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#17
SEP 13 |
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“Venomous”
Her hacking cough sounded like gravel scratched across chalk, thick and cracked. Diana felt as though her lungs were full of fluid, although she was certain that her lungs did not function in the way they once had, or if they even existed at all now her entire body was full of molten lava.
“Are you well, my love?” Brion looked up from his breakfast. Several plates of local delicacies rested on the huge oak table. At the head of the table, white cloth dangling from his neck, sat Brion, while Diana sat to the side without a scrap of food in front of her. She simply watched him eat.
“Fine, Brion. Please continue.”
“Yes,” he said. A fork loaded with flaking fish doused in a thick, fresh citrus sauce entered his mouth and he chewed silently, with impeccable manners.
“As I said, this fish only lives in one lake in Markovia. Once we had nearly fished this poor morsel to extinction, however, I decided to take matters of nature into my own hands...”
“As you are want to do,” Diana said. Brion bristled slightly, returning to his jovial bragging as Diana's face softened. “Gravity has no more hold on you than I do.”
“Psh, dear. Your hold on me is more complete than gravity. If anything, I would consider your hold on my heart to be its opposite, you lift me up and...” Brion's face changed. He cocked his head to the side. “You still find this uncomfortable, don't you?”
Diana said nothing. Her rigidity was evidence in itself.
“Please, Diana. I act rashly, I am a man of emotion. My heart draws itself over every decision I make. Perhaps I should have considered the heart of another before making my proposal?”
Diana shook her head solidly before another cracking wave of coughing ripped through her body. A flake of flint, which constructed the form fitting toga she wore, dropped to the table, smashing the empty plate before her.
“Diana!”
Brion was to his feet before she could react, his arms around her waist and arm, pulling her into an upright position.
“You are not well, you haven't been for days!” he said. “My doctor will attend you.”
“Brion, this is not something a doctor can diagnose. The Earth does not catch the flu.” Diana stood up, almost knocking Brion onto the floor. “There is something wrong with me which stems from the Earth itself. Not just the connection to Maya but something more. I'm going to find it.”
She extended a hand to Brion, who took it briskly. “Yes, you do that. I'll...”
“Stay here and wait for me to return. I would like to hear more about the fish.”
Diana offered a weak smile, which Brion returned. He walked back towards his breakfast, his smile growing wider. “Yes, of course you do. Will you be long?”
“No,” Diana said. “Not long at all.”
Siberian Wastelands
“Dig it faster!”
She slammed her leather clad hands against the side of the protective railing. The cold, snow-caked winds buffeted her body, leaving a slight haze of steam as it evaporated.
“You should think about calming down, my dear Doctor.”
Doctor Poison whipped her head to the side, narrowing her vision to stare at her unexpected visitor. “Osira. Business, sister, or did Modo...?”
“Neither. This is pleasure, my dear Doctor. Is it wrong to want to spend time with a sister? You're going to have a wonderful visitor soon and I, for one, cannot wait to see her reaction to your part in the plan.”
The leather clad doctor snarled through her slightly pointed teeth, dribbles of glowing poison clinging to her tongue. “My part of the plan? Osira...my part is the best part.”
“Of course it is, Doctor. Of course it is...now, where were you?”
Poison nodded and grinned. “DIG, YOU LITTLE SHITS! DIG!”
The Russian women and children below wailed in frustration as they were forced to dig their glowing fissures even deeper, carving deeper and further into the barren and solid wasteland around them.
They had so much more to bury.
Snow cracked and shifted underneath Diana's feet. It gathered tightly in the cracks that lined her body, leaving trails of steam behind her. She had already lowered her internal heat more than she liked to. The effects she had on the environment around her, especially now that she had very little control over it, worried her.
She could feel the biting wind against the small of her back. Before, when she had attended the Parliament of Stone's contest in the Himalayas, she had felt nothing. Now, she felt everything: temperature, wind, weather, even pangs of hunger, despite her inability to eat. She felt everything, seemingly, without a filter save for emotional connections. Her 'love' for Brion was marked with necessity and dependence, clinging to a fragment of her old world, her old life. A weakness she hated in herself. Before her transformation, she knew she was almost made from love, possessing an unfathomable level of compassion. Now, all she felt was indignity, anger and bitterness towards her former life.
A jilted lover stuck in a cage of Earth.
Her travel had taken her almost three times as long as she had expected. Markovia was not that far from Siberia, yet, it had seemed to take an eternity for the stone womb which she lay inside to travel the distance. Were she still elemental it would have been minutes, instead, it was dozens of hours. Brion would be worried.
“Whoa. Da kine Earth Elemental? Wonder Woman too! Da kine!”
Diana froze in place. A figure stood before her, a little lower in the snow since it had been reduced to steam under the immense pressures of his lava body. He crossed his arms over his chest and tilted his burning head. The shape was humanoid, but the entity had never been human. It was a lava elemental given shape and form.
