Elsa Bloodstone

1. Ulysses Bloodstone.
2. The Conspiracy.
3. Elsa Bloodstone profile #1 – Bloodstone Limited Series by Abnett and Lanning – this here writeup.
4. Elsa Bloodstone profile #2 – Nextwave.
5. Elsa Bloodstone profile #3.

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Background

Powers and Abilities

After the Bloodstone choker “bites” her, the dormant powers Elsa inherited from her dad are activated. These abilities are roughly similar to those her father had whilst the Bloodgem fragment was embedded within him.

How much Elsa’s powers depend on the choker is unclear. This writeup assumes that the choker was needed to jump-start her abilities, but that it’s not important anymore.

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Ms. Bloodstone state that her powers was “in [her] genes and blood”. We also know that Ulysses Bloodstone was so infused with Hellfire Helix energies that he could continue functioning despite being dead and deprived of the Bloodgem.

Thus, that his DNA was altered enough for her daughter to inherit abilities with a little help from a Bloodgem fragment seems reasonable.

Memory, all alone in the moonlight

Even before the choker, Elsa had apparently somehow inherited swathes of her father’s memories. These chiefly manifested as dreams, instinct and knacks. It was as if certain activities of her father were things that she had personally done before.

It also gave her a patina of experience despite having never actually done anything special. Many of the situations she’d encounter were hazily familiar from dreams. These dreams were re-enactments of actual Ulysses Bloodstone adventures that occurred before Elsa’s conception.

In concrete terms

Elsa has inherited enviable qualities from her dad. She’s athletic, attractive, calm under pressure, healthy, physically talented, etc.

After the Choker bits her, Bloodstone displays superior fighting ability, agility, speed and reflexes, as well as superhuman strength and endurance – plus a healing factor . Despite never having actually trained, she could immediately engage large groups of armed men in hand-to-hand combat, with a highly acrobatic style.

She is also assumed to be immortal and able to regenerate (even from seeming death) like her father.

Blood power

Elsa Bloodstone’s blood is charged with undefined regenerative puissance. It will even cure vampirism, through the exact same mechanism that would bring Elsa back to life if she were killed.

This usually destroys the vampire, as it returns it to its human state well past the stage of death through old age. But a recently-infected vamp could be resurrected using Elsa’s blood. The full properties of Elsa’s blood are unexplored, but could easily lead to her being a McGuffin.

Knowledge

Bloodstone doesn’t just make constant media reference in her mile-a-minute blather. She seems to be genuinely knowledgeable about the classics. She once asked Adam if he liked James Whale movies (the director of the original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein) as a spur-of-the-moment joke.

She also seems to have started undergraduate studies in archaeology and/or anthropology a few years before the Limited Series.

Weapons check

Elsa is less of a tech-head than her father was. She prefers her field equipment to be proven and robust, not fiddly digital stuff. Gear that her dad used 50 years ago is perfectly fine for her needs, and she appreciates the vintage look. Her equipment is :

• The Bloodstone choker. This magical artifact is apparently built from a fragment of the Bloodgem. Said fragment must be protected by major magics to have gone undetected by Ullux’l Kwan Tae Synn – perhaps an enchantment against mystical scrying and detection.
  The main role of the Choker was to bite Elsa when she first put it on, activating her main abilities. However, it also includes a magical point-defence system against vampire attacks. Elsa can mentally override the later feature if she wants a vampire to bite her.
• Her father’s over-powered shotguns. The make and model are never specified, but it struck me as likely that Bloodstone would have bought a stockpile of ’em new-fangled 10 gauge Ithaca shotguns back in the 1970s. Thanks to her superhuman strength, Elsa can fire her Mag-10s one-handed without discomfort.
  She also carries an old .45, presumably a Colt M1911A1.
• Silver cross buckshot cartridges. Typical supernatural warfare ammunition, entire sealed crates of which are available at Bloodstone Manor. Those 10-gauge magnum cartridges are filled with tiny crucifixes made of solid silver, and are devastating against some supernatural opponents.
• Elsa also has access to huge stockpiles of hardware and curios which belonged to her father, including quite a few genuinely enchanted items. The notes about those are in the Ulysses Bloodstone entry.

