MEGGAN

 

MEGGAN

Real Name: Meggan Puceanu-Braddock

First Appearance: Mighty World of Marvel (Vol. 2) #7, December 1983

Powers: Rumors to the contrary, Meggan is not a fairie. She is actually a mutant whose power makes her an elemental chameleon, her nature allowing her to affect her environment and in turn be affected by it. This is based on the fact that Meggan draws power and sustenance from any living bio-sphere: The stronger the natural energies of any given world, the more power Meggan can call upon. Lands where the inhabitants are in tune with the natural order of things and claim strong magical ties feed her energy, while overly industrialized and polluted areas are like a corrosive to her body. It seems unlikely that she would be capable of surviving in outer space. Because of her power, Meggan is unnaturally susceptible to influence from outside sources, as it is an inherent aspect of her being to be affected by her surroundings. If left unchecked, she will adapt her body and mind to anything prominent in her area: She may accidentally adopt the appearance of a bat or dolphin by being near such a creature, assume the ethnic features of a certain type of person she is around (even Nightcrawler's elfin appearance), or change to match the feelings or expectations of others. When surrounded by aroused men, she responded by adapting her mannerisms and appearance into more of a living pin-up girl to fit their desires; when influenced by the ambient evil of Inferno, she quickly became evil as well, in both form and deed; even her own emotions affect her, as Meggan becomes more or less attractive based on her own self-image. After learning to control her powers, though, Meggan became less reactive and more assertive about her appearance. Now, she could consciously fight off outside influences on her mind or form: she could negate Jamie Braddock's reality-warping effect on her body, or hold back the transmutation effect of Alchemy's touch for a time. In addition, her adaptability makes her resistant to high or low temperature extremes, and capable of intuitively understanding other languages, whether they be human, fairie, or whatever.

Actively speaking, Meggan is capable of perceiving what is known as the Alshra, a spirit plane which makes the living energy of a world and its inhabitants visible. By drawing upon this energy, Meggan can increase her physical strength and durability, reaching at least Class 80-90 levels. At first she would physically expand in size and muscle mass while doing so, but later learned to augment herself without changing her appearance. Meggan can also rechannel the energy she draws upon to fly and fire beams of psionic force from her hands. She can consciously access the empathic and morphing aspects of her power as well. Meggan is able to alter her clothing and physical features at will, mimicking the appearance of another person or creating new "looks" all her own. She can expand herself, growing fatter and wider upon command. Meggan can also assume animalistic traits at will, even if a given animal isn't around: She has adapted humanoid wolf, lion, bat, dolphin, mole, and rabbit traits in the past. As an elemental, she is now able to sense the flow of electricity around her and different electromagnetic phenomena by the way they alter natural energy patterns around her. She can ignite flames at will and manipulate fire created by her own hands or other sources, even dousing it if she chooses. Meggan is able to summon high velocity winds, disrupt force fields of an electromagnetic nature, manipulate lava so that it flows as she wishes, warping seismic fields to open up massive sinkholes that swallow buildings, etc.

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.

CAPTAIN BRITAIN

 

CAPTAIN BRITAIN

Real Name: Brian Braddock

First Appearance: Captain Britain (Vol. 1) #1, October 1976 (First UK); Marvel Team-Up (Vol. 1) #65, January 1978 (First US)

Powers: Originally a baseline human, Brian Braddock was a scientist working at a research lab when it was attacked by criminals. Fleeing them on his motorcycle, Brian went off the side of the road and crashed. As he lay dying, Brian was visited by Merlyn and his daughter Roma, who offered to save his life and make him their champion. Brian was given a choice between two talismans to serve as his symbol: The Sword of Might and the Amulet of Right. Brian chose the latter, and was transformed into Captain Britain. He normally possessed no superhuman powers, until he touched the amulet on his neck and mystically summoned his costume and staff. Then he would possess superhuman strength (no more than Class 1 at first), speed, agility, endurance, and reflexes, along with instinctive fighting prowess. His original quarterstaff fit snugly on his back in a collapsed state, and had three buttons built into the handle. The first caused the staff to extend to its full length for combat usage. The second button generated an invisible force field over his body, protecting him from physical impact, explosions, flames, and energy blasts (but not gas, apparently). The force field could be projected over him only when he was touching the staff somehow, but could be produced when the staff was in its collapsed state on his back, and not in his hands. The third button sent a tingling vibration through his body, resulting in a powerful explosion striking whatever the staff was pointed at that moment. Later, after once more meeting Merlyn and Roma, Captain Britain's staff was replaced by a star-sceptre, composed of mystical circuitry. Instead of being a normal telescopic pole, the sceptre magically lengthened itself whenever Brian started using it for close combat. It has no more blasting-power, and the force field was redesigned as a type of energy barrier projected from the tip of the sceptre into mid-air, creating a simple shield of different sizes for protection in one direction. The main new feature, though, was the power of flight -- by holding the sceptre, Brian could now fly at over 100 mph for up to 15 minutes at a time. All these powers were summoned by a mystical link between the amulet and the sceptre; no one could fly or form force fields just by touching the sceptre and willing it except Brian. It has also been said that the sceptre provided Captain Britain with a constant supply of mystical energy, giving him literally inexhaustible stamina so long as he held the weapon.

