently that the young girl blushed self-consciously. “And these two,” she said, looking down at the two delinquents who fancied themselves as sophisticated criminals. Why, Ms Parker, you look positively sinful this fine day…

This was it. This was the place she was supposed to be, where the Eye of Graeae had led her. Diana cocked her head, listening to the wail that signaled the rapid approach of the emergency service, then grimaced as she glanced down at Barrow and Parker once more. The fight had drained from the pair of them, and they cowered beneath her steely glare. The empathic conduit of the lasso transmitted their fear and sorrow with such clarity that it almost made her ill to share it, and it was quite obvious that they were only intimidating when enjoying the upper hand. Diana had dealt with spiteful bullies before, not least her old combat rival from Themiscyra, Asteria. Sadly, it seemed that these humans from the world beyond her island’s boundaries had more in common with their Amazon cousins than was immediately obvious…

“I knew you’d come here!” Cassie gushed, her excitement building. “Celestial City’s own costumed hero! Do you know this Superman guy they’re talking about, the one who saved the plane? Are you… I don’t know, part of some justice club or something? Where did you come from? Another time, another place? Are you—”

“I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken,” Diana interjected. “I’m not looking to be a resident here. I’m just… visiting. And I’m searching for somewhere in particular if you can help me.

“Tell me, have you heard of a place called… EDEN?”

The EDEN Foundation, Celestial City

“Tell me that damn door’s going to hold!” Colonel Trevor yelled, but his voice barely rose above the hammering din emanating from the other side of the room.

The three people trapped in the laboratory – the Colonel plus the two scientists, Bryce and Julia – watched on in horror as the steel partition that separated them from the corridor beyond suddenly buckled beneath another impossibly powerful blow, this time enough to wrench the door loose from two out of its three hefty hinge plates. Metal shrieked and tore, and a half dozen rivets popped like champagne corks as the bulkhead on either side of the door groaned in its foundations.

“It’s like it’s being bludgeoned by a tank!” Steve exclaimed, incredulous. “What in hell’s name could be strong enough to—”

In that instant the door crumpled further and the force that was applying this incredible pressure burst through amidst a cloud of sickly green gas and swirling spores. It was a tendril, a plant, an elongated limb of remarkable elasticity considering its weighty thickness that now snaked through into the lab at high velocity and slammed into another wall, causing an enormous dent with the strength of its impact. This first tendril was quickly followed by a second, and then a third, this one ripping a jagged groove through the metal floor as it whipped forth, causing Bryce to scream and hurl himself beneath a nearby table, his arms wrapped around his head.

Colonel Trevor and Julia Kapatelis merely looked on in sheer disbelief, their eyes widening still further as the tendrils stretching through the sundered doorway parted and another figure emerged through the murky yellow-green fog.

It was a woman. Or, at least, something that had once been a woman. But now…

“Saints preserve us,” Julia breathed, pressing the knuckles of her fist to her mouth. “Pamela? Pamela, is that you…?”

“Oh, come now,” a sweet and feathery voice crooned, like the unfurling of leaves. “Why don’t you use the name you all liked to call me behind my back, when discussing what a cold and disagreeable bitch I was, hm? The name you had for me when I was alive. Oh, dear Julia…

“…call me Poison Ivy.”

NEXT ISSUE: “The Fruit Of That Forbidden Tree…”