GOTHAM CITY WELCOMES THE MAID OF MAGIC!

Zatanna smiled up at the banner hanging from the Wayne Foundation building's windows. She was feeling sublimely pleased with herself and the world – and, it must be confessed, not without reason. After all, she was young, she was beautiful, she was essentially omnipotent, and she was just starting a week-long gig in a city that was already lining up to fall at her feet; what more could a young woman desire?

She sighed contentedly, tossed her long, black hair back over her shoulders, and turned to continue her stroll through Gotham's market district. This was her favorite part of a new show: the afternoon of the first day, when all the details of lodging and scheduling had been taken care of, her first performance was still ahead of her, and she was free to wander aimlessly around, soaking up the atmosphere of the new city. To people whose knowledge of Gotham was limited to what they saw on America's Greatest Crimefighters, and who consequently had a vague impression of it as a dark, brooding city where you could barely see the clouds for the Bat-Signals, it might have seemed surprising that anyone could derive such pleasure from wandering through its streets, but that was a feeling born of ignorance; at 3 o'clock on a July afternoon, with the waves lapping the docks and the sun glinting merrily off the Clocktower, it was all but impossible to remember that this was the city the New York Times had dubbed "America's headquarters for macabre iniquity".

Yet Zatanna would have done well to remember this, all the same – for, among the thousands of people in Gotham who thrilled to the great enchantress's presence in their city, there was one who saw her arrival not as a privilege, but as an opportunity: an opportunity to settle old scores, and to test the full potency of his particular brand of evil.

"Miss Zatanna?"

Zatanna turned, and smiled at a little boy who was running up behind her, cupping something in his hand. "Yes?" she said.

"I have something to give you," the boy said. "Hold out your hand."

Zatanna did so, and then blinked in puzzlement at the green, puckered objects the boy poured into her hand. "Lime peels?" she said.

The boy nodded. "A man at one of the fruit stands told me to give them to you," he said. "He said that chewing lime peels made people's voices stronger and prettier, so he thought you should have some, free of charge. After all, we want your voice to be as good as it can tonight."

"Oh." said Zatanna. "Well, that's very kind of him. Tell him thank you for me."

As the boy turned and walked away, however, she frowned down at the small scraps of citrus skin. Lime peel as a throat-strengthener? She'd never heard that one before.

Of course, that didn't mean it wasn't true. There were a lot of folk medicines she'd never heard of; in fact, by and large, she tried to avoid learning about that particular subject, since there were few better ways of deflecting allegations of witchcraft than by genuinely not knowing what monkshood was good for. (Her father had avoided astronomy classes for a similar reason.) So probably the gift was completely innocent – but, still, it seemed wise to check.

"Laever ruoy yrehcaert," she whispered, in a stern, commanding tone. (The tone wasn't a necessary part of the magic, but it made her feel important.)

Nothing happened. The lime peels sat in her hand, completely unaffected by the mystic command.

For Zatanna, that was sufficient. If something wasn't affected by one of her spells, it could only be because the spell didn't apply to it – and that meant that the peels had no "yrehcaert" about them. Satisfied, she tore a piece off of one of them and popped it into her mouth.

And, having done so, she almost immediately spat it out again. A raw citrus peel is not the sweetest thing in the world, and this one, being taken from a lime of the Omani variety, was particularly bitter: it would have tasted foul to just about anyone, let alone a half-Chinese enchantress who had inherited her mother's sensitive taste buds.

Zatanna wrinkled her nose, and discreetly dropped the rest of the lime peels into a nearby trash can. "Oh, well, it was a nice idea," she murmured, "but it looks as though my throat is on its own tonight."

Shortly thereafter, she turned into Busiek Avenue and lost herself among that street's forest of flower stalls, and forgot all about the little boy's gift – at least, until later that evening.