Fury

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Background

Powers & Abilities

Fury possesses superhuman strength (about “Class 40”). Among other applications this allows her to jump to great heights and cover long distances in a single bound. She can also run at superhuman speeds, enjoys superhuman endurance, and demonstrated considerable proficiency in hand-to-hand combat.

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Although she is superhumanly resilient, Lyta can be visibly hurt, bleed, get concussed, etc., when hit with sufficient force.

Reputedly, her durability works like Wonder Woman’s and she’s significantly more resilient against punches and blunt weapons than against bladed weapons and bullets. The Fury wears some very light body armour that compensates for this vulnerability by protecting her vitals from impalement.

Lyta is a professional-level pilot (both fixed- and rotary wing). Her father trained her since she was a teen and she has hundreds if not thousands of hours of flight under her belt.

Crises

The book in which Lyta appeared, Infinity, Inc. was strongly rooted in the Earth-2 continuity. Earth-2 essentially was DC’s Golden Age  continuity. For instance, Lyta was the daughter of the Golden Age Wonder Woman. However, the book debuted mere months before Crisis on Infinite Earths struck.

During these epic events, Earth-2 vanished – most characters were now living on New Earth, where history had been different.

After the Crisis, writers Roy and Dann Thomas furiously worked to have everything land on its feet despite the great changes in the DC Universe. Apparently the initial intent for Infinity, Inc. was to keep as much of the Earth-2 backstory as possible in the history of New Earth, but that proved impossible in many instances.

No small Wonder

Fury was hit particularly hard by the continuity upheaval. Unlike the Wonder Woman of Earth-2 — the Golden Age Wonder Woman — the Wonder Woman of New Earth never was a wartime heroine and never had a child with Steve Trevor. In the brave new continuity, Wonder Woman was a somewhat different character and only discovered the World of Man in 1986, rather than being active from 1941 onward.

Successive attempts were made to fix this quandary. At first, persons in the DC Universe who knew Fury now thought that Lyta’s biological parents were unknown, and that she had been adopted by a couple called the Trevors. Things were fuzzy for everyone, including Hippolyta, as the new reality wasn’t fully realised.

Then, Lyta became tied to two other wartime heroines who has just appeared in the continuity – the first Fury (Helena Kosmatos) and Miss America (Joan Dale).

Both Kosmatos and Dale were intended to play roughly the role of the Earth-2’s Wonder Woman during her World War Two adventures. They would serve as substitutes for the Golden Age Wonder Woman. This would in turn fix various issues of the “but if Wonder Woman never fought in the war, how can such-and-such event possibly have happened ?” type. The answer could now be “it happened, only it wasn’t Wonder Woman but the Fury/Miss America who did it.”

Thus, using this strategy, the answer to “but if Wonder Woman never was involved in WWII, how can the Fury be her daughter ?” becomes “well, she’s actually the daughter of the first Fury, and was raised by Miss America.”

Time after time

The issue was later re-re-fixed by having Queen Hippolyta of Themyscira travel back in time and become the first, wartime Wonder Woman. This resulted in major continuity problems for Helena Kosmatos, and arguably caused more paradoxes and confusions than it fixed.

However, in *your* campaign, it is now entirely possible for Lyta to just be the daughter of the time-travelling Queen Hippolyta and to have a background close to the one that was published before the Crisis. Complete with kanga-riding childhood, bullets and bracers games and “Holy Hera” exclamations.

As to this entry, it simply relates things as they happen from Lyta’s point of view — as we usually do on writeups.org.

History

Earth-2 origin

Lyta has had two sets of childhood. The first of those took place on pre-Crisis Earth-2 and has now been erased and forgotten, including by Lyta herself.

In this past, she was the daughter of Wonder Woman, who had been active in the World of Man from 1941 onward, and her paramour Steve Trevor. The adventures of the Earth-2 Wonder Woman were the ones published in Wonder Woman volume 1, Sensation Comics, and other DC titles during the 1940s and 1950s.

Lyta was raised as a military brat and was forever asked by her mother to do everything ’on the double‘. She was an obvious superhuman from birth, able to perform massive feats of strength, speed, acrobatics, etc. even as a tomboyish tween. And, of course, she took the occasional joy ride in the invisible jet.

The JSA of Earth-2, including Wonder Woman, were a close-knit bunch. Thus, Lyta spent many hours visiting and being visited by other JSA brats. These children of the Justice Society and a few friends would, as young adults, form Infinity, Inc.

