CAROL SUSAN JANE DANVERS
WARBIRD WITH THE EARTH OF A HUNDRED NATIONS IN MY SKIN
I'M AT YOUR BACK DOOR
Full Name: Carol Susan Jane Danvers.
Nicknames: Cheeseburger.
Gender: Female.
Age: Thirty-four.
Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual.
Usergroup: Superhuman.
Occupation: Writer.
Canon or Original: Canon.
YOU WON'T RECOGNIZE ME
FOR THE LIGHT IN MY EYES IS STRANGE
Powers/Mutation: Carol does not win prizes for the most imaginative power at all. Then again, since hers were both accidental and
stolen after some Kree DNA got mixed into her human genetic make-up, this is to be expected.
Like your average super-powered baseline human, all of Carol’s physical attributes were enhanced. Genetically, she was an excellent example of
Homo sapiens health, strength and agility – add some Kree into that mix and you have a woman with enhanced strength, reflexes, speed and durability. Her physical strength is such that, on an average day, she can lift about fifty tonnes and her speed when flying rivals that of a jet going at Mach 3 in earth-comparable conditions. Her increased durability means that she is capable of surviving blows that would kill an average human without any real damage since, right down at the level of her tissues, her body is designed to withstand much tougher forces – including those of bullets, blows and extremes of temperature and pressure. It is theorised that her increased strength comes from possessing the Kree permutations of actin and myosin proteins, versions that have a far higher tensile strength and that require less ATP to function. Her durability comes from having more densely-packed cells in her tissues, particularly her muscle groups and epidermis, with special organs scattered throughout that are capable of shock absorption. Though she needs to breathe oxygen to remain conscious, this does allow Carol to be able to exist underwater at great depths or at high altitudes for as long as she can hold her breath for.
Her reflexes and agility are probably the last enhanced features of her human form, leaving her only marginally more superior in these fields to a top human athlete. Other powered people gifted in those fields can beat her every time.
Carol’s stamina is also improved. She thought she was fit as a soldier, but her body’s biochemistry changed to the degree where she tired far less quickly than an average human and her muscles produce the chemical byproducts of anaerobic respiration far more slowly, while still being able to work at peak efficiency with lower oxygen requirements than a normal person. At her current strength, it was been quantified that Carol of exerting herself fully for a span of 24 hours before exhausting herself and only needs an hour or so’s sleep to refresh herself. Her metabolic requirements, however, are unchanged, something she laments.
One of the options Carol has in regard to powering herself is the absorption of energy. She can use absorbed energy of any time to further enhance her physical properties or, if charged up enough, fire compressed energy waves from her clenched fists. She has an upper limit for energy absorption, though, in that she can just about absorb the energy produced by an exploding nuclear warhead – anything more than that will do her damage as if she was a normal human. Carol also has a slightly accelerated rate of healing compared to humans, but nothing special – mostly, she relies upon her enhanced durability. Since she became a superpowered person, though, Carol’s technical fighting skills have actually
decreased since she has become accustomed to being able to survive most blows. Some would accuse her of becoming sloppy and using brute force rather than skill to win a fight. She is also hopelessly, hopelessly vulnerable to telepaths.
Skills: - Was once the best qualified pilot the USAF had.
- Fluent in Russian, passable in a few other world languages.
- Excellent marksman, though most familiar with a .45 ACP Colt M1911A1 or an XM16E1.
- Trained in espionage and intelligence ventures.
- Proficient in multiple hand-to-hand combat styles after her time in the military.
- Has a surprisingly good poker face.
- Can Logan-wrangle.
- Has intimate knowledge of all the best junk food places in any city she’s visited.
Personality: All of Carol’s strengths seem to have always had drawbacks attached to them, making them double-edged swords in her arsenal. As a young, extremely talented, she was a confident maverick, but also about as arrogant as they came, made worse by the fact that she
was exceptionally brilliant for her age. Carol has always been smart, but was precocious to go along with it and often didn’t have the common sense to temper her smarts – that would only come with age and with the experience of a far older, more world-worn partner to drawn upon. Before Afghanistan, she was brave and fearless…which wasn’t always a good thing. Good soldiers needed to know when to retreat and she had never had much of a head for that, being far too stubborn where her perceptions of success were concerned.
