The threat outside really wasn't much. Thea decided the arrangement Diana had proposed was actually rather amusing — and besides, it had been her own fault for starting things.
Pinned arms meant the padded coat she usually wore was completely out of the question. Her Divine Vestment robe, on the other hand, was entirely unaffected. She gave a light, graceful spin and slipped it on — both hands clasped behind her back, radiating the practiced composure of a seasoned master.
Diana, with a smile playing at the corners of her mouth and triumph written all over her face, clasped on her battle armor.
The two women dissolved the soundproof barrier. The heroines soaking in the hot spring did a collective double-take at the sight of them fully dressed.
Several heroines with enhanced senses immediately detected the disturbance outside. The pool erupted — a magnificent surge of motion as everyone began getting out and changing.
Zatanna and Raven, both magic-users, were the fastest by far. They shed the water from their bodies in an instant, clothes on, done.
The others with powers were equally creative — ice, fire, electricity, plant manipulation — each one used her abilities to dry off and suit up in seconds.
The non-powered heroines were a beat slower, but only a beat. How to change out of civilian clothes and into a battle suit as fast as humanly possible was lesson one, day one, for every hero team in existence.
Barbara and Laurel moved with practiced efficiency. Aside from faint damp streaks in their hair, they looked exactly as they always did.
"I thought Star City was supposed to have decent law and order," said Vixen — the Zambesi heroine, who used her totem to channel an animal spirit and get a look at the threat in the distance. She had the expression of someone deeply unsurprised. "Guess not."
"Ha." Thea was magnanimous about it. "Just a minor headache. Consider it an opening act for the Justice Girls' very first gathering — a bit of live entertainment."
She glanced over at Shado on the far side of the pool, who had already pulled on her green hood and picked up her bow. Thea lowered her voice and murmured to Vixen, "I heard you know Oliver too — don't tell me you and my brother also...?"
"Don't be ridiculous. We're just good friends," Vixen said flatly.
Thea kept her opinions to herself. Women who hadn't been linked to Oliver were rarer than unicorns, but she wasn't going to press the point.
Even if this impromptu entertainment hadn't been her idea, she felt there was something genuinely memorable about assembling every heroine in one place and going out to fight together — so she pulled Felicity, Lois, and Iris into the group as well.
Those with flight ability launched directly from the rooftop. The rest had magic, powers, or glider wings. The truly flight-impaired were scooped up by Carol Ferris of the Star Sapphire Corps, her ring conjuring a glowing construct that swept them all along.
A crowd of heroines streaked through the air toward the commotion, every single one curious about whoever had been stupid enough to cause trouble here, tonight, of all nights.
The attackers and defenders were locked in a fierce exchange — sustained gunfire crackling through the street. For security, Thea had hired Blackwater's all-female division to handle protection detail. Every last one of them was a combat veteran. The generous pay, combined with the knowledge of exactly who they were protecting, meant they were trading fire with the intruders in a completely composed fashion.
When Thea's group arrived, a low, unhurried male voice was saying, "Oh my? Someone important must be inside. I only wanted to take a look around..."
He didn't finish the sentence. A cluster of figures dropped from the sky and cut him off. Someone who can fly under their own power in this era is almost never a pushover — his eyes swept across the assembled group.
Thea wasn't wearing her signature padded coat. The hooded Divine Vestment she had on was far less recognizable. Diana, however, was unmistakable — there was almost no one in the world who wouldn't recognize Wonder Woman. The middle-aged man's gaze narrowed slightly. He hadn't expected to run into superheroes just by following a stray magical energy reading.
He scanned left and right. No sign of Superman. No sign of Batman. That was reassuring. The male heroes had always overshadowed the women — even the celebrated Batgirl and others who'd been active for years barely registered on this man's personal threat radar.
"Anyone know who this is?" Thea asked the group, utterly unbothered, as though he wasn't standing right there. She had a hunch, but she wanted confirmation.
"He's the Shadow Sorcerer's fellow disciple — Damien Darhk," Sara Lance, the White Canary, said in a perfectly even tone. "Word is he knows some magic. On any normal day he'd be a serious problem." She paused. "With this many heroines on scene, he'd be finished one kick at a time."
So it is him. Thea looked at the pale, heavy-set man standing in the street. The main villain of Arrow Season 4 — and he'd managed to bumble right to her doorstep. Of all the rotten luck.
