Ruby

Resurrection Star

There was little reaction, until he touched her. Her body froze like a sudden snap freeze in the coldest winter; just immediate stiffness in her entire being, from her face to her body to her very heart, at least, it felt to her.

Are ya STUPID?

It surprised her, it very nearly shocked her. Reaction was delayed, but once it happened, it happened with the same photonic speed of light; she was there, where he put his hand on her, the sudden sensation of warmth and the overwhelming sensation of calm, like touching her was some kind of emotional anesthetic—but she was also behind him, untouched, literally a blur of motion and being.

Once he looked behind him, she’d be gone in front of him, as if she was Shrodinger’s metahuman. Both there, and not there, depending on the observation. Her eyes were big, their golden color shining and shadowing as she moved, the very human emotion of slight anger very present, though, it was closer to irritation.

“What if touching me was dangerous? What if I was dangerous? What if I…” her eyes darted, searching for the words, finding only things she did not want to say out loud. There was an underlying truth, and she knew it: she wasn’t used to being touched. The last person to hug her was her mother. The last person to touch her was her dad, handing her a drink as they settled into the car that night after the restaurant, and the drive back.

She re-lived it. She re-lived it every day, in one way or another, and the sadness could creep in like a fog before the dawn light of a new day. “Don’t do that,” she half-whispered at him, just shaking her head, slowly, absently. He was staring into her eyes, and it was the easiest moment, she just…knew. So she moved them.

To the beach; where the distant drum and roar of waves could sooth her, where the sun shined bright as any gold upon her being, where the warmth could soak into her. She liked the sun. It was that it was a star. She knew that, somehow…it gave her power. Like the star, itself, brought her back to life and gave her purpose.

And because this stretch of beach on the Massachusetts coast was not fluffy sand, but darker, browner, harder stuff that crabs used for burrowing, and the shrubs of the dunes nearby were used by thousands of birds. It was a bird sanctuary; one her father had taken her to for bird watching when she was a little girl.

There was no one nearby. She was no fool, she understood what happened now. Just as a scientist made describe the chain reaction of a chemical compound as it lost a carbon here, broke an atomic bond there, so she started to describe what would take place: “Your people will want to know. Finding me won’t be easy. I don’t appear on satellites. I don’t have metadata to mine. I have a phone, but I can just…make myself a digital ghost. I’m not sure how, exactly, I just…will it. Like flying. Like healing that variant. Like saving those families. Like saving that woman.”

She shrugged, looking back at him, briefly. He was cute, at least, for an old guy. “So, good luck, anyway.” She looked away for a moment, a long one, before finally starting to talk, turning her head to look at him, as if she couldn’t just bend the soundwaves to him no matter which way she turned, “Don’t call me that. I’m not that. I don’t know what I am, exactly, but I’m not that. Just…call me Dawn. It’s my ‘name’…at least the one I want to answer to. I’m tired of watching, being afraid of getting involved…so, I’m coming. I’m not a bad person. I’ll do what good I can do, just don’t try to ‘help’ me.”

Awkwardly, she paused, and looked this way, upward, than back his way, “I’m, uh, gonna fly off now. We’re in Massachusetts. Your people know where you are. They’ll come get you soon. Sorry about the long flight back.”

Resurrection Star

Her red lipped mouth only tugged at the corners; the apparition of a smile, not even quite a full hint of the thing. She heard the scramble of his handlers and superiors, but not from the earpiece—she could just see them, hear them, like she was in the corner of the control room, even as she stood before Agent Knight.

“It wasn’t always gold,” she said in pure afterthought, remembering her dark hair, her dark eyes. Mom and dad were both dark haired. That she was gold-haired and gold-eyed would have made them laugh. Sometimes it made her smile, just imagining them making fun of it, “I know who you are.”

Despite the cave and the wooded surroundings, there were signs of life and chaos all around, trash flittered about the mouth of the cave, old tarps, as if someone had thought to use the area for hiding…from soldiers, from drones, from each other. She could smell the fear and the metallic stench of blood, even if it had been at least a year since it was spelled, from the faintness of it.

