Author's Notes: I realise that my portrayal of Wonder Woman contains some
elements of the modern version, even though this is supposed to be the
Silver Age variant. While I adore the old Diana, I still think that the
modern version's history makes a lot more sense, eliminating a lot of the
Silver Age Amazons' sci-fi elements in favour of mythological ones. You
might want to imagine that this Wonder Woman appearing here, though
originally the Silver Age version, was already partly changed by the
rewriting of history that took place on the post-Crisis Earth before she
was 'devolved' by the Anti-Monitor and is therefor stuck somewhere between
the original Silver Age and the modern version.
#
Part 5: Ashes and Ruins
#
Diana stood on the shores of the island, her body shaking with barely contained rage and a hundred other emotions, gazing at the scenery unfolding before her. Her eyes saw it, took it all in, but her rage-clouded mind refused to accept it. It was just impossible.
Finding Paradise Island had not been easy, even with her knowledge of its exact location. She knew that, in her world, most people believed that the island was somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, that near mythical stretch of ocean that seemed to swallow planes and ships almost regularly. It was a mistake that she saw no reason to correct. A lot of people had tried to find the island in the past, especially since Diana had revealed herself to man's world. The more of them searched in the wrong place the better.
The truth was that Paradise Island did not really exist in man's world at all, not any longer anyway. It had been a mere Mediterranean island when the goddesses Athena and Aphrodite first led the Amazons there, but ever since then it had been separated from the rest of the world by a magical veil that only few were able to pierce.
The only way for someone to reach the island by boat was to follow the exact same route that the ancient Amazons themselves had taken during their exodus to Paradise several thousand years ago, starting at the shores of Greece and heading directly into a seemingly empty spot in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. It was this route that Diana had followed and, after several attempts, it had led her to the shores of her home. Or this world's version of her home, anyway.
She had beached the small boat on the same shore where she had pulled Steve Trevor out of the ocean so many years before, wading through the water until she reached dry land. Her steps had been uncertain, more of a stumbling than anything else, as her eyes were rooted to what lay before her, her mind spinning with disbelief.
The island was a wasteland.
Only a few hundred meters in front of her, the place where she remembered the first buildings to be, blackened ruins reached into the overcast sky like skeletal fingers. The ground, once lush and fertile, had been fused into glass. There was no trace of the towers and spires she remembered, the statues of their gods and goddesses. Only ruins.
Even the omnipresent anger faded from her conscious mind as she made her way further in, stumbling through ashes and remains in a daze. The warrior inside herself immediately started analysing her surroundings in a military fashion. In several places there was nothing left but fused ground and bare rock, the devastation growing less farther away from these. Impact craters? Some kind of air strike? She could see no signs of actual fighting in the streets.
She found corpses littering the remains of the city. Skeletons, nothing more than bones and some dried-up remains of skin and flesh. They had been dead for decades. Her entire body was shaking, but her warrior's mind still listed up the facts in a cold, clinical fashion. No armour on the bodies, no sign of weapons apart from those merely ceremonial. They had not known what was coming. They must have been taken by surprise.
A sob broke free from her throat and Diana realised that her control was about to snap, maybe for good. The rage clouding her mind was meshing with the sadness and outrage caused by what she was seeing and the result would be something more terrible than the mythical Furies. With trembling hands she knelt down beside one of the bodies and, cursing herself for a grave robber all the while, removed the only thing from the corpse that had survived the devastation intact.
The Amazonian bracelets.
The moment she slipped the cool metal over her wrists she felt her mind clear. The boundless fury receded. Not too far, though, not far at all. It was still there, boiling beneath the surface, and Diana knew that it did not originate with the Amazonian curse, but with what she was seeing here. Someone or something had killed these people, killed them all. They had been taken by surprise, slaughtered like sheep by an invisible enemy, who had left their bodies to rot in the ruins of their beautiful island.
Diana squeezed her eyes closed and fell to her knees, tears streaming down her face. Her hands reached towards the skies, pleading, demanding, as her voice called out across the dead city.
"Gods of Olympus, hear your daughter's plea. Tell me who has desecrated this island home that you blessed my sisters with! Reveal to me who has murdered my sisters in this world!"
