MAN-KILLER

 

MAN-KILLER

Real Name: Katrina Luisa Van Horn

First Appearance: Marvel Team-Up (Vol. 1) #8, January 1973 (As Man-Killer); Thunderbolts (Vol. 1) #67, September 2002 (As Amazon)

Powers: Katrina Van Horn was a German Olympic skier who was crippled and left horribly scarred during a skiing challenge against a male chauvinistic competitor. Becoming a fanatical misandrist with financial support from a wealthy militant feminist group (which itself was technologically and financially supported by the male-dominated subversive terrorist science organization known as the Advanced Idea Mechanics), Katrina underwent a physical rehabilitation program to regain her mobility and was outfitted with an exoskeleton which augmented her strength and hid her scars, she became the terrorist known as the Man-Killer.

The Man-Killer is superhumanly strong (she can lift up to 75 tons) with enhanced durability. These traits originally stemmed from her strength-enhancing exoskeleton, but the power now seems to rest in her own body. How she eliminated the need for her exoskeleton remains unknown, as does how she removed the extensive scarring that had previously disfigured her body. Shortly before and during her Ultimate Brawling League stint, she wore an armored harness, claiming it was a life-support mechanism that she could not remove, but this may have been a deception since she has not worn the harness before or since that brief period. Van Horn has some ability as an organizer and strategist, is a formidable but savage unarmed combatant, and has cultivated a certain degree of acting ability during her time spent working under various cover identities.

She is an experienced bartender. Van Horn has worn a gauntlet that generates Pym Particles, enabling her to assume gigantic size (apparently up to twenty-five feet tall), further enhancing her already superhuman strength, though this may have been a temporary ability. She formerly carried razor-edged discs that she could throw with great force and accuracy. While working with her feminist army, Man-Killer employed a flying, armored hovercraft outfitted with a powerful front-mounted battering ram and a roof-mounted energy cannon.

KING COBRA

 

KING COBRA

Real Name: Klaus Voorhees

First Appearance: Journey Into Mystery (Vol. 1) #98, November 1963 (As Cobra); Captain America (Vol. 1) #367, February 1990 (As King Cobra)

Powers: Klaus Voorhees is a Dutch ex-convict who was bitten by a radioactive snake, and while he administered the anti-venom to himself, he developed the proportionate attributes and abilities of a king cobra snake.

As a result, he has superhuman speed, agility, dexterity, reflexes, and developed a highly flexible and resilient molecular structure. The elasticity of his body enables him to absorb the brunt of considerable impact without suffering any harm, providing he adapts to the impact. He can squeeze his malleable body through extremely tight areas, even the barrel of a tank. A bizarre sort of independent muscle control allows King Cobra to move himself without using his limbs: He can lie flat on his stomach and "slither" like a snake to propel himself forward. This is also how he manages to keep moving through tight spaces too small to give him any leverage. He has a move called his "Cobra Grip" where he wraps his body around an opponent and begins to squeeze them. His elasticity and muscle control give him a virtually unbreakable grip and makes this a potentially lethal attack. He molts on occasion, leaving him with a serpentine appearance (scales, yellowed eyes), but his appearance gradually returns to normal.

His costume is coated with slippery chemicals that facilitate his unique motions and make him difficult to properly hold onto. Micro-suction cups in his boots and gloves enables him to climb walls and ceilings, and a spring-fired cable from his chest gives him a line to swing from off of buildings. Once he adopted the King Cobra identity, Voorhees adopted a flexible, blunt-ended tail on his back that normally resembles a cape in design, but adds an extra edge to his "Cobra Grip", allowing him to pummel his enemy with great force using the tail while he holds them immobilized. His wrist-shooters contain his various "Cobra Bite" missile types, including explosive, venomous, smoke-filled, nerve gas-filled, and blindness-inducing. He also once employed a "Cobra Convulsion Pistol" which fired an energy beam that temporarily simulated the neurological symptoms of a cobra's venom in his target's metabolism. As leader of the Serpent Society, he controls their resources (including multiple secret headquarters, Brand Corportation technology capable of creating superhumans, and their flying "Serpent Saucers").

AQUEDUCT

 

AQUEDUCT

Real Name: Peter Van Zante

First Appearance: Ghost Rider (Vol. 2) #23, April 1977 (As Water Wizard); The New Warriors (Vol. 1) #7, January 1991 (As Aqueduct)

Powers: Peter Van Zante was a United States Army soldier who was injured in combat overseas and transported by ship back home while strapped into an experimental life support unit. Lightning stuck the ship and the energy was conducted through his body, somehow giving him the power to manipulate liquids. Turning to crime, he initially adopted the costumed identity of the Water Wizard and later Aqueduct after briefly working with environmental activists.

Aqueduct can psionically manipulate all liquids within 500 feet of him by stacking liquid molecules. Though he tends to manipulate water more than anything else, he has also affected oil and coolant fluids in the past. He is able to shape liquids into different forms (such as giant hands, waterfalls, solid restraints, and even geysers) and create enough surface tension in the liquid that it feels like a solid mass.