Blood is thicker

Elsa Bloodstone is readily recognisable as the daughter of Ulysses Bloodstone for all sorts of monsters, mystical creatures, the undead, etc. who have heard about the great monsters hunter.

This can be a good thing (monsters who knew her father and allied with him at some point may assume that she’s an ally), or a bad one (evil creatures immediately realising that she’s probably here to kill them).

In game terms this is considered to be an advantage. The more nefarious creatures would probably end up attacking her anyway.

How it works and how monsters recognise her is unknown.

History – introduction

Elsa Bloodstone is, as one might surmise, the daughter of Ulysses Bloodstone.

For years (perhaps decades – see the “A question of time” below) she didn’t know who Ulysses Bloodstone was. Reportedly, her father was with her mother for but two years after Elsa was born. He then resumed his life of adventure and monster-hunting.

Elsa’s mother Elise was a young archaeology student when she met Ulysses. When Elise and Ulysses realised she was pregnant, she tried to convince Ulysses to retire and use his collections of trophies as an emporium. It didn’t work.

Growin’ up

Elise never spoke to Elsa about her father. She artfully dodged every question for years until Elsa gave up. After Ulysses left, Elise decided to get away from their Boston home and travelled for years throughout Europe.

Eventually she settled in the UK. Elsa thus grew up in England, acquiring an unspecified English accent and a matching diction. She also regularly experienced weird dreams as she grew up. These were versions of her father’s adventures featuring herself as the monsters hunter.

In 1978, Ulysses Bloodstone was killed at long last. After a ten-thousand-years-long hunt he took his foes with him.

History interlude – a question of time

As discussed in our comic book ageing article, we generally assume an “absolute” timeline. Which means that events take place as per publication date. In the case of Elsa, things do end up looking weird, though.

• Elsa is born at least two years before the death of her father in 1978. Given the chronology of Bloodstone’s adventures, it is likely that she was born circa 1972.
• Elsa is about 18 when the Bloodstone limited series is released… in 2002. At that point her mother Elise seems to be in her mid-to-late 30s.
• Elsa seems older (about 24) in 2006. However, at that point the Nextwave members have been drugged up and mentally tampered with. It is likely that Elsa looks older chiefly because of her permanently hostile and closed facial expression. In those rare occasion where she unclenches she looks significantly younger.

Thus, it would seem that the ageing of both Elsa and Elise Bloodstone was greatly slowed after Elise met Ulysses. This common in comics. You can check the aforelinked Leòn Genetic Sequence article on this site for a general framework about comic book people not ageing and people not being flabbergasted about this.

Wait ! I can explain !

Using the Leòn explanation is not necessary, though. Elsa is known to have inherited her powers from her dad, though those were dormant at first. Her metabolism may have simply started ageing in very slow motion after her mid-teens, as a diluted form of her father’s immortality.

Extensive blood exchange with her daughter whilst pregnant could easily have triggered a similar slow-ageing phenomenon in Elise.

In this hypothesis Elise is born in 1952, meets Bloodstone circa 1971, and gets pregnant in 1972. For the last six months of her pregnancy she receives enough of her daughter’s blood to freeze her ageing for several years, though she gradually resumes ageing at a slower rate. By 2002, Elise Bloodstone is chronologically 50 and physically 35.

Thus, Elsa would have had a very long adolescence, from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. She would grow up normally until 1986, at which point her ageing slows down at about 4:1, taking 16 years to become four years older. Which, in the Marvel Universe, is not unheard of since a significant portion of humanity has… interesting genetics.

History – resumed

The inheritance of a super-caveman

Bloodstone had willed a considerable amount of riches to Elsa and Elise. For Elise, he had regrouped and organised in Boston a collection of curios. This way, she could run the emporium she had suggested before he left. For Elsa, he prepared a magical item, the Bloodstone Choker.

However, the inheritance apparently wasn’t sorted out until 2002. One imagines that the properties of Bloodstone were innumerable, atrociously organised and poorly documented. It is likely that they only gradually surfaced as international research into his holdings progressed.

Furthermore, Elise Bloodstone was complicated to track down – presumably private detectives had to be hired to locate her. Lastly, one supposes that there were other descendants whose inheritance had to be worked out.

