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"Jade, I think I have a problem..." Sighed Barbara Ann Minerva, also known as the supervillainess Cheetah.
"You think you have a problem?" Grumbled Jade Nguyen, also known as the supervillainess Cheshire.
"I'm one of the world's most wanted assassins, and I currently have a member of the Justice League sleeping on my couch!" Jade groaned while rolling her eyes in exasperation.
As absurd as the complaint might sound… it was technically correct.
Protruding from a pocket of Barbara's black coat was a small onyx rectangle with the words "Justice League" written on it in a stylized white font.
"First you roped me into a crazy scheme to rob the Watchtower, then you springboarded off of that into making me watch you fight a god. After that, you couldn't even go two entire months before getting pulled into some weird tournament Darkseid was hosting. Is it too much to ask that you just try and live a normal life for five minutes?" Cheshire sighed despondently.
While both of them were technically supervillainesses, Jade was really more of an extremely adept mercenary who only qualified for the title by virtue of how many superheroes she'd ended up fighting in the process of completing her contracts. Barbara, on the other hand, checked all the boxes. She had superpowers, she was the capital N "Nemesis" of one of the three most important members of the Justice League, she'd been a founding member of the Legion of Doom, and she'd even supposedly once gone back in time to bomb Pearl Harbor.
Jade, being a woman of Vietnamese descent, had rather strong opinions on that last one, though Barbara insisted that it didn't really count since it had been part of a scheme to tilt the nature of reality itself away from the concept of "Justice" and towards that of "Doom." Thus, the intended alterations to the timeline should have been far more dramatic than something as simple as possibly allowing Imperial Japan to win World War 2. Jade wasn't quite sure that qualified as an excuse… but Cheshire also wasn't quite sure the entire story wasn't just her fellow villainess pulling Jade's leg.
That was the danger of being associated with Barbara Ann Minerva: when big things happened, Cheshire could just keep her head down, and they would typically pass her by, but big things noticed Cheetah.
In this case, as a result of the most recent "big thing" to have hit the world (for extremely complicated reasons that Jade did not want to try and wrap her head around), a bunch of supervillains were being offered the chance to join the Justice League, and as Cheshire's luck would have it, Barbara was one of them.
"It was bad enough when I already had one member of the League dropping in every so often..." Jade further groused.
Barbara just looked at her in confusion for a few moments.
"You mean your daughter?" Cheetah eventually probed.
"I said what I said." Cheshire snapped back.
She was inordinately fond of Lian Harper, and proud of the fact that Cheshire Cat would doubtlessly grow up to be a better person than her mother… but that didn't make Jade's words about Lian's status as a member of the Justice League any less true!
The two women just looked at each other for an extended period of time, each remaining silent.
"So what is your problem?" Jade eventually relented, keenly aware that ever since the very first time they'd worked together, sooner or later Cheetah's problems tended to wind up becoming Cheshire's problems, so at least if she involved herself in them intentionally, Jade could know ahead of time what fresh hell she was about to experience.
"After the tournament, all the other villains involved claim to have had one of those Ebenezer Scrooge-style grand visions of how they needed to mend their wicked ways and how the path they were currently on would only lead to their own self-destruction. Everyone except me." Barbara growled, her fur standing on end, while her tail lashed back and forth furiously.
Cheshire didn't bother directly asking, "What did you get?" She could tell from the look in Cheetah's eyes that if Jade remained silent long enough, the feline minor goddess would tell her without any requiring direct prompting.
"All I got was a rendition of 'Would you Fall in Love With me Again' from EPIC. Which, honestly, makes me worried that whatever powers are at play think that I'm such a lost cause they didn't even bother trying, so my own brain had to fill the proverbial dead air with something I was familiar with instead." Barbara lamented.
"Then why haven't you thrown that Justice League membership card in the trash?" Jade didn't "play the game" at Barbara's level and was honestly all the happier for it, but she could still see how being intentionally left out might get on a girl's nerves.
"Because I'm done letting divine beings tell me what I can and can't do. I'm a goddess myself now, and unlike most of them, I had to earn my seat at that table. F**k the Greek gods if they think I'm nothing but a monster, f**k Urzkartaga for thinking I was nothing but his bride, and f**k whatever Yahweh-esque 'powers that be' evidently decided that Barbara Ann Minerva couldn't possibly have a path to redemption!" Cheetah insisted, slapping her tail against the floor at each iteration of the expletive.
