Generations of white trash have lived and died in the trailers of the "Paradise Garden" trailer park near Smithville (Texas) and Barbie was just an unwanted mouth to feed for her constantly drunk mother Tiffany. Her mother was waitress at a bar and probably gulped more than she served but despite the obvious traits of alcoholism she was still one of the more attractive women in the surroundings so people kept coming to the bar to stare at her and sometimes go home with her for some "extra service".
Who her father was is unclear to Barbie to the present day and if her mother knew herself she didn't tell her. There were so many men and after a certain amount you begin to loose count. Only thing that could be said with some certainty was that he had to be a trucker or biker because Barbie's mother favoured such men. It was just one day when Tiffany woke up with a mean hangover and ran to the toilet to get rid of her liquid dinner from the evening before while her company for that night snorted the morning away. At first this did not bother her, business as usual, all this poison needed to leave your body some way. But as this happened every morning she began to wonder. Her menstruation was not worth mentioning for some time due to her massive abuse of alcohol but when she finally got the drift it was too late to do anything against the little life that she carried beneath her hollow addicted heart. Grudgingly Tiffany accepted her fate, the consequence of her own carelessness.
Nine months later the consequence was born. At first Tiffany tried to be a good mother and named the child after her mother Barbara who had left her and her drunkard of a father when she was still young. She even attended the AA-meetings on a regular basis and did her best to change her messed up trailer into a hospitable environment for a child. Sadly this lasted only for a few months before the devil of addiction struck again. You can't be around that stuff all the time and not succumb to it, so it was hard for a woman who had been weak her whole life to be strong this time. Delicious beer, golden liquor, smoky brandy, tasty whiskey, those were the names of her tempters. All the time they looked at her from the service plate and whispered to her in seductive tones "Drink me, I will make all your problems go away" and so began Tiffany's descent into a liquor fuelled nirvana again. Barbie only received the most basic care and given the tendency of their trailer neighbours to care about their own "stuff" it was like a miracle that the little child survived her first few years without starving to death or choking on some dirty pillow. The rest of her childhood was dominated by violent physical abuse from her mother every time she failed in preparing food, cleaning the trailer or just when her mother had to vent on somebody for her miserable life, for her addiction, for the men that mistreated her or any other reason that came to her clouded mind. Or sometimes just because... More than once did little Barbie who had never been called by her real name, come to school with a black eye or even an arm in a sling. Neither did one of the underpaid and frustrated teachers nor one of the unmotivated aggressively violent pupils pay any attention. "Paradise Garden" was a dead end and everybody knew this. You were damned to be a miserable fail only with being born there. Why do anything against it? As already mentioned it was a wonder how she survived.
But survive she did, against the odds she survived. Like a rose that grew from a heap of trash Barbie blossomed into a stunningly beautiful young woman. Long slender legs, long golden hair, full breasts, deep blue eyes, a model figure, no woman could have asked for more. Her intellect did not grow as well but that did not pose a problem to her many admirers. This did not go unnoticed by her mother as well who grew jealous of her. The beatings became more and more. The massive alcohol consume of her mother had taken a heavy toll, her once full breasts had become saggy and all together she had already turned into an old hag at the age of 38 when Barbie was 13. But the visits of men did not stop because of that. There were always men who grabbed what they could get. Barbie was introduced to a lot of "uncles" in those days and learned to stay away from them. They were big rough man, real brutes who did not bother to strike out if they weren't obeyed at an instant, sometimes even if she hadn't said a word, sometimes even if THEY hadn't said anything at all. Barbie could soon tell the worse from the worst. The worse were those who chased her out into the harsh night of the trailer park with the screams and arguments from the other families living there filling the air, sounds of crashing glass and splintering wood, flesh meeting flesh and people giving in to basic lust out of a need to feel something. Not to speak of the roaming gangs of youths who sought out easy victims which to do with as they pleased... But after some time Barbie had found a safe hideout and was safe for the night.
No, the worst were those who kept her inside, who came into her room after they were done with her mother and let Tiffany lay in her bed in a drunken stupor to play their own little games with Barbie.
The count of the latter grew bigger and bigger as it became inofficially known that Tiffany had a beautiful daughter who could be used as you wanted as long as you gave Tiffany what she wanted. Of course Barbie had tried to put some confidence in her mother and had told her about the "bad uncles" but the only thing that had happened was that she had received another beating. Her mother always said "for lying" but even Barbie knew that it was out of jealousy, out of the wrong impression that all those men only left her because of her daughter, an easy excuse. This went on till her 17th year of life. Then everything changed. The 4th of July. That was the day when Barbie struck back. When she gained her own independence. It was just after a night when one of the "uncles" had raped her again and she tried to speak to her mother about that for a final time. The reaction was the usual one. But the beating was the most savage one she had endured so far. With bare fists her mother punched her in the face, pulled her at the hair and drove her face first in the wall of the trailer. She kicked her in the back when she laid there and cried and threw porcelain cups at her, all the time yelling at her like the madwoman she was and insulting her in the worst ways possible. Even more horrible when it comes out of the mouth of a mother. Normally she would have stopped early before this but that evening she was even more drunk and more desperate than before. So she reached for the kitchen board and ripped of a piece of wood. Ferociously she struck out at Barbie only screaming in an inarticulate fury. Again and again the wood came down on her back and caused bloody bruises. And it did not stop. Tiffany went on and on and on and on. Barbie tried to protect herself with her arms but that was in vain as the unaimed strikes of her mother met another part of her body every time. That was when she got hold of the empty whiskey bottle that her mother had emptied only half an hour ago. The whole bottle on her own in less than half an hour. In self defence Barbie struck out with the bottle in hand.
And hit her mother right in the face. It seemed like a bullet time as her mother fell and hit the kitchen table with her neck. "CRACK!!!" The breaking sound of her neck echoed through the whole trailer and suddenly there was silence. No insults. No screams. No hits. Nothing. The only thing that could be heard was the heavy breath of Barbie standing atop the dead body of her own mother. But that lasted only for a few seconds before she crawled up under the kitchen table, her arms slung around her knees, and filled the silence with her cries and sobs...
This night saw a funeral fire rise to the sky as Barbie stood before the burning remains of her trailer. A clear decision was made. She would leave this place which had never been more than a prison to her anyway. Leave the rape and the violence and the emotional pain behind. With the trailer and the corpse of her mother her past burned away as well. The night lay before her, the stars hidden by the fire of her new life like her destiny, unknown and somehow frightening but it was all that remained to her. Walk her own path, make her own destiny, find some happiness somewhere, sometime. That was all that she had but she tried to use this given chance.
Now she is out on her own, looking after herself and happy this way. No one can tell her what to do. Best way to be and she plans on continuing so.
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
Besides her unearthly looks Barbie cannot claim any talents, superpowers or qualities . She is not even overly smart. Quite the opposite. Her intellect is below average, resulting in her relaying on others to make decisions and talking in awkward, if not outward weird, ways that combine with her southern accent to let her appear even dumber. She is used to guns but only so far as hitting a barn, her melee skills almost non existent. Mostly she tries to convince others to fight for her or accomplish the more demanding tasks.
ALTERNATE VERSIONS
THE ALL AMERICAN GIRL
The Barbie of Earth 1610 is quite different from the main version. Although she has gone through the same abuse and bad history she has an average intelligence degree and finally managed to make something of her life.
The bad luck that seemed to accompany her for her whole life stuck again when she set out after the burial fire for her mother. For months she lived on the road, riding the land on trains and as hitchhiker paying for what she needed either with the money that she earned along the road as a waitress or when that wasn't enough with her own body. Now she at least chose who to give her body to. It wasn't the best of all lives but worlds better than anything she had experienced so far. But of cause this could not last for long...
One day when she slept in a train, exhausted from her work and ready to travel to the next town she felt rough hands all over her body. She was used to that and already knew how to react. With a flashing of moonlight on the blade her switchblade came forth and in a silvery bow it swished through the air. A mean curse echoed through the dark wagon as she stabbed a man's eye out with that. No, she would not be the victim again. NEVER again. More silhouettes appeared in the door casting their bulky shadows on her beautiful body as she got up but she would sell her hide as costly as possible. Maybe after she had cut some fingers or ears of those rapists would loose interest. But it was not rape those dark figures were interested in.
As skinny guy in a suit entered. Other than his men he did not show any caution but radiated pure self confidence. The full moon shone on his back and obscured his front until there could be seen nothing more than pure blackness and the glasses on his nose seemed to glow by reflecting the moonlight. His voice, coldly amused, was dark and vibrant. He chuckled. "All right, exactly what we were looking for. This should be number 13. That means we only need two more. Get her!"
Next thing she remembered was that one of those men lifted a rifle at her and that spasms ran through all her body, caused by several hundred volts that she was hit with when the taser gun hit her.
The following months were a blur of pain, constant trial and experimentation. She and 14 others (oddly she was labelled Nr. 13 in the process and only called by that name) were forced into that project and underwent serious surgery. Every day they were drugged and tested, put through physical trials until the desired result was met. Who wasn't able to meet the results... well, that unlucky one was dragged deeper into the sterile building screaming only to never be seen again. There were times when Barbie wished to be dead, only to end the constant pain from the operation wounds and the feeling how her body was reconstructed, how the cold minds of the scientists analyzed her body if the integration process worked as they went on. But there was something inside her that held on to life, that clung so dearly to it that it was able to cancel out the pain and only focus on the trials. On certain days she only passed them barely but she did. Still better than the ones who disappeared permanently. And then the final test came. She and number 15 were the only ones left. What this test was Barbie is reluctant to tell even today but it had to be horrible, even more horrible than anything she had experienced before. She was the only one to pass it. As well as his 13 predecessors number 15 vanished into the big building forever...Barbie on the other side underwent the final hurtful modifications.
Six months later:
The newest superheroine, the newest role model for American Girls, the new darling of the press and defender of America and all what was rightful was presented to the media and the public:
BARBIE: THE ALL AMERICAN GIRL!
But no one knew what dark desires for young boys slumbered in that pretty shell... Maybe it was a consequence of the procedure to turn her into a superheroine or maybe the constant abuse left psychological scars so deep that they created a neurosis but once she sees an innocent looking, young, blonde boy she has to possess him. An overwhelming sexual desire overcomes her and she uses that boy without caring about the consequences, usually those consequences are the boys' deaths. The regret always comes only later. So far she managed to hide her obsession from the public but it is only a question of time till the press will find out about America's little darling's dirty secret. At least their reaction will be clear so Barbie takes great lengths to prevent that. Till now she has been successful...
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
This version of Barbie has ridiculous amounts of superstrength (in the 100 tons + degree) and the ability to fly as well as access to superspeed of several mach. She is nearly invulnerable thanks to her artificially enhanced mass (two tons or more at a height of 5'9''), her senses are heightened to a superhuman degree and her creators also gave her the ability to send out intense heat rays through her eyes. Since she is more of a advertisement icon than a superhero she lacks combat training but her super strength mostly makes up for that.
THE CORSAIR
The Barbie of Earth 2599 also had a troubled past (a trait that all Barbies from the different alternate universes seem to share) but couldn't be more different even if she tried.
