Allies of the Superwomen of EVA #18: Crush and Starfire
"The girl known as Crush was born to an unknown Japanese woman and the alien bounty hunter known as Lobo during one of his rare visits to planet Earth in pursuit of his next score. At first carrying the infant along with him following the sudden passing of the mother, the 'Main Man' bristled at the thought of being a 'lone wolf with cub' and left her in the care of an old ally of his in Ramona, the owner/proprietor of a combination unisex hair salon and bail bond office; Ramona subsequently gave the girl the name 'Mara Roja'. Ramona had help in the girl's upbringing from Darlene Spritzer, and old flame of Lobo's and a waitress at a diner that frequently found itself in the crosshairs of many of Lobo's exploits. The only thing left with Mara that she's had since she was a toddler was a sentient chain named Obelus, which protected her from any external dangers. At times, Mara would express curiosity about her birth parents, to which Ramona fed her details that were close to the truth but just enough to sate her curiosity for the time being. Eventually, while walking around town, her eye caught a vid-screen broadcasting a news bulletin about Lobo pursuing one of his latest bounties; that glimpse was all Mara needed to realize that she was looking at her father. After confronting Ramona with this revelation, Mara stormed off, Obelus in-hand, to blow off some steam. She got her opportunity when she was confronted by some xenophobic gang members at a refueling station, all of whom she beat to a bloody pulp. Feeling somewhat satisfied, Mara returned to Ramona's salon, only to find it burned down and Ramona herself missing and presumed dead. Mara would later learn that the one responsible was Agent Mortis, an operative of a ruthless interstellar tax-collection agency who was sent to recollect finances from debts incurred by both Ramona and Lobo-the former especially, due to the higher-ups of the agency preferring Ramona remain in debt to increase their own profits, even as she had earned enough to pay off her own debt. Mara, enraged, stole a spacehog of (unbeknownst to her) a similar make to Lobo's and set off to find Lobo himself, blaming him for the chaos that took her mother-figure from her.
Mara, taking the alias 'Crush', traveled through the galaxy, operating as a bounty hunter herself as well as a fighter in illegal underground cage matches, earning money while also trawling for information on her father's whereabouts. It was in her travels that at one point she wound up in a minor collision with a speeding escape pod. Justifiably ticked off, Mara managed to stop the pace of the pod so she could have it out with its pilot, only to discover the occupant of the vehicle was a runaway girl like herself-though not just any girl.
Deciding to humor the girl and listen to her story, Mara learned that her new acquaintance was Koriand'r (or "Starfire" in English), the middle child of the royal family of the planet Tamaran, located in the Vega System, which was ruled by the interplanetary empire known as the Citadel. Koriand'r, or Kori for short, found herself the new successor to the throne after her older sister, Komand'r (or "Blackfire"), was crippled by a childhood illness that robbed her of her natural Tamaranian ability to convert ultraviolet light into flight energy. Both sisters were sent to train with the legendary Warlords of Okaara, but at one point during the training, Komand'r, bitter over being denied her birthright, ran away and allied herself with the Citadel, providing them key information to successfully invade Tamaran. To ensure peace, the girls' father, King Myand'r, with a heavy heart, was forced to turn Kori over to the Citadel. (The girls' younger brother, Ryand'r, would remain with their parents until he came of age and was sent to train, eventually joining the intergalactic freedom fighters the Omega Men under the alias 'Darkfire'.) Under their ally the Gordanians' and her traitorous sister's watch, Kori endured six years of torture until she, and the unexpectedly betrayed Komand'r, were turned over to the race of sadistic alien scientists known as the Psions. They experimented on both sisters to see just how much energy their Tamaranian bodies could absorb before exploding from the overload; the procedure was interrupted when forces loyal to Komand'r attacked the Psion ship. While her captors were distracted, Kori used a new ability she acquired in the procedure (destructive solar energy blasts, or 'starbolts') to escape; despite her better judgement, she also freed her sister, who returned the favor in kind by striking her down with her own newly-acquired starbolt power. Komand'r had her restrained and readied for a later execution, only for Kori to manage to escape again, steal an escape pod, and flee from her captors. With her escape craft totaled by the collision, Kori hired Crush to be her bodyguard and transporter, promising her whatever her family could provide upon her safe return to Tamaran. Liking the idea of having royalty in her debt (and feeling that Kori was still naïve in some respects about the universe at large), Crush agreed, and Kori hopped on the back of her spacehog as the two renewed the latter's flight from the Gordanians.
