Summary: It doesn't matter if the show looks upside-down, Zatanna Zatara will still steal her audience's attention by not only being an illusionist, but a witch, a sorcerer, and the best magician around.

Disclaimer: Zatanna and all affiliated characters here are property of DC Comics, and I do not own them.

Chapter 9: Z2

Madame Étoile, Paris Region, France.

All the wizards, sorcerers, and witches in the world specialized in something. None were good at everything; that was the first thing Giovanni Zatara explained when he trained her to speak backwards. Specializing in a type of magic helped the wizard to focus and enhance their spells, especially after they stopped failing.

Logomancy, the practice of words, was a type of sorcery originally developed by Leonardo Da Vinci. When he first explained what it was about, her father took the opportunity to reveal, as casually as possible, that Leonardo Da Vinci was a distant ancestor of the Zatara family, that Da Vinci had been a sorcerer…, and then, Giovanni continued explaining and training her, as if it was nothing. That how her father was. She missed him so much!

To perform their specific style of magic, Giovanni and Zatanna used their magical energy to ask the universe for a favor, which it then granted. The favors included moving things without touching them, changing faces, revealing hidden objects, conjuring flames in their hands, etc. For the universe to connect with the magician, they had to ask their request backwards, with perfect precision. They couldn't make any mistake. Neither in letter nor intonation. The most important thing was to understand that it wasn't just speaking in reverse. Anything they said existed in a unique and different language.

"LAEH EM"

"Heal me." That was the request Zatanna Zatara asked as she bled out on the floor, watching the Glass-Thing move away, reflecting her surroundings before leaping off Sainte Marie des Cristaux's bell tower. She opened her hands, and several stars of light, in all colors, came out of her fingers and settled on the wound.

The best thing about magic was that it wasn't governed by the strict rules of science. The magician using healing didn't need to know much about physiology or medicine to heal. Rather, it was like asking the body to "force" itself to be well, to return as it was before, and magic then acted as a bridge. Healing required a lot of energy, so her wound needed to regenerate quickly and before she lost consciousness.

She needed to focus.

After a few minutes, Giovanni Zatara's daughter checked that she was better. She opened her red-stained shirt and noticed that she didn't even have a scar. She took a deep breath. She calmed down; she needed to do something very important before getting up. She closed her eyes, touched her shirt with one hand, and with the other, traced a circle in the air, while whispering some words:

"NEALC YM TRIHS"

Now she was ready! If there was one thing she was sure of, she would never dare to look dirty or, even worse, not completely perfect in front of the public. She owed it to them, whether it was to impress them with her show as a stage magician who pulled rabbits, cats, and giraffes out of her hat every night, or to protect them as a mysterious pseudo-hero who seemed to practice witchcraft.

She looked out the window. The Glass-Thing was moving away from the bell tower, followed by the fake Zatanna. Her doppelganger. The real Zatanna had destroyed the first reflections it had created, so the monster was probably heading somewhere else to create more. Therefore, it was evident that it couldn't create more than one double per person.

The Glass-Thing, reflecting the landscape, along with its horrible creation, walked over the River Sequence, with no problems or witnesses who could see them. At this point, few things could surprise the real Zatanna. Not when she had seen aliens, had touched an angel's wing, had played Chinese checkers with three demons, enamored one, and had kissed the Wayne heir, who totally wasn't Batman.

Eventually, the monsters were going to turn left following the Sequence, so they were heading to the Tour Union. How could they not go to Union Tower? Not even the strangest and most obtuse aliens in the universe would refuse the opportunity to visit that huge phallic monument with which to compare themselves. Or that, according to them, they had inspired. Or whatever option they liked best. She needed to stop them, and for that, she was going to need good transportation.

Zatanna looked around, leaned out through the gates of the bell tower, and compared the gargoyles. There were hellhounds, griffins, demonic goats, chimeras, beasts born of the most vicious nightmares… So, of course, she chose a monkey. A monkey with wings, with the most bored facial expression in all of France. She found it just too adorable!

Plus, who wouldn't want to feel like the Wicked Witch of the West for a day?

"EVOM DNA KCATTA"

Honestly, what she had just done was very difficult for any magician to do. Giving an inanimate object some sort of life required a lot of skill and cunning, both because of the magical energy required and the instructions she had to give to her cursed object. Of course, the instructions had to be simple and direct. She couldn't discuss Victor Hugo with a gargoyle; at most, she could make it fly and attack the Glass-Thing with some violence, just as it was doing at that precise moment. For any sorcerer, that would require a skill that couldn't be improvised in an emergency.