Later in his career, Brian's sceptre was disassembled by Merlyn and its mystical circuitry was incorporated into a new Captain Britain costume, costing him use of a personal weapon but making his powers much closer to him. This reverted his force field to a personal body shield, like it had been with the quarterstaff. Shortly thereafter, though, Brian first encountered Saturnyne and was devolved, then re-evolved using a "life-enhancing fluid." He began manipulating his costume's personal force field more readily at this point, such as expanding it outwards to protect other people as well, or projecting it as a hand of energy to move or manipulate objects. An encounter with the Fury, however, left Captain Britain very much dead. Merlyn and Roma rebuilt Brian's body from the inside-out on both physical and spiritual levels, and in the process incorporated his powers into him as natural abilities. Brian now possessed considerable superhuman strength, enhanced endurance and reflexes, the power of flight, and natural invulnerability even without the suit. He was also given "para-senses" which were never truly expanded upon, thought at one point he was able to perceive illusory images. During this time, his strength level increased dramatically as he began benching in the Class 90-95 range. Also, because of the nature of the Omniversal energy matrix, its energies (and therefore Brian's inherent powers) would fade beyond the borders of the United Kingdom. This is where the suit was still useful: It acted as an antenna, broadcasting the matrix's energy to Brian if he was elsewhere in the world. The suit could still generate its force field, but Merlyn had greatly limited it when he rebuilt Brian and the suit. The field mostly just acted as an extension of his invulnerability now, and could not be manipulated in other ways.

This basically set the stage for Brian's "classic", more well-known powers and remained that way for years. After taking the costume of Captain Marshal during the events of the Cross-Time Caper, Brian eventually found that suit to be operating on a slightly different wavelength, which caused his powers to become unbalanced and unreliable for a time. Roma ultimately fixed the problem. After being cast adrift into the timestream, Brian bounced from the beginning of the time to the end and back for months until he was eventually grounded back in the present. This changed him personally, and he adopted the identity of Britanic. It may also have changed him physiologically: Britanic was seen operating for extended periods of time in the United States, Genosha, and continental Europe without wearing his Captain Britain suit and without showing any marked loss to his powers. Finally, his trip through the timestream had caused Brian to literally experience the entire span of history. This knowledge could not be fully contained in his mind, but occasionally snippets of his journey came to him as "flash-forwards", visions of the future or possible futures. As he resettled into the timestream, the flash-forwards ultimately stopped occurring. Brian eventually dropped the Britanic identity in favor of returning to being Captain Britain. He reprised his old costume and tinkered with the force field a bit, reactivating its ability to alter its shape. He could now once again expand the force field's size, or lash out with it as a strike of pure energy. Brian lost his powers for an extended period of time after a clash with the Crimson Dawn, but when he was named ruler of Otherworld, Brian's power was potentially at cosmic levels, to a scale that was never fully explored. The House of M effect disconnected him from Otherworld, though, and his powers were apparently back to what they were before as "classic" Captain Britain. Brian was killed during the Skrull invasion, and resurrected by Merlin as a spiritual representation of the British people. Because of this, Brian's power levels are inherently variable. His strength, endurance, flight speed and invulnerability fluctuate with his emotional state, particularly his self-confidence and assuredness. His sister, Betsy, has recently undertaken the mantle and costume of Captain Britain while Brian is now Captain Avalon.

Brian Braddock holds a Ph.D. in physics and is a brilliant scientist with expertise in physics and engineering.