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The Games that Gods Play	By : Ristul Category: DC Verse Comics > Wonder Woman Views: 16896 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Wonder Woman,nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 17
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Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction that infringes upon copyrights and characters owned by DC Comics and Warner Bros. This author (nor anyone else) is making no money, nor receiving any type of compensation for this work.

Late at night in summer heat. Expensive car, empty street
There's a wire in my jacket. This is my trade
It only takes a moment, don't be afraid
I can hotwire an ignition like some kind of star
I'm just a poor boy in a rich man's car
So I whisper to the engine, flick on the lights
And we drive into the night
-Stolen Car, Sting
A month ago
Ramon pleaded one last time. “Boss, don’t do this! It’s not worth it! You won’t be able to get out if there’s an accident!”
In the racing car, Bill ignored the teenager’s pleas, and silently continued wrapping the tape around his right hand to the steering wheel. The rest of his garage crew stared on, trying hard to ignore the gnawing nausea in their bellies. True, they had done their best fixing Bill’s car to its maximum performance. Whether he could win was another matter.
A few meters away, Ramon spied Kash doing the same, but while Bill was deadly pale from the tension, Kash was wearing a nonchalant attitude. No reason why he should be worried. Kash was the top illegal race driver in Boston, and he had never lost. Tonight’s race wasn’t just any ordinary race. Kash’s growing crime organization was putting the screws to their small car ‘acquisition’ garage, and Kash had challenged Bill to a race. If Bill won, they kept their independence. If Kash won, the garage would be absorbed into his crime organization.
And just a few moments ago, Kash had challenged Bill to raise the stakes and the difficulty. They would tape both hands to their steering wheels. While they could still change gears by tapping the buttons on their steering wheels, the danger of taping both hands to the steering wheel was that a crash was much more dangerous. Escape was impossible.
Old Jase, their chief technician and mechanic, limped over to Bill, and leaned down to whisper, “Hold your patience. Be steady. Above all, remember one thing. You control the car; don’t let it control you.”
Ramon clenched and unclenched his fists nervously as both cars rolled up to the starting line, revving their engines in eager anticipation. A girl sauntered up between the two cars, holding up a red flag. She held her arm up for a few moments, before swinging it down.
Both cars accelerated into the distance, the glare from their rear lights receding rapidly.
Twenty minutes later, Ramon and the rest of the garage crew stared at the burning wreckage of Bill’s car. Kash had accelerated and rammed Bill’s car from behind when they were rounding a particularly dangerous bend. The resulting loss of control had sent Bill over the flyover and into the ground almost 60 meters below.
If Bill had not been killed in the crash, the resulting explosion from his car’s fuel and Nitrous tanks would have finished him.
Ramon, tears in his eyes, glared venomously at Kash, who grinned back. His black clad mobsters surrounded the crew, daring them to dispute the result. Kash spoke to Jase, “How about it, old man? You lost the race. We’ll be sending you a list of what we want in the morning.” Kash walked away, laughing.
The crew stared sadly at the burning wreckage of their dreams. Ramon felt a hand on top of his head, ruffling his hair affectionately. He looked back up to see Jase, tears streaking down the older man’s face.
“Don’t worry kid,” Jase said, his voice weary but determined. “We’ll just have to wait for our chance.”