(The Boston estate was presented as being the totality of the Bloodstone properties. This is impossible given what was seen of Bloodstone’s holdings in the late 1970s – such as high-tech island bases with special boats and multiple towers. It is probable that the actual Bloodstone inheritance was compartmentalised, though other beneficiaries remain unknown.
One could probably run an entire RPG campaign about a team of lawyers and investigators working on this.)

To the olde towne

By 2002, Elise Bloodstone had recently divorced, was six months pregnant, and was in a perilous financial situation. Thus, when solicitors contacted her about the Bloodstone inheritance, she had little choice. She spent what little savings were left to fly with her daughter to Boston, despite her mixed feelings about the legacy.

There, the Bloodstone widow and her daughter discovered the huge manor and the extensive exotic collections hosted therein. It is in Massachusetts that Elsa saw pictures of her father for the first time in her life. Her mother grudgingly acknowledged that Elsa’s father was “a special person”.

Elise and Elsa also discovered that the manor had its own staff.

Adam and the Choker

The executor of the estate, present at the manor, was one Charles Barnabus – likely an alias referring to Barnabas Collins . Barnabus had one of his employees, the elderly Mr. Dluga, arrange guest rooms for the Bloodstones.

Within hours, Elsa discovered a secret passage leading to the hidden collections in the basement. There she met the manor’s caretaker – Adam, better known as the Monster of Frankenstein.

Adam gave Elsa the Bloodstone Choker, which bit her and activated her superhuman abilities. Minutes later Elsa, fooling around with a Middle Eastern oil lamp, was magically teleported to Bosnia, where she confronted Dracula.

The overwhelmed Elsa was saved by the Choker. It distracted Dracula long enough for United Nations peacekeepers to stake the Lord of Vampires. The lamp then teleported a confused Elsa back to the manor’s basement.

Back to the USA (and Egypt, somehow)

Meanwhile Elise, realising Ulysses’s intent, decided to operate the Boston estate as an emporium. She started dating the affable Barnabus (apparently without realising that he was a vampire). Elise also arranged for Elsa to continue her education in a US college.

Greatly missing Bloodstone and his monster hunts, Adam decided to equip Elsa so they’d go on an adventure together. He naïvely assuming that since she was a Bloodstone she would know what to do. They ended up fighting zombie gunmen in an Egyptian pyramid. Though neither of them had any idea of what was going on, they escaped alive.

Elsa soon teamed up with an ally of her father, N’Kantu the Living Mummy. They fought his mummified foe Rakses the Necromancer. Elsa soon formulated a Bloodstone-style plan, and Rakses was destroyed by Adam after his spells were undone by N’Kantu.

Elsa the vampire slayer

The manor was then attacked by Nosferatus vampires, old enemies of Bloodstone. They overwhelmed and kidnapped Barnabus as he tried to defend Elise. The vampires then beheaded Adam, though that was but a temporary setback for the Monster of Frankenstein.

Furious at having her mother’s boyfriend kidnapped, Elsa went on the warpath. Thomas, the grandson of Mr. Dluga, volunteered as her sidekick.

Despite having been thwarted by Ulysses Bloodstone decades before, the Nosferati had been plotting. They extensively experimented with blood viruses to dominate humanity. They had kidnapped the likes of Barnabus and Dracula (the latter in part thanks to Elsa’s unwitting diversion in Bosnia) to finalise their master plan.

Howbeit, Elsa and her allies ruined their plot. The Master Nosferatu ended up drinking Elsa’s blood, which was exactly what she wanted. Ms. Bloodstone had gained an intuitive understanding of her abilities. She knew that her blood would cure the ancient bloodsucker of his vampirism… thus rendering him into dust.

And once again, a Bloodstone hunts monsters

After rescuing Barnabus, Elsa convinced him to never tell her mother about her activities. Guided by the djinn’s lamp Elsa, Adam and Thomas then started adventuring regularly, hunting monsters. Meanwhile, Elsa was accepted at a nearby college and started undergrad studies in the humanities.

As part of her budding monster-hunting activities, Elsa organised her father’s notes. She also requested information from various adventurers (including some super-heroes such as Dr. Reed Richards, who remembered her father) about monsters mentioned by Bloodstone. She entered all of this everything into a text-rich database.