New Earth origin

In the rewritten, post-Crisis universe, Lyta is the daughter of Helena Kosmatos and an unrevealed father. Ms. Kosmatos was, as the original Fury, a member of the Young All-Stars. This was a group of teenage heroes attached to the All-Star Squadron, an organisation that included practically every American wartime super-hero.

During the 1960s, Kosmatos heard that her former All-Star Squadron colleague, Joan Dale aka Miss America, had just gotten married to one Mr. Trevor but could not bear a child. The pregnant Fury approached her.

Unwilling to raise a child, Kosmatos offered Joan to become the adoptive mother of little Hippolyta, on condition that the newlywed Trevors never reveal who the actual mother was. The Trevors agreed, though Hippolyta would eventually discover the truth on her own.

Adopted

Lyta mentioned much later that her birth occurred in Greece. The Trevors presumably flew there to be present at the birth, then flew back to the US with the baby.

Thus was Hippolyta raised from birth by the wealthy Trevors. Joan Trevor, like many other JSA members, had retired from her Miss America identity in 1951 when the House Un-American Committee  investigated the Justice Society. Mrs. Trevor later confided that her powers had started to fade anyway, and by the time of Hippolyta’s birth she had seemingly lost them entirely.

As to Derek Trevor, he was an Admiral with the US Navy, who fought in the Pacific during WWII. Mr. and Mrs. Trevor may have shared an Italian ancestry, as they owned and read books in Italian and Lyta was taught the basics of the language.

Growin’ up

Little Hippolyta was reportedly visited from time to time by her namesake Queen Hippolyta of Themyscira. The Amazon Queen had been, during a long stay in the 1940s achieved through time travel, a colleague of both Joan Dale and Helena Kosmatos under the name Wonder Woman.

When Hippolyta Trevor was a little girl the Queen would reportedly play with her, and when she became a teenager Her Majesty trained her in the basics of Amazon martial arts and athletics.

The Trevor family often spent time on Trevor Island, near Australia. That was an island which Admiral Trevor discovered during WWII, when he crashed his P-38  there before being rescued by the JSA. The Trevors never told anyone but friends and relatives about the island.

Both Joan and Derek Trevor had wartime ties with the Justice Society of America. Their adoptive daughter and the children of some JSA members were roughly the same age, and the kids played together whenever their parents spent time together. As a little girl Lyta developed a crush on another such JSA brat, Hector Hall.

Considering her future

It seems safe to assume that, much like during her pre-Crisis childhood, Lyta was a very active and competitive child, with a love for sports and physical education. Knowing that Joan Trevor née Dale had been the wartime Miss America, Lyta wanted to become the new Miss America once she’d be older.

Lyta inherited part of Helena Kosmatos’s superhuman powers. After her freshman year at Georgetown University , she insisted that she was ready to begin a career as a super-heroine. Her parents, however, wanted her to complete her college education first.

Lyta complied and, after a look-see at the University of Southern California  (where she briefly met again with fellow JSA brat Al Rothstein), transferred to the UCLA in pre-med. There she was reunited with Hector Hall, who was also a student there. A romantic relationship developed between Lyta and Hector.

Infinity, Inc.

Hector also wanted to become a super-hero, and they became the Fury and the Silver Scarab. It is unclear why Lyta adopted this code name, since she did not know that she was the daughter of Helena Kosmatos. However, supernatural influence is plausible, quite possibly through the mysterious Shade (Richard Swift) who apparently knew about Lyta Trevor’s parentage.

JSA brats Al Rothstein (the future Nuklon) and Norda (the future Northwind) renewed their ties with the young couple. As the four friends were on a vacation on Thanksgiving, they decided to present themselves in costumes and code names at a JSA meeting and petition for membership.

Along the way they were joined by Jade (Jennifer-Lynn Hayden) and Obsidian (Todd Rice), who suspected that they were the children of the original Green Lantern (Alan Scott).

Although their application was rejected, the youths formed their own super-hero team, Infinity, Inc., with the help of JSA member the Star-Spangled Kid (Sylvester Pemberton). Other youths, such as Brainwave II (Henry King, Jr.), soon joined the nascent group.

Lyta became engaged to Hector. They announced this after Hector revealed his identity during the Infinity, Inc. launch press conference. However, their relationship did not go very smoothly due to their fiery tempers, and was rife with fights and emotional conflict.

Crisis and consequences

Infinity, Inc.’s early career was marked by the Crisis on Infinite Earths. In its aftermath, reality was rewritten and no longer included Earth-2’s Wonder Woman or Earth-2’s Steve Trevor – Fury’s parents.