"You know, I don't think I've ever heard someone claim 'spite' was their motivation to try and be a better person before." To her surprise, Jade found herself smiling, just a little.
"By the way, the Super-Villain Amnesty Pilot Program isn't only open to people who were part of the tournament..." Barbara abruptly offered as she gazed a bit too intently at her partner in crime for Cheshire's liking.
"You'd better not be suggesting what I think you're suggesting." Muttered Cheshire as she even went so far as to turn her back on her fellow supervillainess for emphasis.
Cheetah didn't reply with words, only the slow rhythmic "whap, whap, whap" of her tail continuing to strike the floor every so often.
For someone with super speed, Barbara proved to be surprisingly patient, and Jade ended up caving first.
"Why would you ever expect something like that to appeal to someone like me? You may be living this weird grand mythological life, but I just kill people for money, always have, always will." Cheshire insisted.
"You know that Lex Luthor is still rich, right? What the League is offering, it's not just 'don't go to jail'; it's bigger than that. How would you like to never again have to worry about bouncing around your finances through a dozen different Swiss bank accounts and cryptocurrencies with carefully limited withdrawals to avoid getting every government agency from here to the Vatican on your ass?
"Yeah, you can keep killing people for a million bucks or so a pop, but there's a big difference between gold Krugerrands or blood diamonds in a vault somewhere that could theoretically be seized by Interpol, and the stuff in a normal hum drum every day bank account that you can access through a checkbook or credit card. If you signed up for the S.V.A.P.P., every single cent of your dirty money, power-washed clean in an instant." The most dangerous thing about Barbara Ann Minerva (at least when it came to Jade Nguyen) was that the two had worked together so frequently that Cheetah knew exactly how Cheshire thought.
"You better not be doing this just because it's going to give you some sort of reward for recruiting one of your fellow supervillains," Cheshire warned her couch's occupant.
"Jade, it's a superhero team, not an MLM. I'm doing this because when there was no one else whom I felt capable of trusting… I could still trust you. After all the work you did to help me deal with Urzkartaga, this is the least I can do to repay the favor." Cheetah promised her host.
"If the Justice League is insisting on being so… nice about it, do they have some kind of 'free trial offer' to let a girl give their new supervillain redemption service a test drive without having to commit one way or the other?" Jade reluctantly inquired.
"For you, I can probably arrange something. I mean, what are they gonna do, complain that letting you on board the Watchtower could compromise the place's security?" Barbara snickered.
Cheshire eagerly joined in a moment later.
XXX XXX XXX
Journeying to the Justice League's orbital headquarters was an almost depressingly blasé experience for Jade, especially compared to the complicated scheme that she and Barbara had needed to enact to facilitate their prior visit.
This time around, they just went to an out-of-the-way spot in the middle of the desert where they got picked up by a spaceship piloted by the Watchtower's civilian staff, who were almost comically nonplussed about the prospect of spending time in the company of two women who had recently pulled off history's most successful smash-and-grab of their current place of employment.
Even once she actually got on board the Watchtower, the security wasn't anywhere near as rigorous as she would have expected...
"My scanners are familiar with over a thousand different poisons; but whatever you've got on your nails is currently registering as 'Unknown'." Cyborg declared while cautiously studying Cheshire.
"Cheetah already warned me about the rules: no using my new mixture that makes people explode, no using anything derived from box jellyfish, and no using anything derived from platypuses. All I'm armed with at the moment is 'A Brief History of Time'." Jade insisted, holding up her fingernails, their special coating glinting in the Watchtower's seemingly ever-present white lights.
"Which does what exactly?" Cyborg pressed.
"It's designed to..." Cheshire paused for a moment, uncertain of how best to phrase the effects, only to have Barbara abruptly jump in.
"You're actually allowed to just call it the 'Stephen Hawking poison'; nobody will get upset," Cheetah promised.
"Huh." Jade reflected, surprised that something so theoretically mocking of the famously disabled physics professor was openly acceptable to the world's foremost superhero team.
"Batman once boasted about how he uploaded Stephen Hawking's physical characteristics into Prometheus' helmet before punching his lights out. It's an acceptable metric." Barbara clarified with a malicious smile.
Cyborg did not protest; indeed, he rather pointedly turned his head to the side slightly, leaving his metallic chrome cheek facing the two supervillainesses so that it would be impossible for them to make out his expression.