She reached out with every sense she had, searching for that connection her people had always shared with their creators. During her life she had met all the gods of Olympus, had fought with and against many of them. Things she had seen during her adventures, both in space and here on Earth, had made it more than clear that they were not the omnipotent creators of all that was that they often pretended to be. Ares, the god of war, had found defeat at her own hands a few times too often for her to believe in divine supremacy. Yet never had she lost faith in the denizens of Mt. Olympus. Omnipotent or not, they had called the Amazons into existence, had given life to her form of clay, and that was more than enough to qualify them as gods in Diana's eyes.
Only now she was reaching out to touch these very same gods and found nothing but silence.
Diana knelt in the ashes for hours, searching for some sign, some clue that the gods who had called her sisters into being in this strange world had heard her words, that they might be listening and willing to help her. There was nothing, though. The silence around her was like a fist squeezing the life out of her.
"Have you forsaken me?" she asked, wondering whether the gods did not hear her at all or were simply not in the mood to listen.
She clenched her fists, trying to smother the rage she felt build inside herself again. Only days ago, or so it seemed to her, her Amazonian sisters and her had strode through the hallowed halls of Olympus itself, had fought beside the gods to repel the unholy alliance of Hades, Ares, and the Anti- Monitor. If not for them the gods themselves would have perished, yet here they refused to help her.
Fool, she thought to herself. The gods that might or might not exist here in this world would have no more similarity to those she and her sisters had saved than this island had with her home. They would feel no obligation to help her. Maybe they were not even here any longer. Gods sustained themselves on faith and she doubted that many people outside Paradise Island had kept faith with the Greek pantheon. Maybe the death of this world's Amazons had been the deaths of their gods as well?
All this went through the rational part of her mind, the conclusions and theories filed away for later consideration. The largest part of Diana was numb, though, unable to do anything but gaze at the ruins of what could have been her home. Someone had murdered her sisters here. Someone who had to be punished for this crime.
One of the bodies she walked by had carried a sword at its hip. The blade was warped and blackened, of little use as a weapon, but she drew it nevertheless and ran the dull edge over her palm until she drew blood. Droplets of it fell to the ground, mingling with the ashes.
"You will be avenged, my sisters. This I swear by my blood."
#
Kara was drifting motionless at the very edge of Earth's atmosphere, her blue eyes gazing at the world below her that so resembled her own, yet was so very different. To the satellites whose orbit she crossed she was little more than a piece of space debris, if they picked her up at all. She emitted no energy to trace, her body barely reflected radar beams, and who would look for an unprotected human body in space anyway? Certainly no one on this world, that much was for sure.
She thought back a day to her first encounter with Helena and, later that same night, her step brother Richard Grayson. At the end of their talk Helena had been more or less convinced that she actually was who she said she was. The idea of someone she had seen die coming back to life wasn't really any stranger than five worlds merging into one, entire histories being rewritten, whole universes collapsing.
In many ways Dick, as he called himself, reminded her of his doppelganger on Earth-1, whom she had first got to know when he had still been Batman's side-kick Robin. She had lost track of him over the years, but knew that he had handed over the costume to someone else, creating a new identity for himself. Nightwing, he called himself now, leader of the Teen Titans.
Nothing of the sort had happened to this Richard Grayson. He had stopped being Robin when he went to college and by the time he came back his Batman had been married, expecting a daughter, and thinking about retirement. He had taken up the mantle of Robin once again, taking his mentor's place as protector of Gotham City and member of the Justice Society.
From what the two had told Kara their father had never found out that Helena had become the Huntress. The world's greatest detective had been blind to what was going on inside his own family. Then he had died before they could tell him, leaving them behind to continue his crusade against crime.
Dick, now rapidly approaching the age where further activity as a masked vigilante became a really bad idea, had opted for a more covert role during their stay in this new world. Helena had been restless, feeling helpless and betrayed by a universe that now denied her very existence. She had needed something to occupy herself and had found it by introducing this new Gotham City to the concept of vigilante justice. Dick, meanwhile, had taken it upon himself to find out all he could about this world and, hopefully, find a way home for them.
Kara had not needed to actually hear them argue about that. Their looks had spoken volumes. What was the use, Helena's eyes seemed to say. There is no more place for us in that merged world that used to be home than in this new one. Why go back? It wasn't like anyone would miss them over there. Dick clearly did not see things that way. If no one else than the heroes who had fought with them at the dawn of time still remembered them.
