Powers
Nuclear Form: Tania is able to generate, store, and release massive amounts of nuclear energies. Her body is constantly emitting Remarkable levels of radiation at all times, within a 2-area range. She may also perform the following stunts:
- Flight: Starlight is capable of attaining Incredible airspeed
- Generate a stream of Monstrous intensity energy up to 5 areas away
- Create a heat shield providing her with Incredible protection against physical attacks. Any physical object of less than Incredible material would melt in contact with the shield
- Absorption: Tania is able to absorb and store radiation of up to Unearthly levels.
Talents
Thrown Weapons, Martial Arts A E, Acrobatics, Tumbling, Medicine: Neurosurgury, Bi-Lingual: English and Russian
Contacts
None
History
Dr. Tania Belinskya was the daughter of Dr. Andrei Belinsky, a leader of the Soviet dissident movement which protests the repressive policies of the Soviet Union. Despite her youth, Belinskya herself had become one of the world's greatest and most renowned neurosurgeons. After her father was exiled to Siberia for his public denunciations of Soviet policies, Belinskya decided to adopt a secret costumed identity, unknown to the state, in order to help other dissidents and to fight crime. Belinskya named herself after the deceased Red Guardian, a special intelligence operative for the Soviet government, and modeled her costume after his. She knew the original Red Guardian had been intended to be the Soviet Union's counterpart to Captain America. She, too, intended to be her own country's version of Captain America, but whereas the original Red Guardian served the policies of the state, she would attempt to uphold the spirit of liberty which Captain America represented and which the Soviet Union suppressed.
Belinskya was motivated by a deep love of her native country and a desire to move it towards liberalization. Dr. Stephen Strange obtained permission for Belinskya to come to the United States to perform a complicated operation on Kyle Richmond, who was also known as the hero Nighthawk. After completing the operation, Belinskya went into action in America as the Red Guardian when Richmond was abducted from the hospital by the villainous Plantman. She acted as a member of the superhuman team of adventurers known as the Defenders for the rest of her time in the United States. After having been shunned in the Soviet Union for years because of her father's opinions, Belinskya found her first true friends in her colleagues in the Defenders.
Belinskya was forced to return to the Soviet Union by Sergei Krylov, also known as the Presence, a brilliant scientist who had become a powerful figure in the Soviet government. Krylov had selected Belinskya as the woman he believed most worthy to be his mate once he had achieved his goal of transforming himself into a superhuman being. Krylov placed Belinskya's mind under his mental domination. Through exposure to cobalt radiation and a nuclear explosion, Krylov transformed both himself and Belinskya into superhumans capable of generating nuclear energy and using it in various ways. The Defenders battled the Presence and the entranced Red Guardian.
Belinskya succeeded in regaining control of her mind during the battle, and demanded that Krylov leave her, claiming that he did not truly love her, and was trying to force her into his own image. Krylov really did love her, but departed, crushed. Since in her new form Belinskya emitted harmful radiation constantly, she allowed herself to be taken into custody by the Soviet government, which kept her in a chamber at a research institute.
But later, the Presence was sighted back in the radioactive Siberian area called the Forbidden Zone, where Krylov had detonated a nuclear bomb in order to transform himself into his superhuman state. The Red Guardian, released to investigate, found him battling a gargantuan life form created by Krylov's past genetic engineering and mutated by nuclear waste. In fighting the life form beside Krylov, Belinskya began to fall in love with him, and she chose to remain in the Forbidden Zone with him.
Later, the renegade Soviet scientist Professor Pieter Phobos used means of his own to drain energy from the Presence and the Red Guardian in order to extend the Forbidden Zone's radiation over all of the Soviet Union. In order to thwart this plan, the Presence and Red Guardian absorbed the radiation of the Forbidden Zone into themselves. They then left Earth, claiming that they would transform themselves into inert matter once they were far from this planet. Instead, at some point the two were captured by the enigmatic alien known as the Stranger and placed on his planet for the Stranger's own mysterious reasons.
The Presence and Starlight (as Belinskya now called herself) were inadvertantly freed by the Avenger Quasar, who had travelled to the Stranger's world for his own purposes. Leading other refugees of Earth, Krylov returned themselves to their native planet, at which point he influenced another refugee, the Jack of Hearts, into fighting Quasar, who tried to stop the refugees from entering Earth, fearing one of them might be an assassin for his mentor, the cosmic being Eon. The Presence went on to challenge Eon directly, as the Presence was somehow surruptitiously fed information by the villain Maelstrom into believing that, should Eon die, a tremendous secret to the stability of the universe would be safequarded. Quasar thus believed the Presence to be the cosmic assassin Eon was awaiting, and he defeated the Presence by teleporting and abandoning Krylov in the Quantum Zone, a dimension of energy accessible through Quasar's signature quantum-bands weapons.
Later, Krylov had somehow managed to return to Earth, to the Forbidden Zone where he and Belinskya had been allowed to live in isolation. When he learned that his son, Vanguard, had died during an adventure alongside Quasar battling the so-called Starbrand. He confronted Quasar directly but was momentarily repulsed. Krylov then threatened to kill Quasar's family and friends if Quasar himself did not submit to execution at Krylov's hands, forcing Quasar to fake his own death and flee Earth lest the Presence learn of his survival and threaten his loved ones.
Krylov visited the memorial to his son and sought to revive him. He shifted his atoms to microscopically enter the body of his son and discovered a trace of his mutant energy remained, keeping him faintly alive. Krylov nearly exhausted his own power to resurrect his son, and he spent many months adrift in the subatomic reality he had entered. There, he discovered new aspects of his power and atomic particles, and, when he had sufficiently regenerated, resumed his normal size and returned to the Forbidden Zone. There, he embarked on a plan to unite all of the former Soviet Union by transforming its people into a race of zombie-like radioactive beings living under a communal mind. He managed to convert several Siberian scientists and the hero teams Winter Guard and the Avengers, who investigated the disturbance. Only the Avengers Thor and Firebird remain unscathed from the transformations, and Krylov planned to recreate the world in his new vision. Thor nearly killed the Presence in retaliation for his fallen comrades, until Starlight offered a surrender and convinced Thor that, as she shared the Presence's power, she could revive those who had been transformed and remand herself and the Presence to Russian custody.
History care of: http://www.marvunapp.com/handbook
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