XXX XXX XXX
The last time that Jade Nguyen had visited the Watchtower, she'd been far too busy helping steal some of the most priceless and powerful magical artifacts to find out what its mess hall was like.
Shockingly good turned out to be the answer.
Because as a provisional member of the Justice League, she now was free to just drop in, and not only was food available, but she wasn't going to be charged for it! Anyone who wasn't at least mildly pleased by the prospect of a steady supply of completely free, high-quality meals had way too much money on their hands. Indeed, the fact that Jade could still appreciate such mundane pleasures was one of her ways of knowing that she probably wasn't quite rich enough yet to retire from her life of crime.
An unexpected side benefit was that since she and Cheetah were eating together, they were extremely unlikely to be accosted by any well-intentioned actual superheroes. At worst, the two might end up being approached by one of their fellow criminals taking advantage of the S.V.A.P.P., but surely there was no costumed crime fighter who was going to stick their head in the proverbial lion's mouth by deciding to interrupt Cheetah and Cheshire's meal...
Or so Jade had thought.
"It's nice to see you eating salads again." With an almost unnervingly warm smile, Wonder Woman sat down at the table opposite a woman who had once tried to stab her in the back with a poisoned knife, and another whose personal offenses against the Amazon Princess were so numerous that they were practically beyond recounting.
Cheetah's orange eyes briefly glanced down at her meal, which did indeed seem at odds with her feline form.
"My stomach hasn't been bothering me the way it used to." The spotted supervillainess responded with a nonchalant shrug of her shoulders.
Jade was sorely tempted to shoot Barbara a look suggesting that the two of them should take their food somewhere else; anywhere would be better than this, even if it meant sitting next to Roy!
Because at the moment Wonder Woman didn't know that Barbara Ann Minerva had decided to take advantage of her newly gained ability to change back into a shape resembling her pre-Cheetah form to create a secret identity for herself as Dr. Elizabeth Juno, seemingly (as far as Jade could tell) for the sole purpose of hanging around with the Amazon Princess. Thus, Barbara deciding to "double dip" on spending time with Wonder Woman felt like a surefire way to have that particular scheme blow up in her face.
"I'm happy for you. It's easy for people to only focus on the grand tragedies, but even small matters can still make someone's life harder and are deserving of compassion." The Amazon Princess continued to confusingly commiserate with the woman who had routinely done her best to rip out the heroine's throat.
"Like how it took you months to stop getting migraines if you spent too long under fluorescent lights?" Cheetah answered with something that looked absurdly like a genuine smile on her face.
Wonder Woman laughed.
Barbara's body twitched in a way that looked like it could very much have been the start of… well, the start of something; Jade just wasn't quite sure what.
What she was sure of was that Wonder Woman and Cheetah somehow knew more about each other than she did about Roy Harper, and she'd had both sex and a child with Arsenal!
"Yes, exactly like that. I'm sorry that we haven't had time to talk yet, as one of the main proponents of the S.V.A.P.P. I've had my hands full both overseeing its implementation and defending it from critics." The Amazon Princess apologized.
"There's a reason why only an absolute idiot would have challenged Lex Luthor for leadership of the Legion of Doom; trying to get that many supervillains following orders is the equivalent of herding cats. Right now you're having to deal with that, except they can't even blow off steam by killing random people..." Cheetah accepted the apology.
Jade could have been stuck in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and felt less adrift.
"On the topic of ending people's lives, I'm glad that you didn't kill anyone since we parted ways." The Amazon Princess added, as if this was a perfectly normal conversation topic.
"How do you know that?" Barbara practically hissed the words, her tail starting to lash wildly.
"There haven't been any victims whose cause of death roughly matched 'mauled to death by an oversized cat' lately." Wonder Woman insisted, perversely willing to engage the supervillainess in open debate rather than simply calling Cheetah out for how absurd the conversation was becoming.
"That doesn't tell you anything; I could have been killing people and then eating them! Plenty of people have gone missing since we settled things with Sovereign!" Jade tried to remember if she'd ever seen anyone argue the case for their own depravity as vociferously as Barbara Ann Minerva.
"I checked with Batman; there haven't been statistically more than usual. What there have been is a rash of morticians getting fired after buying jet skis." The Amazon Princess noted with barely concealed amusement.