Her own thoughts were still churning, trying to work through the idea that everyone back home thought her dead. Kal had buried her. How was it possible that she had left a body behind? She was here, wasn't she? Body and all. Either someone had snatched her away mere moments before her death, leaving some kind of fake in her place for Kal and the others to find or ... she was not really sure what the alternative was. Some kind of soul voyage? Her restless spirit travelling to a new world? No, that idea was ridiculous. Where would this body come from then? There had to be a better explanation.
She just had trouble thinking of one.
Helena, Dick, and Kara had spent the last day going over their combined notes. Dick had found much the same she had. This world seemed to resemble Earth-1, a world Dick knew quite a bit about thanks to his stint in the Justice Society and their frequent visits, just without superheroes. He had also found some people he remembered existing exclusively on Earth-2, but none of those had been heroes back home, so it came as no surprise that they weren't here, either.
He and Helena had also come to the same conclusions Kara had drawn. The idea that every single event that would have given superpowers or the motivation to become a superhero to the people they knew just happened to be missing in this world was a bit much too take. It was all just too neat. Three heroes who would not be missed back home, either because they were believed dead or had been forgotten, just happened to end up on a world were no one had ever become a superhero. Something stunk here.
One new idea that their meeting had produced was that the three of them might not be the only ones stranded here. The Crisis had cut a bloody swath through the ranks of the heroes of five Earths and more. So many had died. Many more had found themselves without a home after the merging of the Earths. Were they here, too? If they were then they had to find them.
Dick and Helena were busy milking the internet for all it was worth, trying to find people that had simply appeared out of thin air during the crimson storms. New identities that had been created since then. Kara had learned that Helena and Dick had also seen the need to be legally alive. To all but the most suspicious pair of eyes Richard Grayson and Helena Wayne (the latter in no way related to Gotham's famous son Bruce Wayne) had existed on this world ever since their mothers had given birth to them. Maybe others had done the same.
Kara was doing the same thing, only without electronic aid. Her enhanced senses were able to sweep the globe in a matter of hours. Of course simply looking at everything was no guarantee that one would actually spot what one was searching for. More than once Kara had been forced to realise that her superior senses came with their own version of a blind spot. Sort of like not seeing the forest for the trees.
She was looking for things that stood out. People performing superhuman feats. Familiar faces. Familiar places. Crowds in an uproar because of something that should not exist in this perfectly normal world.
It took Kara several hours until she finally found something. Her eyes swept across the Mediterranean and came to rest on an island. A familiar island. Yes, she dimly remembered. She had been there before once, during a time when a large part of the superheroines on Earth had come together under the guidance of the woman who called this place home.
Kara did not breathe this far up into space, but had she done so her breath would have caught in her throat as she beheld the devastation below her. The island was little more than a charred ruin, littered with bodies. Nothing moved there, not even animals or insects. Everything was gone.
There was one body moving among the wreckage, though. A familiar body.
Dropping out of orbit like a stone Kara fell back towards the planet below and the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. All the way down to Earth, all 5,000 kilometres of it, Kara cursed herself for an airhead. Paradise Island, how could she have forgotten looking there? It wasn't like Wonder Woman wasn't one of the pre-eminent superheroes on her world, was it? When people started talking about superheroes the same three names usually fell first: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
When Kara had first arrived on Earth she had looked up to Diana. Yes, Kal had been her mentor and role model when it came to being a superhero, but Diana had been her role model when it came to being a heroine. Most female superheroes had started out as sidekicks of other, male heroes. Batgirl, Hawkgirl, even herself. Wonder Woman was different. Not only was she one of the first superheroes altogether, she had shown a generation of female super beings how to do it.
Even from her great height Kara had no problems making out the one living figure walking amidst the ruins of Paradise Island. Diana, no doubt about it. The question was, though, was it the Diana she knew? She didn't think it was the Diana of Earth-2, as she had been older, her immortality lost upon leaving her home to marry a mortal man. There was, of course, the possibility that this Diana was native here. Somehow Kara did not think so, though. The destruction of the island wasn't recent, years if not decades had passed since its demise. Why would the local Diana get around to inspecting it just now?