Present day, 7.30 pm
Wonder Woman, Princess Diana of Themyscira, glanced around the room. It was yet another gala party in Boston, which she found to be a sheer waste of her time. However, she simply had to endure these because of her role as Themyscira’s ambassador to the world.
At least I’m not alone. She smirked as she glimpsed a bored Phillip Delacroix standing near the refreshment table, exchanging small and brief talks with businessmen passing by. The women conspicuously avoided him, in stark contrast to the other rich and eligible young bachelors being swamped elsewhere in the room. In the past, he would have been ‘attacked’ voraciously, unless Veronica Cale was around.
But Cale was not around this time, and no woman was trying to get ingratiated with him. Diana knew it had to do with the rumors from the incident in New York. Apparently, word of Phillip’s ruthlessness had spread throughout the upper echelons of society, making him a much less desirable target for hanger-ons seeking a sugar daddy. And Phillip actually looked happy at the situation.
Diana smiled to herself as she went over to him. “Bored?” she asked. She never did figure out how he had managed to recover so quickly from the gun wound he had suffered.
“Very.” Phillip replied. “But I don’t mind it at all.” The side of his mouth turned upwards.
“Don’t mind what? Being alone like this, or being feared by the rest of the world?”
“Both. Better to be feared than loved. Fear is a healthy emotion.” He shrugged. “I am who I am, and I find no reason at the moment to pretend to be something which I am not.” Then his expression grew crafty. “Unlike some other interesting people I met recently in Metropolis.”
Diana narrowed her eyes.
Delacroix continued, “Bruce Wayne, for one. He seemed like such a fop all the time, but he actually has a great deal of control over WayneCorp and its success. Makes one wonder as to who he really is, don’t you think?”
She said smoothly, “Perhaps he is both. After all, the rich do have their eccentric tendencies.”
“Like dressing up as flying rodents?” Delacroix pinned her with a questioning look. “And the reporter, Clark Kent. I know about him too. Do me a favor. The next time you see them, tell them not to stand in my way, or I will bury them.”
She glared at him. “You presume too much, Mister Delacroix.”
“Do I?” He picked up a glass of champagne. “Let’s be truthful with ourselves, seeing as you’re the goddess of truth and all that. None of you have ever confronted something like me before. Don’t stand in my way.” He walked up beside Diana, swallowed the contents of the glass in one smooth motion, then walked away.
Diana clenched her fists. How did he find out? Did Bruce and Clark slip up somewhere? She considered the problem carefully. Ares is his patron. It would be all too easy for him to find out secret identities using magic, especially with the magic of a god behind him.
She stared after him as he stopped to converse with another businessman. How do we stop you?

7.45 pm
Ramon slowly made his way to the magnificent Nightblade car in the car lot, keeping an eye out for security. Nope, nobody here. Somebody up there must be smiling on me tonight.
He crept along the ground on his hands and knees, careful not to let himself be seen by the security cameras in the lot around the business building where some sort of party was going on. He had no idea who those people were or what they do, and he was not interested to find out. For all that mattered to him, they were in another world, divorced from his squalid world of poverty, crime and suffering.
The black Nightblade looked brand new, the newest product from Ares Macrotech, probably bought by some rich zillionaire. A high performance car that had proven its worth in several races, it would fetch a pretty price on the black market. At the very least, Kash would be happy with their garage for the month’s earnings.
Ramon scowled at the thought of the mobster. Before he had come along, they were content to be fix vehicles up for wealthy customers for enhanced performance, making the rest of their money through the illegal racing circuit. It had been a hard, but relatively decent living. But with their garage subsumed into the mob, Ramon had been forced into working as both a mechanic in the day for the mob’s vehicles and as a car thief at night.
He was barely over 16 years old.
The boy reached the Nightblade. He shrugged his bag of tools off his shoulder, and stared hard at the car’s lock mechanism. He took out a small electronic device, and punched in a few numbers. The device started flashing, as it quickly ran through the decoding sequence for deactivating the car’s security system and unlocking the doors.
Ramon waited until the red lights blinked to green. He reached up for the door handle, before stopping. It seemed too easy…
He took a closer look at the door and the lock on the car. He frowned. The position of the vertical knob that locked and unlocked the door from the inside seemed to be in the correct unlocked position, but he just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was perhaps a bit too low. He removed a small thin but strong wire from a pocket, and jammed it into the keyhole. He wriggled the wire around for several minutes, patiently working it until he could hear an audible click.
Ramon looked at the knob again. It was all the way up now. He sighed in relief. If he had tried to pull the handle before the knob was up all the way, it would undoubtedly have set off the security systems and sent every security person in the vicinity after him.
He slipped into the driver’s seat, marveling at the comfortable cushions that fitted his growing frame snugly. The steering handles was also stylized, in a fashion that mimicked the steering handles used in professional racing. There were gear shift buttons on the handles, along with all sorts of gauges and instruments on the panel.
Ramon pulled his bag in and threw it into the back seat, then reached down to the circuitry below the wheel. He needed to get the car moving and out of the area. Disengaging the security anti-theft tracking devices could wait until he got back to Jase at the garage. The party would end in an hour’s time, and he needed to be back at the garage before the owner discovered it was stolen.
Hotwiring the engine was a piece of cake. Within moments he was moving out of the car lot, speeding down the highway.
When he stopped at a traffic light, he rummaged through the glove compartment in search of some money. He did not find any, but came up with a small and battered black book the size of a paperback. Without thinking about it, he pocketed the book in his jacket, then drove off as the lights turned to green.
At no time did the young car thief notice the small extraneous tracking device attached to the underside of the Nightblade.

