Powers
Illusion Casting: Dani has Unearthly ability to delve into the subconcious mind of a target and generate the targets greatest fear or desire, from images drawn from the subconscious minds of herself or others. Such a representation of their greatest fear or love appears to those being directly affected by her power and seems real. Targets reduced to 0 health due to these images fall unconscious for 1-10 rounds.
Animal Empathy: Possesses an animal empathy which allows her to share thoughts and feelings with higher forms of non-sentient life such as birds, mammals and shapechangers. She does this with Monstrous ability.
Talents
Hunting, Survival, Equestrian, Bows, Bi-Lingual (English and Cheyenne Indian)
Contacts
Excalibur, X-Factor, Valkyries, X-Men, New Mutants, Bratpack, Mutant Liberation Front, SHIELD, X-Force
History
Danielle Moonstar is an American Indian of the Cheyenne Nation. Moonstar's mutant powers emerged at puberty when she could not control her ability to create visible images of people's greatest fears.
One night she created a symbolic vision of her parents' deaths. Shortly thereafter, her parents disappeared during a trip to the mountains. Moonstar believed them to have been killed, and her dreams were haunted thereafter by a vision of a demonic bear, which she believed to be responsible for their deaths. In fact, Moonstar's parents had been transformed into the demonic bear by an as yet unrevealed cause. The bear would have worked the same transformation upon Moonstar, but her grandfather, the chief and shaman Black Eagle, used spells to keep the demonic bear away from her.
Eventually, Moonstar fled to the mountains, where she was raised over the following years by Black Eagle. Finally, Black Eagle sent a letter to Professor Charles Xavier, who had become a friend of Danielle's father, William, when they were in the army together. Black Eagle believed that Xavier could provide Moonstar with the training she needed to utilize her powers best, and asked him in his letter to do so.
Xavier agreed to come meet Moonstar and become her teacher. Black Eagle ordered her to go with Xavier and she agreed. But before Xavier arrived, Black Eagle was murdered by Donald Pierce, a member of the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club who then intended to overthrow its mutant leader Sebastian Shaw. Pierce was determined to kill Xavier as well as other superhuman mutants.
Moonstar, unaware of Pierce's involvement, vowed to take vengeance for her grandfather's death. She soon found herself hunted by Pierce's agents, but she was saved by the mutant Karma, who arrived along with Xavier. Xavier told Moonstar about Pierce, and she said she would work with Xavier to get revenge on Pierce.
After Moonstar helped Xavier and several other young mutants he had enlisted in defeating Pierce, they became members of his new team, the New Mutants, whom Xavier taught in the uses of their superhuman abilities. Under Xavier's guidance Moonstar not only learned how to keep her powers under control, but also learned how to create images other than those of the objects of people's fears. Eventually she and her fellow student Cannonball became the team's leaders.
Moonstar originally took the code name Psyche but later changed it to Mirage after the illusions she creates.
With Black Eagle dead, the demon bear was no longer prevented from seeking out Moonstar. She fought the bear outside Xavier's mansion and it nearly killed her. The New Mutants then battled the bear, and one of them, Magik, used her magical soulsword to release Moonstar's parents from the spell they were under, returning them to their human forms. Moonstar was reunited with her parents, and she eventually recovered completely from her injuries, thanks to the Morlock Healer.
Later, Amora the Enchantress kidnapped the New Mutants to Asgard, the extradimensional home of the Norse gods. While she was there, Moonstar rescued a winged horse from hunters. Mirage had an immediate psychic rapport with the horse, which she named Brightwind after her pony on Earth, and the horse selected her to be his rider. Brightwind was one of the herd of flying horses belonging to Odin, ruler of Asgard, that are ridden by his female warriors, the Valkyries. The bonding between Moonstar and Brightwind bestowed part of the Odinpower upon Moonstar, and she thus became endowed with the Valkyries' power to perceive the coming of death. When the New Mutants returned to Earth, Brightwind came with Moonstar.
Moonstar was no longer serving regularly with the New Mutants when Cable reorganized the team into X-Force. At some point, under circumstances that have yet to be fully explained, Moonstar was exiled from Asgard and her winged horse Brightwind was renamed Darkwind.
She was found on Earth by the mutant terrorist Reignfire, who had recently reorganized the terrorist group called the Mutant Liberation Front. Moonstar agreed to join the Front, secretly intending to betray the group from within. At some point she secretly joined the international law enforcement agency S.H.I.E.L.D. Hence, she was functioning as a deep cover S.H.I.E.L.D. operative within the Mutant Liberation Front.
To maintain her cover Moonstar was forced to battle X-Force alongside other members of the Front. However, she later allied herself with X-Force against the Gamesmaster and the Upstarts.
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