Meggan (character)

Meggan
File:Meggan 1.jpg Meggan, by Alan Davis
Publication information
Publisher	Marvel Comics/Marvel UK
First appearance	Mighty World of Marvel #7 (December, 1983)
Created by	Alan Moore Alan Davis
In-story information
Alter ego	Meggan Braddock
Team affiliations	Excalibur, Court of Otherworld
Abilities	Shapeshifting; Empathy; Flight; ability to see energy auras; ability to control natural elements

Meggan is a comic book superheroine in the Marvel Comics universe.

History

Born in a blizzard to a Roma family, Meggan adapted to the cold by growing fur, to the horror of her family. Unfortunately, as an empathic metamorph, the more they saw her as a monster, the more monstrous she became, growing webbed hands and feet, antennae, claws, and distorted features. They hid her away in their camper, where she watched television incessantly. Eventually she met Captain Britain and fell in love with him; and after she learned to control her abilities enough to conform to an appearance more in line with the traditional Western idea of beauty, he fell in love with her too. After a long and stormy courtship, they finally married.

Due to her odd upbringing, for many years Meggan was naive in many of the aspects of culture, obsessed with television, and functionally illiterate. Eventually her Excalibur teammates taught her to read. Before she gained control of her powers, she had only fragments of memory of her early years.

File:Megganx.PNG

Meggan sacrifices herself. Art by Chris Bachalo.

When Roma stepped down and let Captain Britain become the Omniversal Guardian of the Otherworld, Meggan came to rule beside him as his queen.

Later, the Scarlet Witch caused a hole in reality when she altered it to create the House of M. This set off a multidimensional tidal wave, threatening Otherworld and the other parallel realities of the Multiverse. Meggan and Captain Britain were sent to fix the hole, given only a short amount of time before Saturnyne would destroy the 616 reality to prevent it from hurting the other realities.

Working with Psylocke and Rachel Summers, Meggan and Britain located the hole in reality through which the tidal chaos wave was about to spread. Allowing the others to seal the gap, Meggan ventured into the void beyond and sacrificed herself in order to deflect a large amount of the impacting chaotic energies. Her fate remains unknown.

Powers and skills

Meggan has three powers; empathy, elemental powers and shapeshifting . These powers actually blend together, aspects of one power affecting the others. Meggan has been referred to as an "elemental empath", an "empathic metamorph", and an "elemental metamorph". Meggan's primary power is her empathy, a telepathic talent which enables her to sense the emotions and feelings of all living creatures (from people, to animals, to plants) and can broadcast her own feelings to influence other people's emotions. She can also psionically "see" psychic, natural, and mystical energy auras. Her empathic powers are highly sensitive, and make her vulnerable to telepathic manipulation. Her empathy also lets her connect to the "life force" of the Earth itself, which brings up her second power; elemental control.

Thanks to Meggan's empathy, she has a psionic link to the natural forces of the Earth. By "speaking" to the elements, Meggan can command the environment around her, and her emotional state can affect the local ecosystems. She can extinguish forest fires with a thought, summon gale force winds or part the waters of a lake with wave of her hand, cause earthquakes in a flash of anger. Meggan has even been observed causing electromagnetic pulses by commanding the magnetic fields around her, freezing opponents by rapidly dropping the air temperature around them, or increasing the powers of elemental mutants (such as increasing the temperature of Peter Wisdom's heat blasts). Meggan has used her elemental powers to affect man-made objects, such as actually making the atoms in a building's roof move apart, creating a hole in the roof that resealed itself (without a trace of ever having a hole) once Meggan passed though (which suggests that Meggan's elemental powers may have a psychokinetic quality). Meggan can focus the elemental energies around her into devastating energy blasts. She has also been observed controlling mystical energies. And she can fly (either by levitation or controlling wind or gravity)

Finally, Meggan is a shapeshifter who can assume the form of any living creature, even those who only exist in legends (once she became a Godzilla-like dragon and actually breathed fire, and another occasion she became a werewolf that looked like fellow X-Man Wolfsbane, and had all of a wolf's natural abilities). Meggan can assume the form of other people as well. Thanks to her empathy, Meggan's body will actually change in response to the emotions around her, becoming beautiful when she feels loved, or hideous when she feels fear or anger. Her elemental powers also cause Meggan to change in response to her surroundings, growing fur in extreme cold, or gills when she is submerged underwater. She can even increase the density of her muscle tissue to boost her strength to superhuman levels.

External links

• UncannyXmen.Net Spotlight on Meggan