"There could be a million different explanations for that!" Cheetah vainly protested before going back to eating her salad.
"Seeing you like this… there are no words to describe how deeply I wish it had worked the first time." An unexpected look of pain spread across Wonder Woman's face, and she turned away from the feline supervillainess.
"It did work. I'm just a bad person who loves having superpowers; why else would I have been willing to do this to myself all over again?" Barbara uttered those words; in that tone, it came precariously close to sounding like an apology of her own.
Rather than accepting it, the Amazon Princess stared straight into Barbara's eye, the heroine's expression fierce enough that Jade began to start rapidly reviewing the various "exit strategies" she'd concocted upon first entering the mess hall.
If that wasn't bad enough on its own, next Wonder Woman dropped her Lasso of Truth on the table, the magical artifact glowing with a golden light that made Cheshire's eyes widen with apprehension.
"What are you…?" Cheetah began to protest.
"Put it on, then say that to me. Tell me you couldn't stand being an ordinary human again." The Amazon Princess commanded.
Whatever unsteady detente had existed between them was gone; now the air was filled with the tension of a pair of gunslingers staring one another down while patting their (temporarily) holstered weapons, except rather than mundane firearms, the prospective combatants were packing divine superpowers.
Why do you two have to be like this? And why do I have to keep getting drawn into it?
Then suddenly an alarm sounded. Cheshire had no idea what it meant, but so long as it didn't presage Jade being exposed to the vacuum of space, it was probably a net improvement on her current situation.
"So much for a nice relaxing meal. I'm sorry, Barbara, we'll have to try talking this out another time." Wonder Woman began to excuse herself.
Except Cheetah couldn't leave well enough alone, and insisted on also standing up.
"What, you think I'm just going to miss out on a chance to show the entire Justice League that I'm every bit as strong and as fast as you? Just tell me, whose ass are we about to kick?" The feline supervillainess scoffed with a predatory bearing of her fangs.
Wonder Woman tilted her head to the side slightly. Jade wasn't sure if it was telepathic messages, superpowered earpieces, or who knew what else, but she was obviously privy to information that neither Cheetah nor Cheshire was aware of at the moment.
"I'm not sure how well this mission would suit either of you. It involves Jason Woodrue trying to terraform an entire village for the sake of what he views as 'nature'." The Amazon Princess explained apologetically.
"Why in the name of Tartarus shouldn't I come? You think I'm afraid of a guy who once thought it was the height of brilliance to use his power over plant life to flood Gotham's streets with the world's cheapest and most potent strain of marijuana?" Cheetah snickered.
"It's a village in Bwunda." The Amazon Princess clarified.
Both supervillainesses rocked back on their heels slightly in response to that bit of news.
Jade by no means knew everything about the numerous wrong turns Barbara Ann Minerva's life had taken that led her to her current supervillainess lifestyle, but she knew enough to be aware that one of the biggest had been when the archeologist encountered a now-deceased god by the name of Urzkartaga in the nation of Bwunda.
"Look, it's nice that you're trying to look out for me; you... always do that, but I don't need you to hold my paw anymore. There's nothing left there that I'm afraid of." Cheetah insisted, her tone unexpectedly laden with camaraderie once again.
"And as for you, Cheshire?" The Amazon Princess turned her eyes on Jade.
Cheshire was abruptly extremely glad that if her and Barbara's plan to infiltrate the Watchtower had required someone to cross paths with Wonder Woman, it wound up being Cheetah. Not only was the feline supervillainess far better suited to holding her own against the Amazon Princess, but by this point in the pair's... long history of interactions, which it might not be wholly inaccurate to describe as a relationship, Barbara probably had to derive at least a small degree of masochistic pleasure from being defeated by Wonder Woman; otherwise why keep fighting her?
Because the simple fact of the matter was that there was something utterly indescribable about finding yourself the focus of the Amazon Princess' attention. Even though you knew the smart move was to take the out that she'd given you, for some reason you instead insisted on saying the dumbest thing possible. As if all of a sudden you felt a disturbing and unnatural desire not to disappoint those soft, warm blue eyes...
"If you give me five minutes back in my safe house, I've got at least half a dozen different mixtures that should make Agent Orange look like Miracle-Gro. Guess now I can finally field test them without worrying about the E.P.A. joining a bunch of other three-letter agencies that already want my head on a pike." Were the words that improbably emerged from Jade Nguyen's mouth, as if there was some part of her shriveled soul that actually cared about other people.