However, Zatanna was not only a sorceress, witch, and magician, but she was also an illusionist. Making the chairs of the audience float over the stage, audience themselves included, or making her hat do the samba, were classic numbers in her routine. Despite her young age, she was already an expert, and her father would probably be proud of her.

Zatanna Zatara, the Strega, watched as the winged monkey crashed into the imperfect copy of the horrendous manicure and shattered it into pieces. The Glass-Thing, which now reflected a bit of the river and a bit of a nearby lamplighter, seemed to turn towards her, standing on the cathedral, like the hunchbacked hero of the classic novel The Angel of Sainte Marie. The Strega put on her shadow suit so that only the alien could see her, and only her. She opened her arms and invited it to an invisible battle.

The city of Madame Étoile continued to exist, unable to perceive what was happening, carrying out its daily tasks. Although she knew it was loud, Zatanna only found silence. Her blue eyes were fixed on the infernal thing whose true form she didn't want to see again. She was focused only on the Glass-Thing, which was now perfectly blended with the river, and whose silhouette only she could see. They would fight. Paris would shine with magical lights.

A crystalline glow emanated from the monster, growing stronger as it soared through the sky, as if it were a sunbeam passing through several giant magnifying glasses. She hadn't expected that, if she was being honest. But she hadn't been caught defenseless either. Mages who couldn't defend themselves wouldn't survive for long. Learning defensive spells was one of the first things magicians had to master in a world plagued by hellish creatures.

She crossed one arm vertically in front of her, from bottom to top. At the same time, she traced a horizontal line with the other arm. Both movements left a violet and pink trail of sparkles in the shape of a cross, while a glowing sphere, of the same color, grew around her.

"¡TCETORP EM!"

She didn't know how a battle against a being from space could unfold, but she couldn't allow innocent people to be harmed. Wasn't that what heroes did?

So, that was her life now? She was a hero? As Zatanna shielded herself from the impact of the beam of light that the Thing had shot, she thought about the things that had led her to this point. She was just someone who wanted to find her father, who had trained her, and who meant everything to her.

A Sorcerer named Sargon had exiled her father to a dimension beyond time and space. Under normal circumstances, no prison would be able to trap her father, a master of the mystical arts, but the sorcerer wasn't alone, and Giovanni was now in a world she couldn't reach. Where was he? She still didn't know, but she would find out. That had been her initial motivation to direct her path.

But now? Wasn't she fighting for other people, instead of studying magic for herself? Instead of performing at night? Instead of doing it for the show, the applause, the smiles, she was fighting evil. Or maybe, she was also doing it for the show. Was it all together what made her a hero-in-training? Zatanna didn't know, although she did remember that she began to question her role in society on that brutal day, literally at the beginning of the millennium, when Kryptonians invaded Earth. Imagine the following scenario:

An army of armed extraterrestrials appears, and no Earth army is able to stop them. Large machines are placed in different areas of the globe and begin to launch thunderous gravity rays onto the surface. They try to terraform it, to get rid of every single person on the planet to give birth to a new Krypton. They only need someone, one of their own, some guy named Kal-El, for their purposes. But he, wearing a blue suit and a red cape, rises into the sky, and the first thing he does is punching one of the machines to bits. The world thus meets Superman. Some are inspired. Others fear. Apparently, no one remains indifferent.

She certainly wasn't.

At the same time, an old acquaintance-turned-enemy named Nick Necro reappears to cause trouble for Zatanna and her partner at the time, taking advantage of all the chaos. The enemy tells them that those who use magic shouldn't worry about what happens in the skies. Magic always protects them he says, if something goes wrong, they can just move to another magical dimension. They can keep on living. They can feed on the mystical energies of the world, greatly enhanced by the anguish, fear, sadness, and dismay caused by the invasion.

Zatanna faces him. Whether it was true or not that magicians could remain separate from all the chaos enveloping the world, it was wrong not to intervene. It simply didn't make sense to have those abilities and not do something for others. Giving smiles to people didn't just require a magic wand and sexy tights. Her lover, while not entirely agreeing, supports her with his own strength. One cigarette in one hand, he uses the other to exile their common enemy to hell. Then, he gives the aliens terrible curses. He goes dark. Very dark. They break up. And that is the end of it.

