Foes of the Superwomen of EVA #24: Deathbird
"Cal'syee Neramani was born the second-youngest member to the royal family of the ruling house of the Shi'ar Imperium, on the imperial throneworld of Chandilar. She is also a mutant among her species, born with atavistic features that she became fiercely proud of, but with the price of her experiencing fits of near-uncontrollable rage. Unexpectedly, she found herself stripped of her name after an oracle prophesized that she would someday commit a great evil, which occurred after she'd seriously injured her mother and one of her two sisters in one of her fits of rage. Exiled from Shi'ar space, the former princess took the name Deathbird as she travelled the galaxy, plotting her return to her rightful place. During that time, her other sister, Lilandra, assumed the role of Majestrix of the Shi'ar, leading to an intense rivalry between the siblings.
Deathbird's travels eventually brought her to Earth, which had been going on one year since the end of the war against the otherworldly menaces the now-defunct U.N. special agency NERV had codenamed 'Angels', along with the thwarting of the respective world-ending conspiracies of SEELE and Gendo Ikari (ironically, NERV's supreme commander) by a group of superpowered women and teen girls directly or peripherally involved with NERV; these 'superwomen' wound up banding together as a team called the Avengers. She had landed on the planet in order to obtain supplies for her ship, and found herself raiding a hidden warehouse belonging to the criminal organization of rogue scientists known as Advanced Idea Mechanics (or A.I.M. for short). Her takedown of a squad of A.I.M. 'beekeeper drones' got the attention of the group's leader, M.O.D.O.C. (Mental Organism Designed Only for Conquest), who offered the exiled warrior princess a place in their organization as an enforcer, in return for them sharing some of their advanced weaponry with her, which she might use in a coup against her sister. This was enough to convince Deathbird to agree to his offer.
After a number of smaller missions for M.O.D.O.C. she was dispatched on what would be her last for A.I.M, which involved her being sent to take out one of the Avengers in Ms. Marvel (former NERV scientist Hitomi Kaga), who a year prior to the Angel War had thwarted A.I.M.'s attempt at stealing the research and inventions being developed at the Japanese branch of Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. Their aerial battle over the streets of Tokyo-3 proved to be an intense one, with Deathbird showing little regard for the innocent bystanders, enabling the young Shi'ar to knock out the hero and bring her to an A.I.M. base hidden in an abandoned department store. Awakening and managing to break free of her captors, Ms. Marvel found herself taking on M.O.D.O.K., Deathbird, and M.O.D.O.K.'s entire contingent of A.I.M. troopers; fortunately for her, her fellow Avengers tracked her identicard's homing signal and broke their way into the base to help even the odds. In the struggle, M.O.D.O.K. escaped via a hidden rocket, causing Deathbird to realize he was abandoning her to their foes.
Overpowered and apprehended by the Avengers, Deathbird was set to be transferred into the custody of the international peacekeeping organization S.H.I.E.L.D. when she and the team suddenly found themselves confronted by members of the Shi'ar's elite force of alien beings from multiple worlds brought into the Empire: the Imperial Guard Superguardians, led by the powerful Kallark the Gladiator (who was also the current bearer of the Helm of the Gladiator, believed during the time of the Angel War to be an Angelic Artifact). The Superguardians had come to Earth to extradite Deathbird back to Chandilar, with the Avengers refuting their claim, Ms. Marvel in particular citing how Earth wasn't in the Shi'ar's jurisdiction and Deathbird had engaged in criminal activity on Earth. Wanting to avoid an interplanetary incident, Majestrix Lilandra, on learning of the standoff, came to Earth herself to see if a compromise could be worked out.
After some near-tense negotiations presided over by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s space-focused sibling agency S.W.O.R.D., a deal was reached-while Deathbird would be taken into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody as originally intended, Lilandra would assign a few of the Superguardians to Earth to act as 'parole officers' for her; this deal would help establish the beginnings of diplomatic relations between Earth and the Shi'ar. The Superguardians chosen by Lilandra were all representatives of recently-assimilated worlds into the Empire, and consisted of:
-Flashfire - real name Lum, the princess of the smaller On'i Empire, capable of flight and possessing electrical and minor light-based powers.
-Chainlink - real name Benten, of the Fukujin warrior clan; a highly-skilled hand-to-hand and melee fighter, with her usual weapon of choice being a super-strong length of chain that she can even use like a whip, a skill taught to her by fellow Superguardian Hussar.
-Windchill - real name Oyuki, the princess of Yukionna (a planet similar to Neptune), possessing cryokinetic abilities.