It all begins with a love story unlike ANY other. The love story of Tiffany, a waitress in "Big Al's Space Diner", and Rrwkk, a loyal soldier of the Kllk Theocratical Army.
The Kllk are a strange race. From head to toe they look like they were created from pieces left over during the creation of other races. Their legs are bird like in appearance with sharp talons at the toes while their broad body is humanoid but has a thick carapace on the front and a turtle shell on the back. Their arms are non symmetric as well. The left one is humanoid although well muscled featuring a dextrous five fingered hand. The other is crab like with a powerful pincer instead of a hand. Their head looks very much like that of the western dragons in human mythology featuring an impressive and at the same time protecting chitin collar. Where their body is not covered in deep blue natural armour (the feet though not the legs, the left arm and the head save the collar) scales only a tint lighter cover it. Due to their unique appearance they believe themselves to be superior to all other races supported by their faith in a "creator people" who created all races with the Kllk as first and most perfect. All others are just bad copies and jealous of them. This evokes a great xenophobia in them and the theocratical ruler, the Tzzk, usually does his best to use that fear.
When Rrwkk entered Big Al's Space Diner with his unit this xenophobia suddenly was nowhere to be seen. From the first moment on he was fascinated by the exotic beauty that the human woman posed to him. It was not like he found human women to be attractive in general, quite the opposite, they were disgustingly soft and had hair, but Tiffany was something different. Of course his comrades nagged him but he didn't care. All he wanted to do was meet this woman.
Tiffany on the other side fared no better. She had seen many Kllk and liked none of them. They were usually unfriendly and racist, sometimes even insulting and absolutely never left tips although they ordered disgustingly smelling things like Capellian Rot Fly Pudding. But this one was different. From the first moment on that he entered the diner with the big rifle over his shoulder she couldn't deny the fascination that had taken hold of her and take her eyes of him.
It came as it had to be. The unit came more and more often to have their meal there and finally they spoke to each other. Rrwkk had even learned some simple basic Trade Language for this. And they found each other to be quite interesting. Eventually they became a love couple. Their affection for each other was strong and grew ever stronger. It even got Rrwkk discharged from the military but still the two clung to each other. Then the unthinkable happened: Tiffany got pregnant. This was a sensation since no one ever thought such utterly different species could create offspring. It was a scandal on Kllkr I, the home world of the Kllk because Rrwkk was not really able to live anywhere else.
But the birth of their child of love cost Tiffany her live. The hybrid was too strong and had too many dry scaly reptilian parts for the soft human body to endure it. As she came into the world Barbie literally ripped her mother open. Rrwkks heart broke the same moment his wife died. He kept the little girl but only because she looked like a mixture of him and his lost wife. Long white hair where her mother's had been blonde but the same tender frame although her arms were like his humanoid one and her legs were covered in the same dark blue scales as his. Her youth was not easy for her. Rrwkk kept her alive but since breed caring is an alien concept to the Kllk, their young are taken care of by a special religious priest caste, she did not get a lot of love. Her unique hybrid origin made her stronger than an ordinary human but still considerably weaker than a Kllk so she was often victim to beatings from Kllk children. Only advantage she had over them was her higher agility. As she grew older the beatings got more and more. Getting physically and verbally abused by all kinds of people, a whole large city even, became her everyday live. No one loved the "bastard that desecrated the Kllk race" and they all wanted her to know it. She wanted to tell her father but he didn't understand, that was the way of the Kllk, and even if he had understood he couldn't have done anything against it. It wasn't long after the last beating that she decided it had to end. Unfortunately she used her father's rifle to end the next conflict and had not enough training to only make a warning shot. As the bleeding corpse of a Kllk youth lay before her and the rest scurried in all directions she knew she was screwed. That was a pure death sentence. No illusions about that. The next ship of to another world was hers.
Even if her father had tried to find her, what he didn't, it would have been very difficult if not outright impossible. Barbie flipped through half the galaxy getting jobs as courier, thief, soldier and a million other things. It would be during her job as soldier that her life was forever changed and made into what it is now. She was fighting as a mercenary for the Onderon dictatorship which was fighting a race of sentient bugs united under a hive mind. She fought like a lioness and her Kllk heritage lent that bit of extra prowess to her fighting style through the fire in her veins and her heightened strength, agility, stamina and endurance. Also she proved herself to be a smart head and rose through the ranks. In this service it was that she met her best friend Zoe Thorzar. The young woman was a born soldier like her and soon they became a very successful team. When the public opinion turned against the war and the soldiers became publicly blamed the two women saw no reason to stay there and bear all the insults when they had fought to beat the bugs and save millions of lives. Stealing an old smuggler's ship, The Lady Luck, the two made their way up to the stars and mock law and order now.
The Lady Luck
Now Barbie is the Corsair, one of the most dreaded space pirates. Her exploits and raids are legendary, origin of tales over a good ale in almost every tavern in the universe. Zoe always at her side as well as other fantastic rough outcasts and outlaws that she took into her crew they fly through space experiencing unbelievable and daring adventures, always living to tell the tale. They have crossed the galaxy twice it seems and no one knows as much about obscure or uncartographed planets as them. The tales that they tell are astonishing. Burning worlds, planets of the living dead, dinosaurs on wild jungle planets, highly developed cannibals in cities of glass... Nothing is so weird they have not seen it.
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
Theoretically this version of Barbie has no superpowers but her Kllk heritage grants her strength, senses, agility, reflexes, stamina and endurance slightly above human standards. Thanks to her years as mercenary she also has considerable experience in firearms and armed and unarmed combat. She is also probably one of the best spaceship pilots in known space.
RAGE
Earth 1395's Barbie differs from all the other Barbies in the fact that she is black. And although she is also of average intellect and has powers due to being a mutant she still has a lot in common with her counterpart from the main universe.
It was Elvis who once sung about "life in the ghetto" but although he pictured it very tragic he knew nothing about the brutality in which Barbie grew up. No father, a crack whore for a mother, the neighbourhood festered with gangs, gangbangers, drug dealers and addicts at every corner, theft, rape and even murder being a part of every day life. This was the small area of the town in which Barbie was rudely thrust into the world.
Even her birth in that run-down filthy one room apartment was not much more than a fight to come to life. Kicking and struggling she almost forced herself out of her mother's womb with the umbilical cord around her throat. For hours she cried and screamed till her mother got out of the crack stupor she had put herself in to be able to ignore the pain from the birth. Barbie may not have been an abnormally big baby but she was bigger than the standard, despite the drug abuse of her mother, making the birth not an easy one. No one can really tell but maybe these first few hours already were the time when this unbelievable rage rose up in her for the first time. An impotent baby, crying for affection and warmth in a cold unforgiving world, still innocent and unaware of the harshness of that world outside, just wanting to be taken care of but being ignored instead. Who wouldn't have been angry?
Her proverbial "bad temper" was what got her this nickname and kept giving her troubles later on. The neighbourhood was not really what you would call nice and certainly not a place for a child that was constantly throwing tantrums. It was especially bad when someone referred to her family. Her mom was almost never at home and just gave her what remained from her drug money to buy food. Understandably Barbie was more busy with stealing than buying food. Who her father was she didn't know and whenever she asked all that she got was just another savage beating. As if she didn't get enough of those out on the streets when her mother needed the room for herself and her "clients". Of course her inability to control her anger and reacting to insults and slights by violence made the streets not the most hospitable environment for her. She may have been stronger than all the kids at her age but there were still the older ones. The ones who hung around in gangs, who ruled this place through fear and violence. They made clear very early that they were the bosses, the ones to set the rules. And that disobeying them was met with brutal punishment. Forced by her sanguine nature Barbie, who took enough shit already for having a more than white first name in an all black part of the city and to add insult to injury was even blue eyed although she had an almost ebony skin colour what further hinted at a white ancestry, was unable to obey and met the consequences more times than she could count. Beaten up for the first time at the age of four and raped at the age of eleven. Constant physical and sexual abuse were soon becoming a part of her normal day life. Oh no, life was not easy for little Barbie and it would become only worse with growing age. Running through littered alleys, jumping over drunken bums and dead dogs, climbing fences and hiding in abandoned houses became her second nature. Sometimes, if it was only one or two, she stayed to slug it out and usually won. Over the years she got better and better at those two activities and soon she got away with that more often than not.
One of those occasions when she didn't get away was her 14th birthday. The gang that called itself "The Panthers", a lame reference to the famous Black Panthers, managed to catch her when they approached her from four angles and beat her down as she said something about them being show offs and wannabes. Standing over her bruised body they decided to have a little "fun" with the beautiful black girl as so many other gangs already had had. As she witnessed how the gang leader loosened his belt and got out of his poser baggy pants rage unlike any other rose in her. She could feel it rushing through her veins, a strong hot energy that refuelled her body, gave her new power and vigour. That was what enabled her to get up. But in vain. Though it needed four gangers to force her back to earth, each one holding one limb, she was forced down again. With a vile grin on his face the leader raped her. He came between her outstretched legs and moved forth and backs, uttering obscene moans while he still wore that sick smile. Barbie got angrier and angrier, she felt how he mocked her but couldn't do anything about it. The epitome came when he spat in her face.
Barbie and her torturers all screamed at the same time. She screamed for all the pain, the degradations, the insults and bad things she had experienced. Screamed to let it all out, to make clear this was the last thing she would endure, that this was the end. To be free from all this, to make something of a life that had started out so miserably. She screamed out to make a point. The Panthers cried out for another reason.
The same moment Barbie let out that feral roar she also emitted an extreme heat. A heat so big that the holders' hands and the leader’s gender melted away. Like a berserker Barbie jumped back to her feet and slaughtered every single one of them with unbelievable rage and brutality. Wherever she approached one of the gangers the sweat that instantly showed on his forehead vaporized and was the only thing that escaped her wrath as she conflagrated them by mere touch and ripped them apart limb by limb. The slaughter was without any equal that the inhabitants of those slums had seen before. Barbie showed a viciousness that surprised even her.
As she stood there above all those horribly mutilated corpses and the awareness of what she had just done hit her mind she was not shocked. No, quite the opposite. She was happy. Although she may be a freak, a gross mutie, now, she could pay all those people back. She was strong, agile and hard as never before in her life. She could treat those gangs just like they had treated her. It took her only a single month, then there were no more gangs in the area. No matter what they tried to do to stop her, it didn't work. The little girl with the bad temper had become an unstoppable killing machine with a bad temper. Baseball bats, knifes, even guns, nothing was able to stop her anymore. No longer would she be the victim. Instead she would be the culprit. Her reputation grew and she earned her nickname "RAGE" a hundredfold by the immense temperatures she emitted when angered. Some of the gangers tried to flee and hide in other districts but then she would come down on those who hid them like god's wrath and soon the gangs in the other parts of the cities did not only refuse to let those fugitives in but even delivered them to her.
