Allies of the Superwomen of EVA #19: Songbird and Hellcat
"While Tokyo-3 proved to be the epicenter of humanity's conflict with the otherworldly creatures codenamed 'Angels', as well as the growing presence of superpowered individuals, its sibling city Tokyo-2 was not without its own strange and unique phenomena. Some of this phenomena could come from the least likeliest of places, or people for that matter. Such was the case with 17-year-old best friends (and friendly rivals) Sakura Hagiwara and Elena Miyazawa, founding members of the pop idol group Sweet Diva. One day, while participating in a promotional exhibition match with members of the Berserk Gym's premier team the Grapplers, Elena's unintentionally off-handed comments about the sport led to her being injured in her match with one of the wrestlers, the cocky and aggressive Rio "Poundcakes" Kazama. Wanting to avenge her friend, Sakura challenged Rio to a match, and trained with the Grapplers to get herself in fighting shape for it; in particular, she was taken under the wing of the Grapplers' team ace, wrestling veteran Misaki "Lascivious" Toyoda, who empathized with Sakura due to her own past as a former idol singer. Under Misaki's tutelage, Sakura discovered her own natural athleticism even as she suffered losses in her first 65 matches. Her cries of pain during the bouts led to Rio teasingly giving Sakura the nickname "Screaming Mimi", yet surprisingly, Sakura embraced it as her ring handle. Sakura eventually worked to overcome her weaknesses and insecurities as she began winning matches for once, thanks to Misaki's guidance and the support of the new friends she made at Berserk Gym. It paid off when she finally won against Rio, and later joined Misaki in a tag-team bout.
While all this was going on, Elena, recovering from her injury, found herself taking over as the lead vocalist of Sweet Diva, a position she wanted to earn herself. This and the pressure of being the face of the group proved to drive something of a wedge between herself and Sakura, who began to really take to wrestling after discovering her passion for it. Feeling that the pull of the mat was threatening to take her from idol singing for good, Elena decided the only way to get her friend back was to beat her in the ring, and she secretly trained under Misaki's former teammate Juri Sanada, known by her wrestling handle "Auntie Freeze" (taken from an American women's pro wrestling legend of the same name). Elena adopted the masked identity of the "Blue Panther" as she cut a swath through the matches she won, until she faced Sakura in the ring. Their fight proved to be heated, as both girls were evenly matched, until Sakura managed to come out on top. Sakura then reconciled with Elena, convincing her that there was nothing keeping her from being both a singer and a wrestler. Accepting this, Elena opted to join Sakura in the wrestling circuit, becoming the newest member of the Grapplers with a new ring handle of her own in "Letha".
A year following the end of NERV's battles with the Angels and the thwarting of the respective world-ending conspiracies of SEELE and Gendo Ikari, the Grapplers would find themselves caught up in the events of what would be dubbed by its participants as the "Secret Crisis". The impetus for this came about when rich criminal gambler Amos Fortune (from one universe) made a wager with En Dwi Gast (alias the Grandmaster, an 'elder of the universe' from the Grappler's own world) involving their respective worlds' resident teams of superheroes. Each put together a team of foes they sent to each others' universes to get the attention of said teams of heroes. While Fortune sent his own group, the Royal Flush Gang, against the Avengers (a team made up of women and teen girls involved directly or peripherally with NERV), the Grandmaster got more 'creative' with his team.
The Grandmaster turned his eye towards the Grapplers, and after imbuing them with power that increased their strength, stamina, reflexes, and durability, along with a few select special abilities (all while putting them under his control), he sent them to the world that was home to the Justice League (the counterparts to the Avengers on Fortune's Earth). The League and the Grapplers battled it out until the former were able to defeat the latter, at which point the Grandmaster teleported them back to their home universe.
Some time after their return, the Grapplers (who barely remembered being the Grandmaster's pawns) were working out at the Berserk Gym one day when they discovered that they'd retained the power they'd been given (after accidentally damaging their exercise equipment in the process). Realizing they'd be disqualified from any regular match in the league, the group worked to master their new abilities, with Sakura working especially hard to get a better handle on her new sonic-based powers. The team then came up with a solution to their dilemma after being inspired by the various appearances of superhumans following the rise of the Avengers during the Angel War. Successful in securing financing from a number of sponsors and contacts, the Grapplers helped form a new league for aspiring wrestlers with extraordinary abilities, known as the Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation.