The trio would be stationed under the supervision of S.W.O.R.D., assisting the agency against any interstellar threats, to which all three agreed. With that settled, Deathbird was turned over to S.H.I.E.L.D. and brought to their facility for incarcerated super-criminals.
During her incarceration, Deathbird was taken under the wing of her reforming fellow inmate Abominatrix (a gamma-powered clone of former NERV head scientist Ritsuko Akagi, who was also the founding Avenger Spider-Woman); Abominatrix became something of a surrogate mother figure to the young Shi'ar, encouraging her to let the facility's resident psychiatrists Leonard Samson and Ashley Kafka help her with her rage issues and her obsession with taking the throne of Chandilar. Unused to such kindness, Deathbird bristled at this at first, until one session where she was encouraged to use her real name got her to willingly accept their aid; it allowed the two psychiatrists to get enough data to diagnose Cal'syee with a form of Bipolar Disorder, which further enabled them to give her the treatment she needed, with some input from the Superguardian trio on Shi'ar medicine (as Windchill/Oyuki had been studying it during her time on Chandilar). When S.H.I.E.L.D. initiated 'Operation: Justice, Like Lightning', Cal'syee volunteered to be its third recruit into the task force of incarcerated superhumans it put together, codenamed the Thunderbolts; as a member of the team, she adopted the alias 'Raptor', with Abominatrix personally keeping an eye on her in the field for the Superguardian trio.
When the Shi'ar throneworld found itself invaded and taken over by the forces of the Skrull Empire, Lilandra, having escaped capture with the help of the space pirates known as the Starjammers, returned to Earth seeking the aid of the Avengers. Cal'syee learned of the situation when the Superguardian trio were alerted as well, and begged to accompany them and the Avengers to help her sister, partly as a means of proving that she'd truly changed and no longer desired the throne herself. Seeing the remorse in her sister's eyes convinced Lilandra, leading to her lifting Cal'syee's exile; her S.H.I.E.L.D. and S.W.O.R.D. overseers, thanks to testimony from Abominatrix and the other Thunderbolts, with some reluctance, reduced the remainder of her sentence to time served. Now freed, Cal'syee joined the others as they returned to Shi'ar space and fought to successfully retake Chandilar from the Skrulls. In the wake of the Skrulls' defeat, Lilandra, in coming up with a means of giving her sister a taste of the responsibilities of royalty, named Cal'syee viceroy over the three Skrull colony worlds surrendered to the Shi'ar as part of their treaty; the Superguardian trio of Flashfire, Chainlink, and Windchill would act as her bodyguards and advisors in this endeavor, and over time, Cal'syee proved to be an effective leader over her charges."
*Author's Note(s)*
As stated prior, the theme of this wave is again of the more cosmic variety (or, in hindsight, cosmic royalty). For the Marvel half of this wave, I decided to go with an idea I'd had on the backburner, and given the strong reception X-Men '97 has gotten since its premiere, it seemed fitting that the character presented would be a take on a classic space-based foe of Marvel's merry mutants (and the Carol Danvers Ms. Marvel) in Deathbird of the Shi'ar. I did my best to incorporate some of the major highlights of her publishing history into her bio, chiefly her time as an agent of A.I.M. (based on the events of 1977's Ms. Marvel vol. 1 #9-10); the fight to retake Chandilar from the Skrulls was lifted from 1991's Uncanny X-Men vol. 1 #275-277, while Deathbird becoming viceroy was based on the conclusion of the 1992 Avengers event story "Operation: Galactic Storm" (where she was made viceroy over the then-annexed Kree Empire). Probably the major tweak I made to her history was her time as part of my version of the Thunderbolts, with her Raptor alias coming from the Marvel Comics 2 character of the same name (who served as part of a government-sponsored team that was pretty much the Thunderbolts in all but name).
For the anime character to visually base my interpretation of Deathbird on, as further proof that my take on the Marvel half of the Superwomen of EVA narrative environs is definitely Rumiko Takahashi-heavy, my recent viewing of the 2022 remake of Urusei Yatsura gave me the answer in the form of that franchise's own avian alien princess, Kurama. Doing this allowed me to incorporate more of Urusei Yatsura into the setting by having the homeworlds of Lum, Benten, and Oyuki be assimilated into the Shi'ar Empire and putting those three in the Imperial Guard. (They'll be getting their own separate entry.) From there, a trip through Photoshop was all it took for me to transform the princess of the Karasutengu into an anime-styled take on one of the 'black sheep' (or in this case, 'blackbirds') of the Shi'ar royal family.