In contrast, the older Carol is almost
too hesitant, for all that she has defiantly reckless moments. Having been burned too much in the past, Carol is unsure of herself and of her own capabilities. That in itself is enough to make her erratic because Carol Danvers does
not deal well with failure and is harder on herself than almost anyone else, just one of the many daddy issues that she has left over from her childhood. After a stellar start in her life, nothing has quite lived up to the golden days of her time in the AFSO and Carol has a massive chip on her shoulder and hates the idea that her best days have passed her by. Being denied to fly, something she loved to do, also drove her insane until she discovered that her powers did in fact allow her to do that.
As a woman, Carol has many faults. She is often unfocussed, easily caught up new fads and phases that she follows with far too much zeal until she burns out and moves onto the next one. She finds it extremely difficult to connect with people who aren’t interested in the same things that she is, finds it difficult to
respect other interests, in fact. She cares more about her image than she should, about being liked and respected and wanting people to
know that she’s still as talented as the golden girl she used to be. She is
useless when it comes to knowing her own heart and acts cool even as she mentally second-guesses herself.
But, for all her failings, Carol has a core of fire. She is determined, oh so determined and she
always has good intentions for all that her execution is often faulty. She loves to be challenged in every aspect of her life and…well, she just loves. With a passion. She loves to fly, she loves eating junk food, she loves the way she looks in her uniform. Granted, she has a surprisingly deeply-ingrained inferiority complex thanks to her father, but Carol’s core ethos is about always, always trying to be the very best she can be. In everything. In her writing, in her superhero-ventures, in who she is as a person.
Of course, that was all before her encounter with Rogue. Currently, Carol is in what is known as a tabula rasa state – she is a clean slate, blank and virginal. The core precepts of who she is are buried in there somewhere, but any part of her that was shaped by her memories and experiences? Gone. Sucked into Rogue. And who knows whether Carol will ever get them back…
Physical Appearance: …People generally notice the ass first. If that’s their thing. Because, honestly, Carol has junk in her trunk. As a woman, she is fairly tall, standing at 5’9” in her bare feet, but she is hardly weedy looking. Strong, capable thighs and muscular arms show that she is an active and capable woman who exercises a lot and isn’t ashamed of the effect it has on her body. After all, her hips don’t lie and she
still wears a uniform that proudly bares them. A lot of them. The rest of her figure is boldly curvaceous, with a waist like a double-bass and an impressive rack to the point where she had to work for a while to get a uniform design that provided enough support of them.
Her face is what some would call typically American – oval-shaped with cleanly defined bone structure. Her nose is a little too narrow for her tastes and her eyebrows rather strongly-arched, but her eyes are a clear shade of blue and her complexion is that of a woman who spends a lot of time in the sun. This matches the heavy, thick masses of waving blonde hair that she refuses to wear short as a sign of her vanity. She wears it mostly loose, with a natural side-parting and it goes extra blonde in the summer when she spends too much time flying too close to the sun.
In uniform, Carol is all clean lines and bold designs – black, form-fitting leotard to allow maximum movement, red sash if she ever needs something to tie villains up with, those thigh high boots that she couldn’t resist donning… That and the classic black eye mask, of course, which clearly does so much to hide who she is. All of this is keyed into a peculiar cloaking ability of her Kree DNA and Carol can don her ‘uniform’ at will, no matter where she is.
Out of uniform…well, she’s a jeans and t-shirts kind of girl. She
likes pretty things well enough, but is rather useless on the fashion front and so sticks to what she knows best, which isn’t necessarily what she looks best in…
Play by: Yvonne Strahovski.
History: From before she could walk, Carol dreamed of flying. Before the air force, before the Kree, before
everything, the sight of that open sky called to her like nothing else did. For the rest of her life, she would chase the endless blue and all that lay beyond it.
First of all, though, she needed to get her feet off the ground. And that was going to be a tough one…
Carol Susan Jane Danvers was born in Boston in 1978 to Joseph and Marie Danvers. She was the eldest of a very white bread family and the only girl, with Steven and Joseph Junior being born a few years behind her. Joseph Danvers was a tough man and an even tougher father, with high expectations of all his children. After being preached to for as long as she could remember about the importance of courage, independence and never giving up – all good, masculine skills her father claimed that all men should possess – Carol sought to please her dad by living up to them whenever possible. Even though they weren’t the activities suggested by her mother, Carol’s efforts to attract her father’s attention included learning how to play poker, playing as many ball sports as she could, fishing and helping out whenever she could with building of their summer home in Cape Cod.
