In her most human form, White Tiger performs chiefly as a heroic martial artist, acrobat and sneaky type. She’s pretty good, though not as good as she thinks she is - Iron Fist, for instance, is better. She has further advantages, however - her leaps are slightly superhuman, and she routinely enlarges her hands and morphes her fingers into talon-like claws that can inflict terrible damage.

When she wants to (or when she is too angry or worked up) White Tiger can morph into the shape of a huge white Bengal tiger - or lock her transformation at an intermediary stage between catgirl and tigress. Her tiger form is one enormous specimen - she’s likely bigger than any tiger that exists in the real world. Thus, her intermediary forms are also significantly larger than her near-human form. In DCH the intermediary forms are represented by Growth, whereas her tiger forms are represented by Shape Change.

White Tiger is immune to Man-Beast’s mental powers, forcing him to fight her physically. This ability was a product of Isotope E, which apparently allows to develop psionic abilities that were previously only possible with the since-destroyed Isotope C.

History

The White Tiger is one of the New Men created by the High Evolutionary - an uplifted animal granted human-level intelligence and the power of speech, plus a humanoid form with hands. As her name implies, she was originally a tigress with white fur, found in Bengal. The story doesn’t specify whether it was the Indian half or the Bangladeshi one, though the tigress presumably didn’t care much about frontiers.

The tigress was created after Exodus’s first assault against the Evolutionary’s science citadel at Wundagore. The Evolutionary used a material he had recently synthetised, Isotope E, to create some new New Men with super-powers so as to reinforce his defences. This generation also included Lady Vermin and Lord Wulf, later known as Lord Anon.

Thus unlike most New Men, the tigress has obvious superhuman powers and can morph between a near-human form and her animal form. Her abilities are specific and include antipsi - she was uplifted not to explore a new form of life, but to be a weapon.

Decades before New Men had been created from Isotope C, a variant the Evolutionary soon destroyed. One of the flawed Isotope C New Men, the Man-Beast, became the snake in the High Evolutionary’s would-be Eden. Though the Man-Beast had always been defeated by powerful superhumans such as Adam Warlock or Thor, the Evolutionary wanted the tigress to stalk and destroy the Man-Beast at last.

The White Tiger, sent out in the world, had various unchronicled adventures and eventually met with the Master of the World (Eshu). The Master offered to tell her where the Man-Beast was in exchange for an unrevealed object she acquired for him. Sensing that the Master was not a good person she tried to trick him - once she gave him what he needed and he told her the Man-Beast was imprisoned in the Vault, the object exploded and White Tiger fled, thinking the Master was dead. Her naive stratagem did not work, though - the Master easily survived, and he had been planning to raid the Vault anyway. When the Tiger arrived, the U-Foes had already attacked the prison to free superhuman inmates as a distraction for super-heroes. Man-Beast was already gone.

Hangin’ tough, stayin’ hungry

Looking for allies, the White Tiger went to New York City to find Luke Cage (presumably she had heard he could be hired) but saw Iron Fist (Daniel Rand) first. Deciding that she liked him better, she shadowed Rand and helped him and Hercules fight the U-Foes. Iron Fist and Hercules were at that point the only two operatives the newest version of Heroes for Hire had. Starved for manpower, they asked the Tiger to join despite not knowing anything about her. The tigress agreed, in part out of burgeoning sexual interest in the two handsome men.

The White Tiger worked with the Heroes without a hitch, but never volunteered any information about herself. Having noticed that she was holding back when fighting, Iron Fist provoked her during a sparring session to understand why, and annoyed her enough to have her lose control and turn into her tiger form. Rand talked the embarrassed Tiger into calming down and morphing back. The Tiger later tersely explained that she was actually an animal, and the Heroes dropped the matter of her past for the time being.

After the Heroes foiled a plot by Ghaur of the Deviants, their ally the Eternal Thena started looking for a refuge for her children. The Tiger suggested Wundagore, assuming that the High Evolutionary would be interested in studying Thena’s hybrid Deviant/Eternal children in exchange for protection and secrecy. Though the Heroes were somewhat taken aback to learn that the Tiger was a New Man, Thena agreed to check Wundagore out.

Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past

To the Tiger’s shock, Wundagore was in ruins - as a result of a recent assault by Exodus and the Acolytes of Magneto. Thena and the Tiger repulsed the attackers, but found no one else and had to come back to New York City to resume their Heroes for Hire activities. When Iron Fist was nearly killed, White Tiger volunteered to take part to a mystical ritual led by Brother Voodoo, where some of her life force and that of other Iron Fist allies was drained to revive him.

