---

The Arctic Circle

“I don’t understand,” she began, looking up at the swirls of light and energy in the sky above her. It played differently in her mind than in her android companion beside her.

“It’s somewhat over-whelming is it not?” the automaton known as Red Tornado said, his tones hushed. He was exhausted, his body was aching in ways that he did not know robotics could ache. His cloak had been removed and wrapped around the naked woman’s body, even though it appeared as though she didn’t feel the cold.

“Not that so much,” she said, looking at John as though he were a completely foreign concept. “It talks to me. The energy from solar winds and from the sun hitting against the atmosphere of the planet. Solar dust biting at our front door is telling me that this world, this time-period...it’s so much different to the one I am from.”

John put his hand on her shoulder, which she quickly pulled away from. No man touched her.

“I am sorry, I am only offering support as best I can approximate,” he said, looking down at the snow they both sat on.

“Perhaps I am the one who should be sorry. Diana taught us so much,” she began, before she cut herself off, remembering that there was so much history between Diana and herself, so much that hadn’t happened yet. Perhaps this was the point at which Diana really came into her own, embracing the role of Earth Elemental and rising above all others.

“You know Diana?” Tornado asked, his curiosity piqued by her hint.

She shook her head slowly, and sighed to herself. “I am afraid I have said too much, already, Wind Elemental,”

“Please, call me John,” the Tornado said with a smile. She didn’t return his response.

“I cannot and will not. You may call me the Electromagnetic Elemental, but that is all,” she said, with a stern tone, something he had not experienced, despite only delivering her into the world mere minutes ago.

“Please...there must be some way we could come to a more amicable conclusion,” he said, holding his hands up. She responded with crackling energy around her eyes and hands. John could feel the fields around them dilating and expanding with every movement of her fingers. He let his hands drop and sat in silence, waiting for her to leave.

“I must find Diana,” she said, looking from her burning hands to the Tornado, who looked as though he had been spurned by a lover. “Alone.”

---

Doctor Doris Zuel was a genius. She was dying of a terminal disease and had tried to put her mind into the body of Wonder Woman once before. However, after a stalled start, and spending some months within the body of a a Gorilla, she managed to insert her mind into the Comatose body of a Circus Strong woman, with a incredible secret. She could grow to incredible sizes.

Having spent many years as Wonder Woman’s enemy, Zuel had been defeated many times by Diana. This time would be different, however. Zuel had been visited by a woman known as Modo, who was a powerful force of nature for a new world of nature. A world that ignored everything that had come before it.

As if it were mocking their previous relationship, Giganta’s powers and place in the world had been augmented and made brilliant, while Diana had been stripped of all that made her Wonder Woman and transported to a world she was unfamiliar with. Now, Giganta had made her move on Wonder Woman, holding the tiny form of Diana in her huge hand, her former enemy was barely the side of the her palm. She stood, ankle deep in one of the deepest lakes in Markovia.

“HA!” Her voice boomed. Diana put her hands over her heads and looked up at the huge body of Giganta. All over her costume there were sign posts and huge logos...she was a walking bill-board. More than that, she had buildings attached to her body the same way that restaurants attach themselves to

“How do I hurt her?” Diana said to herself, looking up at the massive, red headed woman as she began to notice the other details of Giganta’s costume. There were railings spiralling down her body.

“You don’t understand, do you?” she spoke, her voice much deeper than before because of its sheer size. Diana shook her head, looking at the buildings that made their way up her costume and the railing enclosed mono-rail that snaked it’s way around her.

“I’m a living cruise ship, Diana. In exchange for having these things attached to me, things I barely notice, my powers, my life, my desires are incredible. I want for nothing,” Doris said.

“How do you shrink down?” Diana asked, after a few moments, looking up to Doris’ huge form. Doris paused for a moment, before closing her hand into a fist. Diana threw her hands up to take the weight of the massive finger on her body.

“Ugh! Doris! You’ve been tricked by Modo. She’s using you to get what she wants!”

“I’ve got what I want from her, not the other way around!” Doris threw her open palm into the ground, smashing Diana into the dirt and twenty feet into the very bedrock of Markovia.

Diana, under the immense pressure of Doris’ huge hand pushed up against it, drawing the bedrock underneath her to bulk up her body. Within minutes Doris’ hand was being pushed out of the impact crater it had made by the steadily growing form of Diana underneath it, her legs spread apart and the majority of her mass in her arms. Spires of rock and sediment jutted from her arms, connecting her to the Earth and preventing Doris’ body weight and strength from being too much for her.

It was then that Diana noticed that the buildings on Giganta’s body were held by free-standing axles. As she bent over, the building stayed in place, not tilting with her body. It was literally a huge place for people to live and shop and be...a place for the super rich.

“Manipulated and used. How does it feel to be the one on the receiving end, Doris?” Diana asked, as the spires underneath her crumble and shot up through her arms once more, but in the form of spikes, piercing Dori’s skin.

She receded her mighty hand, holding it up to view as Diana began to grow in size.