His control over his liquid creations is absolute until it has dissipated or he loses focus, interest, or consciousness. Aqueduct can cool and condense moisture from the atmosphere in order to form a fresh supply of water for him to manipulate virtually anywhere. He can pull water and other liquids from many sources, including sprinkler systems, underground rivers, and nearby bodies of water. He can affect water molecules within both the human body and technology (such as vehicles and armored suits), and he can dehydrate people and objects, extracting fluid from them and displacing it into the atmosphere.

He can make water flow and move about in mid-air, and direct it as highly-pressurized streams that carry a solid impact. Thus, he can create giant creatures made of water which are strong enough to shatter wood with their fists, or create a "jet ski" made of water and ride away sitting on top of it. He can propel himself forward on jets of liquid over vast distances at speeds up to 35 miles per hour, so long as water remains available for him to manipulate. After 30 minutes of steady water control, Van Zante experiences mental fatigue. Additionally, he cannot convert or control liquids once they've been transitioned to a solid or gaseous states, nor can he control the temperature of water (or combine hydrogen and oxygen to create water). His powers were briefly enhanced by the mystic Moondark, allowing him to make larger liquid constructs with hellfire immunity.

TASKMASTER

 

TASKMASTER

Real Name: Anthony Masters

First Appearance: Avengers (Vol. 1) #195, May 1980

Powers: The man who became the Taskmaster was biochemically enhanced by a mnemonic primer, an experimental solution which opened his mind to rapidly assimilating new skills and abilities. This gave him an ability most commonly referred to as "photographic reflexes". Through observation, Taskmaster can break down any form of simple or complex action and imprint it onto his implicit muscle memory. He can duplicate any action he sees, including playing a musical instrument, preparing a gourmet meal, performing rope tricks, etc. His skills are limited to what he can see: He can mimic the ability to play the piano, but not how to read sheet music, and watching someone play Beethoven's 2nd would not allow him to play Beethoven's 9th.

Taskmaster has mastered the fighting styles of numerous super-heroes and villains through personal contact or watching videos of them in action. Short exposure to their skills allows him to mimic specific moves, but extended observation has enabled him to perfectly duplicate their entire set of movements, attacks and counterattacks as one smooth fighting style. As a side-effect of his studies, Taskmaster can predict and reflexively defend against the attacks of anyone he has observed in-depth. He also mastered the skill of breaking down a fighting style after he intuitively learned it, enabling him to "manually" teach the style to the students at his various Academies.

Taskmaster is limited by his human physique in some cases: He cannot duplicate the Iron Fist, for instance, or Spider-Man's more elaborate leaping and bouncing. He can assimilate and "map" techniques onto his reflexes that are beyond his physical capabilities, but cannot fully mimic skills that require a superhuman physique to accomplish. He has accelerated his reflexes to near superhuman speeds at times by mimic techniques by video while watching them on fast-forward, but attempting to force his body to move that fast is extremely unhealthy and quickly exhausts him. He was also able to assimilate Redshirt's Shi'ar avian physique-based fighting style to predict his moves and mimic at least some of his actions, but not all of them.

In his original costume, Taskmaster employed a variety of weapons patterned after those used by super-heroes, letting him combat them with their own tricks. This included duplicates of Captain America's shield, Daredevil's billy club, Black Knight's sword, Hawkeye's bow and arrow, Punisher's guns, etc. Later on, he adopted a tactical body suit equipped with an image inducer for holographic disguises, a standard set of handguns and swords, and photonic weapon systems in his gauntlets that could generate energy-based shields, sais, and even webbing. Taskmaster was briefly able to augment his abilities through a procedure enabling him to outright mimic superhuman powers by observation, but this modification quickly faded away.

Eventually, the full side-effects of Taskmaster's powers were revealed. The "implicit" muscle memories he has assimilated over the years have largely overwritten his "explicit" memory: His personal history, childhood and so forth. He may be able to perfectly identify someone's accent, down to the country and region, but can't remember if he's ever personally been there. These personal memories still exist, but are buried deep within his subconscious most of the time. Learning new skills with his power buries any further memories he has developed since the last use of his powers. Taskmaster makes his way through life using a combination of his reflexive actions and the guidance of his wife Mercedes Merced, who poses as a representative of "The Org" that gives Taskmaster his assignments. Beyond that, he apparently relies upon elaborate bluffs and acting to make it through his every day existence.

GYPSY MOTH

 

GYPSY MOTH

Real Name: Sybil Dvorak

First Appearance: Spider-Woman (Vol. 1) #10, January 1979

Powers: Known as Skein or as the Gypsy Moth, Sybil Dvorak is a mutant, possessing a version of telekinesis that she has apparently subconsciously limited so that she can only affect "soft" materials like hair and various forms of cloth, fabric, and textiles. Skein is capable of lifting people off the ground and moving them about through the air by hefting them by their clothes. She can cause someone's clothing (or long hair) to turn against them, wrapping them up in a cocoon, constricting to cut off blood flow, or throwing them into a wall or solid object.