8.15 pm
Kash smiled in glee at the terrified girl in front of him as he brandished his gun. “Come along now, and don’t give us any trouble. Wouldn’t want to spoil your pretty face!”
She drew in a breath, but before she could shriek her sonic attack at him, one of his men fired at her. It was a tranquilizer dart, filled with fast acting drugs that would render her asleep in moments.
Vanessa Kapatelis collapsed to the ground. His men moved quickly to secure her, binding her in strong metallic ropes that even her cybernetically enhanced strength could not break.
Kash nodded in satisfaction. After tonight, he would have the city in his iron grip. And to do that, he had to nullify Wonder Woman, Boston’s champion. Though she no longer stayed within the city proper, it still regarded her as its favorite daughter, and the Princess would return to the city every week to help out with charity and crime.
The master mobster intended to change that. And to bring down Wonder Woman, he had no qualms about exploiting her ties to her friends. Of all her friends, the Kapatelises were the most vulnerable and easiest to attack. Once young Vanessa was in their hands, they would have a valuable bargaining chip to use against the Amazon.
Being a master criminal was so easy. Using the loved ones of do-gooders against them was usually a big no-no for the criminal population, but Kash could hardly care less. He was no pussy like Lex Luthor. He would go straight for the jugular, and tear his enemies apart before they could do the same to him. Subtlety was for the pussies.
One of his men asked, “Boss, what next?”
“We go back to base, and wait. Oh, and give the police a tip off. I want the Amazon to run around silly looking for her friend.” The heroine would be frenzied with worry, and he had planted more than a few false rumors in the underworld leading to enemies that would undoubtedly tire out even the mighty Princess as she looked for her friend. The informants didn’t know the information they had been fed was false, of course, a precaution against the power of truth the superheroine possessed.
Then when she finally found out his location, tired and fatigued, Kash would strike hard, using all the information he had gleaned about her weaknesses to defeat and break her. Such an act would catapult him into the highest echelons of crime in the world.
He was already looking forward to celebrating his ascendancy.

8.30 pm
Diana turned to greet the tense looking police detective as he walked towards her. “Detective Indelicto!” She said with some joy. He had been one of her allies in Boston. But the glum expression on his face told her something was wrong.
“I’m sorry, but I have some bad news for you.”
A cold hand grasped her heart. “What is it?”
“Vanessa Kapatelis has been kidnapped. We’re working on it, but if you wish to help…”
“Let us leave now.” The Amazon Princess declared. She had failed her sister before, and she was not about to fail her any more. Whoever did this shall pay, and pay dearly! She promised herself.
They left the hall.