Predictably though, none of her efforts to be just like her brothers earned her a whit of respect from her unbending father. For all that she tried to be the very best she could for him, his interest remained solely rooted in her younger brothers and, the older she got, the more that rankled. It meant that most of her teenage years were spent in heated, bitter arguments with her old man and her behavior often had petty, defiant causes at its heart. Her summer adventure of hitchhiking down to Cape Canaveral when she was fifteen, for example, was partly because her love of everything airborne was already strong in her, but also equally because she wanted to enrage her father. (It worked.) Her school performance was also stellar, of course, unsurprising given how precocious a young woman she had already shown herself to be, but her hard work had little to do with the joy of learning and instead was based in a desire to
prove to her father that she was just as good as his male offspring. Her sights were set high, extremely high, and it was Carol’s desire to earn herself a place studying Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. But scholarships were rare and even with the money she’d worked furiously to earn on every spare evening, weekend and holiday that she had, as her eighteenth birthday drew near, Carol realised she’d have to ask her parents for a loan if she wanted to attend the college of her choice. Or any college really.
So, though it chafed at her considerable pride to do so, Carol practically got down on her knees and begged for a loan to let her go to college. She’d always imagined that her father would be grudging regarding paying for anything for her…but she’d never considered the possibility that he would flat-out refuse.
They were not a rich family, he told her, not rich enough to send more than one of their kids to college. And it didn’t matter that her GPA was sky high, or that she’d aced every test she’d ever taken, or that her college references seemed to abuse every thesaurus ever written – all that mattered was that, unlike Steven, Carol was a girl. And girls didn’t deserve to go to college, not when they had other, better things to do in their lives. Her only worth, apparently, was as a wife, so what was the point in wasting money on an education ‘for show’?
…Carol was shocked. And appalled. And
furious. They were in the 90s now, not the
1900s. The fact that her father could be so pig-headedly sexist in the face of all that women had accomplished so far was just beyond her.
Fine. If he wouldn’t help her reach the stars, then she’d get there on her own two feet. She’d
crawl if she had to. These were the vows she made to herself as she lay fuming in her narrow bed at night, listening to Joseph Junior’s soft snores because, of course, she didn’t get a room to herself.
Yet.So, on a sunny day in early June, Carol graduated as the valedictorian of the class of ’96. And the next day, without telling any of her family that she was leaving, she enlisted with the United States Air Force. She
was going to fly, one day or another.
Carol’s rise through the ranks was alarmingly rapid and probably not at all good for her modesty. Apparently, all those nights dreaming of flying had not been in vain because it turned out that she had phenomenal natural talent when it came to piloting…well, just about everything. She may have had hopeless fashion sense and been a disappointment as a daughter, but as a pilot? She was a star. Even in a male-dominated field, though she encountered less prejudices than she might have if she’d been born in an earlier age. Being the undisputed top student of her class at the Air Force Academy helped and the fact that she did her best to establish herself as part of the team.
Put through fast-track program after fast-track program, Carol’s confidence grew almost as fast as her expertise and the number of pips on her collar. Faster than usual, she progressed to the rank of Major (it may have had something to do with the Medal of Honour that she won on a very early mission of hers) and was considered one of the very best pilots that the USAF had to offer. Even a callsign of ‘Cheeseburger’, earned after an…interesting first try of the G-force simulator didn’t detract from the fact that she had, very early on, found the one thing she was best at in the world. Put Carol Danvers in anything with a cockpit and she’d make a better than decent-attempt at flying it.
Being at least bright and precociously intelligent for all her lack of explicit, formal and advanced education, Carol was a natural pick for the Special Operations branch of the Air Force. With her admission into the AFSO at the almost painfully young age of 22 at the start of the year 2000, Carol entered a new stage of both her life and her career.
So too did Logan enter her life.
She never knew his last name, that much was classified. What she did know was this – that he was Canadian, that he smoked like a chimney, that he was shorter than she was and
still managed to kick her ass on the training mat. Full of the youthful arrogance that so dangerously went hand in hand with being brilliant, the young Carol took that as a challenge – around Logan, she was going to be the best she possibly could be. The best pilot, the best spy, the most professional agent –which meant
ignoring his flirting—and generally doing best to live up to the man’s illustrious and somewhat mysterious reputation.