She walked around him like he was little more than a tree. She had been stabbed. She had been shot. The thing about dying is that dying again didn’t hold the same level of fear, so you were a little more adventurous, especially if you were likewise depressed, or racked with survivor’s guilt. No knife pierced her, no bullet she’d ever seen lacerated or broke any surface of her body. She’d let them get close, too.

Very close. It didn’t matter.

“Who do you help with knives and guns, Agent?” Her sing-song tone held bitter undertones, her head turning sharply to regard him as she stopped to give him a slight glare. “I’m scared you’ll try to help with those weapons. If you want to help, call in a medical team…but I imagine they’d have better things to do out here, anyway.”

Again, she just sounded sad as she walked into the cave, towards the variant, the grotesque ‘reject’, whatever numb buzzword or cruel label you wanted to throw on them. Dawn just thought of them as poor souls. The screeching scream came echoed and blasted from the cave minutes after Dawn went in, the ghoul finding a new target.

Then the light came. First, gold, bold, and brilliant. Then brighter, and brighter…and warm, without ever threatening to become hot. When it went white in its pure brightness, the screech became a woman’s scream. Over the span of a minute, the light died down, until the golden girl in the white suit with the gold shimmer cape and the fine, delicate, gold line details upon both suit and part of her skin just walked out.

“She’ll rest. Try to get her to a place where she can emotionally and psychologically recover. Preferably away from the corporation that failed her.”

It all came so matter-of-factly. She had considered healing variants before, but she knew so many of them either didn’t want saving, weren’t sure, or would struggle just as much either way, that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The Ghoul was one of the very few that she knew, in her heart, would be better off.

If the poor woman wasn’t plucked up and studied. Dawn pitied the people who did that, if they did.

What Are You Listening To?

Resurrection Star

Hi. I’m Estella.

No, she sighed, so faint the sound of wind at two thousand feet above the ground easily swallowed the sigh whole, her golden strand hair a constant stream carried by the constant air moving around her as she floated, liquid gold eyes pouring down to what she saw below her. It all happened in slow-motion to her, and all of it so easily the sigh took more effort than stopping all the artillery shells, or the floating in place flight at a few thousand feet above ground level.

It had always been instinctive, intuitive, easy. The hardest part had been dying, and even that wasn’t quite true: learning to live isolated, surviving without her parents had taken her most of the last year of her…post-life? New life?

Of all the things that came easily to her, answers were never, ever, one of them.

Hello, I’m Dawn.

It held an overbearing hint of ‘hello, fellow children, I am, of course, one of you’ meme to it, but she couldn’t think of anything better. Not intervening in Syria had proven difficult. Not getting involved in Africa was even harder, even though the more she learned about the conflict, the more she questioned if she would do any actual good there or just make it worse.

Ukraine felt differently. One, Imperialist country, invaded another, smaller, non-Imperialist nation. A former client state that had been drifting westward. But would that make her some kind of champion for the west? Would she introduce herself by picking some side? The series of gaming out what the world would do when they found her, what people would think, how they would contort and distort what she tried to do with their own spin…dizzied her head to the point of nothingness.

She saved people. She had saved no less than a thousand, and more, families in the past year. None of them saw anything, at least, none of them remembered anything. ‘Angels of golden light’ had been talked about in increasing frequency, but no one had made any connection to a new metahuman. The second sigh was louder. Then something unexpected happened:

He sees me.

She knew he was one of them. She’d seen him before. She’d stalked them, watched them, listened in on them. They thought they were safe; no one was safe if she wanted to see them, if she wanted to listen. It violated so many norms of privacy and secrecy, and she was certain her mother would give her a lecture on national security, but mom was dead, and Estella had finally had enough of watching.

She didn’t float down, she didn’t fly down, she went down like a beam of golden light, quick as a lightning bolt, she was simply there, in front of him. “Stop.” Her big, gold, eyes looked afraid, her typically sing-song voice uncharacteristically shaky, but very human.

