LUNA

 

LUNA

Real Name: Luna Maximoff

First Appearance: Fantastic Four (Vol. 1) #240, March 1982

Powers: Luna Maximoff is the daughter of Quicksilver and Crystal. A hybrid of both mutant and Inhuman genes, she tested negative for the x-gene at birth, and would not have developed powers naturally. She was exposed to the Terrigen Mists and received powers of empathic sight and projection as a result.

She perceives individuals as radiating different colors or intensities of light from within their bodies, and can interpret these lights as indicators of that person's emotional state. This allows her to not only read someone's general mood, but also small changes in their emotions caused by people or events surrounding them. For instance, Luna saw her father's general mood as one color, yet when he said her name his love for her radiated in a different set of colors for a moment. Luna can also somehow divine other forms of information by intuitively reading the emotional signature of people she looks at, such as picking up on Callisto's self-mutilation tendencies after M-Day just from a glance at her aura. In addition, she can read intentions to a degree, allowing her to sense what someone intends to do before they do it. This acts as an "early warning sense" whenever someone is attacking her, at least when she has her eyes on them. Luna's power is also expressive. She can impose specific emotions onto other people, such as causing them to become afraid of her. By seeing emotional activity in someone's aura, she can also isolate and "remove" that emotion, either by disabling a specific instance of emotion or removing someone's capacity to feel a given emotion entirely. How exactly this works and what the long term ramifications might be are unclear.

POLARIS

 

POLARIS

Real Name: Lorna Sally Dane

First Appearance: The Uncanny X-Men (Vol. 1) #49, October 1968

Powers: Polaris' mutant ability gives her a significant electrolyte count in her bloodstream which increases her personal bio-magnetic field. Furthermore, that field resonates on the same wavelength as the Earth's own electromagnetic field, placing her in attune with the energy patterns of the entire planet. This allows her to manipulate magnetism and other electromagnetic forces for a variety of effects. Her ability is the same as that of her father (Magneto), though considerably less powerful than his.

She is able to levitate, attract and repel anything that possesses even trace levels of ferrous material in it, and can direct clusters of magnetized molecules to cling to nonferrous materials, giving her a medium to hold onto and manipulate them as well. She is capable of warping metal by shifting it into a liquid state and reforming in into new solid constructions. By forming intense magnetic force between trace metallic atoms in the atmosphere, she can form solid-seeming force fields that deflect all manner of assault, or concussive blasts of magnetic energy. Polaris is also capable of shifting her perceptions so that she sees her environment in terms of electromagnetic energy, enabling her to detect various sources of electronic power and recognize the different between humans and androids. Polaris can fly by means of magnetic repulsion and also absorb and metabolize electricity in order to boost her power levels.

Polaris has a latent secondary mutation that allows her to manifest superhuman physical power in the presence of danger. Her body absorbed negative emotional energy from her environment (the empathic residue created by thoughts like anger, fear, hatred, aggressive lust, etc), processing it in order to physically transform herself into a 7-foot tall powerhouse with superhuman strength and resistance to all manner of physical injury. A side effect of her power was an enhanced residual echo of that negative energy she absorbed, radiating from her position to enhance the negative emotional reactions of others around her, making them act more wild, violent, amoral, etc. At first, her physical enhancements would wear off when the threat passed, but after she took up residence on Muir Island where the Shadow King was already heightening the darker natures of the residents, her physical changes stabilized as permanent until being struck by Psylocke's psychic blade reversed her powers and restored her magnetic abilities.

Briefly, Polaris lost her powers on M-Day and was taken in by Apocalypse who remade her into his new Horseman of Pestilence. As Pestilence, Lorna's body was artificially re-engineered to recreate her mutant genes so as to possess magnetic powers once more, and she was additionally given the power to assimilate and maintain pathogens and viral agents into her metabolism, mutating them into more-advanced stages, and then releasing these bio-hazards into the atmosphere as a "meta-plague". The X-Men cleansed her of all these pathogens once they rescued her, but it is unclear whether or not she still has the capacity to act as Pestilence.

Lorna Dane holds a masters degree in geophysics and has expertise in the use of physics, chemistry, geology and advanced mathematics to study the Earth and its composition, including its atmosphere, internal make-up, oceans and electrical and other fields.