"Why…?" The Amazon Princess was, for some strange reason, more confused by Jade's level of preparation for the task at hand than her refusing to be left out of this particular batch of harebrained dogoodery.
Cheshire simply pointed at Cheetah.
When that didn't seem to be enough of an explanation, she offered a verbal one as well.
"Up until recently, she was at the very tiptop of a plant god's shit list; it would have been reckless of me not to be experimenting with herbicide-based poisons!" Jade insisted while crossing her arms defensively.
Yes, if the deity himself had decided to show up, she doubted it would have made much of a difference, but the plant god would hopefully send plant minions first, and those her poisons might have a chance against. Cheshire had spent too much of her life figuring out how to improve her chances of survival to have missed that particular possibility.
XXX XXX XXX
Jade Nguyen breathed a heavy sigh and shook her head, amazed that it had come to this.
"I'm a big enough woman to admit when I'm wrong… and after spending a day as a member of the Justice League, I was wrong, and you were right." Cheshire offered up an apology of her own.
Lian Harper giggled with girlish delight that was only slightly more acceptable given that she was, in point of fact, a girl.
"I told you Barbara and Diana were in love with each other!" Cheshire Cat crowed with fierce delight at having won over her mother on this particular issue.
"I'm not happy about it, and I'm sure it's going to cause more problems for me down the road… but one lesson I learned growing up is that you have to accept painful truths before you can do anything about them. So yes, like you said, those two are in love with each other." Jade reflected forlornly.
"Like you and Dad?" Lian added with a taunting smile.
"Oh, no, no, no!" Jade abruptly began to backpedal.
"Listen, you're old enough to know that what exists between your father and me is fundamentally just raw animalistic passion. Meanwhile, what those two have is like the weird mushy kind of love where you actually care about each other's feelings." Cheshire insisted.
A "better" mother might have looked for less blunt language to convey that particular message, but Jade had given up hopes of being "better" before Lian was even born.
"So does that mean you don't want to talk with him about the three of us going on a mission together now that we're all members of the Justice League?" Lian asked with a look that Cheshire was painfully certain the young superheroine had inherited from her mother.
"What part of 'raw animal passion' did you not understand? It's bad enough that I had to watch Wonder Woman and Cheetah fight the Floronic Man, and luckily they were moving so fast that I honestly didn't see that much of it. You do not want to be present for what might happen if Arsenal and I went on a mission together." Jade insisted, glowering at her daughter.
Cheshire was fairly sure she'd already ruined Lian's life in at least half a dozen different ways, but a woman to draw the line somewhere!
The End.
AN: This fic exists because I can't stand the fact that even though Barbara's character arc has been trending in increasingly anti-heroic directions ever since "Feral part 2" (Wonder Woman Volume 5 issue 792), Mark Waid (the current writer of Justice League Unlimited) refuses to do ANYTHING with Barbara Ann Minerva besides including her in a pair of group shots in issue 17 (and since she was a member of the King Omega tournament, it would border on a continuity error if she wasn't present). He hasn't even shown us if she accepted an offer to join the Justice League, despite the fact that Diana is one of the main proponents of the S.V.A.P.P. and Barbara is unquestionably the first supervillain who Wonder Woman would reach out to with an offer of official amnesty for their past crimes.
Batman: Diana, are you trying to alter the entire balance of power between superheroes and supervillains just so that it's easier for you and Dr. Minerva to spend time together?
Diana: Bruce, I'm surprised you could ask me such a question; it would be crazy if I did something like that!
Batman: That wasn't an answer.
(Diana turns around and walks away)
Batman: (Shouting after her) THAT ISN'T AN ANSWER EITHER!
Diana: (Over her shoulder nonchalantly) Fine, since I respect you as a friend, I can honestly say I'm not doing it just to spend more time with Barbara...
Batman's thoughts: That "just" is doing more heavy lifting than Atlas.
Thus, I decided that if DC wouldn't explore that particular possibility, I'd just have to do it myself!
Cheetah going back in time to bomb Pearl Harbor happens in Justice League (2018) issue 31; I will take no further questions on the matter.