After erasing all the gang influence from the scene it was time to move on. Someone like her could make a lot of money in organized crime. And indeed she did. The mob bosses were willing to pay a lot of cash to have an enforcer like her, no matter if she was black and a woman. From the money she earned she even bought some training lessons in kickboxing whenever she had the time. For some time she worked for the DeLarocca family intimidating and killing their enemies and everything was good till the main competitor, the Russian Gorodetzky clan, hired a superhuman enforcer of their own. To the present day Barbie still doesn't know what his name was but he gave her the beating of her life. His own superhuman powers, especially the physical ones, surpassed her own by far. Seemingly with ease he struck hard enough to ignore the unusual hardness of her mutant body and made her bleed again after such a long time. She had no chance. He left her as a bloody pulp in some dirty back alley. All that reminded her too much of the gangs that had used and beaten her to let her back on the street. To her luck somebody called an ambulance and got her to hospital.
Hospital and recovering was not something that she enjoyed a lot. Her nigh invulnerability made it difficult to perform surgery on her and the training to mend her bones and spine back into the right forms stressed her already legendarily thin patience a lot. And while she was in hospital, her employers lost a lot of ground. No one was happy with this turn of events except the Gorodetzkys. Half a year later she came out of hospital, containing even more anger but knowing she couldn't do anything against that other enforcer or this time he would kill her. The pure thought of it let her melt her footsteps into the concrete as she walked away from the hospital. All her enraged mind could think about was how to pay that man back who had hurt her so badly.
It was one of her employers in the DeLarocca family who introduced her to MGH, the Mutant Growth Hormone. The kick and excitement every time she took a hit of that inhalator was indescribably awesome but the real thing about it was the power increase she experienced. Her euphorism bordered on omnipotence delusions. But it was true. Her natural abilities were heightened to the extreme by that drug. Not long and she would encounter the other enforcer again. With a cocky smile that mirrored that of the dreaded gang leader from her past he entered the alley in which he had left her last time. This time she left the alley victorious with him as the bloody pulp. Contrary to him she made sure he would never bother her again though. Hard to do that when you were strangled and hung up with your own intestines...
After she had won the war for the DeLaroccas she set out for the bigger scene under her old name "RAGE". The stakes were higher but she needed a lot of money now because she was addicted to MGH. Ironically calling herself a henchwoman now she hired herself out to several villains and gangster bosses for money not caring about what she had to do as long as the payment was generous. Like she had sworn herself she would never be a victim again and would never return to the existence of poverty and abuse she had lead before. Lately an up-and-coming mob boss named Ginju bought her precious and useful services...
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
Originally RAGE a.k.a. Barbie had limited invulnerability and superstrength (about 10 tons), heightened physical attributes like superhuman stamina, endurance, speed and agility. Very acute but not superhuman senses are also a result of her mutation. After she started using MGH those powers were considerably increased. Where a burst from an automatic weapon or a piece of heavy artillery could still hurt her there something harder than Titanium is needed now. Her superstrength likewise increased to 25 tons and her other attributes were raised accordingly. The most noticeable thing about her powers is that she gets stronger if she is enraged. Barbie calls that "Berserker Mode". Her strength can reach the 40 ton mark then. What is even more worth mentioning is the big amount of heat she emits when enraged. As a general rule the madder she gets the stronger and hotter she gets. Unprotected flesh is seared away and she even leaves foot imprints in the concrete. As a side effect she is totally immune to high temperatures and fire. To add to her physical prowess she is also heavily experienced in street fighting and has extensive kickboxing training as well.
THE GHOST RIDER
The Barbie of Earth 860 is probably the one of all who is most haunted by bad luck. The low intelligence of 616 Barbie combined with an even worse fate make her the most tragic in the collection of Barbies.
The same story of abuse and rape that formed her counterpart from the 616 and the 1610 universe is also hers, including her drunken mother Tiffany and the large "bonfire" that she created as a funeral for her. But after she set out to find herself and her place in this cold harsh world something went terribly wrong.
Living on the road is everything but easy. The things one has to do to get along are sometimes... unpleasant. It wasn't different for Barbie. Walking along the long dusty Texan roads with a rucksack that contained what little she had in the hot desert sun with a thump up for trucks to pick up hitchhikers got some of said truckers ideas. Filthy ideas. Barbies outfit consisting of some worn out jeans, an old farmer's shirt tied together shortly over the navel, some cowboy boots and a fitting cowboy hat over her long golden hair didn't help either. This way she had to pay her passage with her body not trying to shiver from disgust under the rough callusing hands of fat truckers.
Working as waitress or dishwasher or anything else didn't work well either. Half of the time she worked for a ridiculous wage of maybe a dollar or less an hour and half of the time they didn't pay her at all and instead threatened to call the police for she had worked more or less illegally. Some of those jerks beat her and one even dared to rape her in his own kitchen, throwing her out into the mud and the heavy rain, laughing at her and telling her she should go to the police commissioner, his best friend, and tell him what he had done to see if he would trust some stupid hobo girl. No, Barbie was neither happy nor lucky. Nothing after she had left that blighted hellhole of a trailer park had worked out as planned.
It was after that last rape that fate found her. Crying she simply stumbled out into the rain the mud staining her boots and the legs of her pants. She just walked and walked and walked not caring what was around her, how the landscape changed or if she crossed streets, boulders or fields of cactuses. Nothing was of any importance anymore. It was like that last dirtbag had broken her, defiled everything in her that was good and proper. Now nothing mattered. Nothing mattered. She hadn't eaten for days. That did not matter. The night was unusually cool and rainy for Texas. That did not matter. She was walking right into the nothingness of night into the area of tumbleweeds, coyotes and rattlesnakes. Even that did not matter. Everything had lost its significance.
When she finally returned to her senses it still hadn't stopped raining but at least she had stopped walking. Around her there was the blackness of night only partially ripped apart by the flashing forks of lightnings illuminating the gravestones around her. Her zombie like trance had led her to a long forgotten, god forsaken old wild west graveyard. Nothing more than a few rotting wood crosses and some weathered stones with names engraved on it. Neglected it had become a joke of its former beauty. Like her.
One loud single cathartic scream escaped Barbie's throat before she fell down on her knees and threw stones somewhere in the night. All the time she kept crying and wincing the same lines over and over. "It's not fair... It's not fair... It's not fair..." And there, on the brink of starvation on that little graveyard, her life took the last tragic twist.
It happened in form of a hand touching her shoulder. Nothing in this touch spoke of lust or bad intentions, it was something that Barbie had rarely experienced in her 18 years of life. Just a touch. Her eyes still full with tears she looked up and saw a dignified man there. White hair combed back over his head revealing a broad intelligent forehead. Aristocratic nose, mouth and cheekbones. Wonderful deep blue eyes telling of years over years of experience. Even his suit spoke of class, black Italian silk with a red tie. But what was most impressing was the cloud of steam that constantly surrounded him as the rain vaporized before it could touch him.
As he spoke his voice was dark and soft, understanding lulling her into security like black satin. "What do you want my daughter? To be free of hunger, of thirst? To live on and never care about anything in your life again? I can give that to you. I do not ask for much, only your soul and a few services. Simply take my hand and say yes!"
Although Barbie was certainly not the smartest person on the planet she definitely knew who stood before her and whom she looked up to with her eyes red from crying. His aura was just too overwhelming. It went farther than mind, farther than ratio, it went deep into her soul and everything she was. For a short moment she hesitated. Was it really worth it? Give away the last thing that was still hers? Her soul? Then, the next moment, she thought about what she had to loose and grabbed that hand. But not before stating another wish. Mephisto laughed and thus she was the only one of his ghost riders to be granted two wishes.
Now there is a girl named Barbie who walks the long Texan routes by day free of thirst and hunger with no need to sleep, just the wish to see this beautiful country by foot and at night there is a new Ghost Rider with a blazing blue flame skull who rides the roads in the service of the devil. People tell that you can hear sad country music from an indestructible radio in his bike when he comes near. And that is true since it was Barbie's second wish...
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
Her human form is immune to hunger, thirst and high temperatures though not fire, lack of oxygen and physical violence. Barbie’s IQ is still considerably below average and her combat training almost non existing.
Her Ghost Rider form has the usual powers of a Ghost Rider like the Penance Stare and so on. From some unknown source it has some knowledge of melee combat with chains and fists.
THE SAINT
The Barbie of Earth 2019 is not a woman but a man who was ironically named "Ken" but his story is nevertheless as tragic as any of his female counterparts'.
Ken was a poor boy. Literally and metaphorically. The only thing that differentiated him from Earth 616 Barbie aside from his gender was that his mother eventually found another man who was not his father who stayed with her after Ken’s birth. Nothing else was different after that. The abuse of alcohol, violence and sexuality was the same...
Bob, the new husband of his mother, was a man with two faces. Over the day he sat on the couch in the "living room" of their trailer in his underwear watching TV with a beer in his hand. Working or even moving his enormous hairy body was not a question for him. What Tiffany earned in the bar was enough for the two of them to get drunk and thus it sufficed. After all there was still Ken to care about the household and making sure there was something to eat on the table. And if he neglected his tasks for any reason, be it school, be it simply for the fact that his "parents" alcoholism consumed all of Tiffany's small wage, there was still the belt to teach him some good old fashioned "discipline".
Bob's second face showed after darkness rose. Then, after he and Tiffany wasted themselves with brutal efficiency, he was indeed willing to move. Then his socks clad feet moved his disgusting fat body over the floor. Stumbling they carried him over the wood imitate floor to Ken's room where he closed the door behind him. Not once did Ken's screams wake his mother and at day he was too ashamed by this rough rape to tell her. Not like she would have believed him how we have seen on the fate of 616 Barbie...
This whole seemingly unbearable situation went on for 6 years until Ken was 10. That was when his life changed for the better. Not much but at least a bit. To the present day Ken still remembers what happens when he played outside with some of his friends from the trailer park. It was in the morning, maybe 10 am, and the sun had just risen only to hang lazily over the still peaceful trailers. Bob and Tiffany still lay in their bed snorting their souls out caught in that drunken stupor that always came over them after emptying several bottles of whiskey. At this day something broke the dull routine of "Paradise Garden". That something was a car. A car like Ken had never seen one before. Blinking and reflecting the golden rays of the morning sun it captured little Ken's fascinated gaze as it curved up the street till it stopped right infront of them. Then everything happened too fast for him to remember. He only recalls being pulled into that shiny black car and how some policemen stormed the trailer to drag Tiffany and Bob out. Not without some strikes with their black batons though. Even if Ken had known that he would have seen his "parents" for the last time in his life he would have not wept or even said goodbye. Too much had happened to him to still love them. His little heart was broken, dead...
The following months became one big hazy blur. Nice people took care of him, doctors examined him, a lot of papers were reached around and before he knew it he was standing before an old fashioned wooden door in a decent district with his small suitcase of clothes and a few toys at his side. They had told him that this was the place where his grandmother lived, that she had recovered from the same illness that had plagued his mother, that she had found Jesus and that she was a better woman now. Ken didn't know who that Jesus was but he had no doubts his grandmother Barbara was a better person than his mother. As said door opened and he entered he knew his life would change.
And it changed. Sadly not much for the better. Barbara was an ex-alcoholic who had left her violent and drunken man and her young girl Tiffany to find happiness elsewhere. And she had found it elsewhere. In a gospel church that bordered on fanatism. Ken was raised accordingly. Although the sexual abuse was lacking the belt was still his faithful companion in everything. Not praying before meals or before going to bed? Slap! Cursing? Slap! Talking back? Slap! ... The list went on and on and soon Ken had learned the new rules in the new house. It needed only one year to form the still malleable Ken into the same thing his grandmother was: An ultra-conservative religiously fanatic American nationalist.