SCARLET WITCH

 

SCARLET WITCH

Real Name: Wanda Maximoff

First Appearance: The Uncanny X-Men (Vol. 1) #4, March 1964

Powers: Wanda Maximoff would have originally been merely an energy-manipulating mutant like her father, Magneto, if not for her birth on Wundagore Mountain giving the Elder God Chthon an opportunity to infuse her with chaos magic. Consequently, she developed her mutation as a hex power. By pointing at a target and concentrating, the Scarlet Witch unleashes her hexes, scientifically defined as a creating a psionic field around the target that causes probabilities to fluctuate wildly, making highly improbable events occur. Initially, Wanda's power was wild and limited. She could cast no more that three hexes in rapid succession without taking time to regenerate her energies, and she had no control over the hex's effect. Striking an opponent could just as easily make them stronger than defeat them. She typically caused some form of calamity, though, such as making floors or ceilings collapse, glass to shatter, guns to misfire, objects to burst into flame, machinery to turn on, shut down, or go haywire, etc.

After receiving some rudimentary training in magic at the hands of Agatha Harkness, Wanda developed a greater refinement in her powers, in terms of strength, stamina, and control. The Scarlet Witch now had no set limit to the number of hexes she could cast in a row, and the sheer power she could unleash and range of improbable events she could cause increased dramatically. She could destroy buildings by altering the odds of every single stress point or minute fracture in the construction suddenly breaking down at one time, or cause a passing comet to turn 90 degrees and crash to earth right on top of a target she chose. Wanda could also control specific outcomes, willing her hex power to force a specific improbability to happen. She could manipulate games of chance, control the roll of a set of dice, and so on. She can still cast wild hexes easily, but with concentration she can gather her energies and will that a single outcome be achieved.

For a brief period Wanda, as her reality's nexus being, was used by Immortus as a storehouse for accumulated temporal energy taken from other realities. This had the side effect of dramatically increasing her powers again, and altering their basic nature. Wanda's hex power would now retroactively alter the timeline to engineer the outcomes she desired. For example, instead of simply causing a metal pipe to fracture and break, she manipulated space-time so that the fracture was always present in the pipe. Wanda eventually rejected the temporal energy, losing all of her powers for several weeks. Eventually, her abilities returned at their pre-Immortus levels.

Wanda later became even more in tune with the "magical" nature of her powers after being used as a conduit for mystical forces by Morgan le Fey and learning the true "chaos magic" nature of her hex power from Agatha Harkness. Wanda developed a range of specific skills she can call on her hex power to perform. Because chaos magic is a form of "natural magic", the elements bent more easily to her power than other phenomena, allowing her to create fire, control wind, and so on. She can sense other forms of magic, as well as the natural order of things, and detect when something unnatural is occurring. Her hex power acts as a natural counterforce for any other form of magic and for the unnatural, allowing her to easily undo artificial changes to a "state of being", such as the presence of mind control. Wanda can also now generate hex fields (energy domes of hex energy that automatically alter the probability of any projectile suddenly being diverted away from her) or hex charges (samples of her chaos magic infused into objects to be used as talismans, such as when she focused her hex power into Iron Man's microchips and gave them to the Avengers so that they would be immune to Kulan Gath's mind-altering enchantment field while she wasn't with them). She also learned more specific hex castings, like making people invisible to the naked eye or healing and repairing wounds.

During the Avengers: Disassembled event, Wanda's powers raged out of control as full-fledged reality-altering abilities. Originally presented as the true extent of her powers untethered, it was later stated that Wanda actually became a conduit for the cosmic essence known as the Life Force, which was truly responsible for her ‘reality altering’ powers. During this period, Wanda's powers were phenomenal: She could create matter from nothing, and deconstruct matter in the same way, wiping it from existence. She could manipulate existing matter so that it moved aside to let her pass, altered shape and form, changed elemental composition, and so on. She could access souls from beyond and resurrect the dead, then banish them to the afterlife just as easily. Wanda could reconstruct spacetime, creating scenarios that represented a new sequence of events in history, and impose that scenario on the matter and energy around her, and the minds of other people. Her "House of M" construction changed the history of the entire planet Earth for several decades, influencing everyone present on it.

Although she has since been separated from the Life Force, Wanda remains incredibly powerful. Her "chaos magic" based abilities have apparently been restored to proper levels, allowing her to radically influence her environment by applying quantum-level manipulations to her targets, causing sudden but improbable things to occur. Her full range of capabilities at this point remains unclear.