One successful mission became two, then three, then dozens. In between intense bouts of combat and intelligence training, honing her into as sharp a weapon as the AFSO could make her, a partnership grew out of the random assignation that had been her first mission with Logan. They worked well together, as odd a combination as they were together, and Carol was unwavering in her trust for the gruff man. It didn’t matter that he was crude or often unshaven or the most dangerous man she knew – he was her partner and Logan always,
always had her back. Of that she was sure.
Four years of Logan as her partner. Those were probably the most fulfilling,
simple years of her life, for all that they routinely involved espionage, near death experiences, far too many forged identities to count and an equal number of propositions from Logan that they ‘shack up for real, none of this fake happily married couple bullshit.’ Carol always laughed and brushed him off – maybe in another world, another lifetime she’d have entertained a romance with a colleague, but she’d worked too hard to play fast and loose with her hard-earned reputation by finally acting like a ‘woman.’ Besides, Logan flirted with everything that moved. It wasn’t a compliment. And she much preferred being Major Danvers, one half of a duo that was now legendary in the SO circles, rather than someone’s girl. Anyone’s girl.
Then came Afghanistan.
It was a mission (wasn’t it always?) Carol was flying an experimental stealthcraft over a base in the country in mid-2004 and it was
meant to be reconnaissance only. Of course, ‘meant to be’ didn’t mean much when a missile came out of nowhere, explained the ‘experimental’ part of her plane’s title and left her forced to land clumsily, loudly and obviously in front of the very base she’d been attempting to stealthily gather data on.
The one thing Carol can say about her capture is that she didn’t break. Even after they’d broken her leg, ripped out her fingernails, turned her arm into a mess of splintered bone and rent flesh, all they got out of her was her name, rank and her serial number. And some classic Carol defiance because she just
had to be a smart-ass, even where her captors were concerned, but she did what she needed to do to survive. And when the blow that ruined her arm had also weakened her restraints…well, that meant sucking up the pain, ripping her chains free and slamming them into the face of her torturer.
Carol escaped. Barely. And doing so almost killed her. It also cost her her Air Force career.
She didn’t realize this, not until she was stateside and summoned straight from her discharge from the hospital two weeks later to a review board. It was there that she was told that, while they were grateful for her commitment to her country, torture did not make for stable agents. Just like that, her military flight credentials were revoked and even being made a Colonel upon her ‘retirement’ did not soften the blow.
Carol was 27 and her career was over. The only thing she’d ever wanted to do with her life done, just like that.
Of course, it was Logan who found her in the aftermath. He thoroughly ruined her attempts to find a new meaning in life at the bottom of a bottle and unceremoniously dumped her on her couch until she sobered up. Once the puking was over and done with (Cheeseburger was going to be a fitting name for life, it seemed) Logan was the one who gave her the kick up the ass that she needed. Her time in the AFSO was over, yes, but she was meant to be better than this. She was meant to be
smarter than this. And if she had any sense in that blonde head of hers, she’d start seeing who else could use her brains and her expertise and her
contacts.
…he may not have been her partner any more, but he was still Logan. He still had her back. And Carol still had his. Her dismissal, fair or not, did nothing to change that and, hungover and sick to her stomach and
miserable, Carol Danvers had her revelation.
The next time Logan asked her to shack up with him, she didn’t say no.
…it might have been blissful. It might have been happy ever after (but probably not.) It might have been a lot of things. But three months later, Logan left her sprawled across their sheets and went out to get some more beer.
He never came back.
Carol…Carol dealt with it. Oh, she missed him. And she looked for him. But there had always been something transient about Logan, something timeless, something she knew she couldn’t hang onto. And even though he
left her and that hurt like having her arm shattered all over again, it didn’t cripple her. His words from months ago when she was that close to wasting everything good about herself stayed with her and no way was Carol Danvers ever quitting. So what if the Air Force didn’t want her anymore? They only controlled the sky. She’d just have to aim higher than that.
Of course NASA hired her. Honestly, with her belligerence and foot-long CV and intense desire to be
useful again, she didn’t give them much choice. Carol Danvers became the new Head of Security for Cape Canaveral and, okay, so she wasn’t an astronaut, but it was damn well close enough. Besides, she was
good at her job and it kept her occupied. And with the limp and the intermittent numbness in the arm those bastards had broken, it wasn’t as if she was physically capable of being a space-goer anyway.
This was okay, she told herself. This was good. This was something she could see herself doing for the rest of her life, if life decided to cut her a break and not throw any more crap in her path.
Of course, that was never going to happen, was it?