Kara bridged the distance in the time it took to formulate these thoughts and set down on an island no man had walked on in thousands of years. Something about a curse, she recalled, one that would spell doom for the amazons if a man should ever set foot on their home. Was that what had happened here? No, she did not really think so. This place looked like it had been bombed from the air and she rather doubted that magical curses manifested as air-to-ground missiles.
No, it was far more probable that someone had found the Amazons, someone who did not like to have a race of technologically advanced females that were invisible to the world at large. So he or they had destroyed them. Just like that.
Diana was kneeling in the ashes only a few feet away from her, but seemed unaware of Kara's presence. She approached slowly, hesitant to disturb the other woman in her obvious grief. Her first step caused a few charred bones to shift.
The noise caused Wonder Woman to spring into action, moving with a speed that even Kara found hard to follow. The Amazon's eyes were cauldrons of red-hot fury and before she could even utter a word Diana lashed out at her. The blow caught her directly on the chin.
Kara flew through the air, feeling as if she had been hit by a freight train. She hit the ground hard, more than a hundred meters away from where she had been just a moment earlier, and every bone in her body hurt. Especially her chin, which she was sure was going to be bruised tomorrow.
"Ouch," she muttered.
The differences in strength between a fully powered Kryptonian and Wonder Woman were hard to measure. When applied to third-party objects there was not even a contest. Diana could lift tanks. Kal and Kara could throw moons around. The Amazon wasn't even in their league. For some reason, though, that vast difference in strength did not translate well into actual one-on- one combat. Kal and Diana had come to blows a few times, sometimes in training, sometime due to manipulation by a villain or other, and it had always been close. Kal had suspected it was due to Wonder Woman's powers being magic-based. Kryptonians did not handle magic well.
Kara cleared the cobwebs, slowly climbing back to her feet. That blow certainly should not have hurt as much as it did, yet it had. Which meant that she did not want to continue this slugfest any longer than necessary, and not just because she did not want to hurt Diana. Said person was stalking toward her even now with fire in her eyes.
"Diana, it's me," Kara pleaded, taking a few steps back. "Supergirl! Don't you remember me?"
For a moment Diana seemed to hesitate, but only for a moment. The rage clouding her face scared Kara to the bone.
"I don't know who you are," the Amazon said through clenched teeth, "but you made a grave mistake assuming this guise. Supergirl is dead, I was there. You have five seconds to tell me if you had anything to do with what happened to my sisters before I tear you apart."
TO BE CONTINUED
#
Part 5: Ashes and Ruins
#
Diana stood on the shores of the island, her body shaking with barely contained rage and a hundred other emotions, gazing at the scenery unfolding before her. Her eyes saw it, took it all in, but her rage-clouded mind refused to accept it. It was just impossible.
Finding Paradise Island had not been easy, even with her knowledge of its exact location. She knew that, in her world, most people believed that the island was somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, that near mythical stretch of ocean that seemed to swallow planes and ships almost regularly. It was a mistake that she saw no reason to correct. A lot of people had tried to find the island in the past, especially since Diana had revealed herself to man's world. The more of them searched in the wrong place the better.
The truth was that Paradise Island did not really exist in man's world at all, not any longer anyway. It had been a mere Mediterranean island when the goddesses Athena and Aphrodite first led the Amazons there, but ever since then it had been separated from the rest of the world by a magical veil that only few were able to pierce.
The only way for someone to reach the island by boat was to follow the exact same route that the ancient Amazons themselves had taken during their exodus to Paradise several thousand years ago, starting at the shores of Greece and heading directly into a seemingly empty spot in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. It was this route that Diana had followed and, after several attempts, it had led her to the shores of her home. Or this world's version of her home, anyway.
She had beached the small boat on the same shore where she had pulled Steve Trevor out of the ocean so many years before, wading through the water until she reached dry land. Her steps had been uncertain, more of a stumbling than anything else, as her eyes were rooted to what lay before her, her mind spinning with disbelief.
The island was a wasteland.
Only a few hundred meters in front of her, the place where she remembered the first buildings to be, blackened ruins reached into the overcast sky like skeletal fingers. The ground, once lush and fertile, had been fused into glass. There was no trace of the towers and spires she remembered, the statues of their gods and goddesses. Only ruins.