Hippolyta was devastated by the disappearance of her parents, though they appeared to her one last time to tell her they had been invited by Zeus to reside among the gods in Olympus, leaving the mortal plane forever.

The shock of losing her parents, seeing them erased from the memory of most people, and slowly gaining “memories” from the rewritten continuity proved difficult. The stress made her tense and angry, leading to almost daily shouting matches with Hec and chronic fatigue.

Forgotten, not forgiven

Her team-mate the telepathic Brainwave, who felt her distress, erased Lyta’s memories of her pre-Crisis parents and life – without her knowledge or consent.

The universe completed the job, making people forget about details whilst continuity knit itself back together. For instance for a while no one knew or cared where kangas came from since the Pre-Crisis Paradise Island, home of the kangas, was no more. Eventually Trevor Island appeared in the continuity and everybody accepted that kangas were from there and had always come from there.

For a time, the Fury simply had no idea whom her parents were, or what her childhood had been. She assumed that she was an orphan until her retconned-in childhood with Joan and Derek Trevor reassuringly overwrote this assumption.

Oy.

In the wake of the Crisis

While the new reality patched Hippolyta’s background and eased her feelings by giving her a past, other problems were brewing. Hector started behaving in an oddly cold and detached way – though he still fought with Lyta. Eventually he just packed up and disappeared without an explanation. A short time later, Lyta learned that she was pregnant.

Lastly, the sons and daughters of the JSA learned that their parents had vanished into another dimension to fight and eternal battle to forestall Ragnarok. The JSA was gone forever.

After a clash between Infinity, Inc. and Injustice Unlimited in Calgary, the Shade forced the Fury to accompany him to a hidden cave under the Areopagus in Greece, to steal a fragment of the Tablet of Erebus. This is where Fury, facing the mythological Furies (Alecto – who perseveres in anger ; Megæra, the jealous one ; and her mother’s patron Tisiphone, the blood avenger), learned about her mother, the original Fury.

This encounter may have been deliberately triggered by the Shade. Though back then he was just a slightly goofy thief and villain straight from the Golden Age, Richard Swift would later be revealed as a complex and knowledgeable immortal.

The Silver Scarab

After a long absence and no contact, Hector finally sent Hippolyta a message and met her at her favourite romantic spot on the Malibu beach. Hector was no more – he had turned into an inhuman monster simply called the Silver Scarab. Wearing a trench coat and fedora to conceal his new appearance, he cruelly rejected his wife then flew away, further shattering Lyta.

Infinity, Inc.’s leader Skyman (Sylvester Pemberton) learned that Fury was pregnant, and forced her to go on maternity leave. Fury decided to return to Virginia, and perhaps check up on Hector and attempt to win him back.

On her way back, she cracked and went straight to the Hall manor, which she found in a terrible state of disrepair and surrounded by barbed wire. Investigating, she discovered that the doors and windows had been bricked-up from the inside.

Lyta burst through the yard-thick walls, and discovered that everything within had been rebuilt in the likeness of an ancient Egyptian tomb. Exploring, she stumbled upon the ritually sacrificed body of Hall.

Human sacrifices

Removing the dagger in his chest in near-panic, she discovered that the corpse was but an empty shell, which crumbled into debris and dust when the blade was removed. The horrified and confused Fury was then confronted and swiftly defeated by Hastor and the Silver Scarab.

Though chained on the altar where Hector had been sacrificed, the Fury overcame the drugs she had been given. Thus, when the Silver Scarab came to check on her the fight resumed, but Lyta discovered that he was much more powerful and resilient than even the armoured Hector Hall had ever been. The distraught Fury was again defeated.

At this point, Fury’s morale was broken, in part through sorcery. She was used as a hostage by the Silver Scarab when Infinity, Inc. came to the rescue. Nuklon narrowly saved Fury from being crushed by a preternaturally heavy statue, but all she wanted was to die. Nuklon helped Fury shake off her mystically-induced despair, and they broke the statue together.

The Scarab was defeated soon after that, in large part thanks to Fury’s unborn child, which was the only thing tethering Hector Hall to humanity. See the Silver Scarab writeup for the complex issues of Hector Hall’s soul, its transmogrifications  and transmigrations – and Hastor.

Enter Sandman

Some months later Nuklon proposed to Lyta Trevor with the support of her parents. But she passed on his offer as he was just a friend to her. In any case, Lyta was still mourning Hector and sleeping with a photo of him under her pillow.

Later that night, an ominous figure garbed in gold and red materialised in Lyta’s bedroom. The Trevors and Nuklon eventually captured this Peeping Tom, who kept materialising in Hippolyta’s room every night. He turned out to be a resurrected Hector Hall, now in the garb and role of the Sandman.