While operating in her previous identity as Gypsy Moth, Sybil wove a set of moth-like wings out of soft material and mentally knitted them into the flesh on her back, using them to fly. Skein can manipulate fabrics on an individual thread-level, letting her unweave clothes into individual strands, and mentally weave loose material into new costumes or garments through concentration. As Skein, she keeps thick bundles of fabric around her arms at all times as a constant source of material to work with, sending it out as ropes and lassos or to bind her opponents in place.

SONGBIRD

 

SONGBIRD

Real Name: Melissa Gold

First Appearance: Marvel Two-In-One (Vol. 1) #54, August 1979 (as Screaming Mimi); The Incredible Hulk (Vol. 1) #449, January 1997 (as Songbird)

Powers: Melissa Gold was a member of the all-female wrestling team known as the Grapplers, who sold out their services as mercenaries and were bionically augmented by RoXXon Oil. Melissa became Screaming Mimi after she received cybernetically enhanced vocal chords, enabling her to amplify her own voice similar to a megaphone and scream consistently for nearly an hour without damaging her throat. She also could produce a variety of symptoms in nearby people by modulating a series of hypersonic frequencies. Mimi could induce panic, anxiety, blindness, deafness, nausea, vertigo, reality-warping hallucinations, and unconsciousness. When directed against solid structures, Screaming Mimi could shatter glass, weaken building foundations, and at her most intense actually liquefy matter within a few yards of her position. While partnered with Angar the Screamer, the two hypersonic villains learned how to create specific sensory illusions by harmonizing their twin scream-effects together. Thus, Mimi and Angar were once able to pose as Hawkeye and Mockingbird, committing crimes and anyone who saw them (and was affected by their harmonic pitch) saw two Avengers instead of two super-villains. After Angar was killed, however, Mimi overstrained her power: Damaging her bionics and tearing up her own vocal chords. Approached by Baron Zemo to join his Masters of Evil/Thunderbolts, Melissa agreed and her vocal powers were augmented by Techno, who had appropriated some of Klaw's solid sound technology.

As Songbird, Melissa wore mechanical nodes on her neck that allowed her to speak normally and were small enough to be concealed by a simple neckerchief. In combat, she wore a sonic carapace around her throat which enhanced and manipulated the sound generated by her augmented vocal chords to create solid sound constructs made of pink sonic energy. Adjustments to her cybernetic implants now enabled Songbird to mentally shape her sound waves into these constructs and direct their movements and actions psionically: She could even remove the carapace after creating a construct, and could still move the solid sound around mentally. Songbird used her power to create battering rams, storage pods, giant knives or scissors, protective shields, barriers, domes, or anything she could visualize. She quickly learned to use her powers for flight, manifesting a set of wings attached to her arms and mentally propelling the wings (and therefore herself) through the air. As time has passed, her throat has healed enough to restore her Screaming Mimi powers, lost to her ever since just before she became a member of the Thunderbolts. Besides the previous effects she exhibited, Songbird has demonstrated the power of subliminal influence, producing a sonic frequency which makes a person far more open to whatever is suggested to them next. She can also map her environment using sonar waves and cast sound in tight pulses, allowing her to speak directly to one person over a distance without anyone nearby hearing.

TEXAS TWISTER

 

TEXAS TWISTER

Real Name: Drew Daniels

First Appearance: Fantastic Four (Vol. 1) #177, December 1976

Powers: Drew Daniels was a cattle hand who was near a nuclear power generating facility when a tornado touched down near one of the site's waste storage canister areas. Finding himself in the tornado's erratic path, Daniels became bombarded with radioactive particles sucked out of the facility, even as he was swept up into the funnel cloud itself. The radiation triggered body-wide mutagenic alterations in him, giving him the ability to generate tornadoes at will.

As the Texas Twister, he possesses the superhuman ability to mentally cause the acceleration of volumes of air to great velocity within a radius of about 100 feet from his body. Through concentration, he can psychokinetically interact with air molecules and agitate them into a coordinated motion. At peak condition, he can create a tornado 200 feet in diameter, whose outermost winds travel at 225 miles per hour. Such tornado-strength winds are capable of making him airborne and can sustain him in flight. The Texas Twister can also create whirlwinds of more manageable proportions. Wind swirling around his hand at a radius of 2 feet enables him to strike a blow with tornado force: About 80 pounds per square inch over the area of a 2 foot sphere. He can even create a whirlwind around a single finger. Although his body is generally at the center of the tornado winds, he can mentally control the offset of the center up to a distance of about 200 feet. Thus, he can surround another person with a tornado or lift him or her into the air. Mental fatigue, however, has been shown to impair his performance.

His body has favorably mutated so as to be adapted to high-velocity spinning. The semi-circular canals of his inner ears filter out confusing information brought about by rapid motion and allow him to perceive his surroundings normally. Thus, he cannot experience dizziness or motion sickness (unless artificially induced through drugs). His eyesight and reaction time are also superhuman, permitting him to see and react while moving at high velocity. His skin is denser than normal and prevent unwanted heat loss from wind-chill factor by slowing peripheral blood transport. His skin is harder than human and resists friction and airborne particles abrasion.

The Texas Twister is a an expert horse rider, lasso thrower, and sharp shooter. He also received unarmed combat training from S.H.I.E.L.D.

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.