"Same name as Damian?" Raven, ever the darkly amused one, stepped forward to volunteer. "Let me deal with him. What gives him the right to share that name?"
"Me! Me! My energy weapons are incredible!" Stargirl shot her hand into the air like she was answering a question in class, then charged forward — only to look around and realize the total headcount below, including Darhk and his mercenaries, barely cracked thirty. This barely counts as a warmup.
"And me—" Supergirl's knuckles were itching after a full day of getting pounded by Alex.
"You've got a nerve!" Damien Darhk was not accustomed to being dismissed. In his estimation, aside from Diana, this entire collection of women posed zero threat to his formidable magical abilities. He was both thinking it and acting on it — his right hand shot open, and an invisible shockwave of force surged upward toward the assembled heroines.
His twenty-odd fully-armed mercenaries raised their weapons and opened fire.
Who would step up to meet it? Thea glanced at Zatanna, then at Raven. In the end it was the dark princess who lost patience — Raven backhanded Darhk's magic aside with one lazy sweep of her arm. No finesse. No technique. Pure brute force, like swatting a fly.
"This fight isn't worth my time," Thea said with serene detachment. "Anyone who wants to play, go down and have fun. Don't kill them. The rest go to Star City PD afterward. Their leader goes to the Oversight Commission." She gestured vaguely. "You're welcome."
Stargirl was already diving. The rest of the heroines exchanged glances, trying to figure out whether these goons were paid actors or just extraordinarily unlucky.
With cheerful laughter, they each picked a target.
"Kara — remember this morning's drills. No powers," Alex grabbed Supergirl's arm and whispered sternly. Kara sighed and resigned herself to fighting like a regular person — throwing honest punches and kicks at a bewildered mercenary.
Thea, catching Diana's amused look, casually picked one for herself as well.
Hands still bound behind her back? Irrelevant. Her psionic ability wasn't impaired in the slightest. She seized a hapless mercenary with her mind, muffled his scream, and sent him spinning up — caught him — spun him up again. The man experienced the sensation of being a human yo-yo operated by someone who wasn't touching him.
The other heroines made do with their own methods. Mera, Caitlin, and Frost all had adjacent abilities that had never been properly measured against each other. Today's entertainment provided a convenient comparison — so long as they didn't actually kill their test subjects, anything went.
Going around the circle, each heroine had one opponent — maybe two. Hardly satisfying. Most knocked one down and stepped back. This was recreational, after all. About as competitive as a year-end raffle — everyone participates, no one's supposed to win big.
Cassandra, tiny and ferociously serious, was the exception. She darted back and forth across the entire battlefield until every last mercenary was on the ground before she finally stopped.
Seeing his entire force taken out like a bad joke, Damien Darhk would have to be a special kind of oblivious not to realize what he'd walked into.
But wanting to run and being allowed to run were two different things — Raven had him exactly where she wanted him, and his magic against the daughter of Trigon's bloodline was pathetic.
Thea pulled Felicity aside and said a few quiet words. Felicity gave her a strange look — why is she standing there with both hands behind her back like some kind of seasoned master? — but didn't dwell on it. The former hacker called in a drone, its massive camera lens sweeping across the assembled heroines. Realizing they were on film, several women immediately struck their most dashing poses.
Unaware he'd become a prop in a group photo, Damien Darhk kept fighting desperately — with precisely zero effect against Raven's magic or Cassandra's fists.
The man who'd spent a lifetime believing himself at the absolute limits of human potential lay on the pavement with the sinking realization that his entire self-conception had been wrong. The world is terrifying. That was his final thought before unconsciousness took him.
"Everyone gather 'round!" Thea called out cheerfully. She directed the heroines to stack Darhk and his crew into a neat half-meter-high human wall, then lined everyone up behind it.
The captives who were still conscious didn't dare move. They made for a remarkably cooperative human wall — even the ones faking unconsciousness.
Click.
Twenty-nine official members plus Stargirl — an enthusiastic plus-one who'd brought her own energy — thirty heroines total, immortalized in a single frame. Serious faces, ridiculous faces, everything in between. The Justice Girls' first official group activity, documented for posterity.
By deep night the precinct was down to a skeleton crew, so the captives got trussed up and left to wait for morning pickup.
The heroines said their good nights and drifted back to their rooms.
Thea and Diana's room.
