PSYLOCKE

 

PSYLOCKE

Real Name: Elizabeth Braddock

First Appearance: Captain Britain (Vol. 1) #8, December 1976 (First UK); The New Mutants Annual (Vol. 1) #2, October 1986 (First US)

Powers: Elizabeth "Betsy" Braddock's mutant talents began with precognition and clairvoyance, enabling her to see into the future and become aware of events in the present that she could not visually see. She also developed as a psycho-blaster, capable of generating a devastating amount of psionic force from her brow that could cripple or kill an opponent with one burst. An encounter with the villain Slaymaster left her badly wounded and blinded after he tore out her eyes. Using her psychic powers to compensate for her disability, Betsy developed full-fledged telepathy between her accident and her first encounter with both the New Mutants and the X-Men. In the meantime, she was captured by Mojo and Spiral, who held her captive for about a year, during which they gave her bionic eyes to replace the damaged ones, and named her “Psylocke." With telepathy, she was now capable of mind reading, thought projection, mental communication, different forms of mind control and manipulation, and astral projection. She briefly manifested her precognitive/clairvoyant powers during this time, but they've since disappeared.

After passing through and emerging from the mystical portal of the Siege Perilous, Betsy's mind and body were warped and mingled with the Japanese mutant assassin Kwannon, courtesy of Spiral's Body Shoppe. She now possessed Kwannon's body, but her telepathy was reduced significantly, as her original body (now with Kwannon's mind) kept a good portion of that power. Psylocke stopped displaying most of her other previous telepathic feats, instead she had learned how to focus the sum totality of her telepathic powers into a "psychic knife", projected from the back of her hand. This blade would infuse any victim it struck with an enormous surge of telepathic energy, temporarily disabling any form of conscious thought or motion in a wave of pain and paralysis. The "psychic knife" was also useful as a focus for specific telepathy, allowing Betsy to penetrate psychic interference, barriers or blocks to probe or manipulate minds that were difficult to grasp normally. After Kwannon (aka Revanche) died of the Legacy Virus, Psylocke's full memories and telepathy returned to her in a wave of energy. She began using her power to generate a full on psychic katana sword, instead of the smaller "psychic knife".

After being critically wounded by Sabretooth, she was saved by bonding a portion of her soul to the mystical energy source called the Crimson Dawn. The Dawn added a small boost to her physical and psychic abilities, while also giving her the power of shadow teleportation. Betsy was now capable of instantaneously traveling from one place to another by entering one shadow and exiting through another some distance away. She can travel alone, carry passengers with her, or even cause other nearby shadows to become passageways, swallowing up people or objects she is not in direct contact with. After the events of the Psi-War, Betsy was forced to turn off her telepathic powers permanently in order to prevent the Shadow King from escaping his prison in her mind. In an as-yet unseen event, Psylocke and Jean Grey encountered the Shadow King on the astral plane. The end result was that Jean's telekinesis was transferred to Betsy while Psylocke's telepathy was removed and added to boost Jean's own telepathy. Betsy's psychic katana was now a focused projection of telekinetic energy with two uses: It could upset neurological activity as it passed intangibly through a person's body or act as a solid, mono-molecularly edged blade capable of slicing between atoms to cut through almost anything. Whether or not Betsy maintained her teleporting power after the switch remains unanswered.

Upon her return from the dead, Psylocke is still wielding a variation of her telekinetic powers. She has now demonstrated the additional abilities to bolster her fists with telekinetic force, dramatically amplifying the strength of her blows, and the projection of a tangible platform of telekinetic energy for transportation. She can also telekinetically bend light waves around her body to become functionally invisible. Betsy can also aid her own healing abilities by telekinetically holding her body together when she's cut or bleeding. Furthermore, her brother Jamie tightly constricted the strings that made up her essence in reality, making her a unique individual unaffected by any outside forces of manipulation. She has become completely immune to telepathic attacks and virtually invisible to psychic detection, as well as immune to reality-altering powers of any kind. After spending time with the Exiles and returning to the X-Men, Psylocke once again possesses telepathic abilities, as well as telekinetic ones. Additionally, after emerging from the immortal soul vampire Sapphire Styx, she regained her original British body. 

 

In her second tenure as the current Captain Britain, she wields the Amulet of Right that summons a costume of mystical circuitry accessing the Omniversal Energy Matrix, providing her with superhuman strength, endurance, reflexes, a personal force field, flight, and extra-dimensional transport to move between Earth and Otherworld.

Betsy Braddock is college educated and holds a bachelor's degree. A former supermodel, she is also a trained pilot. She has excellent hand-to-hand combat skills and has been trained in unarmed combat by Wolverine and Captain U.K. (Linda McQuillan). She received further training in martial arts by Matsu’o Tsurayaba’s instructors in The Hand. Her mind-merging with Kwannon resulted in gaining a portion of the latter’s ninja fighting skills, making Betsy more receptive to the Hand’s training. As a result, Psylocke is a highly skilled ninja and martial arts fighter.