Bride of Frankenstein

Reading the profile for Frankenstein before this one also seems like a good idea.

On the third hand (she has four) she can be used in stories without any context, since the spin-offs about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are well-known classics.

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Background

Powers and Abilities

While the Bride does not seem to be as brutally powerful as Frankenstein, she is made of the same stuff. As such, she is particularly deadly and likely immortal and unkillable. She seems to identify as undead.

She is an extraordinary assassin, a formidable killer, and a master of all sorts of advanced military technologies. Being a stone cold executioner, she’s entirely ruthless and seems devoid of empathy.

The Bride apparently has excellent peripheral vision. She’s often gunning down multiple targets without seeming to even look at them.

Between her firearms skills, her four arms and her numerous, her powerful pistols and burning through thousands of dollars of made-to-order advanced ammo per firefight, the Bride can be amazingly devastating. And that’s without taking into account her ability to be an ace one-woman helicopter gunship crew.

The Bride also seems to be a competent intelligence analyst. She definitely studies her briefings and files, and demonstrated a wickedly sharp mind.

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History

It is unclear how much the history of the Bride differs from the events chronicled in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Of course, in the books, Victor Frankenstein destroys the Bride before he animates her, refusing to accept the terms of the Creature. But in the DCU both Frankenstein and the Bride were not really animated by electricity. Rather their vital essence is the blood of Melmoth, a variant of the Water of Life.

Thus, it would be entirely possible for the DCU version of the Bride of Frankenstein to “survive” her apparent destruction at the hands of Victor Frankenstein. It is likely, after all, that the doctor did not understand the full potency of Melmoth’s blood.

In any case, the Bride believed her intended mate had been destroyed in the icy waters of the Arctic. She eventually became the star agent and cleaner of S.H.A.D.E., an American subsecret organization.

Woman-at-arms

The Bride once was kidnapped by a demented Indian villain called the Red Swami. He brainwashed her and implanted her with a new pair of arms. The goal was to turn her into the avatar of an assassin goddess. Probably Kali — it’s always Kali.

The Bride was eventually rescued by S.H.A.D.E. agents and her conditioning broken. But she kept the arms (more guns ! Yay !).

During the Salvation Valley fiasco, the Bride stumbled upon Frankenstein and rescued him. The male creature seemed nostalgic or perhaps sentimental at meeting her. Unmoved, the Bride took him prisoner by complete surprise, suddenly shooting one of her handguns point blank through the corner of his left eye and into his brain. She knew that would but incapacitate him for a bit.

Frankenstein did not seem to really mind. Thus he allied with S.H.A.D.E. for a few days, out of expediency.

The Bride remains a key agent for S.H.A.D.E. and quite possibly their best cleaner. She has stuck with Father Time despite the Infinite Crisis trainwreck. Because she just doesn’t care and is vaguely amused by the whole mess.

Hazy S.H.A.D.E. of winter

S.H.A.D.E. (Super-Human Advanced Defense Executive) is a subsecret American agency founded by President Lyndon Johnson. It is all about using superhuman agents (or, to be blunt, jackals and cleaners) in foreign and domestic highly classified black bag jobs.

When Frankenstein ran into them in 2005, their glory had faded from their heyday. Though they seemed competent and highly experienced, their budgets had considerably shrank from several decades before. Furthermore, they had become so secret and so paranoid (they apparently glided through the entire Janus Directive , as even Kobra missed their existence) as to become irrelevant.

Or at least, as irrelevant as an organization of inhuman killers backed by super-heavy, competent firepower and directed by a maniac can get. As their director put it : “We clean up the crap no one else will touch, on a budget that wouldn’t buy you a breakfast at a fancy hotel.”

Modus operandi

For S.H.A.D.E., the ends definitely justify the means, no matter what sort of carnage ensues. They seem to prefer to create their own superhuman weapons. This means very high risk, high return experiments they *know* are likely to become horrific disasters.

Being cowboys, they seem in fact to have a culture of pride about their ruthlessness. Even support personnel seem to share a culture of morbid amusement, black humour and crass indifference when civilians, agents, technicians, etc. get caught in the semi-regular catastrophes.

Likewise, they will kill at the drop of a hat, and with apparent impunity. When Neh-Buh-Loh cleaved off Frankenstein’ s arm, their immediate solution was to assassinate a prominent bodybuilder, saw off his arm and use it to re-arm Frankenstein.

Resources

S.H.A.D.E. resources tend to be heavy, destructive and to have been mostly acquired in the 1960s and 1970s. They have low-yield atomic bombs, and have used them to “clean up” theaters of operation on domestic soil. They have at least one Chinook  converted into a super-heavy gunship (with M-134  emplacements that seemed similar to those on some Spectre gunships .

Like many influential organisations in Morrison -written DCU books, can hack the global bulk teleport system to their advantage.

All of their superhuman agents, and possibly the human ones, have surgical implants giving them an Internet uplink. They also have special access to the extensive and quite up-to-date S.H.A.D.E. databases.

More details about S.H.A.D.E. can be found in the entry for Father Time.

Description

Her appearance is a reference the 1935 version of The Bride of Frankenstein with Elsa Lanchester .

Personality

Stone-cold assassin, special agent and commando. She seems deeply cynical, amoral and unprincipled. This appears to be the result of her accepting that the world is a ruthless, dog-eat-dog miserable mess filled with treason and exploitation.

This is probably a result of decades spent working for S.H.A.D.E.. It is likely that, much like Frankenstein, she was initially a blank state.

The Bride just doesn’t give a damn, follows orders and does whatever is expedient. In fact, she seems to find the notion of everybody betraying everybody else and using the rest perversely amusing. She also seems to have fun going through battles like they were shoot ’em up video games.

As a S.H.A.D.E. agent, she can be played as a sort of fallen Jack Bauer. She’s every bit as intense, every bit as hard, every bit as manipulative… but she has no ties to anything, believes in nothing, and forever remains alone due to her profound cynicism.

Also, she’s made out of pieces of corpses animated by lightning and blood from one billion years in the future and 42,000 years in the past, but who’s counting.

Quotes

Father Time: “Replika here had to sacrifice himself to get us the data we already have. But you dead people…”
The Bride (sarcastically): “We prefer the term ‘differently active’, Sir.”

Frankenstein: “You… you were made to be my companion.”
The Bride: “I know, and it’s nothing personal. But you never were my type.”
Frankenstein: “Your type ?”
The Bride: “Alive.” (beat) “One of these days they’ll figure out how to sew on a sense of humor.”

“Take a deep breath, flyboy. You’re about to be updated in the personnel database.” (decapitates the pilot with a sharp piece of glass)

“It’s like a message from the future that makes more and more sense the closer we get to it. I keep spotting repeated patterns in all the incoming crisis data. Read [Agent Helligan]’s report !”

“I’m going in.” (parachutes into the Manhattan warzone with an arsenal of pistols and lots of ammunition)

(Mentally accessing S.H.A.D.E.’s VoIP network) “Bride online ! Resistance is concentrating here at the Hero Museum on Broadway and Lennon. We’re holding the fort, but those fairies are furious !”

“Activating liquid temporal teleporter. What have you gotten yourself into, Time ?”

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: DC Universe.

Helper(s): Roy Cowan.