And just like it was proper for one like him he joined the army one day after his 18th birthday. Although his psychological profile stated an enormous mental instability he was accepted as a good and loyal soldier and eventually became a Ranger.
Nothing, not his messed up childhood, not the religious drill of his grandmother who insisted that he trained his god given body as well as his mind, not even his army training could prepare him for what he experienced in Afghanistan. As a scout Ken was put into the most hellish fights like in Kabul, Djerjallabad and other places he could not even pronounce. More often than not it was man against man in a hellish infight, decisions being made with knifes, fists and teeth instead of guns. The slaughterhouse of war taught him things that no school had on its schedule and as he returned after five years of service to the US he was profoundly changed. Not in a good way though.
Ken's mental state had worsened. From an obedient man he had devolved into a nearly mindless machine, a puppet that did what it was told. His scout abilities combined with his grown physical prowess made him a real social problem. And as he came back into his grandmother's house and opened the door the old woman already waited in her wheelchair in which she sat since a drunken driver had hit her on open street. Her prayers had finally been heard. With her own grandson god had finally delivered the answer to her question how she could purge the world of its sins.
Now a new nightmare for criminals and sinners prowls the night. A clouded mind carrying out the orders of a bitter old woman in a wheelchair, a nearly unstoppable killing machine with little to no regard for pain or human life and a Ranger training, skills and senses sharpened to the extreme in the forge of war. Small time criminals and crooks call him "The Saint" for he usually crucifies his victims in dark back alleys.
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
Ken has no superpowers of any kind but is extremely fit and well trained. Thanks to his army training he is able to handle most small calibre guns and is as well trained in military martial arts. His time in Afghanistan further enhanced this training and taught him some new methods of infighting. He is mentally unstable and absolutely unpredictable, almost stupidly following orders making him even more dangerous as he doesn't care for anything, neither his own pain that he usually ignores or the lives of anyone involved. Everything he is interested in is punishing the sinners and carry out "god's will".
NOCTIFERA
It is the Barbie of Earth 666 who sets new standards for all of them. Maybe all of them were abused at some point but it was 666 Barbie who now goes under the name of Noctifera who took a revenge so cruel it suffices for all of them...
No one could have guessed how it all started. One day Barbie's mother woke up alone although she could clearly remember taking a man back home the previous evening. But on the other hand it was not the first time one of those worthless bastards had stolen himself away after he had done his job. So she simply opened another bottle of bourbon and prepared for the next night of work.
Not surprisingly she ignored the signs of her pregnancy for the most part like 616 Tiffany did until it was too late. But here the first differences appeared. The pregnancy proved to be utter hell. Barbie kicked and boxed like a maniac inside of Tiffany's womb, even when she was sleeping and mean cramps shook her body. The baby had a ravaging hunger and no matter how much Tiffany ate while her belly grew the rest of her body grew thinner and thinner until she looked like a skeleton carrying a grotesque sack before her. Her long golden hair became strawy, her blue eyes sank deep into the sockets, most of her body got eaten away by the endless hunger of the foetus.
Of course the egoistical Tiffany hated every second and tried to kill the little life within her but said unborn child showed itself to be remarkably resistible. Alcohol didn't help, it didn't even cease the pain. Other drugs, even the hard ones like heroine, succeeded in letting her forget the cramps but they were not worth the money since the pain was even worse after waking up from the drug induced coma and it was too expensive to keep it up especially since the embryo didn't react to it at all. Even as she threw herself down the stairs it refused to leave her body and as she paid a local gang to punch her in the belly till the child came out she had to stop because she couldn't bear the pain anymore at some point before the procedure was successful. So she endured as good as she could and hoped it would be over soon.
But it wasn't. As if to torture her for the means she had employed in trying to kill the baby under her heart Barbie stayed in there nine months and three weeks. Tiffany went nearly mad. When she had thought the first nine months were a torture the last three weeks let her think about killing herself. And the birth was unlike anything she could ever hope to put in simple words. 42 hours of birthing pain were more than she could bear but something kept her conscious and aware no matter what the cost. At some point the anaesthetic doctor resigned and just gave green light to the pediatrist to start with the birthing. A lot of cutting was done and as her ruby red blood spilled all over the operation room Tiffany screamed through the whole cruel procedure. It was like the baby had dug hooks into her not to have to go to the outside. When it was finally over Tiffany fell unconscious and stayed that way for three days.
The return to "Paradise Garden" was difficult as Tiffany came back with a child she was afraid of. Something told her she would regret it if she gave this baby away or killed it and once in her life she listened to that voice of reason. That did not mean that she did not sedate herself and her fear with alcohol and men once more. From then on Barbie's life went almost identically to that of her counterpart in the main universe. Abuse both physically and sexually became a common aspect of her life, perhaps even more so. She was 4 when a lover of her mother raped her for the first time and since then she did not sleep a single night untouched. It was like an unholy might mounted the men's body at night and forced them over the trailer corridor at night into the little bed where little Barbie tried to hide under her blanket crying. All she could see were those horrible eyes glistening with lust in the darkness when the clouds covered the moon in the sky outside. The abuse was ghastly, the next day she always was black and blue. And telling her mother was of no use either. Everything it brought was another insult and another slap. So another part of little Barbie died with each passing day.
Time went by and the situation got worse and worse. And with age not only Barbie's body grew to the pleasant image she is nowadays but the hate that she festered in her heart grew as well. Vile and horrible things were done to her at night, partly so evil it was not imaginable, sometimes not only by a singe man but by two or three at the same time. At the same time she felt something in her... A burning intensity... A silent whisper... Something that spoke to her in old and forgotten languages whenever a new disgusting body rocked forth and back above her in the darkness. And more and more she began to understand it...
The day she finally found out what this all meant was the day when Tiffany snapped for the last time. To the present day Barbie doesn't recall what they struggled about only that it got out of hand. Once more, for the thousandth time or even more, Tiffany reached out with anger distorted face, gritted teeth and widely opened eyes to slap her daughter. But this time it was different. With no effort at all she lifted her arm and caught Tiffany's hand with a devilish smile on her face. Rather quickly but for her shocked mother in slow motion Barbie began to change. Her long golden hair became black while her skin took on a more and more reddish tone until it was red like the blood spilled during her birth. Her beautiful blue eyes changed into glowing yellow orbs and fangs began to grow in her mouth. Although her amazing figure did not change the skin over her back popped up and freed her large red demon wings. It took only a second for Barbie to shed off her larval husk and remerge in her true form but to Tiffany it was an eternity as she finally understood everything. A last small courtesy of Barbie's real father before Tiffany was incinerated by her own demon child.
As Barbie took the sky into possession as she rose from the pyre the trailer had become she finally understood. The cthulhoid whispers suddenly became clear to her, the dark language of her father, the dark energies of her heritage surged through her veins and etched millenia old secrets under her skin. More and more trailers began to burn as she directed her new found dark arts against them, a revenge against those who had watched her suffering without acting, a bacchanal of her rebirth, her own little purgatory. A whole new universe unfolded right infront of her eyes. And the mortar to build it was the power within her, the semen of her father: Lucifer!
But before she could build this new world she had to finish her old life and there was something that had to be taken care of. One after one she sought them out, every single man who had raped her in that vile fashion and slaughtered them in the most cruel way possible. Each of them suffered things ten times worse than what they had done to her and each suffered exactly 6 hours, 6 minutes and 6 seconds in an homage to her father. With them suffered their families and friends if they had such.
Till now she hasn't succeeded in slaying all of her former torturers but given her abilities that is only a question of time. And the world will certainly not be happy about what she is going to do afterwards because that involves recreating the world in her father's image... So far her first part of recreating it started with throwing that ridiculous name that her mother gave her away and accepting a new one that fitted her. Where her father had been the bringer of light once she would bring eternal night. And thus she called herself the female bringer of night:
NOCTIFERA
.
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
Obviously Noctifera has superhuman strength (between 2 and 5 tons), agility, durability and endurance as well as a certain amount of invulnerability towards physical damage. Her wings provide her with flight on a subsonic level and her fangs and claws make for excellent natural weapons even able of tearing through a flak west. As a demon she has of course access to the dark arts but is susceptible to magic as well as true faith. Interestingly she bleeds shadows when wounded.
THE ENIGMA
The Barbie of Earth 998 is fiery in the purest word of the sense. Her intellect may be as low as 616 Barbie's but apart from that her powers and her unclear heritage make her something very erratic.
Where she came from is widely unknown, even to herself. The earliest recorded point in her history is that she was found on the steps of "Saint Florian's Orphanage" obviously shortly after she was born. The priest and the nuns leading this institution were understandably shocked to find such a baby right infront of their door but at the same time it looked like a sign of their patron. Hours and hours of talk went by while the poor little infant cried infront of the door till the nuns finally convinced the unwilling priest to take this "child of god" in before it froze to death.
One might wonder why the clerics were so shocked but the fact that a child with actual FIRE for hair was found at an institution that was named after the protector against fire would have unsettled even more scientifically thinking people. Of course instantly test of all kinds were made from simple sickness tests to mutant tests to see where her fiery hair came from but none of those proved positive. To at least give her a name they called her after the protector of the pregnant Barbara, or Barbie for short. The child remained an enigma. An enigma to all but father John, the priest of the orphanage.
It had been a night six months ago, a night that father John had dismissed as a nightmare because it was so absurd. Like always he had slept the sleep of the faithful after he had said a good night to his children and had said his night prayer when something awoke him. It was a an intense red and yellow light that filled the room entirely and cast strange, flickering shadows on the walls where it met the rare personal things in his room. When he was finally able to open his eyes he saw a flame hovering in the middle of his room, just hovering there in its eerie silence, not touching the ground and not burning anything. In terror he watched it, none of them doing anything. And then it happened. John had gathered all his strength, all his valour to say something and just as he was about to speak out the flame was suddenly over him. But it didn't burn him. Instead they fought, struggled. But it was a strange struggling, nothing like he was used to. Actually it felt good. Something he had never experienced, a comfortable yet arousing warmth. Harder and harder they fought until it was like father John exploded. The fire retreated and he fell asleep. As he awoke the next morning he had thought it all to be a dream.
Now that this strange child lay before him with its fire hair he knew what had happened. But if or if not it was his child, he had to raise it properly.
And that he did, at least in his mind. The girl carried the mark of the devil for sure and when he couldn't remove it from her with the scissor (which proved impossible), he would at least teach her faith and modesty. While the nuns tended to the other children Barbie became his own personal project. With hour long bible reading, teaching from dawn to dusk and of course the good old stick he tried to form her into what he desired. Of course her rather low intelligence and very short attention span as it was to be expected from a being of fire made that a futile attempt. As he noticed that she bled lava that only furthered his zeal. This devil child, even if it be his own, would be a proper Christian, no matter the costs.
