MOONSTONE

 

MOONSTONE

Real Name: Karla Sofen

First Appearance: Captain America (Vol. 1) #192, December 1975 (As Karla Sofen); The Incredible Hulk (Vol. 1) #228, October 1978 (Moonstone)

Powers: Karla Sofen was a doctor with a lunar gem infused to her life force. The gem was a shard taken from the Lifetree gem that represented the principle of gravity. It has given her Class 10 strength, superhuman endurance, reflexes, invulnerability, and the ability to fly at supersonic speeds. She can also manipulate light for different effects, such as a blinding flash or coherent beams of energy. Moonstone can manipulate her own molecules to become intangible, passing through solid objects and becoming untouchable to physical attacks. Her costume appears or disappears at her command, displacing whatever else she is wearing at the time. When posing under the heroic identity of Meteorite, Karla represented her powers to the public in a different way. She described her blasts as "plasma bursts" and completely refrained from using her phasing powers. She also caused her costume to constantly morph and flow between a series of similar designs, and manipulated her light power so that it built in intensity as a glow from her abdomen, a fake power signature to disguise herself. Once the Thunderbolts' ruse was revealed, she shifted to a stable costume, discarding the light effect, and started using her phasing powers again. She did continue to make use of her morphing costume occasionally, though, and could form it into any set of clothing she could visualize.

The lifestone in her body began to malfunction, and her powers expanded to a certain degree: She was now capable of making objects become intangible from a distance, and could even cause multiple people and objects to each shift into a different state of phase, making them all incapable of coming into contact with each other or anything else. Also, she was now capable of surviving in the vacuum of space before. Later, she absorbed a second lifestone into herself, one identical to her first one. This exponentially increased all her existing powers, and gave her a number of new gravity-based powers. She could now render herself and other objects invisible by warping light waves around them, and could generate localized gravity wells to immobilize people and objects in mid-air. By manipulating the pull of gravity on an object, she could make it fly off at speeds of nearly 1,000 mph. Using this power in conjunction with her intangibility allowed Moonstone to almost instantaneously displace herself or other people across the surface of a planet, simulating teleportation. She later learned how to create actual teleportation by opening up folded space rifts, using gravitational distortion to connect to distant points in space. After time spent in a coma when separated from the moonstones, Karla was reawakened with a much depleted level of power. Her abilities are apparently back to their original levels at this point.

Dr. Karla Sofen holds a doctorate of medicine with a specialty in psychiatry. Dr. Sofen is an above-normal intellect with extensive knowledge of psychology and psychiatry.