“I am not being manipulated, Diana. There isn’t some promise to this; I have received all I want already,” she admitted, lashing out at the stone woman below with her mighty foot.

Diana dropped low, dodging, her powers still something she had to get used to. She was able to form limited weapons and talk to rocks, but acquiring this much mass, this quickly, was something she could barely control. It was a slow process, as everything was with rocks. She could feel her body begin to slow down, removing the pumice and returning to her slow pace of speech.

“Everything you’ve....ever wanted...Doris...would that in...clude, being loved by...someone?” Diana asked, her eyes locking onto the huge orbs of the woman above.

Doris shook her head. “I don’t want or need to be loved, Diana. You know that!” she screamed. Diana’s now massive hands held onto Giganta’s leg, though she daren’t throw her over. Hundreds, possibly thousands of people would lose their lives.

“You don’t know how to beat me, do you, Diana?” she asked, yanking her leg free and throwing her other arm downwards, clocking Diana in the center of the head, sending the smaller rock woman reeling backwards.

“Admit it: the all powerful Wonder Woman, the Woman who can do no wrong, doesn’t know how to get out of this situation!” Doris began to laugh, dropping to her knees, the huge pads of metal that adorned each joint landing on Diana’s much smaller elbows, sheering her arms off.

Diana screamed in shock before she realized that it didn’t hurt. She allowed her face to relax a moment before pulling back to pain. She wanted Doris to think that she was in agony.

“So, Miss High and Mighty, you think that you’re still the best? You think that you’re still able to dole it out? You’re not! You’re nothing! You’ll be absorbed as everything will be!” she yelled, her huge hands pushing down onto Diana’s throat.

“I...am the...Earth,” Diana said, as her voice box cracked underneath the huge pressures of Giganta’s fingertips.

“You’re not the Earth! You’re nothing! The Earth is dying, Diana. We killed her and now we’re going to kill you.”

Diana said nothing, pulling her will into the ground below the pair, rather than into repairing her body.

“You know what I represent here, Diana? I am Globalization. I am homogeneity all over the world. You go to East Timor and you’re hungry? You grab yourself a MacWhopper Meal. You’re thirsty in Russia, you’re going to be grabbing yourself a nice, cool glass of Cola. Nothing will ever diverge from the big companies again, Diana. NOTHING.”

“So...you sold...your soul?” Diana asked, her lips moving and her rock voice box vibrating despite them no longer being connected to each other.

“No! Never! I became part of something bigger than myself, if that’s even possible anymore!”

“You started off...thinking...differently to...everyone else...” Diana began, as Giganta pulled her hand back, insanity in her eyes, smashing half of Diana’s face to chunks of rock, “Now you’ll...be the same...as every...one else.”

Giganta’s second blow stopped just short of Diana’s face as she began to ponder what the woman had said. Diana took that moment to move her plan along. The ground on either side of Giganta erupted with pillars of sand and rock. They arched over the ankle and wrists, pulling them tightly to the ground, as a huge rod of sediment and soil shot into the air, hitting Giganta underneath the chin, causing her to gag before dropping a few meters and twisting upwards to hit her in the chin. She felt her head loll-op to one side as Diana began to slowly reform herself.

“Tell...your mistress...that I am...getting better at...what I do,” she began, her arms being joined by additional material, before that slowly melted out of her fingers and back into the ground.

“I see...what she is...trying to do...with you....and Osira....you won’t...get...away with...it.”

Giganta’s eyes opened for a moment, as she looked down at Diana, a smile breaking over her face, as a huge droplet of blood fell from her lip, engulfing the woman below her.

“I think you’ll find, Diana...” Doris flexed her muscles, breaking the stone bondage that held her in place, “that you’re still deeply, deeply underprepared.”

“All this violence,” Giganta continued, throwing an open palm out at the drenched Diana, knocking her off her feet. Diana hit the ground, digging a trench as she slowed down from the velocity of Giganta’s attack.

“I came here for a reason, Diana. I came here, not only to show you how strong I am, how powerful I’ve become, but to tell you something.” She let a sick smile twist over her face as she got to her feet, flicking some of her crimson hair, which was filled with hundreds of thousands of neon lights, giving her almost a glow around every strand.

“Maya is Dead, Diana. She’s dead, we kill her. We’ve won and you’ve lost. You’re separated from your little ‘Brotherhood’ of Elementals, and you’re getting weaker by the moment. Control has been taken out of your hands again, and Maya’s hands.” Giganta smiled, as she turned away from Diana.

“We know more about what’s going on than you do, Diana. Prepare to be tested...and fail. Soon you’re going to have nothing to rely on.”

Diana watched the huge woman begin to walk away, looking at her blood drenched form and allowed herself a moment of weakness before she picked herself up. She balled her fists. No doubt from now on. This was exactly what she was. A woman of stone and soil.

“I will not...be a prisoner...of my doubts...or my past...again!”

---

Hours Before Hand

It had been months of agony for Maya. Her crippled body lay broken over jagged edges of wrought iron and plastic spears. They penetrated her body through every junction of flesh...through her elbows and knees, her eyelids, her ear-drums. As Modo spoke to Maya she could barely make out her vicious words, her ears were so caked with dried blood and oil.