Even the omnipresent anger faded from her conscious mind as she made her way further in, stumbling through ashes and remains in a daze. The warrior inside herself immediately started analysing her surroundings in a military fashion. In several places there was nothing left but fused ground and bare rock, the devastation growing less farther away from these. Impact craters? Some kind of air strike? She could see no signs of actual fighting in the streets.
She found corpses littering the remains of the city. Skeletons, nothing more than bones and some dried-up remains of skin and flesh. They had been dead for decades. Her entire body was shaking, but her warrior's mind still listed up the facts in a cold, clinical fashion. No armour on the bodies, no sign of weapons apart from those merely ceremonial. They had not known what was coming. They must have been taken by surprise.
A sob broke free from her throat and Diana realised that her control was about to snap, maybe for good. The rage clouding her mind was meshing with the sadness and outrage caused by what she was seeing and the result would be something more terrible than the mythical Furies. With trembling hands she knelt down beside one of the bodies and, cursing herself for a grave robber all the while, removed the only thing from the corpse that had survived the devastation intact.
The Amazonian bracelets.
The moment she slipped the cool metal over her wrists she felt her mind clear. The boundless fury receded. Not too far, though, not far at all. It was still there, boiling beneath the surface, and Diana knew that it did not originate with the Amazonian curse, but with what she was seeing here. Someone or something had killed these people, killed them all. They had been taken by surprise, slaughtered like sheep by an invisible enemy, who had left their bodies to rot in the ruins of their beautiful island.
Diana squeezed her eyes closed and fell to her knees, tears streaming down her face. Her hands reached towards the skies, pleading, demanding, as her voice called out across the dead city.
"Gods of Olympus, hear your daughter's plea. Tell me who has desecrated this island home that you blessed my sisters with! Reveal to me who has murdered my sisters in this world!"
She reached out with every sense she had, searching for that connection her people had always shared with their creators. During her life she had met all the gods of Olympus, had fought with and against many of them. Things she had seen during her adventures, both in space and here on Earth, had made it more than clear that they were not the omnipotent creators of all that was that they often pretended to be. Ares, the god of war, had found defeat at her own hands a few times too often for her to believe in divine supremacy. Yet never had she lost faith in the denizens of Mt. Olympus. Omnipotent or not, they had called the Amazons into existence, had given life to her form of clay, and that was more than enough to qualify them as gods in Diana's eyes.
Only now she was reaching out to touch these very same gods and found nothing but silence.
Diana knelt in the ashes for hours, searching for some sign, some clue that the gods who had called her sisters into being in this strange world had heard her words, that they might be listening and willing to help her. There was nothing, though. The silence around her was like a fist squeezing the life out of her.
"Have you forsaken me?" she asked, wondering whether the gods did not hear her at all or were simply not in the mood to listen.
She clenched her fists, trying to smother the rage she felt build inside herself again. Only days ago, or so it seemed to her, her Amazonian sisters and her had strode through the hallowed halls of Olympus itself, had fought beside the gods to repel the unholy alliance of Hades, Ares, and the Anti- Monitor. If not for them the gods themselves would have perished, yet here they refused to help her.
Fool, she thought to herself. The gods that might or might not exist here in this world would have no more similarity to those she and her sisters had saved than this island had with her home. They would feel no obligation to help her. Maybe they were not even here any longer. Gods sustained themselves on faith and she doubted that many people outside Paradise Island had kept faith with the Greek pantheon. Maybe the death of this world's Amazons had been the deaths of their gods as well?
All this went through the rational part of her mind, the conclusions and theories filed away for later consideration. The largest part of Diana was numb, though, unable to do anything but gaze at the ruins of what could have been her home. Someone had murdered her sisters here. Someone who had to be punished for this crime.
One of the bodies she walked by had carried a sword at its hip. The blade was warped and blackened, of little use as a weapon, but she drew it nevertheless and ran the dull edge over her palm until she drew blood. Droplets of it fell to the ground, mingling with the ashes.
"You will be avenged, my sisters. This I swear by my blood."
#
Kara was drifting motionless at the very edge of Earth's atmosphere, her blue eyes gazing at the world below her that so resembled her own, yet was so very different. To the satellites whose orbit she crossed she was little more than a piece of space debris, if they picked her up at all. She emitted no energy to trace, her body barely reflected radar beams, and who would look for an unprotected human body in space anyway? Certainly no one on this world, that much was for sure.