Standing off to one side, Phillip heard everything. He frowned slightly. Vanessa Kapatelis kidnapped? He thought back to his own recent forays into the belly of Boston’s underworld, seeking allies and useful fools. The current numero uno was Kash Galucci, a crude but nonetheless effective leader in the city’s crime scene.
And like so many villains before him, Kash had chosen to target a hero’s kin and friends to weaken them first. It was a despicable ploy, but a very effective one. The concern and reverence for life the superheroes of the world had was commendable, but it was also a terrible weakness that could be exploited. Phillip had long ago found out just how terrible the cost of maintaining that reverence for life could be. As a result, he no longer cared.
He waited until the Amazon Princess and her small entourage had left, before going over to the host to inform him of his departure. A tingle at the back of his mind whispered to him of betrayal and death before the night would be over.
Delacroix walked out of the building, and stopped short when he came to the car lot. His Nightblade was missing. Other men would have been frantic.
Instead, he knelt to the ground, brushed his fingers carefully over the gravel, and smiled. It was a car thief, very young by the distribution of his body weight, using an advanced electronic decoder, and apparently smart enough to have detected the double warning mechanism.
Luthor’s assassins, who had planted the tracking device on his car, would be in for a very interesting night indeed. He knew Luthor, smarting over his humiliation, had hired several Intergang assassins to remove him from the picture, and the tight security around him at all times except when he was on the road alone practically guaranteed they would attack him in his car.
Except he wasn’t in his car anymore. Whoever had stolen it was in for a very nasty surprise when the assassins come calling.
He took out his mobile phone, and called a number.
“Cab service center. How may we help you?”
“I’d like a cab at the Toyota building.”
The night was still young, but Phillip could already smell the fear and tension hanging heavy in the air. This is going to be fun, he thought sarcastically, staring down the route the car thief had taken. Very fun.

8.45 pm
Ramon stared hard at the blank pages of the book he had taken from the Nightblade. The first few pages had words on them, but after that was mere gibberish, and then blank pages. He had tried looking at the pages sideways and even upside down, but he still couldn’t make any sense of it.
In the end, he had stuck to reading the first few pages, since he was bored out of his mind while waiting for Jase to finish disabling the security systems on the Nightblade. He wanted to help, but Jase had insisted that he do the work alone. Ramon thought Jase simply wanted more time to appreciate the magnificent Nightblade. He tried to ignore the fact that he still wasn’t very skilled at disabling such systems, especially an advanced system like that on the Nightblade.
He read a section on the second page without looking at the front, “All choices bring a person into conflict with the one enemy he can never hope to defeat – himself. Good choices allow survival. Evil choices ensure a swift death.”
Ramon frowned at the words, then flipped to the front. It sure as hell was no storybook. There was the title, Book of Paths, on the introduction page, but no author. There were red splotches of something on the first few pages, and Ramon grimaced at the sight, recognizing it for what it was. Blood.
He was no pansy, his mother a drug junkie in one of Boston’s worst ghettos. He did not know who his father was, and did not even have a surname to add to his first name. His childhood was mostly poverty and toiling in a sweatshop once he could understand to help pay off his mother’s debts and her addiction. One day, when he was about six years old, his mother was killed by a car while running across the road after stealing food from a store when he was hungry.
Jase had never forgiven himself, though Ramon had long ago. A repenting Jase had taken Ramon into his garage, and raised him along with his crew. Ramon never went to school, but he learnt mathematics and science under Jase’s tutelage, while working on the vehicles in the garage. It was not the broad based education most children received, but Ramon was already as well versed in engineering as most first and second year university undergraduates. Still, he would be hard pressed to know any history, geography, or literature beyond the porn books the rest of the garage crew would sometimes give him to read.
Ramon felt a cold chill as he read the opening paragraph.
“Choose this path, one without cheering crowds, showers of medals, monetary rewards enough to live out the rest of your life in comfort. There is only a promise of pain, blood, and tears. You will be considered by others to be a fool, a charlatan, a madman. You will face foes beyond reckoning, every time outgunned, outnumbered, and outmatched. You will be buried in an unmarked grave if you are lucky, your carcass fed to the vultures if you are not. There will be no happy ever after for you.”
“There is no shame in closing this book and walking away, but if you think you have got what it takes, read on and change your life for the worse.”
Never one to be frightened by mere words, Ramon read on. There was a lot of stuff he couldn’t quite understand, some vows and promises or some such. And a series of instructions on meditation exercises. Some questions on the basis of good and evil, which he could not understand at all.
Bored beyond relief, the adolescent was trying out one of those meditation exercises when Jase poked his head into his small room. “Ramon, Kash wants the Nightblade delivered to him in twenty minutes at the harbor.” The contempt Jase felt for Kash was obvious, but both of them knew there was nothing Kash nor Ramon could do.
“Okay, Jase.” Ramon opened his eyes, feeling refreshed after the meditation. The instructions had said that the exercises were useful in driving away fatigue and some bullshit about ‘centering the soul’. Hmmm… that mumbo jumbo really worked. He reached for his prized Red Sox cap, plopped it on his head, and left his room for the garage.
Grabbing a set of forged keys off the rack, Ramon hopped into the Nightblade, and drove out of the garage. He whistled as he drove, not suspecting that his life would soon be changed forever.