"Come on, untie me already... it feels really strange," Thea said, doing her best impression of a girl sweetly pleading.
The smile on Diana's face was threatening to overflow entirely. "Let's play a little game first. A role-playing game..."
[Five hundred words omitted.]
The mercenaries were delivered to Star City Police Department at first light. The officers — unaccustomed to having this many criminals to process — were thrilled, and hauled everyone in with great enthusiasm.
Darhk himself was brought back to the Oversight Commission. Thea had originally planned to hand him to the D.E.O., but given that organization's impressive track record of losing high-value prisoners, her own facility seemed more reliable. She found him a cell. He was small-time as far as she was concerned.
The demonic idol that had been the source of his dark power was smashed on the spot. Trading with demons for borrowed strength was a classic League of Assassins technique — dangerous, and with a hard ceiling on how far it could take you.
She did recall that in the show, this heavyset pale-faced man had planned to cleanse the surface world with a nuclear warhead and retreat underground, where he'd apparently cultivated a rather impressive cornfield. Thea couldn't help wondering whether he had some kind of latent agricultural talent. A very unusual place to put your skill points. Well — if he was genuinely good at farming, Nevada had plenty of desert that could use the help.
A routine interrogation was scheduled before processing. Standard intake questions — name, gender, occupation. What nobody expected was for that standard intake to produce results.
"Commissioner, he says he's affiliated with an organization called H.I.V.E.," Diggle reported, barely containing his excitement. "The interrogation specialists asked three separate times. No indicators of deception. According to his statement, it's a large and well-staffed operation."
Thea's interest sharpened. "H.I.V.E.?"
She picked up the transcript and read through it.
Reassuring, on one front — no Hydra, no Umbrella Corporation analogue. H.I.V.E. looked more like a mutual grievance society for the wealthy and disgruntled.
Darhk seemed to be running purely on spite: I'm not comfortable, so everyone else shouldn't be either. He was angling to goad Thea into conflict with a network of powerful elites.
What he hadn't accounted for was that his petty grudge had just handed her an excellent pretext. One of the names on that list was the loudest opponent of the Queen family's current political push. She'd already been considering engineering a convenient traffic accident. This was far cleaner — she'd simply show up and take everything.
Darhk swore categorically that the listed parties were co-conspirators. Every scrap of evidence — genuine, embellished, and strategically arranged — was compiled and assembled. Thea led the strike team personally.
In the glorious chain reaction of mutual betrayal that followed, she walked away with an impressive haul: two deputy mayors, one senator, and three prominent civic figures placed under arrest. The charges were real enough — corruption, insurance fraud, financial crimes — but fell somewhat short of the treason and crimes against humanity she and her mother had been aiming for.
Fabricate harder, or fabricate smarter? She rested her chin in her hand, thinking.
"Commissioner! New development!" Diggle reappeared, waving a fresh transcript.
Thea skimmed it — and snapped her head up. "Mr. Diggle, you're absolutely certain that H.I.V.E. was established by extraterrestrials with premeditation? We have to be responsible with a claim like this. We need hard evidence."
Diggle produced an evidence bag. "Found in the basement of one of the properties. The device self-destructed before we could contain it, but this is all the residue we recovered. Professor Stein confirmed — the metal is not of terrestrial origin."
Thea took the bag and examined it. Silver-white metal, scarred with blast damage — but the composition was genuinely unlike anything from Earth. What had started as a minor cleanup detail was developing into something considerably larger. She gave the order immediately: "Their communication networks are still active. Put your best investigators on a full deep dive. Report directly to me."
The Commission's evidence was airtight. A group of extraterrestrials had been embedded in human society for an extended period — and they had infiltrated the highest levels of government.
Facing that threat, the loudest political voices went instantly silent. The turbulent controversy evaporated overnight. The international Justice League initiative — which had been advancing with considerable momentum — suddenly announced, citing "venue coordination difficulties," that it would be delayed by three months. Thea heard through Mera and Caitlin that the initiative's primary organizer, Golden Guardian, was absolutely furious.
On a separate note: Diana had officially resigned from the Hepburn Foundation. Whether that was a return to her true path or simply a lateral move was debatable — the Louvre had been courting Wonder Woman for some time, and the curator had made a personal visit. Diana had always held a genuine interest in historical artifacts. After a brief conversation with Thea, she caught a flight to Paris and reported for her first day of work.