She thought back a day to her first encounter with Helena and, later that same night, her step brother Richard Grayson. At the end of their talk Helena had been more or less convinced that she actually was who she said she was. The idea of someone she had seen die coming back to life wasn't really any stranger than five worlds merging into one, entire histories being rewritten, whole universes collapsing.
In many ways Dick, as he called himself, reminded her of his doppelganger on Earth-1, whom she had first got to know when he had still been Batman's side-kick Robin. She had lost track of him over the years, but knew that he had handed over the costume to someone else, creating a new identity for himself. Nightwing, he called himself now, leader of the Teen Titans.
Nothing of the sort had happened to this Richard Grayson. He had stopped being Robin when he went to college and by the time he came back his Batman had been married, expecting a daughter, and thinking about retirement. He had taken up the mantle of Robin once again, taking his mentor's place as protector of Gotham City and member of the Justice Society.
From what the two had told Kara their father had never found out that Helena had become the Huntress. The world's greatest detective had been blind to what was going on inside his own family. Then he had died before they could tell him, leaving them behind to continue his crusade against crime.
Dick, now rapidly approaching the age where further activity as a masked vigilante became a really bad idea, had opted for a more covert role during their stay in this new world. Helena had been restless, feeling helpless and betrayed by a universe that now denied her very existence. She had needed something to occupy herself and had found it by introducing this new Gotham City to the concept of vigilante justice. Dick, meanwhile, had taken it upon himself to find out all he could about this world and, hopefully, find a way home for them.
Kara had not needed to actually hear them argue about that. Their looks had spoken volumes. What was the use, Helena's eyes seemed to say. There is no more place for us in that merged world that used to be home than in this new one. Why go back? It wasn't like anyone would miss them over there. Dick clearly did not see things that way. If no one else than the heroes who had fought with them at the dawn of time still remembered them.
Her own thoughts were still churning, trying to work through the idea that everyone back home thought her dead. Kal had buried her. How was it possible that she had left a body behind? She was here, wasn't she? Body and all. Either someone had snatched her away mere moments before her death, leaving some kind of fake in her place for Kal and the others to find or ... she was not really sure what the alternative was. Some kind of soul voyage? Her restless spirit travelling to a new world? No, that idea was ridiculous. Where would this body come from then? There had to be a better explanation.
She just had trouble thinking of one.
Helena, Dick, and Kara had spent the last day going over their combined notes. Dick had found much the same she had. This world seemed to resemble Earth-1, a world Dick knew quite a bit about thanks to his stint in the Justice Society and their frequent visits, just without superheroes. He had also found some people he remembered existing exclusively on Earth-2, but none of those had been heroes back home, so it came as no surprise that they weren't here, either.
He and Helena had also come to the same conclusions Kara had drawn. The idea that every single event that would have given superpowers or the motivation to become a superhero to the people they knew just happened to be missing in this world was a bit much too take. It was all just too neat. Three heroes who would not be missed back home, either because they were believed dead or had been forgotten, just happened to end up on a world were no one had ever become a superhero. Something stunk here.
One new idea that their meeting had produced was that the three of them might not be the only ones stranded here. The Crisis had cut a bloody swath through the ranks of the heroes of five Earths and more. So many had died. Many more had found themselves without a home after the merging of the Earths. Were they here, too? If they were then they had to find them.
Dick and Helena were busy milking the internet for all it was worth, trying to find people that had simply appeared out of thin air during the crimson storms. New identities that had been created since then. Kara had learned that Helena and Dick had also seen the need to be legally alive. To all but the most suspicious pair of eyes Richard Grayson and Helena Wayne (the latter in no way related to Gotham's famous son Bruce Wayne) had existed on this world ever since their mothers had given birth to them. Maybe others had done the same.
Kara was doing the same thing, only without electronic aid. Her enhanced senses were able to sweep the globe in a matter of hours. Of course simply looking at everything was no guarantee that one would actually spot what one was searching for. More than once Kara had been forced to realise that her superior senses came with their own version of a blind spot. Sort of like not seeing the forest for the trees.
She was looking for things that stood out. People performing superhuman feats. Familiar faces. Familiar places. Crowds in an uproar because of something that should not exist in this perfectly normal world.
