Author's Note: This story opens up mere hours after the final scene of my recent story "Seven Conversations from Wayne Manor (Plus One on Themyscira)." A full list of my Justice League/DCAU fanfics, arranged in chronological sequence, is available on my Profile.

According to my current plot outline: superheroes with prominent roles will include Wonder Woman, Batman, Flash, Fire, Question, Huntress, and Captain Marvel. (And many other heroes will participate in varying degrees; this will be a long story!)

Changes of Fortune

Chapter One: Early Rumblings: Gotham

The last time Bullard had heard of any seasoned superhero being killed by a bunch of ordinary guys with itchy trigger fingers would be . . . never. It must've been tried hundreds of times, and what did anybody have to show for it? But his new boss had promised the boys that tonight's plan would let them all be part of breaking that long losing streak.

Bullard had never worn night-vision goggles before tonight, but it wasn't hard to get the hang of them after you allowed for everything looking so green. The bright figure he saw now, shaped like a woman and framed in the doorway, had to be Batgirl coming in, following the clues the boss had planted around town. They'd been hoping for her mentor, but this was better than nothing, right?

The boss's orders were clear: Nobody should do anything before the loud noise.

The feminine figure advanced a few paces—

SLAM!

Fifty square feet of steel plate, six inches thick and previously concealed behind the huge sign above the front door of the warehouse, had now fallen to seal that exit shut. Electromagnetic locks built into the doorframe would hold the plate steady against anything a normal human could do it on short notice.

"Fire, boys!" the boss's voice rasped, but he needn't have bothered. Bullard was already pulling the trigger of his tommy gun and holding it back as he sprayed bullets at the bright figure trapped in front of the now-sealed doorway. The boss had insisted there be no crates or other stuff to hide behind for at least fifty feet in all directions from the doorway. Even someone as light on her feet as Batgirl wouldn't be able to make it to cover in time to dodge all the bullets coming her way from four angles at once, right? Especially with each shooter perched atop piles of shipping crates so that his buddies would be well above his own line of fire.

Sure, if they hadn't been able to see her in the dark, Batgirl might've been able to use one of those grapple-gun things the Bats were so good with, and quietly rise straight up into the rafters while Scarface's gang wasted ammo shooting into the killing field at ground level.

But the goggles let Bullard see it wasn't happening that way. The female figure was staying put—more or less—though she kept making fast, jerky movements, presumably from the repeated impact of so many metal slugs drilling into her tender flesh.

Vaguely, the thought occurred to Bullard that she should have fallen down by now . . .

"Cease fire, ya mugs!" the boss roared, and two seconds later the last echoes of the rat-tat-tatting had faded away. "Okay, boys. Shuck da goggles and we'll see what a bat looks like when it's been ventilated."

Perren tugged the goggles up onto his forehead just as the big overhead lights came on to reveal . . .

Wonder Woman, looking both mildly amused and perfectly healthy, despite the hundreds of bullets littering the concrete floor around her boots.

"Thanks for the quick workout," she said pleasantly. "Always nice to know my reflexes are still sharp. Now that you've gotten that useless aggression out of your systems, would you care to surrender without any further fuss?"

"Whacha doin' here, pretty princess?" the boss demanded. "Aint'cha heard dis town is strictly da Bat's turf?"

Wonder Woman turned her head to look down an aisle to where Mr. Scarface was comfortably seated on the lap of his new girlfriend, Sugar. Bullard still wasn't sure what a statuesque blond like Sugar saw in such a sawed-off little runt as the boss, but so far no one in the gang had been dumb enough to try to get fresh with her.

"Batman asked me to pinch-hit for him," Wonder Woman said. "But we don't have to take the 'hitting' part too literally if you just accept that your little trap has failed."

"Huh. Y'mean he didn't wanna tangle with me after he heard I ain't saddled with that dummy who useta carry me around? So he conned a dame inta testin' da waters first in case me an' my Sugar were too much for him to handle?"

Wonder Woman was walking toward Scarface now, and sounded as if she were just barely suppressing a laugh as she asked, "Did it ever occur to you that perhaps a second-rate imitation of the original Ventriloquist is nowhere near the top of Batman's to-do list? He has serious business elsewhere tonight, but I had some time on my hands . . ."

Scarface sputtered incoherently for a few seconds before he managed to growl: "Serious? Toots, whaddaya call goin' up against Scarface and his best boys, if it ain't 'serious'?"