An encounter with a Gordanian squad would cause them to go off-course and enter another star system, which would bring them to Crush's birth planet Earth, the squad in pursuit. They eventually wound up crashing Crush's spacehog in the middle of a street in downtown Tokyo-3, Japan, which had been going on two years since the end of mankind's battles against the otherworldly creatures that had been codenamed 'Angels' and the thwarting of the respective world-ending conspiracies of SEELE and Gendo Ikari. Responding to the incident was Earth's resident team of superhuman defenders, the Justice League (made up of various women and team girls directly or peripherally involved with NERV, the since-disbanded U.N.-backed agency formed to fight the Angels). Unable to understand the two alien girls at first due to the language barrier between them, one Leaguer, Green Lantern (secretly Misato Katsuragi), used her power ring's translator to enable better communication between both parties. While Crush wasn't too fond of having someone poke into her head, Kori didn't care as much due to needing the League's help against their Gordanian pursuers. Once the girls and the League sent the Gordanians packing, they (and Crush's spacehog) were brought to the League's headquarters, Metro Hall, so they could give them their full story. The girls were kept at ease (or as much ease as Crush would willingly express) due to the presence of League members who were powered by alien gadgetry (in the cases of Green Lantern and Blue Beetle (Ritsuko Akagi)) or being half-alien themselves (in the cases of Ms. Martian (Hikari Horaki) and her best friend Supergirl (Asuka Langley-Sohryu), as well as Supergirl's cousin Power Girl (Karin Shikinami)). It was while there that they also met members of the League's support staff, including Asuka's boyfriend Shinji Ikari and one of his best friends, Kensuke Aida. When Misato found her ring's charge at a low level, meaning the translation field she put up wouldn't last for much longer, Crush saved her the trouble by activating the Interlac translator on her belt, which she'd acquired at some point before meeting Kori. While this helped Crush, Kori was left with few options due to Tamaranians being immune to telepathy, leaving Hikari unable to help her. Kori managed to circumvent this issue in a rather startling way...by kissing Kensuke, much to his shock (and that of the others in the room). Hikari, aghast at this (due to her slight conservative nature), demanded an explanation, which Kori in turn provided-in fluent Japanese, thanks to the natural Tamaranian language assimilation ability, which worked through physical contact. (Misato and Ritsuko were able to verify this ability of hers thanks to the respective databases contained in, respectively, the former's ring and the latter's scarab.)
Once Misato recharged her ring, she offered Crush and Kori a place to stay in her apartment building (which she'd recently become landlord of) so they could lie low and get acclimated to Earth; she also would relay their story to her bosses, the Guardians of the Universe (the leaders of the Green Lantern Corps). While Kori opted to join the younger League members as a student at their high school (taking on an identity as a foreign exchange student named 'Kori Anders'), Crush was firmly against enrolling in any form of school, instead plying her mechanical aptitude by working in the 'motor pool' of Metro Hall as part of the League's support staff. (On the side, she made inroads into Japan's biker culture, becoming something of an urban legend among the two-wheeled delinquent population.) Kori, occasionally acting as a League reservist under the name Starfire, gained a bit of popularity among her classmates, with the male contingent puzzled over just why she happened to be more close with Kensuke, of all people; she and Kensuke would end up forming a genuine relationship, which puzzled Hikari and his other best friend (as well as Hikari's boyfriend) Toji Suzuhara to no end. Kori wound up also forming a genuine friendship with Crush, since she was the only one who was able to get the half-Czarnian girl to show her little-seen 'softer side'.
Kori, Crush, and the League would later find themselves targeted and attacked by the one person Crush had been searching for when Lobo came to down, having been hired by none other than Komand'r to find and retrieve her sister. Crush went head-to-head with her father, in the process revealing what had happened to Ramona; this elicited a rare show of sympathy from the 'Main Man', as Ramona had been a good source of business for him for a number of years. Deciding that he had bigger fish to fry, Lobo decided to put his contract with Komand'r 'on hold' until he dealt with Agent Mortis and the tax collectors in, as he put it, 'his own special way'. After Lobo sped off, the League reconvened, at which point they decided to head off the bounty hunter's return by helping Kori defeat her sister, who they had learned had taken over the throne of Tamaran in a coup backed by her Citadel allies."
*Author's Note(s)*
For the DC half of this 'wave', I knew at one point in my 'series' that, for the visual depiction on my DeviantArt page, I wanted to use character designs from one of the most popular and successful superhero manga/anime in print/on screen, as My Hero Academia proudly wears a lot of comic book tropes on its sleeve. Originally, I was thinking of doing something on the Marvel side of the SWOE fence, in this case a take on the Sentry modeled after All-Might (with his arch-foe the Void based on All-For-One). I reconsidered once I thought back to the designs of two fan-favorite students at U.A. High, and how they reminded me of a couple of well-known aliens in DC's canon. For the more recent creation in Crush (who debuted during writer Adam Glass's time on the Teen Titans title), Momo 'Creati' Yaoyorozu strangely appealed to me as a visual basis for the daughter of DC's considerably most violent and crass antihero/semi-villain. With Momo's upperclassman Nejire Hado, I found there were more than a few parallels between her and fan-favorite Teen Titan Starfire (especially the incarnation seen in the beloved 2003 Teen Titans animated series). From there, establishing a reason for the two winding up in their own 'coming-of-age buddy story' was simple enough, even with the modifications I made to Crush's backstory. I like to think that Kori showing an interest in Kensuke, of all characters, is a nice little riff on so many anime and manga rom-coms that have setups like this.