It took Kara several hours until she finally found something. Her eyes swept across the Mediterranean and came to rest on an island. A familiar island. Yes, she dimly remembered. She had been there before once, during a time when a large part of the superheroines on Earth had come together under the guidance of the woman who called this place home.
Kara did not breathe this far up into space, but had she done so her breath would have caught in her throat as she beheld the devastation below her. The island was little more than a charred ruin, littered with bodies. Nothing moved there, not even animals or insects. Everything was gone.
There was one body moving among the wreckage, though. A familiar body.
Dropping out of orbit like a stone Kara fell back towards the planet below and the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. All the way down to Earth, all 5,000 kilometres of it, Kara cursed herself for an airhead. Paradise Island, how could she have forgotten looking there? It wasn't like Wonder Woman wasn't one of the pre-eminent superheroes on her world, was it? When people started talking about superheroes the same three names usually fell first: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
When Kara had first arrived on Earth she had looked up to Diana. Yes, Kal had been her mentor and role model when it came to being a superhero, but Diana had been her role model when it came to being a heroine. Most female superheroes had started out as sidekicks of other, male heroes. Batgirl, Hawkgirl, even herself. Wonder Woman was different. Not only was she one of the first superheroes altogether, she had shown a generation of female super beings how to do it.
Even from her great height Kara had no problems making out the one living figure walking amidst the ruins of Paradise Island. Diana, no doubt about it. The question was, though, was it the Diana she knew? She didn't think it was the Diana of Earth-2, as she had been older, her immortality lost upon leaving her home to marry a mortal man. There was, of course, the possibility that this Diana was native here. Somehow Kara did not think so, though. The destruction of the island wasn't recent, years if not decades had passed since its demise. Why would the local Diana get around to inspecting it just now?
Kara bridged the distance in the time it took to formulate these thoughts and set down on an island no man had walked on in thousands of years. Something about a curse, she recalled, one that would spell doom for the amazons if a man should ever set foot on their home. Was that what had happened here? No, she did not really think so. This place looked like it had been bombed from the air and she rather doubted that magical curses manifested as air-to-ground missiles.
No, it was far more probable that someone had found the Amazons, someone who did not like to have a race of technologically advanced females that were invisible to the world at large. So he or they had destroyed them. Just like that.
Diana was kneeling in the ashes only a few feet away from her, but seemed unaware of Kara's presence. She approached slowly, hesitant to disturb the other woman in her obvious grief. Her first step caused a few charred bones to shift.
The noise caused Wonder Woman to spring into action, moving with a speed that even Kara found hard to follow. The Amazon's eyes were cauldrons of red-hot fury and before she could even utter a word Diana lashed out at her. The blow caught her directly on the chin.
Kara flew through the air, feeling as if she had been hit by a freight train. She hit the ground hard, more than a hundred meters away from where she had been just a moment earlier, and every bone in her body hurt. Especially her chin, which she was sure was going to be bruised tomorrow.
"Ouch," she muttered.
The differences in strength between a fully powered Kryptonian and Wonder Woman were hard to measure. When applied to third-party objects there was not even a contest. Diana could lift tanks. Kal and Kara could throw moons around. The Amazon wasn't even in their league. For some reason, though, that vast difference in strength did not translate well into actual one-on- one combat. Kal and Diana had come to blows a few times, sometimes in training, sometime due to manipulation by a villain or other, and it had always been close. Kal had suspected it was due to Wonder Woman's powers being magic-based. Kryptonians did not handle magic well.
Kara cleared the cobwebs, slowly climbing back to her feet. That blow certainly should not have hurt as much as it did, yet it had. Which meant that she did not want to continue this slugfest any longer than necessary, and not just because she did not want to hurt Diana. Said person was stalking toward her even now with fire in her eyes.
"Diana, it's me," Kara pleaded, taking a few steps back. "Supergirl! Don't you remember me?"
For a moment Diana seemed to hesitate, but only for a moment. The rage clouding her face scared Kara to the bone.
"I don't know who you are," the Amazon said through clenched teeth, "but you made a grave mistake assuming this guise. Supergirl is dead, I was there. You have five seconds to tell me if you had anything to do with what happened to my sisters before I tear you apart."
TO BE CONTINUED