9.00 pm
“You idiots!” Nolan screamed angrily at his men. “Delacroix is already on the road and you’re all still here napping!” A computer screen set to one side of the room showed Delacroix’s Nightblade cruising towards the harbor.
Around Nolan was chaos as his terrified men scrambled for their weapons. And the weapons they were using weren’t any old weapons either. It was mostly B13 tech, plasma cannons and antimatter blasters that seem lifted out from a science fiction movie.
The high technology wasn’t limited to their weapons. Lex Luthor had provided Intergang with several top line vehicles and motorcycles upgraded, though not with B13 tech, all for the express purpose of killing one Phillip Delacroix.
Nolan, not for the first time, wondered if one man justified such overwhelming firepower to kill. He shrugged to himself, then got into one of the open air jeeps. His men weren’t going to complain at Luthor’s largesse, and neither was he. But they had to get their man, and time was running short. If Delacroix managed to get back to a secure location, they would have to wait another few days before another opportunity like this occurred again.
Nolan suppressed the urge to shoot the gang member on watch. He had fallen asleep when he should have been watching the tracer planted on the Nightblade, and informing the group once it started moving. Thankfully, they still had a chance, though Nolan had no idea what Delacroix was doing, heading towards the harbor.
At a signal from Nolan, they moved out from their holding area, a line of 4 jeeps and 8 motorcycles, all armed to the teeth, to hunt down the Nightblade roaming the city.

Wonder Woman flew over the city, heading towards a particular hive of villainy which the police’s informants had suggested might be a good place to go searching first.
The first was a gambling den. She did not bother to knock on the front door, and simply smashed through, sending wooden splinters flying away from the door.
Four men attacked her almost immediately, but she lashed out with her fists, punching them into the walls of the room. They did not get up again.
A whirring sound alerted the Amazon to a massive robot charging at her from a hidden position in the building. It bulldozed its way towards her, various weapon ports blazing a hail of metal at her.
Her bracelets flashed as she deflected the storm of bullets, her stance firm and confident. She stood her ground as the robot advanced on her, before moving quickly to one side during the tiniest of breaks between the robot’s firing.
Wonder Woman punched her hands onto the ground, and pulled up the floor to act as cover against the robot’s gunfire. She focused her divine-granted powers and moved forward, battering her body against the robot, knocking it to the ground, its mechanical limbs flailing helplessly.
Before she could react, several metal tentacles erupted from the robot’s body. Diana batted away the first few tentacles with one hand, then used her tiara in her other hand to sever the next set of tentacles. The severed tentacles bled fluid, fluid that splattered onto her. She landed several powerful punches into the robot’s chest, exposing the vulnerable innards.
Just when her hands reached into the robot, it sent a massive electrical discharge through its chest, down to the conductive liquid. And to Wonder Woman’s hands.
Diana shrieked in agony as her nerves ignited with pain. She managed to stumble away, but the damage was done. The robot seemed to sense her distress, and ponderously regained its footing.
Wonder Woman pushed past her pain and threw her tiara at the exposed chest area. Without any protection for the area, the golden tiara simply cut through the circuitry. The robot fell silent like a marionette with its strings cut.
Diana stayed on her knees for a moment, winded by the fight. Anger sparked anew in her as she saw several men try to sneak away. She got to her feet and flew in front of them. Her golden lasso gleamed as she said, “Going somewhere?”
Moments later, she was flying through the city skies again, towards the warehouse they said Kash Galucci had stashed Vanessa. The operators of the gambling den had told her what they knew. However, she knew very well that what they knew to be the truth might not actually be the truth. Furthermore, from the battle with the robot, she suspected that Kash had been prepared for her. There could be more powerful foes lying in wait for her.
It was not a comforting thought.
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The Games that Gods Play