The White Tiger had fallen in love with Iron Fist, and realised to her dismay that he was in a relationship with private investigator Misty Knight. Having little context to work with, she decided to fight Misty until she’d submit so she would become Iron Fist’s mated female. Misty fended off the tigress’s initial attack and explained her that humans didn’t work that way, which Iron Fist later confirmed. Though she understood the situation, the White Tiger was distraught, not knowing how to deal with her human emotions of jealousy and unrequited love.

The White Tiger returned to Wundagore to investigate further, and discovered that the High Evolutionary, the Knights and some New Men such as Bova had moved back in after the Exodus onslaught. She offered to bring the Heroes for Hire with her to deal with the threat, and the Evolutionary reluctantly agreed. However, as she brought her human colleagues in, the Tiger realised that Lord Anon of the Knights of Wundagore was actually the Man-Beast in disguise. He attacked her before she could, triggering a brawl between the Heroes for Hire and the Knights of Wundagore.

Quicksilver, an ally to the Knights, rushed the severely wounded White Tiger back to New York City for specialised medical care. She recovered quickly thanks to Iron Fist’s ministrations. While she did Bova and the Knights also discovered the truth about Lord Anon, but by that point the Man-Beast had taken the High Evolutionary hostage and stolen his latest creation, Isotope E. He forced the Knights to fight at his side against the Tiger and the Heroes for Hire when they returned, and hammered out an alliance with Exodus. The Heroes and their ally Quicksilver were overwhelmed, but soon escaped. White Tiger resumed stalking the Man-Beast as battle raged in Wundagore, she came in too late to prevent the death of fellow New Man Lady Ursula at her foe’s hand.

You must fight just to keep them alive

The White Tiger and Man-Beast were separated by an explosion, but both survived - albeit the Tiger had taken the worst of it and had to bide her time as she recuperated. By the time she could attack again, the Heroes for Hire had forced Man-Beast to join a psionic gestalt that could bring the insane High Evolutionary under control. Killing the Man-Beast in this state would have had dire side effects, and Iron Fist told the tigress to stand down. Though her every instinct was to kill Man-Beast, the White Tiger couldn’t bring herself to harm the interposing Iron Fist. This bought enough time for the psionic gestalt to return the High Evolutionary to his senses.

Predictably, the Man-Beast then attempted to kill everyone with a psionic blast as they were weakened, but the tigress ignored the attack and pounced on him. The White Tiger was winning the fight, but the High Evolutionary chose to regress Man-Beast into being a normal wolf, who ran away.

The High Evolutionary wanted to reward the White Tiger for her faithful service, and she asked to also be devolved back to her animal state. She found human emotions to be too painful for her to handle, and too difficult to appease. Heeding her plea, her creator turned her back into a normal tigress, and had her returned to the forest where she had been originally found.

Description

White Tiger’s accent sounds vaguely East Indian - apparently somebody in Wundagore thought it was funny to teach her English with a Bengali accent. She tends to start her sentences with a growl or some other animalistic noise when she’s trying to remember a word or composing a long sentence.

Curiously, the White Tiger’s intermediary forms seem to be male but, heh, comics. Officially her tiger form is 400 lbs., but this has been adjusted upward in this entry given how she was drawn.

Certain moves of the Tiger reminded Iron Fist of K‘un-Lunese techniques, but this was presumably an impression created by the existence of K‘un-Lun kung fu techniques based on observing tigers, which would resemble the White Tiger’s fighting style. 

Personality

White Tiger is a clever, competent huntress. She demonstrated a strong ability to quickly understand complex human concepts, and seemed very results-oriented and pragmatic. She could easily follow complex instructions, understand complicated things such as how Nitro’s powers worked, and was generally way smarter than most humans.

She speaks in a stilted manner and is not a big fan of verbs, either omitting them or keeping their conjugation artificially simple - usually using the present progressive as a one-size-fits-all solution. Her vocabulary is good and she’s never at loss for a word, but she visibly prefers using broad generic words (“vehicle” instead of “plane” or “car”, for instance), hinting that she may not actually know more specific words - though she can easily understand terms other people use based on context. She’s not a fan of talking, generally, and prefers action.

White Tiger seems to have been trained as a martial artist, and is concerned with notions such as discipline, staying in fighting trim, fighting honourably and the like. She also has some habits such as bowing before certain opponents before a fight, or before certain allies to signify an alliance. There’s a tension between her wish for discipline and the ferocity of her animal nature - she generally maintains control, but as noted by her Minor Rage Drawback there’s a tendency toward bloody violence that she may one day not be able to keep in check.

While the White Tiger is undeniably smart and has powerful hunting instincts that work well even in a complicated context, she has next to no experience with the world. Her subterfuges and sneaky tactics are canny, but they also have a childish and naive character since she’s not been exposed to many examples of such and underestimates the guile and skill of some of the people she meets. She also has no experience with human emotions, and is very poorly armed to deal with those.

Writeup completed on the 26th of May, 2011.