So the little flame led a life full of beatings isolated from the other children. At times the physical punishment became so severe that she was not able to leave the bed and had to be tutored there. And when he saw how her flaming tears burned holes into the pillow he would beat her only the more.
Time went by and Barbie grew into a stunning beauty, combining the best of the world of the humans and the plane of fire. Father John who hid her away from the world she belonged to witnessed that with discontent. His attempts to raise her had been in vain for the last 17 years, she didn't show any faith and since some time she was even showing signs of teenage rebellion. Not acceptable. If he was not able to redeem her he would be the one to purge this sinful being from earth. How does the old saying go: "I brought you into this world and I can also bring you out of it!"
One night he entered her room with a knife he had personally blessed for this purpose. Barbie herself didn't get what was going on till he dealt the first strike. Her high shriek as the blade created a bleeding cut in her arm echoed through the long hallways of the venerable building. Yet he said nothing no matter how miserably Barbie begged him to stop. His holy rage was too much. Slash after slash he lead in silence against what he considered to be his own child and Barbie was hardly able to dodge in the small room. More and more the fury grew on both sides till the unpreventable happened...
Seconds after the explosion that turned St. Florian's and all of its inhabitants into ash Barbie rose. To her still troubled mind it was not clear what had happened, only that she was finally free, free to do what she wanted. And that she would do, she would experience that world that she had been denied for so long to its fullest, to see what it was like and to finally find her place in a world that she at least 50% belonged to. Time would prove what it would bring her.
One thing was certain. She soon became a darling of high society because of her exotic exterior and got a lot of advertisement contracts, her most famous being the one she made for Martini:
A really hot drink...For the pure fun of it she also turned to crime fighting. Well, partly for the fun and partly because her agent told her it would be good for the rest of her career. Supermodel and superhero in one, something that had never been there before. And now the two small fire trails that she leaves while using her superspeed are a certain sign that The Enigma is on the job. Nevertheless is she inexperienced with her powers as well as naive and already accidentally burned a bank robber to death, a deed that her agent was barely able to explain. Time will tell if the hopelessly naive Barbie will prove a bigger threat to gangsters or to all those around her as she grows in experience...
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
Her hybrid heritage grants this Barbie the power of pyrokinesis as well as pyrogeneration, meaning she can not only control fire but also create it from thin air and is totally immune to it. Surprisingly she has also shown the ability to fly in subsonic speeds and when on ground she has a small amount of subsonic superspeed (between 200 and 250 mph) leaving two burning trails when she utilizes this power. Her body fluids like blood, saliva and tears consist of lava. Of course her one big weakness is water in any form. Although she loves to take steaming hot baths and showers water (or ice) effectively cancels out her powers.
THE IRON MAIDEN
The Barbie of Earth 2099 is in so far remarkable as she does not only possess the legendary beauty of the Barbies but also a genius level intellect.
A lot has happened to her, that is for sure. From the beginning to the tragic end of her mother her story equals that of 616 Barbie. The abuse, the rape and the constant degredation that she suffered were just as brutal and cruel. But there was one big difference. Whenever 616 Barbie would turn on the constantly flashing TV in the "living room" or just cried to get over the horrible things that had happened to her this Barbie grabbed a book and fled into the complex world of math, physics and engineering. It became her new home, her safe haven when everything around her went to hell and math tasks and problems became her hobby, her way of escaping.
Would anyone have shown interest in her this gift might have been discovered but as it was the nature of "Paradise Garden" struck again and just made her a "geek" in a school full of uninterested pupils and overly challenged teachers. And of course none of the first weren't very interested in looking even worse next to the excellent grades that Barbie achieved. So her time in school was not really different from her time at home. Strikes and insults filled them...
Nevertheless the inevitable happened. As physical weak, as frail she might have been, how feeble her strength, how high her intellect, an empty whiskey bottle and a kitchen table lead to the same result as she finally defended herself against her mother. The body lay there as broken, the neck as twisted, Barbie's life was as ruined. She still wept when she set the trailer on fire and she still had the same bruises as she left the gates of "Paradise Garden" behind her.
This is where the story differs once more. This time Barbie put her vast intellect to good use. After the first night under the sparkling star sky only huddled in a thin jacket against the stinging cold that more successfully tried to creep into her body than any boyfriend of her mother's she knew something had to be done or she wouldn't survive for long. So she grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and started calculating.
Later in her life she was asked how she managed to accumulate all this wealth and all that she would answer with a soft smile was: "It was not easy, that much I can tell you." And indeed: Easy it had not been. She took every job that she could get, from washing dishes and mopping the floor over carrying suitcases up to sorting stinking trash. More often than not she slept on some hard wooden floor or some bus station waiting for the greyhound to carry her further. But this was all worth it because as she bought only food that was hardly necessary to survive and slept in the cheapest motels her stock portfolio grew slowly and steadily. It took several years but then came the big day...
Using a complex math formula that she had developed herself (and that got her a Professor degree in business economics later on) she used a self modified version of a simple computer program to achieve the infamous "One Minute Mega Buyout". The details are kept under high security clearance even today but the theory of this action was clear. With the help of a high speed modem she sold all of her lucrative stock only to buy a some other less lucrative stock, therefore more of them, until they gained one cent more than the original ones she had sold only to begin the game anew. The whole went on for exactly 60 seconds and at the end Barbie was suddenly one of world's 100 richest, place 81 to be exact, directly between Edward Johnson III and Hans Rausing with an estimated bank account of 32 billion dollars.
But it did not stop there. Theoretically she could have stopped. Of course. 32 billion dollars were more than most people could spend in an entire lifetime. But for Barbie, who now insisted on being called Barbara to reflect on her changed background, it was not enough. Inventing an easily and cheaply reproducible cure for aids like she did was not enough. She wanted to do something, not only donate money to the third world while her bank account grew and grew but to actually take action so no little girl would have to suffer like she had to.
So Barbie returned to the blackboard and another six months later the world had a new iron heroine:
The Iron Maiden
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS:
First and foremost her most remarkable feature is her mind. She is definitely on the genius level able to do complex math in her head only without any help, and can successfully comprehend and solve complex issues. At times her mind with its sharp analytical ability has been referred to as "computer like". The armour that can on command materialize on her body gives her superstrength (about ten tons), and increased endurance and durability though not agility. In air it can achieve speeds up to mach 3. It also has extensive sensors as well as radar in it and some weapons are built into it like lasers and tasers.
MALICE
Abuse comes in many forms. Sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally. The Barbie of Earth 1618 who was created during "Project: Malice" shows that lack of emotions maybe can protect you from abuse but that it can also produce monsters just as bad as Noctifera.
The original idea of "Project Malice" was simple: To create world's most powerful psionic. As always the praxis proved to be more difficult than the nice crunched numbers on the paper. In this case it began with abducting 100 children with considerable potential all over the world. Under the cool cover of the night specially trained commandos invaded peaceful homes and dragged crying children out of their beds making some of them orphans in the process when the terrified parents tried to defend their offspring.
One by one was ripped out of their safe environment and brought to their new last home in the laboratory in Texas that euphemistically had received the codename "Eden" because it was supposed to be the birthplace of a new kind of human. As the children aged and finally showed the powers they had been stolen for it was disappointing. Not a single one lived up to the high expectations the leading scientists had after examining the amplitudes on the psi-screen. But on the other hands that was nothing that couldn't be handled accordingly.
Enhancers were the new thing they put their hopes in. The nature was not the question, in fact they tried as many enhancers as possible from drugs like the Mutant Growth Hormone to cybernetic enhancements and much more sinister things of even arcane origin. The results on the already fragile children's psyche were devastating. 50% were reduced to raving maniacs that had to be disposed of because they posed too great a threat to the project, 40% didn't meet the desired quota and met the same fate while the remaining 10% were already dead because their little bodies did not have the fortitude to bear the cruel procedure that was forced on them.
After 6 years and several changes in the working staff the scientists stood there with empty hands again. But the government demanded results for the money that they had already invested. So the leading heads of "Project: Malice" came to another conclusion: If there wasn't any material worth working with out there they had to create their own. Back to the blackboard. Cloning seemed a good way to achieve that. So they took samples that they had collected during the previous step and combined them only to find out that for some reason those samples produced... things not able to life after the first few months of their foetal stadiums. Fed up with failure after failure the people in charge decided they had to use some different "binding material".
Information on who the three people who delivered this material were is still heavily classified but it is certain that each of them was a true professional on his or her field of powers: The world's most powerful telepath, the world's most powerful empath and the world's most powerful telekinetic. Again the commandos were send out to retrieve the scientists' wishes. This time it was a bit more difficult. The dangerous hunt spanned the globe and the cost of life on the soldier's side was more than simply high. And then, after another ten years, the new samples finally lay in the greedy hands of "Project: Malice". Instantly they went to work and already their first try produced a well growing life form out of the three new samples and the seven most powerful old samples of the now deceased children.
After 17 years, 100 dead children, hundreds of dead soldiers and hundreds of millions of dollars that were pumped into it "Project: Malice" finally seemed to be successful when a little odd looking baby was born. Exterior had not really been a priority when it came to the new weapon (because of they were honest that was the sole purpose of "Project: Malice" to create the ultimate psychic weapon) but they somehow took it as a success that the only mutation that the baby showed were exceptionally pale skin, pure black eyes and a red birthmark on her forehead. Although this baby almost excusingly received the name Barbara almost no one called her that apart from a few nurses who tended to her 24/7. No, the name by that the baby was known through the whole institution was the name of the project itself: Malice.
In the end they were probably more successful than they had ever hoped to be. Although Malice was not as strong as any of her "parents" her powers still ranked in the upper 10% worldwide and there was absolutely no one who combined all those three powers on the same level as she did. But more troublesome than her high power level was her emotional state. It started with the nurses complaining that the little baby was "creepy". Never did she laugh or cry, she just observed the world from behind those strange black eyes. She was not interested in any toys and showed no attachment to even a single special person. Just watching, watching and watching. As she grew it only got worse. "Emotional distancing" as the psychologists had called it in their fancy styles, had been planned but there was nothing that she had to be distanced from. No people, no favourite toys, nothing. She didn't even take on any moral restrictions from the nurses. A nice little sociopath. It was like all the pain, all the misery and the cruelty that had been inflicted upon others during her creation had somehow infected the embryo and made her cold and detached. "Emotionally detached" was also the new fancy word the psychologists used. People got worried. If she cared about nothing, not even the people who raised her, what did they have to control her?
Malice grew and her intellect served her well in her learning and studying to learn the skills that she would need. Still she showed no emotion, every attempt to provoke any reaction when they took something from her or told or showed her something emotionally disturbing was futile. Some day when she was 13 she even found out she could spare the teachers by sucking the information she was supposed to learn in an hour by sucking it directly from his brain in a few seconds. The nurse who entered the room to tell them that the lesson had ended ten minutes ago found the teacher dead on the floor and her sitting over a book of her teacher like nothing had happened. The coroner stated "death from mental exhaustion". As this happened more and more often over the years and she even killed one of the nurses to get some medical knowledge Malice was classified as uncontrollable and concerning. Her being so powerful she was seen as a threat to national security. In other words: designated for termination in two weeks. Too bad she was also able to extract information of minds without killing someone...