Hec’s spirit had been captured in the “dream dimension”. He was now the successor of Dr. Garrett Sanford, protecting Earth from demonic nightmares and monitoring the Dream Stream along with his companions, captive “nightmare demons” Brute and Glob. Hall could only manifest on Earth for one hour out of 24, and was very hesitant to announce to his fiancée that he was still alive.

Dream a little dream

Lyta did not care much about this problem, though. They were happily reunited, soon organising their marriage and wedding ceremony. They eventually found a way for the heavily pregnant Lyta to come live in the Sandman’s Dream Dome in “dream dimension” with Hector, Glob and Brute. By some accounts she was there for two years.

It was apparently during this era that Lyta’s mother (presumably meaning Joan Dale-Trevor) reportedly “deserted” her. What this means wasn’t explained.

Due to the peculiarities of the “dream dimension”, Mrs. Hall’s pregnancy never progressed. Lyta herself became increasingly stuporous, living as a pretty pretty pregnant princess in a dream world, accepting all events around her as natural, and having considerable difficulties keeping a coherent train of thought.

True to form, the Fury’s happy but fuzzy life would soon be shattered by events much greater than herself and the evolution of a story in which she was but a side note.

Description

See illustrations.

Personality

Lyta Trevor Hall was originally an independent young woman, with a strong belief in herself and usually in control of her emotions. She was proud of her ability to deal with matters in a self-assured, confident manner. In her early career, she wass the stereotypical “liberated woman” of the early 1980s.

However, this may have been an act to hide her deep-rooted family problems. She constantly butted heads with her adoptive mother and kept her adoptive father wrapped around her finger.

Very much in love with Hector Hall, Lyta was pleased to find that she was pregnant and looked forward to raising their child. The transformation of Hector Hall into the Silver Scarab, and Hector’s seeming death shattered Lyta’s confidence and life dreams.

Nevertheless, she continued to do what was right in the aftermath of his death, and was instrumental in the final conflict against the Silver Scarab.

Spent

By that point, though, Hippolyta had just been through too many tragedies and soul-breaking events. She was no longer that assertive or certain of her values, and her behaviour was increasingly wobbly and victim-like.

This depressive aspect was not pronounced at first. But it dramatically worsened when she started living in the Dream Dome in a permanent stupor. By that point Mrs. Hall was but a pathetic shadow of whom she once was.

Woman of action

Although she’s generally a nice and easy-going person, the Fury’s temper when she gets emotionally hurt or distressed is frightening. Her fighting techniques might become lethal, or just get outside to smash boulders, run like the wind and break trees to let off steam.

When it comes to taking physical action, she tends to do so unhesitatingly and directly. She’s all for smashing obstacles if she gets a good excuse. The Fury’s temper would later prove to be her tragic flaw, in the Ancient Greek sense.

Like her husband, Lyta was raised in wealth. She comes across as somewhat spoiled and has a tendency to show off – especially by performing acrobatics. This shared history of wealth, beauty, super-heroic parents, brashness, desire to be the centre of attention, etc. seems to explain how enduring her love for Hec is, despite the tension and hurtful episodes in their marriage.

However, despite her affluent family, Lyta tended to be rather practical about things, genuinely rooted for the underdog, and held no contempt for the less affluent.

Besides, she has been in love with Hector for so long and since such a young age that she is no longer able to have a rational approach to their relationship. Part of her has become defined as Hector’s girlfriend.

Quotes

“The name is Fury — and like the man said, even Hell hath nothing like me !”

“Maybe you never heard — but in the old Greek legends, it was the furies, not courts of law, that punished the guilty. Well, my name’s Fury, too — and maybe it’s about time I started living up to it. I’m going to find out who did this – who murdered my mother – and then I’m going to KILL him !”

“Great ! So she gets to sit there laughing — while we have to play ‘fireman save my child’.”

“Now this is what I call a high dive. How do you like my form ?”

(During a spat with Hector) “And why don’t you admit you’re just as jealous of his powers as Todd is of your money ?!”

“The Hell with that ! If we go in — we go through the front door !” (Smashes a breach open, triggers alarms)

“[Hector] was doomed from the start, according to Norda. And yet, despite what he said that night on the beach at Malibu, I know Hec loved me — as long as he lived — and that’s what I’ll tell his child, one day.”

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Helper(s): Danielle Mendus, John Colagioia, John M. Kahane, Yo!Master.

Source of Character: Infinity, Inc v1 comics (DC Universe).