"Would you Fall in Love with me Again" is the last song in EPIC (a musical retelling of the Odyssey) and is about Odysseus confessing his worries that after all the horrible things he's done since leaving to take part in the Trojan War, he could never expect his wife Penelope to still love him. Penelope promptly proceeds to crash her husband's self-pity party and prove to Odysseus that he very much is still the same boy she first met under an olive tree, and all she really cares about is that after twenty years waiting, the two are finally reunited.
MLM stands for "Multi-Level Marketing"; they're, by and large, pyramid schemes by another name. Here's a John Oliver episode to watch if you want to learn more... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6MwGeOm8iI
Box jellyfish venom is incredibly deadly to the point that in "Catwoman: Hunted," when Cheshire claims she laced her weapon with jellyfish toxin, it's probably from that particular type of jellyfish. Platypus venom is not deadly, but it is extremely painful and extremely long-lasting; read about it yourself if you don't believe me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus_venom.
Batman boasting about uploading Stephen Hawking's combat skills into Prometheus happened before the New 52 reboot, but much like Cheetah betraying Cheshire and Poison Ivy to help Diana (see my story "Love in Paradise" if you haven't already), I want it to still be canon so incredibly badly…
Morticians being fired after buying jet skis is a reference to Cheetah and Cheshire Rob the Justice League Issue 1, where we're introduced to Barbara via her bribing a mortician so that she can eat a corpse in their morgue as a way of dealing with her cannibalistic curse rather than through more "obvious" means (indeed, directly afterwards, even though she starts getting hungry again almost instantly when some random guy bumps into her late at night, she refuses to harm him because it would be giving Urzkartaga what he wants). Basically, by following the money/missing corpses, Diana could tell that Barbara was trying to deal with her curse in a more moral fashion after they fought Sovereign together. The bit about "buying jet skis" is my own addition; ever since it showed up in a Tim Dorsey novel, I love using it as shorthand for what a foolish person does when they're given a large sum of illicit money.
The unspoken events that Barbara and Diana start arguing about during their meal together are those that took place during Wonder Woman Volume 5's (2016) story arcs "The Lies" and "The Truth" (basically all the odd-numbered issues from 1 to 23) by Greg Rucka; it involved Barbara and Diana working together to seemingly kill Urzkartaga, which allowed Barbara to revert to being an ordinary archeologist much to her joy and relief.
But then, just like the last time things seemed to be going well in Barbara Ann Minerva's life… Veronica Cale happened
Now, later on under a different author, Barbara would insist that this was "her choice, her course"
But those words are the caption over a panel not of Barbara embracing her inner monster/reveling in her power as Cheetah, but of her growling impotently at a smug Veronica Cale. Thus, to me it makes far more sense to assume this should be taken as Barbara lying about her past rather than believing she's correctly describing what took place.
Rather tellingly, Barbara has NEVER (to the best of my knowledge) directly admitted that she became Cheetah again because she wanted to save her friends' lives. Diana, by this point, has probably put enough pieces of that particular puzzle together (just talking with Steve and Etta about how Cale's men had them dead to rights but suddenly backed off for no discernible reason would be a pretty damn big clue) that she suspects Dr. Minerva didn't decide to become Cheetah again for purely selfish reasons, and so she isn't going to let Barbara put herself down for something that she was actually the victim of.
In Diana's eyes, Barbara already spent way too long blaming herself for not being "faithful" to Urzkartaga (see this scene from Volume 5 Issue 3 https://imgur.com/a/p7hQ8OF where Wonder Woman explicitly tells Cheetah that her not being a virgin wasn't the reason Urzkartaga cursed her; it was only his excuse) for Diana to just sit back while her friend now starts haranguing herself for refusing to stand by and do nothing while Steve Trevor and Etta Candy got mowed down by a minigun.
Floronic Man/Jason Woodrue using his powers to grow Marijuana is 100% a thing that happened (once again, may not be canon anymore since it happened before New 52, but I'm not gonna let that stop me from referencing it); go read the three-part story that begins with Shadow of the Bat #56!
If you aren't familiar with it, "Agent Orange" was a herbicide and defoliant famously used by the United States in Vietnam to try and make the jungle less... jungly.
The E.P.A. is the Environmental Protection Agency, and as Cheshire suggests, they are probably not fond of supervillains who liberally use incredibly potent herbicides
EDIT: I am happy to say that as of Justice League Unlimited Issue #23 (which was published roughly a week after this fic) we now have confirmation that Barbara is indeed serving in the Justice League under the S.V.A.P.P!