It started slowly the next day as everyone in the institution felt slightly aggressive and edgy. Quarrels and discussions arose through the whole laboratory for the smallest reason. It only grew worse and worse with each passing day as Malice carefully rose the aggression potential within everyone via her empathy and planted hidden suggestions and commands in heads with her telepathy. The situation grew worse and worse, an aura of pure hate penetrated everything as the people suddenly realized how much pain they had brought upon others in their selfish quest for the ultimate weapon. As the tension rose between the employees Malice still showed no sign of emotion. And then one day before Malice's execution the tide that had so quickly risen swapped over the last protecting walls and caused an explosion, an orgy of violence and gore.
That day the guards were the first to snap but not the only ones. Blood flooded the sterile rooms as lead flew around and people screamed, ducking for cover before the onslaught that looked and felt like the armageddon itself. Assault rifles were emptied in long sprays and created red flowers of blood on white clothes. Bodies dropped to the floor and formed grotesque heaps there with their twisted and smashed limbs. The scientists were no better as they grabbed their scalpels and slashed wildly at throats and arteries utilizing medicinical knowledge of anatomy that had seldomely been taken to practical use before. Screams filled the air like a cacophony of the damned and mixed with the thundering of the guns only to form a march for a dark goddess: The 17 year old Malice who strode through all that chaos unharmed from any of those maniacs and when someone was really suicidal enough she used her mighty telekinesis to leave nothing more of the attacker than a bloody smear on the floor. Destruction marked her path wherever she went and finally she walked out of her burning birthplace into the night.
Finally she had found something that she liked, that she loved, that she wanted to do for the rest of her life. The psychologists attempts had not been completely without result, they had simply failed. Instead of creating a being free of human emotions that was loyal only to her country they had formed a deformed vile mind that loved, took delight in hurting people and that was indescribable in its abyssal creativity to do so as well as completely free of any loyality out of a blank children's mind without any feelings a t all. Mind rape, forcing people to mutilate themselves or killing those they love while being at full conscience, those and more sick deeds she has already committed and will commit again. Indeed did they create the ultimate weapon, indeed were they successful to clear her from human emotions, but they failed in putting a lock on it, failed in not making her a monster. Weapons are dead things that don't stand up to walk around and kill people by themselves. Malice is a walking weapon that no one has control over and no one can tell what she is up to next. May god have mercy on the world...
TALENTS AND SUPERPWOWERS
Although Malice's body is especially attractive none of her attributes goes over standard level. Her real power is her mind. She is one of world's most powerful 10% of telepaths, empaths and telekinetics able of putting those powers to creative use with her high intellect like mind control, mind reading, causing strokes in brains, driving people mad by enhancing their emotions to unbearable levels and more. She is not only very adept at but also very fond of using those powers to torture people and overcome any resistance that could arise. In fact she enjoys it....
ARCANA
The Barbie of Earth 2366 shares the low intellect of 616 Barbie but surprisingly that did not hinder her to learn some true magic. Paradoxically her innate knack for it even made her Sorceress Supreme of her universe.
Her past is the same as that of 616 Barbie, a childhood and youth in the darkness between the "Paradise Garden" trailers, trying to hide from the things happening to her, hoping for something better in long cold nights outside and crying under the brutal hands of her mother's lovers when inside. But still there was a difference. As simple as her mind was this Barbie knew that the world was special. Colours rode the wind like leaves, plants told her nice little things and she knew how a cat felt when it bit into a mouse's throat. At this time she didn't know all these things were magic.
These impressions continued to accompany her through her life, even more so after her departure from the place where she had grown up. They intensified till she saw strange colours swirling around people, a phenomenon that she would learn to call "auras" later. Some were good expressed through bright friendly colours in their auras, some were bad as displayed by the aggressive dark tones that their souls showed and most were something in between, just people who tried to survive in a cold harsh world... like her. She quickly grew accustomed to those new abilities and used them instinctively to her advantage. It was also the same ability that led her towards meeting the most important person in her life.
She was serving in another diner once more, just another smeary place, a light in the night that drew the bottom of society like a flame draws the moths, to make some money. It didn't pay much but enough to survive, to buy another cheap motel room and some even cheaper unhealthy food. Filthy biker and fat truckers filled the place with their stench and their intolerable laughter. More than one send a short pain up her back by pinching or slapping her butt under his degrading comments. She ignored it. She was used to worse back then. This was not more than a fly bite to her. But there was someone who was different. Instead of boasting infront of his friends, singing along with the loud hard rock that thundered from the boxes or trying to get into physical contact with her he just sat there and laboured over his old thick book. One of the shy and silent types who only accidentally stumbled in there and were too tired to go away before they had the chance to eat one of the fat burgers. Pretty unspectacular on the exterior but his aura was unlike anything she had ever seen. The brightest colours of all they spoke of a great and firm personality in radiant shades, it seemed too big for his small body to contain it, it reached far into the room and illuminated it in a breathtaking spectacle. An almost mesmerising quality to it brought Barbie to his table over and over again to ask if he needed something but everything he wanted was another coffee. The night grew older and older till it finally transformed into the birthing red of dawn and slowly the little diner emptied, the bikers getting back on their loved machines and the truckers going to continue their tour from their thrones high above the street in their rolling fortresses. But the fascinating stranger stayed. Even as she already cleaned the place and put the chairs onto the tables around him he stayed and read his book. For her the language in this book seemed to be just another exotic language that she didn't understand but for him it had become the world. Not once did he look up from it the whole time.
That changed when she politely asked him to go. His reaction was exactly the one she had imagined. Smilingly he nodded and closed his book after reading the current paragraph. As she presented him the bill he got his portemonee out and counted off the amount of money plus a most generous tip. And then, as he looked up to give her the money his eyes widened. Barbie was used to this kind of reaction, her beauty regularly confused those shy guys and rendered them unable to speak. For several minutes he just sat there and stared at her but Barbie didn't mind, somehow she liked it. It wasn't the lustful stares of the bikers and truckers who undressed her with their eyes but rather a admiring one. Like he took everything in that she was, analyzed her and noticed more than she was in the usual three dimensions. She just stood there amused with a hand at her hip. Then the whole thing took a bizarre turn. He made an offer she could not resist.
"Come with me and I will make you the greatest magician the world has ever seen."
She didn't know why but that moment she knew she had to do this. Instantly she told the owner of the diner that she quitted and that he could keep the money that he owed her only to grab her stuff and go with the fascinating stranger.
Her new acquaintance happened to be Marc Terrence, this world's Sorcerer Supreme. And he became more than just a mentor, he became a spiritual guidance, a father surrogate and finally, almost inevitably, her lover. The time she had with him was fantastic. At day she learned the fabulous ways of magic and at night he cradled her in his arms and gave her a love and security like she had never known before. He was a most patient teacher who knew her limitations and accepted her low intelligence with love but even he almost despaired as he tried to teach her the basics of the ancient tongues. Where she mastered the basic techniques of spell casting in a record time the most important texts where closed to her due to her inability to understand them. Just the greater his surprise as he noticed she didn't need them. Raw magic pulsed through her veins and enabled her to perform the most powerful magic on an instinctive basis. Somehow he simply had to tell her what effect to achieve and she did it. Her mastery of the arcane had been unseen before.
But as always the bad luck of the Barbies struck again. Marc's position was not undisputed. Many a powerful sorcerer thought he deserved the position Marc had worked most of his life for. One of these was Mortimer McGee, a Scotsman of ancient heritage who had also studied the dark arts and was in league with several mighty demons. Late at night, almost nearing the dawn of a new day, he broke into Marc's Sanctum Sanctorum well prepared with artifacts and dark spells ready to challenge Marc for the position that he thought was rightfully his. Marc was in the progress of making love to Barbie in this moment and hastily got out of the bed telling her to stay where she was. Frightful she pressed the sheaths still warm from their passion to her body and listened to the sounds that came from outside the room. Only when she noticed that the hissing of arcane energy had stopped did she leave the room naked as she was to look after her lover.
Just to find him dead at Mortimer's feet. Usually Marc would have been more than a match for the Scottish sorcerer but this time it was different. Mortimer had come well prepared to fight in this challenge where Marc had been interrupted at his weakest point, tired, ripped out of the arms of his love just before climax and worried for Barbie's security with no artifacts at his disposal. He put up a good fight, even came close to winning but sadly in the end it was not enough to survive.
Mortimer had just enough time to witness the woman he had called "The Sorcerer Supreme's personal toy" standing there naked before she struck. With nothing more than a simple scream she let his veins burst, the blood shooting out of his mouth, ears and eyes, his whole body deteriated till he was nothing more than a few cinders that were carried into the rising morning sun while she held the dead body of the only man who had treated her well in her life in her arms and wept for hours.
According to the rules she is now the Sorceress Supreme of this universe. That means the task of protecting this realm from magical dangers was laid into the hands of a woman with an immense talent for magic but also an estimated IQ of 80 if not less. So far she has done well...
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
The unbelievable amounts of magical energy that constantly surges through her body lets her achieve almost everything. According to her former mentor her potential is possibly unlimited. The only things that are a minor drawback to this are that she is still of human origin, bringing the usual restriction of this frail physique with it, and her low intelligence.
THE VALKYRIE
Who would ever have thought that a girl with such humble beginnings might evolve into earths greatest fighting machine? To the Barbie of Earth 3999 exactly that happened.
All of her life she wished to be able to fight back. Wished to have the strength so that all those horrible things wouldn't happen to her. Wished to be stronger than the horrible people who abused her. Wished to become the strongest woman in the world, a warrior, a queen justified by her own strength.
Her wishes did not become true. Instead her life went on as usual, the same black abyss of abuse and neglect like that of the other Barbies. The daydreams continued and the rare times when she actually tried to defend against the gangs, her mother or the men sneaking into her bedroom at night the result met only fail. The result was the same, she only got a few hits more. Sad and frustrated Barbie began to descend into a dreamworld of war and conquest to escape her depressing real life.
And then her great moment came, when her attempts at self defence were finally successful. When she became the warrior she always had wanted to be. Only that she could not cherish the moment accordingly as she beat her mother dead with a whiskey bottle.
This was not as it was meant to be, as she had wanted it. This was so wrong. In her mind she had proved her mother that she was the stronger one, stood above her bruised body and look into her swollen blue eyes and noticed the final notice that she could not go on like this. But now the moment was ruined. And she would never be able to fix it. It was over. And as the conclusiveness of her deed started to invade her mind tears started to fill her eyes. She had killed her mother. The woman that had given birth to her. Overwhelmed by the gravitas of the moment she fell to the floor and started crying.
Shaken by this tragedy she decided to leave "Paradise Garden" and set out for the big wide world. Which didn't turn out to be much better than the trailer park. As terrible as her life near Smithville might have been the outworld wasn't much better, especially for someone who was as naive as Barbie. Following her own crude codex of "a warrior's honour" she was not able to do a lot of things that some other people were willing to do and her purse remained empty.
