Starfire

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Background

Powers and Abilities

Starfire is a well-trained and energetic fighter, warrior, huntress and survivor. She has killed numerous opponents with her blade.

She is exceptionally strong for her size and frame. Starfire once wrenched from a wall medium-sized chains holding her. So it’s possible that there are some sort of genetic enhancements in play.

She also displayed superior agility, reflexes and courage.

And besides… it’s all in the reflexes

She’s a natural with action skills. If it involves fighting, climbing up and down stuff, sneaking around, death-defying acrobatics and the like, Starfire can do it without any training.

If she does train, she’ll reach a cinematicThe level of power and (un)realism found in a spectacular action movie. level of proficiency within an impossibly short time.

One example – laser weapons. She was shooting fine within seconds of grabbing the first pistol she ever saw. She then quickly graduated to dual-wieldingUsing two weapons at once, one in each hand a cutlass and a pistol.

However, her ally Moonwatcher displayed the same proficiency. So perhaps these weapons are optimised for ease of use, and it’s a bad example.

(These guns are also pretty robust – Thump could use a rifle as a club without damaging it).

Armament

Soundtrack

There’s a vast repertory of songs celebrating the struggle for freedom. So let’s just go with me current, suitable fav.

History (part 1)

The Mygorg considered Starfire as something between a collector’s item and a pet with a rare pedigree. She had been bred to have a pale complexion, attractive features and physique, and blue eyes.

Thus, she was not spent as a menial labourer. She was selected from birth to be an enslaved house pet.

Given this role, she received a modicum of education – even including reading and writing. Plus the usual conditioning to be reflexively obedient to any form of authority.

As she grew up, Starfire was selected to graduate from house pet to sex toy for the local Mygorg lord, one Sookaroth.

Upon learning this, Starfire attempted to flee. But her obedience conditioning made this attempt feeble. She was easily recaptured.

Still, she had managed to run pretty far into the wilderness.

War priest Dagan

This is how she was spotted by a free Human. He was a war priest named Dagan wearing the traditional blade and gaudy uniform of his caste.

Spotting Starfire being recaptured, the man leapt in, killing several Mygorgs. The two Humans then fled in his flying car.

Dagan spent weeks breaking Starfire’s obedience conditioning, so she would stop unquestioningly carrying out every order she was given. He made good progress, but she couldn’t stop calling him master. She also kept treating him like a senior authority figure.

Dagan taught the freedwoman the skills she would need not to be a burden living in the dangerous wilderness. These included swordsplay, archery, tracking, spear throwing, and the like.

That part was a stunning success. Starfire demonstrated genius-level aptitudes for those. She learned within weeks what most would take years to drill through.

Rebel rebel

Finally, Dagan taught Starfire the history of Humans on their world. He hoped this would help break the enslaved persons’ conditioning.

But this did not work as well as he had hoped.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given Starfire’s preferences, progress came from a more action-oriented situation.

The freedwoman stumbled upon a large and dangerous predator. But she and Dagan prevailed through teamwork. Elated by this victory, Starfire became Dagan’s lover.

These developing feelings greatly accelerated the deprogramming, making Starfire more of her own woman and less of a Mygorg house pet.

Taken²

Some weeks later, as Starfire was away hunting, Mygorgs raided their camp. They captured Dagan.

Having no idea of what to do without somebody to give her orders, Starfire sneaked into the fortress of Sookaroth. Her goal was to recover Dagan so he’d tell her what to do.

However, the war priest had been fatally tortured. He died in her arms.

This tragedy consumed any remaining desire within Starfire to live in slavery. Though in tears, she freed the Human prisoners from the Mygorg jails. She then grabbed a cutlass and led a revolt.

Starfire met Sookaroth in a duel and killed him. That left her and her rebellious humans in control of the keep.

Revolution !

Yet, this situation was untenable. The Mygorg would soon learn of the revolt and sent in a relief force. Starfire therefore took her rag-tag followers cross-country to escape retaliation.

The band came across another isolated keep. They attacked the few Mygorg there by surprise, freeing another outpost for a time.

While many of the enslaved workers were happy to provide hospitality and supplies to the free Humans, the castellanA person who manages the logistics of a castle was furious. He dreaded the retaliation of the aliens and objected to any project of rebellion.

The retaliation came quicker than even the castellan expected. But the fiery Starfire’s decisive actions won the day.

Impressed, the castellan’s boy gave the rebels a precious document.

Retaliation !

It was a map to the stronghold of an organisation called the Lightning Lords. These had hidden advanced weapons back when the Mygorgs ordered the destruction of all such armaments.

Mygorgs reinforcements came in, and they attacked again. On point was a sky-beast – a sort of tough giant pterodactyl shooting eyebeams. Using a lasso and acrobatics, Starfire killed the Mygorg rider of the sky-beast.

She then wounded it, and provoked it into blindly chasing her. Starfire dashed through the surprised Mygorg ranks, with the sky-beast’s beams raining destruction on her enemies.

