BLACK QUEEN

 

BLACK QUEEN

Real Name: Selene Gallio

First Appearance: The New Mutants (Vol. 1) #9, November 1983

Powers: The Black Queen is both a sorceress and a mutant, possessing a wide range of powers and abilities not specifically attributed to either source. She possesses the powers of psychic vampirism, psychokinetic manipulation, and limited telepathy. Her psychic vampirism allows her to drain the life energy from others upon physical contact. She uses this life energy to revitalize herself, maintain her youthful form, and enhance her strength, speed, reflexes, and recuperative abilities to superhuman levels. She can either completely drain a person of their energy (leaving them as ashes or a withered husk) or absorb a portion of it, giving her some measure of mental control over her victim. When properly satiated, Selene is able to change her age at will, appearing as a small child, a young woman, or an old crone at her choosing. On one occasion, Selene demonstrated the ability to change her appearance entirely to pose as one of her victims, Magma, while making the girl take on Selene's appearance at the same time. Whether this is a spell Selene can always perform, can only use with people she has drained, or specifically just with Magma due to their allegedly common ancestry, is unknown.

She can telekinetically manipulate inanimate objects, causing them to move about under her direction seemingly coming to life or disintegrate like her victims do. She can cause giant grasping hands to reach out of the earth or stone, or cause the ground to swallow up and entomb her victims. Selene can also psionically control fire, igniting it with her mind and causing it to move and flow by her command.

She can use her telepathy to read minds and hypnotize others to do her bidding, and create telepathic illusions. She can hypnotize others into a momentary trance, rendering them insensate and immobile. She can take advantage of this opening in combat, or use her great speed to leave the area, giving the illusion that she disappeared before someone's eyes.

For a time, Selene manifested herself as a shadow-being, presumably a side effect of her mystical imprisonment under the Hellfire Club and bartered freedom. She moved about constantly surrounded by a living darkness, which could become tangible enough to grab, cover, and manipulate solid matter. Selene herself seemed to phase in and out of the shadows, with only parts of her body being substantial at a time while the rest of it was merely part of the blackness. Later, she seemed to have abandoned this new ability, and quit the Hellfire Club's grounds.

Selene's old lackey Frederick von Rohem was not a mutant, but instead was the latest in a genetically-prepared line of servants to Selene. With a thought, she could trigger a psychic "switch" in von Rohem, transforming him from a toadying jeweler into an animalistic state. He was borderline feral, developed claws on his fingers, and seemed to gain an increased level of agility and sensory perceptions.

The Black Queen has an extremely long lifespan due to her status as an External. Externals are mutants who, in addition to having powers from their active “x-factor” gene, are gifted with near-immortality. An External’s immortality manifests at the point of mortal death. Externals apparently can die at the hands of another External’s powers, the Legacy Virus, the destruction of their astral forms.

MAGMA

 

MAGMA

Real Name: Amara Juliana Olivians Aquilla

First Appearance: The New Mutants (Vol. 1) #8, October 1983

Powers: Magma is a geothermal conduit, her mutant power grants her total control over the Earth’s molten core. She can manipulate the earth beneath her feet, creating seismic tremors, opening up deep fissures in the ground, or reshaping the earth to cause columns or pillars to shoot up into the air. She can hurl chunks of rock over a distance or cause landslides to collapse heavy amounts of dirt and rock over an opponent. She can also restructure her environment to cause volcanic activity, making spurts of lava come shooting out of an otherwise seismically-stable patch of ground. By focusing the heat from the earth's core, Magma can ignite flames in her hands and project them outwards as fiery plasma blasts, or radiate extreme temperatures in all directions. She can also create "magma blasts", levitating chunks of rock and then melting them before hurling them at a target, thus creating high-temperature projectiles with a solid impact. Her powers are heavily reliant on her contact with the earth. Earlier, her powers quickly faded if she broke contact with the ground.

Over the years, she has developed her abilities so that she can accumulate a supply of geothermal energy in her body as a "reserve tank" to fuel her power when separated from the earth. She can even fly for short periods by manipulating thermal updrafts, completely breaking her ties to the ground. Magma possesses only a limited ability to access her powers while in her normal state. She is highly resistant to flame and extreme temperatures and can exert some level of flame and seismic activity, but only accesses the full scope of her powers once she enters her Magma form. Once transformed, her body is composed of semi-fluid molten rock which gives off light and heat. She can increase her body's production of both through a mental command. Magma possesses an increased resistance to physical impact in this state, and indeed her body is largely immune to physical harm. Magma only experiences pain in her molten state due to residual neural feedback, but otherwise has no physiology or vital organs that can really be harmed. Should she transform back to normal while her molten form is still damaged, the injuries would translate into physical ones, but by remaining in her molten form long enough and soaking up geothermal energy, she can withstand most forms of physical injuries done to her transformed state, even potentially life-threatening ones.