Modo licked her lips in excitement as she directed more hate towards Maya. The Goddess of the Earth was holding onto the threads of her life with increasingly brittle and palsied fingers.

“Please...” she said, finally, the first words from her mouth in over a month. Modo paused what she was doing, inserting burning metal rods underneath Maya’s fingernails, and smiled a bleak smile.

“Please?” she asked, looking to the floating form of the Duke of Deception, who’s new armor gleamed with every camera lens that fixed itself to it.

“Please, you ask? You cannot actually be serious,” Modo continued, cradling her chin and offering a sick smile, “You’re asking me, politely, to stop, is that it?”

Maya offered a weak nod, looking up to Modo as the smell of her burning flesh filled her own nostrils. Modo sighed heavily and knelt down in front of Maya, oil and another thick, viscous liquid dripping between her legs in thick clumps.

“I would imagine that you think you’re appealing to some sort of humanity inside of me. Something that you hold inside of yourself,” Maya responded, cocking her head to one side.

“Human’s are fucking this planet to pieces, Maya my sweet, naïve girl. They don’t care about fuzzy wuzzy animals the way they think they do. They’re dumping their plastics and burning their fuels and pissing away their water. They don’t care, Maya,” Modo said, getting to her feet and holding out her hand.

The Duke, or at least one of his hundreds of doubles, shot down and handed Modo her staff.

“You know what this is?” she asked as Maya looked up at Modo’s weapon. An ornate staff, that appeared to be made from Gold. “This is a gold-plated, uranium tipped spinal cord. It belonged to a God...a God of Nature, similar to you...I forget what Pantheon it was. While you’ve been down here getting beaten and tortured, I’ve been out murdering.” Modo lifted the staff above her head and drove it straight through the center of Maya’s face, exploding the contents of her head onto the ground below.

“Sometimes, like now, I pleasure myself with this. You’ll make a wonderful carpet for my den,” she grinned, yanking the staff from the emptied brains and blood, and waving for the Duke’s to deal with the mess.

“And someone get my Giganta! That giant bitch has a message to deliver.”

A faint wafting glow from Maya’s intact lips rose towards the sky, going unnoticed by Modo and the Dukes.*

---

Corona sat in silence, looking down at the shackles that held her in place. Her arms strained against them again, but she could only feel how tight her bonds were and how tough they were.

She had been increasingly ramping up the levels of heat around her, finding only that she was exhausting herself. Something about this place made her feel...weary.

“Oh...hello,” came a voice from above. Corona looked up to see a make-shift hole in the ceiling of the pure white room. A growl escaped her lips as she tired to direct the heat upwards.

“I think you’ll find that you can’t do that, Corona,” the voice said as a woman’s head poked itself through the gap. She was an attractive Egyptian woman dressed in a smart, black business suit with a thin, polka-dot scarf wrapped around her neck. It dangled down the whole, giving her a slightly refined 1950’s look.

“Who are you?” Corona asked.

The woman smiled, and clicked her fingers. “I’m Osira. I represent Industry, for my Master. Well, Mistress, actually. She introduced me to this concept called Modernisation.”

Osira smiled. “It means that I found a new niche for myself in this modern world. Unlike yourself, I’m not desperatly grasping at straws to find new ways not to slip back into killing things with rocks, and spending a few days near a river to hide the fact your menstrual cycle has started.”

Corona turned the corner of her lip up at the bitter tirade from the woman above her. She didn’t care about her motivations; she just wanted out. “Why am I here? Why can I not move?” she asked.

Osira brushed a hand through her hair, nonchalantly. “You’re here because I need an engine for my Industry. We’re making great strides in the Industralization of magic, Corona, but we need something to smelt the raw materials,” the woman continued.

Corona screwed her face up in response. Something as benign and stupid as that was keeping her trapped?

“You’re my ticket to the big time. There’s just enough magic in you for you to be able to burn and destroy and pulp the rocks and other raw elements of magic I find into something usable, but there’s enough non-magicial power in you to restrain you within a trap of your own making,” Osira explained, gesturing down to the room.

“I grew this, magically, from a scrap of hair we found at a location you’d visited. Nothing particularly clever about it, is there, but I mean we’ve grown something from you to keep you trapped in here, inside this smelting room for as long as we’ve got you for.” Osira rubbed a balled fist against the side of her eye.

“You might die during the course of this whole ‘process’ but hey, that’s life, right?” Osira smiled and waved outside of the hole. “Anyway, must dash, I have things to do, people to see! I hope this isn’t too uncomfortable for you.”

Osira smiled and moved away from the hole as it became apparent there was something large and heavy above the opening. Corona closed her eyes as a cascade of darkness hurtled down towards her, pummelling her body with tiny pieces of rock and shards of elements. Each impact caused a little more pain as she slowly felt the heat around her rise again.

It wasn’t long before she dawned on what was happening.

She was at the bottom of the smelting pot.

---

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To Be Continued...

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