Following a series of crowd-pleasing exhibition matches, the Grapplers challenged the Avengers to a charity wrestling tournament, which the heroes accepted. Sakura, as Screaming Mimi, wound up facing off with Captain America (former NERV Evangelion pilot Mari "Illustrious" Makinami), with their match ending in a draw. The tournament soon found itself put on hold when two Avengers in the audience, Yellowjacket (former NERV tech Aoi Mogami) and the Wasp (former NERV tech Kaede Agano) discovered and revealed that one of the Grapplers' sponsors, pharmaceutical magnate Tetsuma Kido, had been secretly using the wrestlers as test subjects for a new drug called Mutant Growth Hormone (or MGH), which explained the earlier instances in the tournament where a few of Sakura's teammates had gone literally berserk against their opponents. Kido was also unmasked as an underworld power player known as the Power Broker, which caused him to flee from the arena as he sent a squad of MGH-enhanced thugs against both the Avengers and the Grapplers. Sakura and Mari chased after him and his two lead scientists, only to fight against Kido after he injected himself with an untested new batch of the MGH formula. Both girls managed to defeat Kido, while the scientists were able to get away. While the authorities stepped in to round up Kido's thugs, Sakura and her teammates promised the Avengers a proper redo of the tournament, with clean fights all-around.
Inspired by the Avengers' example, Sakura and Elena decided to go into crime-fighting themselves on the side, though opting to adopt new alter-egos. Elena, thinking back to the identity she took as she clawed her way through the wrestling circuit, dusted off her Blue Panther costume and modified its colors while also ditching the blue wig; as a nod to the feline-like reflexes she'd been granted by the Grandmaster, she took up the alias "Hellcat". Sakura, on the other hand, turned to one of the Avengers for assistance in crafting her own hero persona, said Avenger being Iron Maiden (secretly engineering wunderkind Mana Kirishima). With Mana's aid and expertise, Sakura was given a voice-augmenting harness and choker created from technology Mana had confiscated (and reverse-engineered) from the sound-based supervillain Klaw; with these, Sakura could convert sound into a malleable form of energy that has physical form and mass, termed "solid sound". (Mana also gave her a visor that used a built-in image inducer to change Sakura's hair color to further disguise herself.) Training with Mana enabled her to better create more complex solid sound constructs, most notably a set of wings that appeared on her back; this inspired Sakura to take up the name "Songbird". Sakura and Elena's first major battle with a super-criminal came when they stopped a bank robbery being committed by another sound-based villain in Angar the Screamer. Later on, during an incident where the time-traveling despot known as Kang the Conqueror temporarily trapped the Avengers in a temporal void, Songbird and Hellcat were two of a number of superpowered allies of the team brought together via their 'New Avengers' protocols to defeat Kang and bring the team out of the void. Sakura and Elena, along with the others, were then given reserve Avenger status by the team's leaders for her efforts. Sakura would go on to help found the Avengers' first major expansion group, the West Coast Avengers, while Elena would find herself occasionally working with an Avengers-adjacent team called the Defenders, fighting against more esoteric threats."
*Author's Note(s)*
For the Marvel half of this 'wave', I wanted to do something of a follow-up to my earlier Grapplers entry that showed Sakura and Elena in their hero identities, with the first time their being depicted as such (on my DeviantArt page) being the 'New Avengers, Assemble!' piece I put up a short while ago. Like I said in my Grapplers entry, making Sakura from Wanna Be the Strongest in the World! (an admittedly guilty pleasure series to me) the SWOE version of Songbird/Screaming Mimi was one of the more fitting pairings I've come up with, given both characters' backgrounds in wrestling (in the narrative context). Making Elena the SWOE version of Hellcat mainly had to do with the character's time as 'Blue Panther' in the anime and the fact that she's a redhead like Patsy Walker. For an artistic rendering (again, seen on my DeviantArt page), Zair-dacorus was called upon once again, and based on the results seen here, I'd say it was a TKO. Thanks again, man.