Resurrection Star

^{_______________________________________________}

_{IDENTITY: Estella Wilde (Legally deceased)
CODENAME: DAWN
AGE: 20
“There is an answer in a question
and there is hope within despair.”}

_{Personal History
^{▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔}}

<sub>A girl died in a car crash, and the very next memory she had was sitting on a hospital rooftop, watching the sun rise. Did she die? If she did, is she still dead? Something else compelled her to take on the image she is known as now, something whispered to her, an unknown intuition guided her to another family from death, and then another, and another, and it never stopped. Now the world knows she exists, and they seem to know more about her than she knows about herself.

Why doesn't she remember her life as well as she should? Why can't she remember dying? When did she ever wake up? Why does she have memories that don't belong to her? Some recent, some ancient, some alien——there is nothing this girl seems to understand about her current life, if she can even call it that. From the grand collision of the accident that took her life, and the life of her parents, she has little feeling, and is doing the best she can to simply work with what is left of her mind and heart, even as she navigates an unknown future in a world suddenly fixated on her.</sub>

Resurrection Star

Superhero emergence story in an otherwise normal world. Apollo and Ruby 1x1.

DC/Marvel Amalgam

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WIP

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WIP

DC/Marvel Amalgam

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WIP

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WIP

DC/Marvel Amalgam

The Phoenix Force is the embodiment of the universal cycle of creation—life, death, rebirth. As a star begins its life, burns out its fuel to the point of supernova, and thus spreads elements throughout the universe to continue the cycle of creation, so must realities of the metaverse follow their own cycle.

There are times when this cycle of creation is imbalanced, points and moments in space/time when the very cosmic force of creation must step in. For those moments, the White Phoenix of the Crown exists. Whereas the Phoenix Force is the embodiment of the cycle of creation, the White Phoenix of the Crown represents the ultimate unity of Phoenix Force and its perfect host, the creature known as Jean Grey.

Together they become White Phoenix of the Crown, complete in enlightenment, transcendence, and oneness with existence on an omni-versal scale. When Jean becomes the White Phoenix of the Crown, she is not simply wielding cosmic power, she has become one with the very natural cycle of universal creation. The White Phoenix isn’t simply about life, death, and rebirth like the Phoenix Force itself, nor is it destruction or chaos like the Dark Phoenix: it is purity, balance, the cosmic means of healing reality itself.

Tasked by the very primal, base, forces of the omni-verse to safeguard the order of all realities, when the White Phoenix of the Crown arrives on the scene, eventually, reality will heal and be reborn into the state that brings balance.

DC/Marvel Amalgam

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Marvel Girl, Phoenix. Founding member of the X-Men, founding member of X-Factor, founding member of the Krakoan Quiet Council. Leader of X-Men Red. It's hard to separate modern mutant history from the history of Jean Grey, she is as central a character in the tale of mutantkind as anyone outside Charles Xavier himself. She has been in the superhero business since she was a teenager, and has saved the galaxy and the planet more times than she will ever get credit for.

Most of humanity and metahumanity knows her as just that, Jean Grey, paragon of the heroic mutant, a figure that stands for love and compassion. Others might know her as the strongest telepath on the planet, and likely one of the strongest in the universe, an Omega level mutant; a mutant whose primary power has reached a limitless, undefinable upper limit, allowing them to possess world-altering or multiversal capabilities.

She is nearly as strong a telekinetic, making short work of physical based combatants with just the psychic power of her mind alone. When opponents strategize against mutantkind, and the X-Men, Jean Grey is one of, if not the, very first individual threats analyzed and schemed for. Not that any of the schemes have yet to neutralize her for long, let alone for good.

Fewer on Earth, but more among the cosmos, know Jean Grey as the host of the Phoenix Force, and the once dreaded Dark Phoenix, an embodiment of either the life force of the omni-verse, or the embodiment of destruction and chaos in the universe. Some theorize that she is, for all intents and purposes, immortal because of her connection to the Phoenix Force.

Still more claim she is still a cosmic godling, just disguised as a regular mutant in order to live a so-called 'normal' life on the planet for as long as her loved ones live. Whatever the truth of it, she is currently both a member of the Quiet Council, and a member of the X-Men, based in the Krakoan Treehouse on Manhattan Island. Friend and ally to any hero, Jean has spent much of recent history getting closer to her family and navigating Krakoan politics.

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