The details of the accident were never clear. An explosion on the day of a space shuttle launch on a quest for alien life. Some sort of secret box of samples contained at the heart of it all. Carol, caught up in the flames, but left inexplicably alive and unharmed in the aftermath. The accident left her shaken to her core but, at the time, she thought that was it.
In truth, the accident had changed far more than that about her. The exact cause behind the change that occurred in Carol Danvers was something she would never discover – she would not know that aliens did indeed exist and that they were already aware of the humans and their tiny little blue rock. That one of them, a member of the Kree race, had infiltrated NASA. That he had tried to halt an accidental explosion and that, in doing so, his DNA had merged with that of Carol’s. These things she would never discover.
What she would, though, was that there soon appeared blank patches in her memory. She would black out in one time and place and wake up in another, with no memory of how she’d got there, often with her clothes scorched and torn beyond repair. This, of course, terrified the very practical Carol – was she going insane? Was this some delayed reaction to her capture in Afghanistan?
Oh. No. Apparently she just had superpowers. Well then.
For a long time, there was a temporal and psychological dichotomy between Carol and her powers. Her erratic behavior and suddenly unpredictable dedication to her work schedule drew comments at work, but Carol was distracted by an increasing number of revelations – that she was suddenly
insanely strong and
impossibly durable. That she healed faster than a human should and that, when she was angry, energy blasts shot from her hands. That she could do things people couldn’t do, not
normal people.
Of course, this was the age in which the mutant problem was rearing its ugly head. Carol’s own private fear was that she was one of them, a mutant, albeit a late-manifesting one. She was paranoid enough that she even harassed a biologist coworker into checking a DNA sample for the presence of the X-Gene, but that came up negative for all that her friend reported some
startling anomalies. Relief was a short-lived thing, however – apparently, her distracted behavior while she was struggling with the revelation that she could perform superhuman feats was such that her employers at NASA had had enough.
And so Carol Danvers was unemployed. Again. Superpowered, yes, but still unemployed. And her frustration with…well, everything – life, her powers, the sad state of her dating adventures – meant that the woman had a lot of anger in her. A
lot of it. Since most of her previous methods of venting were denied to her (flying, monopolizing a shooting range, kicking the crap out of some green recruits…) Carol did something she hadn’t done since her childhood – she wrote.
To her surprise, the novel that was birthed from her aggravation at the world was a best seller. It made her a tidy profit and, more importantly, opened up yet another career option for her. For a while, journalism kept Carol entertained…but she was a woman for whom one passion was rarely enough and she soon grew antsy, mainly because she still had these
powers that she wasn’t using.
And that was how it started – by day she was Carol Danvers, writer and journalist. By night, though, she was Warbird. Sure, it was a pretentious moniker, but her love of vintage aircraft picked it for her and her refusal to quite let go of her military past meant she held onto it. Besides, she thought she sounded cool.
She started small, feeling free to fight off would-be muggers and rapists behind her mask and her dramatic costume. But at least when she was doing something this active and
brave at night, she didn’t feel quite as…useless. Quite as much of a failure. Maybe that was why she kept her ear to the ground, still unsure enough about the mutant issue and the way people who were ‘different’ were received, but eager to right wrongs all the same.
So when she heard about the Brotherhood of mutants…well, both the journalist
and the hero in her wanted to do something about
that. So she did what she knew best from her days in the AFSO – she snooped.
…apparently, she’d lost her touch. Or the Brotherhood were smarter than her previous opponents. Either way, Carol was not as stealthy as she could have been and someone put the dots together, linking Carol Danvers the journalist and Warbird the superhuman vigilante. And when she got too close to the Brotherhood in her invesigations…well, that was when things got messy.
Carol never even knew the girl’s name. All she knew was that, with typical Carol bull-headedness, she launched herself into the fight that she was presented with, hoping that her superstrength would be enough. Then there was a touch on her skin and everything about her, everything that she
was…it was dragged from her. Painfully. It was like being flayed from the inside out and Carol sank into the mists, screaming.
They found her body, limp and lax but not completely lifeless. And They took her, secreted her away, and watched her as she slept dreamlessly. Carol Danvers, Warbird, it didn’t matter
what she’d once been called – she was just an empty shell now. No powers, no memories, no consciousness.
Until they brought the other man in. Until they hooked his vein to hers hoping that his healing factor would wake her.
And then…well, that’s where Carol’s story begins. Her new one, at least.
RP Sample: 
Warbird, Carol Danvers