“Just...Diana these days. Please. What are you doing here?”
The burning head with no facial features straightened itself out and nodded toward a faint glow in the distance.
“Parliament said I was their new Bridge, between Earth and Humans apparently. They need someone who doesn't cag. I dunno, I told them you were a tita with nothing to lose no more, but they were ignoring me like I was all aznuts or something. You know?”
“No. No, I don't know. I have no Earthly idea what you're talking about, and I don't particularly wish to be associated with another pawn of the Parliaments.”
“Cha. That's hurtful, tita. I'm no pawn. 'Sides, I came looking for you.”
“Looking for me? How did you know I would be...?”
‘Tst. Parliament, yeah? I'm new to this but I know some things. I know how to see the world. Something you need to do now you're not no mondo elemental.”
“I don't understand the way you speak.” Diana admitted. The pair began to walk towards the glow ahead of them.
“Cha. Nobody does, tita. The whole damn Parliament makes me stir crazy. All I wanna do is go back to the beach and pick up some da kine waves.”
Diana looked across her shoulder at him. “Can you even go near the water? You're molten.”
“Yeah. It's kind of a problem,” he admitted.
“What do I call you?”
“Scoria, you call me. I want to learn from you, Diana. I wanna learn how to be da kine Earth Elemental, so I can take over from you when you're back.”
Diana suppressed a smug, angry smile. “I won't be back as the Earth Elemental, Scoria. My time has passed.” Diana paused for a moment. “And that doesn't make sense.”
“Cha. As if it has though. Nothings past except the stuff what's happened, you know? You got time to come back to this and I got time to learn you and watch you do it.”
Diana allowed herself to smile this time and touched his burning shoulder gently. “I believe that you might get along well with my friend, Brion.”
“Why?” Scoria asked.
“You're both idealistic and stubborn.”
Their conversation was cut short by machine gun fire and the explosion of a grenade not far from their position. Diana was thrown from her feet, hitting the snow heavily and sinking underneath it. Scoria took the brunt of the machine gun fire, the bullets turned to molten slag metal as they exited his body and pinged off the hard permafrost underneath their feet.
“How?” Diana asked. The helicopter was low flying, but appeared to have no engine to speak of. Silent, deadly and full of soldiers, in faintly glowing armour, armed to the teeth with weaponry.
“I don't like this, tita!” Scoria yelled. The holes where the bullets had passed through him were matching the faint glow the soldiers armor.
“We must be getting close,” Diana affirmed. Smashing her hand into the ground, she wrenched up a huge chunk of rock and earth to protect them both. With another herculean tug she created a canopy under which they could hide for a short period of time. The ground was solid, frozen and complaining extensively from its rough treatment.
“Quiet,” Diana said. Scoria looked at her with as much puzzlement as a featureless face could manage. “Not you. The ground,” she said to him. “It's annoyed.”
Scoria felt the holes in his chest and looked down at their glow. “Tell me about it. I'm really bent by these.”
Diana pressed her fingers against the holes. She immediately recoilied from the wave of sickness that washed over her body. She gagged and dropped to a knee, the shelf above them receding away from her relaxing commands.
“Wonder?” Scoria asked. She retched and vomited glowing magma onto the Earth, before looking up at the lava elemental.
“This...” she said, dipping her finger into her own vomit, “matches your holes. We are being poisoned.”
Scoria touched the glowing marks in his body, which refused to heal against the tide of lava that ravaged his insides. He looked up at the slowly dropping protective curtain, the helicopter no longer in the air.
“We're safe for now?” he asked. Diana nodded slowly and tried to get to her feet. She found her footing not only unsteady, but almost impossible. Weakness infiltrated her joints. She fell further, resting on her knees and her hands, although even they threatened to buckle under her.
“Oh, dear. Oh dears, oh dear, oh dear.” The snow crunched under leather boots, which creaked and cracked in the harsh, slowly dropping temperatures. Two dozen soldiers surrounded her, weapons levelled at Diana and at Scoria. The young elemental simply put his hands up, his neon wounds glowing brighter as she neared.
“How the mighty have fallen, eh Diana?”
Doctor Poison rested the large weapon over her shoulder and cocked her head to the side. She glared at the pair over the top of the protective layer Diana had erected. Her body, covered head to toe in leather, had barely changed since Diana had last seen her. The only new addition was the plastic face mask full of noxious, green gas which was plastered to her lower face, and her head was now covered by a gimp mask instead of a half villainous mask.
“Modo was right. This is pathetic.”
“Modo?!” Diana coughed, trying to pull herself to her feet. “I'll kill you!”
“No, you won't. You wouldn't before and you couldn't now.”