The heroine ostentatiously covered a yawn with one delicate-looking hand. "Light exercise?"

"C'mon, youse guys! All together!" Scarface began firing his own Thompson down the aisle at the advancing superhero,

Bullard thought it over for a split-second. On the one hand, he didn't believe Wonder Woman was going to be any easier to kill now that the lights would let her see the bullets better than before. On the other hand, the first guy who conspicuously disobeyed the boss's orders by dropping his tommy gun and offering to surrender was likely to get gunned down by Scarface for disloyalty.

Easy call. His finger yanked back the trigger.

Somehow, Bullard wasn't terribly surprised when Sugar turned to run toward the back door of the building while the rest of the gang gave Wonder Woman something to keep her busy for a few minutes. Mr. Kovacs had warned that this sort of thing was an occupational hazard when you joined a 'supervillain's' crew. Being expected to play "Horatius-at-the-Bridge" (whoever that was) while your boss beat a hasty retreat!

Oh, well. At least he'd been very well-paid, in advance, for participating in this set-up. His wife and the baby wouldn't go hungry any time soon, even if Bullard ended up doing hard—

That was the last thing in his mind before Wonder Woman's fist tapped him on the chin just hard enough to knock him out without smashing the jawbone.

Diana took a few moments to deal with all four of the gunmen—mainly out of fear that some of the poor fools otherwise might kill each other with such bullets as missed her while she darted around the warehouse—before she headed after the new Ventriloquist (or "Sugar"?) and the wooden dummy, who by now were out the door and halfway down a long alley leading toward a side street. Probably had a vehicle parked down there.

She could have flown after them, but she was constantly afraid of letting her leg muscles get flabby if she didn't use them enough. An Amazon who shied away from running several miles a day would have been a disgrace to the name of "Amazon." (Fortunately, no such person had ever existed on Themyscira.)

So she sprinted down the alley . . . and her left boot slid out from under her, very fast, as if she'd hit an utterly frictionless surface . . . causing Diana to land on her rump before she surrendered her pride and went airborne.

She still captured Scarface and Sugar a minute later—slightly damaging their vintage Cadillac in the process—but it had taken longer than it should have.

After she'd turned them over to the police, Diana went back into the alley with a flashlight and scrutinized the pavement. Someone had spilled a can of motor oil on one patch of asphalt, and her foot had landed in it.

Diana considered the possibilities.

Sugar had not been pouring out any oil as she ran. And she'd moved so fast and straight that it was almost impossible to believe she'd deliberately been dodging a puddle of oil she had placed there herself an hour earlier. Even if she could have seen it clearly in this dark alley and on a cloudy night, which was piling absurdity upon absurdity.

Nor could Diana see any way that the spiller of oil, whomever he'd been, could have known for certain that any particular person would be the first to slip because of it.

So she concluded that her pratfall had been sheer bad luck, rather than the consequence of some carefully planned boobytrap.

Please note that this conclusion was true . . . as far as it went!

(Diana was unaware of a Chinese-American girl who'd been watching the warehouse through binoculars from a fourteenth-story window in an office building seven blocks away. And even if she had known the girl was idly rolling a pair of dice, there would have been no reason to think twice about it.)

Author's Notes:

1. In the mainstream comic books of the DCU, the original "Ventriloquist" (Arnold Wesker) was killed several years ago, and was later replaced by a young woman named Peyton Riley. In the DCAU continuity, Wesker was eventually cured—and I'm content to leave him that way—but I'm working on the theory that Peyton has an analog who exists in the DCAU, and who has just recently picked up where Wesker left off.

2. The Chinese-American girl briefly mentioned at the end of the chapter is the same girl you see in the cover illustration. Since none of the superheroes know anything about her yet, I'm not going to name her for you at this point. But I will mention that she's based on a Very Obscure comic book supervillain who was never used by the guys producing the DCAU cartoons in the 1990s and 2000s. I figured that left the door wide open for me to offer my own take on how that character concept "might exist" in the DCAU. I kept the basic superpower and much the same costume for my version of the character, but changed her ethnicity. I'll explain that in more detail at the proper time.

3. There was a brief reference in this chapter to a man named Kovacs. He runs a job-placement service for hoodlums seeking employment with supervillains. I created him for a previous Justice League fanfic: "Something Doesn't Smell Right."