Zatanna looked at the world with a spell that tracked large centers of chaos and clashes of mystical energies, the last gift left by John Constantine before he put out the cigarette. Not only that blue hero, Superman, faced the invaders, his own kin, just because it was the right thing to do; other heroes were inspired too and moved around the world, saving people. An ancient warrior in England. A man in the oceans, covered in tattoos. Bruce, escaping from a cult of ninjas and assassins so his city wouldn't suffer more. It only required inspiration and a desire to do the right thing. So Zatanna traveled with two motives: to find her father and to protect people. She was a sorceress, but she was also a hero.

She was very tired. Invisibility twice, using her cards as knives, healing her own body, animating a statue; none of those things were easy. And now she added the task of protecting herself from a space cannon shot she didn't understand. She had to respect the rules of magic, however impossible they might be to understand. Always.

That meant she had to consider her own strengths, and she couldn't make anything she said backward come true. It was a unique and unrepeatable language. They were universal spells, magical words she exchanged with the universe, and that others with her specialty could replicate. "Protect me" backwards didn't yield the same results as saying "shield me" backwards. They were different spells, with a singular objective.

One more spell, she thought. One of the good ones. The great ones. She was facing a creature without personality or features, with no goal other than creating chaos and being horrible. In contrast, she was Zatanna Zatara, the daughter of the greatest magician of all time. If her spells weren't completely perfect, then she was failing him, and she wasn't going to allow that.

The Glass-Thing also had its own rules. It reflected things around it, but not living beings, from whom it could only create a copy at a time. Perhaps it saw it as a personal failure that people could destroy them before the real ones, and so it replaced them. So, what would happen if it reflected something, just once, that it didn't like?

With the magical shield held high, Zatanna jumped and put some of her strength into her feet, to slowly descend to the River Sequence. She was still stuck to the light-beam that the Glass-Thing had shot at her, and soon her shield would break, but her performance would end before that. She was the one directing the show.

"Do you want to reflect something? How about your own ugliness?"

Zatanna took a card from her pocket. A simple Two of Hearts with a cut in the corner, which John had given her on their first date. However it was used, the card was enchanted to always return to her pocket and faithfully respond to all her commands.

She threw it with precision, as she was a sleight of hand master. The card stopped on the transparent beam, in front of the Glass Thing, which was now transformed into a stone and a tree at the same time, unnoticed by anyone. Zatanna focused on the Two of Hearts and recited some words that only she could pronounce.

"TCELFER!"

As simple as that. Abracadabra. Reflect what you have in front of you by becoming a big mirror. Since it was her special card, she didn't need such complex instructions, as the card knew what she desired. It was her last card, and she had almost literally pulled it out of her sleeve. She usually did, but she wasn't wearing long sleeves this time. She didn't know what the hell she was thinking, but the important thing was that it worked.

What was the point of being a magician if you weren't going to leave your best trick for the big finale?

The white card expanded, trapping the beam of light; its romantic hearts disappeared and were replaced by a transparent, polished surface, as clean as it should be in any decent show. It had a beautiful silver frame, with two large golden hearts on the sides, and a shining black "Z" above.

The first sound the creature made was a scream of horror when it had to reflect a reflection. An impossible contradiction, which it couldn't interpose with its true image, in front of the mirrors. Her Two of Hearts had allowed her to reflect nothingness itself, almost literally, as the Glass-Thing didn't want to show its real self. Before that, apparently, it preferred to freeze on the spot, forever transformed (or until some specialist authority in aliens arrived) into a reflection of nothingness itself.

So Zatanna stood on the river, while the huge mirror returned to her pocket turned into a cardboard rectangle with the corner cut. With her face covered in sweat, she took off the shadow dress that hid her from people, before realizing that she was showing her face to people now. She was too tired; thinking well and concentrating weren't priorities.

People saw her standing on the river's surface. She didn't even realize she had cast a spell to fight. Thousands of eyes were on the girl with black hair and a perfectly dry shirt. Zatanna couldn't help but curse under her breath, and then… the usual.

Her hat appeared in her left hand, and when she crossed her arm in front of her, her entire stage magician outfit appeared, enveloping her. She smiled with ruby lips and sent millions of sparks into the sky that formed her name in pink, bright letters. Then, she indulged in presenting an old tap dance number she had practiced, and the people of Étoile, who had completely ignored her previous show, had now become her audience. She just needed to figure out how to elegantly leave, rest, and prepare for what was coming. She needed to find the other heroes. The Glass-Thing's energy hadn't faded when she defeated it…

It had flown somewhere else!