Many a night she spent in the woods what her slightly delusional mind only deemed worthy of a real warrior getting in touch with the nature and thus her real self. Slumbering in her sleeping bag she nestled there between dark tall trees and thick bushes night for night watched by the yellow eyes of badgers, foxes and other inhabitants of the woods. It was in one of these woods where she would meet her destiny during a moonless and otherwise silent night. That was when the thundering thing fell from the heavens. Or at least that was how she perceived it. In fact it was something different. Something dangerous...
Everyone else would have run if they had been awakened in the night by a loud explosion, tried to get away from the danger. But not Barbie. It was somehow like a siren's song that mystically drew her to the crash site while her ears still tingled from the sonic boom. Charred earth and leaves cracked under her boots and the same animals that had watched her before now lay dead and burned in the remains of the wood. Nearer and nearer she got to the strange thing from the stars until she finally reached it.
And there it lay, in all its strange glory, a black rock from the coldness of outer space. Even the darkness of the night in absence of the moon paled against the hypnotic blackness of that space artifact. Twitching, shivering, doubting, almost hesitantly but definitely filled with awe Barbie reached out with her hand to touch it. Just one short touch to know how it felt, if it was really so smooth to the touch as the surface told. One millimeter before she really touched it she stopped. Was that right? The rock met the decision for her. It jumped at her.
With tentacles as black as its body it attached to her body and wrapped around her, her screams sounded through the forest. But the real pain came when it bonded with her nerves. Then she could even be heard in the next village. Pain unbearable...
Two days later the Valkyrie appeared on the battlefields of earth to engage in combat with all forces. Her name was given to her by the exact same forces she battled because she send many soldiers to the afterlife, guiding them in their last moments like the legendary Valkiries of old. Barbie had finally become the unbeatable warrior she had ever wanted to be by bonding with a strange entity from the stars. And with her new powers she was able to do a lot, like slicing tanks in half and burning soldiers to nothing more than cinders. Now she had the power and she looked for a worthy opponent on the battlefields of earth.
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
The alien symbiote gave Barbie several superpowers. Among those rank Superstrength (about 50 tons) and other heightened attributes like Stamina, Endurance and Agility, the ability to send out energy rays through a strange pearl on her forehead. The most unusual abilities that symbiote bestowed on her are probably the superspeed (she can reach top speeds at roughly Mach 10) and blades at her ellbows that vibrate in a high frequency that enables her to cut anything, be it stone, steel, diamond or even otherwise impenetrable superhuman flesh.
THE COMTESSA
Can the blessings of being highly born protect against the ravaging of a burning time, especially the bad luck of the Barbies? The fate of Barbie of Earth 455 who came to some prominence under the nome de guerre “The Comtessa” proves otherwise.
Italia during the confessional wars was not a nice place. Not at least. Entire villages, even towns, were razed in a single night when the madness of the religion conflicts came over them. Men were killed, women raped, livestock slaughtered or stolen, children taken away into the night where a life of slavery awaited them if they were not pressed into the same army that had destroyed their past. And while the fires rose high into the night they grown army marched further towards their next destination…
This was the world the heiress of a venerable old dynasty Barbara Larissa Thalya Jaheira Fiagaretta Felidia-Felicitas de y` della Yezceraldo was born into. Her life began quite promising on the old estate of her family. There the little comtessa had everything that the other Barbies had been denied. A lot of toys, attention of a dozen or more loving nannies, a pet dog, her own pony, an education and countless things more. Life could have been so good but as it almost necessarily had to be reality caught up with that little wonderland.
While the world burned around her Barbara led a content life. Like her peers in nobility the young woman engaged herself in proms, hunts and other lavish pursuits. The stunning beauty she had become attracted a lot of admirers and an advantageous marriage with a charming young noble of good heritage was already in sight. Then the night that changed everything came…
They came under the cover of darkness, hordes of rough men with torches and swords. The riders were the first to mount the attack on the estate. Under wild screaming they shot their bows and suddenly feathered shafts stood out of the torsos and throats of the guardians who never had a chance. Screaming they breached the walls, climbed them and stormed through the gardens. Many a servant, guardian or not, found an unpleasant end through the blade of a bearded unkempt barbarian. They may have called themselves mercenaries, soldiers in the name of the true confession even but they were nothing more than simple bandits and their actions showed that. That night screams filled the burning estate.
Barbara does not recall a lot of that night when she was 17. Her father had locked her into her room with a sword in his hand. Next thing she heard were his screams. Someone battered at her door till it broke down. Dark figures stormed in. Loud laughter was heard. Rough hands. Incomplete rows of rotting teeth infront of a burning background. Darkness. Unconsciousness.
If this night had been bad the time afterwards was worse. The mercenaries, nothing more than a roving band of bandits actually, took her with them and what had started as a young comtessa became the plaything of a whole horde. They used her and Barbara, who was used to a live of luxury, served as a kitchen maid, a horse keeper, a lust maid and whatever came to the bandits’ sick minds. Even her name got shortened to simply “Barbie”.
For long she would not have endured this but it needed only a few months before Rodrigo, the bandits’ leader, laid eyes upon her and made her his personal property. Life changed, not much for the better though. Instead from a hundred she suffered abuse from one hand now. Rodrigo was not exactly a person one could call a gentleman and treated her accordingly. Her martyrium lasted till the band assaulted an old castle near Rome. Very old, ancient indeed.
It was not different from any other stronghold they had razed, the fires, the slaughtering, the screams. Deep in the night flames rose into the sky, cryings of the dying reached to the stars as if looking for help. And Barbara was right in the middle of this chaos. Told to do so by Rodrigo she looted the castle for things that the bandits could use like dishes and food. Like a scavenger she strode through the burning castle on her long legs and stole what she could get. Deeper and deeper her desperate searching led her into the entrails of the old stone building well knowing Rodrigo would cruelly punish her if she did not come back with something valuable. This was when she found the door.
It was strange none of the bandits had already pried it open because it promised certain wealth with its inches thick wooden bars and the heavy steel reinforcements. But it lay untouched before her. Her surprise grew even more when she found out it was not even locked. Carefully she pushed it open and risked a curious look. What she saw there was indescribable for her. A single, monolithic stone, gray, seemingly older than the stone from which the castle itself was built, as if the mighty building had been erected around the stone, as if to surround it, guard it. And from that stone protruded the hilt of the most beautiful sword she had ever beheld. Wrought from pure gold and brought into the most wondrous form it featured a blade seemingly not made from ordinary steel. Hypnotically it bound her gaze and before she realized it she had already stretched out her delicate hand to touch it. But the sword itself was already further in this issue. With a sudden sparkling and a burst of light it dislodged itself from the stone and sprang into her hand. The second she made skin contact with the strange metal a new unknown strength surged through her and filled her mind. Knowledge about combat styles she had previously never possessed flooded her brain and made a new home there. All that new wisdom found a comfortable new home in her head in mere seconds. And when it finally stopped it had completely changed her. Her hair and her skin had become white as milk and the old self confidence of the days of her youth had returned.
Rodrigo was soon the first to fall under her new blade but others would soon follow until she became the new undisputed leader of the band. Under her leadership the band took a new direction and started battling other bandits living of what they took from them. Under her the war torn Italy finally found something like a regular army again and she became a hero of the people who came to know her under her old nickname: The Comtessa, the baroness.
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
The Comtessa herself does not possess any superpowers but is an excellent swordfighter with a grace that mostly makes up for her standard strength and an extensive intuitive knowledge of the art of sword fighting that was mystically transferred into her mind. But the blade that she uses is rumoured to be magical in origin, able to cut through nearly everything with a single swipe, even otherwise invulnerable foes. At times she has been seen sending out bursts of blue and white energy through that blade.
THE GROUPIE
It is truly a world of darkness that the several Barbies live in, they seem to be damned to an unhappy live. For the Barbie of Earth 892 who came to a certain prominence under the name “The Groupie” in a specific subculture “damned” got a very special meaning…
It looks as if sometimes there is an aspect in a life that gives said life some joy, sometimes even a reason. For others this aspect is lacking, their life is a deep black pit full of despair and pain, they turn towards anything that might keep them occupied or slightly happy in a vain attempt to make up for the feeling of a deep void in their life. No one can exactly tell what creates this emptiness in those unlucky people. An infinite number of origins for the void exist, as many as people affected by it. Some are born with it or at least it seems this way. The void nestles into their little hearts the moment they set foot into this world and makes them unhappy children and, later on, unhappy adults. For others the void is created when something is ripped from them, where once a functional soul resided a gaping hole rests now, a black void in an otherwise beautiful fabric. Barbie belonged to the latter.
Lovelessly born into a world after a night of passion nine months ago the environment of the “Paradise Garden” trailer park filled with people each of them having his or her own void was not really suited to make her a functional individual to begin with. The beatings of her mother only worsened her predisposition for loosing an important part of herself but though she was maybe a little damaged at that time she was not utterly broken yet. No, it needed more for that. Not the neglect, not the physical violence managed to tear something out of her but the lovers of her mother did. Each of them ripped part after part of her away when he visited her in her little bedroom at night till the void finally appeared. Bigger and bigger it became until she wished to be dead just not to feel that horrid emptiness in her. But her wishes were not fulfilled. Instead she was cursed to live on, endure what happened to her and to wait till her true destiny found her.
It took its time though to be honest. A lot of time. It needed 17 years till she embarked on her quest to finally find a place she could call home in this world leaving the burning body of her mother in the pyre of trailer behind her. An empty whiskey bottle became her mean of expressing her void, of letting this corruption that fed it explode to the outer world and punishing her mother for letting that happen. Her feet carried her away to find a path to fill her void. Maybe there was something out there that could accomplish that. Her mother had disappointed her, maybe she would never be able to trust a human being once more but who knew… everything was possible.
The next two years Barbie emerged herself in several activities. Tracking her in that time is difficult, her trail leads through the whole USA and back, erratic in her ways going where the wheels of a car could take her when she hitch hiked through the country. She tried nearly everything from sex to drugs to finally not feel empty anymore but it would be the third of the old trinity that would lead to a fitting surrogate for her void.
It was something so basic she would have never thought of it. She experienced it for the first time while being outside a strange club. Alcohol and getting wasted to forget was her obsession of choice during that time and some people told her she could find a lot of guys willing to pay for a hot girl’s drinks in there. It was a small town, one of the graves for legions of obedient faceless workers, one ugly grey box of building stood shoulder to shoulder to the next like tombstones, trash on the streets, dirty people in the side alleys. Like Paradise Garden it was a dead end and she didn’t plan on staying here for long. Just one night and off she would be again. She was right and wrong at the same time.
In that line before the club she stood when she heard it for the first time. Thrashing guitars, pulsating drums, hard rhythms, brutal shouting. Trash Metal. A live band in the club. Like a siren’s song it invaded her mind, stimulated the right areas and proved unwilling to go. The more of the music came to the outside the twitchier she got. That music spoke to her, the sound of the instruments made her shiver as from withdrawal, the texts were unlike any other. For some time she had tried listening to country music but the sad texts full of self contempt only made her angry, desperate, reminded her too much of her own past. This time it was different. This music was angry to begin with, it refused to deal with the misery by just enduring it and writing sad songs about it, it demanded action, it demanded to DO something against it, if necessary with force. Like her Trash Metal came from the bowels of society but it was too aggressive to simply be content with that situation. It screamed its aggression, its frustration out and touched something in her, made her feel whole again. It filled her void.