Poison rested the weapon down next to Diana. It had a large boron point, like an enormous drill, but hollow. It looked to Diana liked a hypodermic needle.
“You realise that all your enemies have been given a new chance at this world you've...neglected,” Poison continued. “You broke the rules, Diana. You left the game. So we had to as well.”
“You didn't have to do anything. I failed and I was taken, pushed into a role I wasn't ready for. And you?”
“Given a role I was born for,” Poison grinned. The soldiers at her side began to slide away, heading back to whatever base camp they had been using. “Princess of Poison!”
“Tst,” Diana managed as she now rested on her knees. Her determination to not die with her face in the dirt had managed to right her, but she was unsteady. She swayed in a non-existent breeze. Much of the weather was blocked by the slowly descending rock shield.
“Do you know, Diana,” Poison said, unbuttoning her black, body length jacket, “that when Modo found me I was depressed? Hard to believe, I know.”
Diana shook her head. “I don't find it hard to believe someone as broken and desolate as yourself would slide into depression. I find it hard not to now, and my history was written in selfless deeds and compassion.”
“Ha. I'd contend that altruism is not altruism if you're willing to talk about it, Diana.” Poison shrugged off her coat revealing a secondary layer of thicker leather underneath. “No, I was depressed because I had no purpose.”
Scoria was still silent in this, his hands firmly in the air. Diana offered him a sideways look. He paused for a moment, seemingly unsure of her intention.
“Modo gave me a purpose. She remade me, Diana. She spoke of your new role and made me an offer – a role to oppose you. To break you.”
Poison stripped back the leather around her arms, revealing brightly glowing skin. Her body had been drastically altered since Diana had seen her last. Had she really pushed her foes into these new roles? Was she responsible not only for breaking her own life, but the lives of those she held dear and those she hated?
“Uranium & Plutonium, Diana. Working with Modo made me infinitely richer than I ever was on my own. I have more money than I'd ever need or could ever spend, and do you know what my first purchase was?”
“I do not care, Poison,” Diana said.
“I bought up the entire nuclear waste from Japan. All of it. Said I'd take it off their hands and I brought it here to the wonderfully desolate lands of Siberia. If you think this is stunning, you should see where I live.”
“I'd rather choke on my own vomit, Poison,” Diana said.
“I rather feel you would. Since then, I've bought up every available nuclear waste plant, toxic waste plant and so on, and brought it all here. I eat it, I bath in it. I am it.”
Diana snorted and slid a leg out from under her. She tried to stand but toppled.
“I control it!” She yanked her glowing hand up towards her and balled a fist. The chemical waste inside Diana pulled her forwards, her stomach blew out from the pressure of the corrosive waste.
“ARGH!” Diana fell forwards, clutching her abdomen.
“I've spent the last five months dumping it into the Earth. Infecting the Earth Elementals, Diana…infecting you. Now I have something inside you. Now Modo has her hooks into you.” Poison smiled, cracked almost blackened teeth shining through the plastic mask. “So, what can we do to amuse ourselves?”
“Perhaps you can treat severe burns, Tanline.”
Scoria thrust his hands forwards, pushing the extent of his body into a jet of molten rock. It collided with Poison. She was knocked her off her feet, sending plumes of evaporated nuclear waste into the air.
“Wonder!” Scoria yelled. He wrapped an arm around her and tore open a hole in the Earth. A hole he'd secretly been digging with his molten feet while he stood under mock surrender. Diana was suddenly impressed. Perhaps he wasn't as stupid as he sounded.
As the pair dove into the lava and mantle below, the screams of Poison managed to reach their ears. Diana closed her eyes and hoped that she could survive the burning pain inside her guts.
She worried for what seemed like an eternity, that she could not.
Hours late, Scoria pulled himself and the red hot semi-molten form of Diana from the top of Loihi in Hawaii. He sat in the lava for a while, washing himself with the Magma. Slowly, but surely, the radioactive elements within him were purged, melting away into the core of the planet, never to be felt by a living creature again.
Diana watched him, laying on her side, while her body slowly cooled down.
“Wonder?” Scoria asked eventually. She sat up, carefully, her hand touched her stomach. It was solid, rebuilt.
“Tried to wash your insides out, tita, but it didn't work as well as I hoped,” Scoria admitted. He sat down next to her, his burning head twisting to look at the open top of the volcano.
“My Pele here, she wouldn't let me remove it all. Couldn't let me remove it all. I did my best but there's a little taint in you. I think it's stuck in there, Wonder. I think you'd have to remake yourself to remove that Poison.”
Diana smiled, touching his shoulder. “Thank you, Scoria. Thank you. I wonder, is that poison from Modo herself? Or is it from me?”
Scoria shrugged and looked deep into Diana's sad features. “Wow, tita, you're deep.”
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Next: In Wonder Woman #18: Arch-Nemsis.
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