Starfire seized the momentum. She had her forces exfiltrate the castle on the double.

Map of the problematique

The boy with the map was killed by his father, who mistook him for a rebel. And the youth had been the only one who could read the script on the map.

Bereft of a clear goal, Starfire’s rebel wandered the countryside. They raided small Mygorg settlements.

One such raid destroyed a minor outdoors arena, where Starfire recruited a key ally. It was the gigantic mute man she named Thump.

Thump could read Mygorg script – and thus the map. He guided the rebels toward the Lightning Lords cache.

The group was also joined by the skilled but untrustworthy scout Moonwatcher.

Starfire trek

Though hopes were high, the rebels were raided in turn. A band of alien humanoids called Nitrons ambushed them, capturing food and supplies.

Having to quickly resupply, the rebels ran into an oddity. It was a Mygorgs-free settlement, run by a Human queen and where all men were enslaved.

The roaming rebels where liberally given hospitality, food and security. Most decided that they’re rather forego their harsh existence with Starfire and remain guests of the queen.

It was a trap. The queen was psychotic and harboured a pathological hatred of men due to past trauma. Though she liked Starfire, the two fought to the death when the rebel leader discovered her plans.

Having resupplied, the rebels sided with Starfire again. They made a fighting exit against the queen’s guards, hitting the wilderness again.

Starfire, Thump and the fickle followers then resumed trekking toward the weapons cache.

The Lightning Lords

As it turned out, the Lightning Lords were but a shadow of what they had been. They met Starfire and Thump with hostility, swords and some automated defences. Starfire and Thump defeated a robot tank, but were captured and imprisoned.

However, Thump knew their technology much better than the Lightning Lords did. Starfire and her giant friend therefore escaped, killed a guardian beast and had the Lightning Lords superstitiously accept them as leaders.

They thus met with Keeper and his unreliable ally Djinn the Lady of the Lightning, a sorceress. See Thump’s profile for more.

Starfire stayed within the complex, but warily kept her men in reserve outside.

During the night, Starfire’s forces impulsively attacked a small Mygorg party. But this was just the vanguard of a much larger force. Much of Starfire’s army, including almost all her lieutenants, was captured.

Alien shadows

The alien Yorgs, looking like living shadows, then seeped into the Lightning Lords fortress. They reminded Djinn that they had a deal. She wasn’t to help rebels such as Starfire.

Escaping from the aliens, Starfire stumbled upon a small weapons locker within the fortress. She drew a laser pistol from it. Suddenly, she had an efficient means of killing the shadow-like Yorgs.

Meanwhile, the Keeper computer tried to help her by teleporting in her captured lieutenants. But the teleportation failed, and most were killed. At this point, Starfire was hopelessly separated from her troops.

Furthermore :

Escape from the tower of chaos

Thump now remembered enough to make the teleportation machines safe to use. He, Starfire and Moonwatcher teleported out with a stash of laser weapons.

The trio reappeared behind Mygorg lines, with the advantage of both surprise and firepower. They routed the Mygorg forces, allowing the Lightning Lords to win the battle.

This victory was on the PyrrhicA victory that cost so much that you’re worse off than before the battle side. There were but a dozen Lightning Lords fighters left alive.

However, they considered Thump to be their prophesied saviour and immediately agreed to join him. Furthermore, they told Starfire about another safe site called Haven.

The quest for Haven

Starfire and her men rounded up what was left of her original band. By that point, it was chiefly made up of non-combatants.

Moonwatcher convinced Starfire that continuing the fight against the Mygorgs with such scant troops was impossible. He advocated for locating Haven, for the sake of their followers’s safety.

An aged Lightning Lord explained that Haven was an aliens-free island, ruled by free Humans. A Haven person had once given him a signet and vague directions.

Starfire and Thump agreed to pursue that lead. The disparateMade up of things unlike each other posse headed toward Haven to live in peace.

The old man with the signet was killed by a giant spider as the troop was crossing mountains. However, this death led to an important discovery – the corpse of an albino man dressed in the same outfit as Dagan.

Looking for other war priests, the rebels discovered an underground city. It had been founded four centuries ago.

Hidden war priests

The war priests therein still commanded pre-invasion technology. They had retreated and hidden during the war against the aliens.

But things went sour. The leader of the hidden enclave was a traitorous sadist. Like many of the men she met, he wanted to own Starfire. He betrayed her and her lieutenants, and imprisoned them all.

Nevertheless, Starfire freed everyone. They fled in a stolen floater.

Though the encounter with the hidden war priests had been a disaster, Starfire had acquired key information. The Eye of Armageddon, the device used to summon in the Mygorgs, still existed. Destroying it would make the Mygorg vanish, or at least cut them off from their home base.

Dagan and Starfire.

History (part 2)

And with that thunderous revelation… the book was cancelled.

The “next issue on sale on the second week of September” we were promised never materialised. Though admittedly DC never specified the year.

Starfire wasn’t glimpsed again in decades, except in a tall tale narrated by the Space Ranger.

