SNOWBIRD

 

SNOWBIRD

Real Name: Narya

First Appearance: The Uncanny X-Men (Vol. 1) #120, April 1979

Powers: Snowbird is a demi-goddess, born of a mortal man and Nelvanna, Goddess of the Northern Lights. A changeling at birth, Narya was mystically bound to the lands of Canada by Shaman in order to tie her to our dimensional plane. She has three standard appearances: A fully human form with no special powers, her "true fires" which represent her goddess state, and her regular form, a transitional body that appears only slightly inhuman with opaque eyes. In this state she has superhuman strength, endurance, reaction time, and resistance to injury. She is able to fly, possesses an incredibly long lifespan, can produce a healing energy which repairs her clothing and regenerates her wounds, and also has certain extra-sensory powers. Snowbird is retrocognitive, able to scan psychic residue to reverse time in her mind's eye, watching the recent events of her surroundings rewind and play back before her eyes.

Created to be her people's champion against their enemies, the Great Beasts, Snowbird is able to sense the presence of great mystical evil, and a psychosomatic feeling of "cold". This power also allows her to sense other sources of evil or magic separately from one another. As a "goddess", she can also detect the prayers of her pantheon's worshipers, those few that remain in modern times. As a result, she instinctively knows when Shaman has invoked the name of the Great Spirit, something he only does in times of peril. In times of great need, Narya can also mentally compel others to aid her in battle with the Great Beasts -- they retain full awareness of their actions, but cannot avoid the compulsion to do as she asks.

Finally, Snowbird is a shape-changer, able to assume the physical appearance of any animal that is native to the Canadian north, where she was born and first bonded to this realm. Among the animals she has become are bears, foxes, wolverines, and owls, all of which are represented with white fur, feathers, skin, etc. She has even transformed into Sasquatch since the amalgam being of Walter Langkowski and Tanaraq was technically "born" at Walter's northern research station. She increases her physical mass when becoming a creature larger than herself, but also retains her full mass without shrinking when morphing into an animal that's normally smaller than she is. Once, Snowbird turned into a swarm of insects, but presumably that was only possible because of the unique hive mind those creatures share, and she cannot normally split herself off into multiple animals. Snowbird is truly bound to Canada and originally would suffer considerably if she left its borders. After choosing to marry a mortal man, however, Narya's people cast her out and removed her immortality. As a side effect, she could now leave at any time, and her shape-changing abilities were no longer limited to animals of Canada: She can now change into any albino animal in the world.