The results are published on her blog, Blogstone, along with her extensive notes about her father’s career. Blogstone was written in collaboration with Jacob Hathaway (the middle-aged son of the custodian of records for the 1950s Monster Hunters) and Frank Johnson (the curator of the Museum of Monsters in the US).

Thomas Dluga was never seen again. Hopefully he realised that he was never going to impress Elsa into sleeping with him, and would likely die sooner rather than later if he kept getting involved in monsters hunting.

And then…

Some years later, things took an odd turn.

Description

Initially, Elsa is the archetypal very attractive, athletic-but-buxom underage blonde. She seems to have stepped out right of the music video clone mills or the Playboy Mansion.

The series had a clear cheesecake component, starring Elsa and her teenage preference for tight belly shirts and even tighter low-riding trousers. But then that might have been obvious from the accompanying illustrations.

The original costume (with the skin-tight beige trousers and the small knotted shirt straining to hold her bust) was Adam’s clumsy attempt at coming up with a feminised Bloodstone costume. It seems to have been inspired by his Betamax movies – the trousers may be patterned after Han Solo’s, and the knotted shirt after a classic Linda Carter photo.

The embarrassed Elsa threw in one of her father’s vintage leather jackets to cover some skin, but soon became more comfortable with these clothes.

Personality

Originally Elsa is the classic bubbly, lively young blonde. Most of her sentences are built using phrases, puns and vocabulary trendy among teenagers, and/or media references.

She’s a genre media geek. She makes constant references to sci-fi, cartoons, classic horror movies, and the like. She’s very media-tropes-aware, and will often snark a bit when cliché elements appear in her adventures. Examples include comparing them to Scooby Doo episodes or Hammer Horror  tropes.

Elsa focuses on being as hyperactive, sparkling and funny as she can. Presumably she’s used to being a popular girl and queen bee and the “charming, quirky, genre-aware teenage girl” patter has become second nature. After all, if our No-Prize Hypothesis  is true, she’s been a teenager for a very long time.

Ms. Bloodstone talks a mile a minute, and never ever shuts up. In combat her constant jokes, skits and media reference simply morph into trash talk and taunts. She’s a bit like an amateur stand-up comedienne who’s on stage 24/7. Perhaps she wanted to be a Joss Whedon female lead and Eliza Dushku got the job instead.

Monsters huntress

Within a week or two of getting the Bloodstone Choker, Elsa starts behaving like a fearless monster hunter. Yes, she’s still bubbly, a motormouth, young, and so on. But she also became determined, resourceful, graceful under pressure, pragmatic, etc.

This may have been the result of Elsa remembering all of her monster-hunting dreams. But it did look a bit suspicious. The Choker may have come with some conditioning cooked up by her father to turn her into a worthy successor.

Quotes

(Commenting upon a portrait of her father in the late 1970s) “’What if the Bee Gees  and Fabio  mated ?‘”

(After discovering a secret door) “Oh, you have got to be kidding. Not the old skull = doorknob routine !”

“Hello ? Attractive young girl coming through !”

Frankenstein’s Monster: “I have something here for you… Ulysses wanted you to have it when you were old enough…”
Elsa: “What is it ? My father’s lightsabre ?”
F’s M: “You’re funny ! I *love* that movie. I have it on Betamax.”

(Discovering the size of American “sandwiches”)
Elsa: “What *is* this ?”
Waiter: “Club sandwich, miss.”
Elsa: “And the rest of the club will arrive to help me eat it *when* ?”

“Ohmygod ! That’s too cool ! A genie !”

“Oh… blimey.” (five minutes later, the situation gets even worse) “Oh… bollocks.”

(To the Living Mummy) “Okay ! I believe it ! You’re the good guy and they’re the bad guys. You can appreciate how I *might* have got that arse backward at first. But what do we do about [the situation], Captain Ace Bandage ?”

DC Universe History

Elsa would be Scandal Savage’s half-sister, of course – let’s rename her Kabal Savage.

If you liked the moody, over-the-top Nextwave version, Kabal Savage could be hunting a race of monsters born out of Vandal Savage’s blood. She’d devour them alive to increase her own mystical potential by ingesting the genetic material of her own father. Which is a good thing for those tormented by these monsters, but not pretty to watch.

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: Marvel Universe.

Helper(s): Darci.

Writeup completed on the 17^th of December, 2009.