The joy of time travel

She was spotted again when, in 2010, an improvised chronal beacon of Rip Hunter was bollixed. It thus sent three of his allies – Superman, Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Booster Gold – close to Starfire.

However, there were oddities about this appearance.

This Starfire was briefly, accidentally involved in the heroes’s quest in finding Batman in the timestream. She ended up fighting along with them against a chronomancer. She was then returned to her time and world.

Given the important discrepancies, this Starfire was presumably a parallel version of the original. Perhaps she was the post-Crisis version ?

Description

Though she has a mostly gender-neutral attitude and behaviour, Starfire’s remarkable beauty frequently incites lust in random men. Even alien ones.

Some of these men will even attempt to manhandle her and force themselves on her. Starfire will have to use wrestling throws and locks to get rid of them.

Such behaviour likely reflects the place of women in the Mygorg-managed society. They are servants near the bottom of the hierarchy, and sex objects.

Starfire improbably uses lipstick (red or pale pink) as the leader of a desperate warband on the run. Maybe she took her lucky lipstick tubes with her when she fled from slavery. Who knows.

Starfire is 19. We know this since she fled on the day after her eighteenth birthday, when she was “promoted” to being a concubine.

Clothing

Starfire originally ran around in her tight, green obectifying outfit. Which was designed to facilitate ogling her body.

Once she found the Lightning Lords base she bartered for an outfit more suited to the outdoors. It included a cape. But said cape was fatally ripped when it caught a rusty nail during a battle.

She discarded the torn fabric, and from then on operated in short jorts and a bra. This is better than a chainmail bikini, I guess.

Starfire wears bracers that are awfully similar to the Amazons and… suffering Sappho, it all makes sense now !

Personality

Starfire is a fierce, and ferociously independent, warrior.

She is a natural leader, big on responsibility.

She would rather die than be captured… or show mercy toward a Mygorg.

Freedom !

Her cause is freedom. She often evidences a youthful idealism about liberty, in sharp contrast with the craven pragmatism of most Humans around her. She certainly talks (and yells) about freedom a lot.

Being brave to the point of recklessness, she intensely dislikes cowards. And isn’t a fan of people advocating for reasonable caution and thinking things through.

While she received an unusual degree of Mygorg education, Starfire knows very little about her world and the many oddities it contains.

Her fierce nature means that her favoured approach toward a problem is to hack it with her sword. She’s not stupid by any mean, but her assets are courage and passion rather than analysis and deduction. She has little time for knowledge that cannot be immediately applied to her war.

When trash-talking her opponents, Starfire comes up with oddly elaborate and polysyllabic swearing. She’s quite creative when it comes to calling opponents — or anything she doesn’t like, really — names.

Woman of action

Though she has clearly higher ethical standards than her rag-tag band of lowbrow desperadoes, she is a barbarian warrior. Starfire sports an explosive temper and extremely direct “tactics”.

On the other hand, she will not attack unprovoked.

When fighting she can easily become reckless, and she’s generally not a friend of subtlety. Starfire :

It’s a good thing her friend Thump is ably watching her back.

Since her followers symbolise everything she is fiercely fighting for, she tends to be too trusting of them. Starfire easily forgives their moments of weakness. Even as they keep acting like traitorous, cowardly swine, Starfire will stand by them.

Enslaved no more

Originally, Starfire was heavily conditioned to be subservient, deferential, somewhat childlike and to please anybody who wasn’t enslaved.

This programming is now utterly gone – except as the drive behind her aggressiveness and hatred of the colonisers.

Since Dagan’s death, she has not shown any interest in sex or romance. She even comes across as being a bit clueless when lewd men are making advances. Howbeit it’s difficult to say whether she has no clue about their mores, or is sarcastically feigning it.

Raised in an environment devoid of technology, Starfire will always assumes that large machines of a shape she hasn’t seen before are animals. She has mental categories for things she has learned about (say, floaters) but not a “vehicle” category.

Given the demeanour and abilities of some of the monsters on her world — such as giant pterodactyls with eyebeams or giant lizards that breathe ice and cold — it’s not absurd.

Quotes

“You mean that after keeping my entire race in chains… after treating me like a household pet… after murdering the man I love — you dare demand mercy ? In a word, Sookaroth… NO !”

“You fare well against a boy, greyskin — now let’s see how you stand against warriors !”

“Die, you filthy demon — die !”

“You beat us, tortured us, killed us, until those who were left could only be slaves… but we slaves are free, and hundreds more will follow, until the last Mygorg carcass lies rotting in the dirt, and we’ve learned to live like men !”

“Come at me, Yorg — come and meet the woman who’ll drive your entire empire to its knees. It matters not if it be Yorg or Mygorg ! All aliens must leave this world to its rightful heirs ! But first — first, you must learn to fear my name ! Starfire, Yorg ! STARFIRE !”

(Futilely trying to hack through solidified energy bars) “Take that — and that — misbegotten spawn of some metallic mother-beast !”

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