As she finally got into the club her previous plans of an alcohol induced delirium were forgotten. All she wanted to do was to dive into the crowd and party the way they partied, share that beautiful music with them and feel how that empty hole inside her slowly vanished. Of course the beautiful blonde woman evoked some scepticism when she entered the moshpit infront of the small stage but soon the leather and jeans clad metallers learned to give her some respect, two years on the road had made her stronger and more durable than her exterior let look through. It was a wonderful night, the best in her whole life so far. She may have been black and blue after it but there was no word that could describe how she felt. Her new obsession was born.
The next two years Barbie spent with pursuing her passion. She worked in nearly any job she could get on the road always on the way to the next concert or festival. As long as it was angry, violent music she was there. The music managed to make her content again, even happy. No longer did she care if she had to sleep in another side alley or a train wagon as long as she had enough money to buy the next ticket. Later on she even got to know some of the bands and thus was allowed in for free. Life just got better and better. Until that fateful night exactly four years after she had left “Paradise Garden”.
To the present day she remembers it was one of the best festivals she had ever been to. People slept in vans, caravans or tents, wasting themselves with alcohol late at night into the early morning after the concerts had stopped. They slept into the next day only to get up again with new energy to attend the next concert. Barbie loved it. There were people like her, steel workers, waitresses, cooks in shady restaurants, barkeepers and McDonald’s employees. People who may not have been the kings in real life but here they were leaders of a new revolution. And she belonged to them. She was at home. They were her family.
It took her two days to notice that parts of her family vanished. They did not just leave the festival prematurely. Their vans were still there, their tends still stood on the area of the old quarry. What was going on there? She started asking around and the result was very shocking: Not only had nobody seen her friends since the last night but other people were missing also. If she had known what her questions had caused she might never had started it.
It was that special night shortly before the concerts, almost everyone had already wandered over to the stages to enjoy some rage loaded Trash Metal when she was still looking for the people who had vanished. The sun had already set and she wandered over the whole place to find some of the missing people. The moon cast its silvery light onto the scenery and changed it into a strange landscape out of a dark fairy tale. For hours and hours she searched but to no result. At last she turned to call her friends’ names out in a desperate hope to find them. That was her big mistake. That was when the thing’s attention shifted towards her.
His name was Redmond Stark and he had been dead for 70 years. Yes, dead because he was a vampire. He had used to prey on the visitors of several Trash Metal festivals for some years at that point simply because hardly someone ever missed them, at least in the long run. It was easy game to drag his drunk victims in some abandoned place and drain them of their blood there. Afterwards he disposed of the bodies somehow, junkyards, graveyards, quarries or whichever strange place the metallers chose for their festivals were good places to let a body vanish permanently. Barbie was not on his menu from the start but she asked too many uncomfortable questions and thus she was declared the dessert…
He grabbed her near the old office, just pulled her in by the hair. The attack came so quick she did not even have a chance to scream. Suddenly she was in that dark room and just as suddenly he was over her like a starving dog. A short sharp stinging pain was all she felt when he bit her throat. The shock made everything a strange experience, so far detached as the life leaked out of her in a thin red stream. All she could do was gasp as he sucked it out of her. There was a void in her again, this time a real one as the very fluid of life was sucked out of her. But that all did not matter. It was just like back then in the dark trailer… Let it happen and it soon will be over. This time it would be over forever.
But then something happened. Somehow her senses were sharpened in her near death state, so acute like she had never experienced it before. For some mysterious reason she could see, hear and feel farer than ever before. And she could hear it. The first few thrashing rhythms of the band on stage, how they played all that anger from their souls and screamed out to the world that it could not treat them as it wanted. How it filled her void for the last time. Somehow it reminded her of how she had promised never to be the victim again, never to be like in the dark trailer. But what could she do against this monster? He held her hands with brutal force, stronger than any human. But she would not let this just happen. And so she did the only thing she could do.
She bit back.
With a surprising result. Already near madness, drained of most of her blood, she showed immeasurable strength. Her teeth tore through the undead flesh at his throat with exceptional ease. Now it was his time to gasp as she sucked the life he had stolen her back. Struck with horror he wanted to get away from her but she would not let him. Like an animal she clung to him, refusing to let him go, wrapping her legs around his waist and still drinking his rich red blood. The terror shook him to the core, nothing could have ever prepared him for that woman’s strong will to live and how she reversed the role in the old predator and prey game as he staggered back on more and more shivering legs. Soon he sunk to his knees not knowing what to do as this woman stole more and more of his blood for herself. Barbie on the other hand drank in full draughts. The new blood pulsed through her veins like an epiphany and made her stronger, faster, harder, better. The sensation it brought with it was without equal. So she drank more…
It ended with Redmond as a shrivelled husk on the floor, a desiccated mummy that obscenely still was able to speak. In his last hours before dawn she interrogated him before he vanished forever about what she had become. The result was… surprising.
She had become a pseudo-vampire. When a mortal drinks a vampire’s blood without being drained of all of her blood the human changes in a different way. Not a human but not a vampire either. A pseudo-vampire. Stronger than a human but at the same time weaker than a vampire but also immune to most of the human and vampiric weaknesses. Of course this would not last for long, about a month, but with constant supply of vampire blood this condition could be held up. After Redmont’s ashes had dissipated in the wonderful morning sun Barbie knew what to do.
As strange as it sounded at first she became the protector of metal festivals. Preying upon the unpopular white trash scene was a common practice among vampires and someone had to finally stop them. To signal the beginning of her new life she even cut her wonderful blonde hair and dyed it red. Clumsily at first but with growing practice becoming better she preyed on the vampires for their blood now to extend her status as a pseudo vampire. Strangely it even paid off because she doesn’t need food anymore and can simply take the huge amounts of money vampires usually carry with them. For the vampires she became a boogie woman, for the metallers she became something like a saint but both know her under the same name: The Groupie. She is still on the road, travelling from one festival or concert to another and still the wonderful music of that angry subculture fills her void and finally she has a good feeling because she feels she could pay them back by protecting them. Maybe for the first time in her life she is really happy.
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
All of Barbie’s physical attributes like strength, stamina, endurance, agility, dexterity, reflexes, perception and speed are just beyond peak human making her a formidable adversary even for vampires. In her chosen field of profession she also learned some considerable hand to hand and weapon skills. Also it should be noted that although she is still vulnerable to massive physical traumata she is more durable than a human, does not need food, oxygen or water and does not show the same vulnerabilities against religious symbols, sunlight and other classical weaknesses of vampires.
FEROXA
Small differences can cause a lot of trouble. They cause misunderstandings, hate, war, genocide even. The Barbie of Earth 893, one of the few survivors of the Great Lycanthropic Holocaust in her world, knows that better than anyone else.
Contrary to the other Barbies the girl who would later take on the name Feroxa was born into a happy, healthy, functional family in Smithville, Texas. Tiffany and Richard, her parents, were pretty normal middle class people with jobs, a nice clean house with a white lawn and two cars. Barbie happened to be their first born but she was not the last. A brother, named Patrick after the uncle of the father like Barbie was called after her grandmother who had died of cancer shortly before she was able to see her grandchild, followed later. All in all little Barbie’s life had the predisposition to be as normal as her parents’, happy even. None of her parents drank excessively, both were faithful to each other, her father never touched her more intimately than the occasional loving hug or kiss on the forehead and her mother only slapped her once in anger but even Barbie admitted to having deserved that. The potential for a life of normalcy was given which would have her differentiated more from any other of her alternative versions than any weird superpower or heritage could have hoped to. But the bad luck of the Barbies struck even here. There was a problem.
Barbies family was different from most others. There it was, this small difference.
There were other… people in this world, people not so different from humans but different enough to better hide from them. And smart enough to do so. Since the first times they walked among men, accompanied them in their greatest victories and their greatest failures. Together, side by side, they invented fire and electricity, rode the great steel rails of progress through America, persecuted the Jews and enslaved the Blacks, they were not better or worse than the humans, they were just like them, as able to do good as well as able to do worse, geniuses and maniacs, saints and butchers.
Lycanthropes.
Werewolves, vampires, demons, those were the three colourful races which were summarized under the ominous moniker. Barbies family belonged to the first. For millennia they had successfully hidden in human disguise and fit in, even the most criminal of them hesitated to use their nature given strength to their advantage in fear they might be discovered. Of course every race had its legends where it came from, some like Adam and Eve, other more on the scientific side, but as it was they were as unable to explain their heritage as the humans were, they seemed to have been there nearly forever and had found entrance into man’s legends and myths.
To the present day Barbie recalls the day when the tide turned. How she and her family sat there in the cold light of the TV, she and her parents on the couch, her brother on the floor infront of the couch petting the family dog, is permanently burned into her brain as the last day they could live without sorrows, without fear. She had just turned 17. Her grades in school were acceptable and the day before the quarterback of the football team had asked her out. Life seemed so perfect back then.
THE QUEEN OF TECHNOLOGY
Barbie of Earth 10101 coming soon
THE MISTRESS
Because of their beauty men of all realities tend to do what the Barbies want but for none this statement could be truer than for the Barbie of Earth 6869 who got the all too fitting nickname “The Mistress”.
Barbie was a golden child. Loved not so much by her mother but by everyone else. Everyone in the whole “Paradise Garden” trailer park could not state enough how gorgeous she was. Her mother Tiffany almost became furious from that. Sure as hell she was jealous, she had to be the star. In the bar, in the bed, everywhere. All the whiskey, bourbon and other hard alcoholica that she consumed were just meant to loosen her up, to make her free minded so she could be tough enough to demand all that attention she wanted. And if that meant taking a man or two with her after service at the bar, so be it.
Even the pregnancy was nothing more than another mean to impress people and beg for their love. Proud and at the same time obviously suffering she walked between the trailers to be seen. It did not work. In a place where unwanted pregnancy, even among teenagers, was all too common a child bearing woman, who was at that known to be very promiscuous, was not really suited to become a sensation. Nobody cared for her, nobody offered her assistance as the other inhabitants of the run down junkyard for humans had enough problems to drown in alcohol of their own.
It took some time before Tiffany noticed that through her usual veil of liquor filled subjectivity. At that time it was already too late. The little life inside her belly had grown too far for any doctor to be willing to remove it. True to her personality Tiffany threw a tantrum. To no avail.
It was Dr. Cornelius Abrahams who offered her a simple way out. A brilliant man. A man without scruples. But still a man without too sinister intentions. At the time he met Tiffany he worked for a pharmacy corporation. He had carefully scanned the list of doctors for patients who had late abortions. Or were all too late like in Tiffany’s case. He approached them and told them of a new medicament his firm was developing. It was not fully tested yet but it was promising. All it needed was a final field test. Of course, so he told them, he was sure it was without any side effects. The only effect would be the loss of the unwanted fruit of the body. Even after the fourth or fifth month after conceiving. Up to the eight.
Tiffany’s mind went different. She? The first one to test a new medicament? One that would help people? Of course! She took it without even subscribing to anything. Greedily like it was a cheap shot she gulped down the strange liquid and waited. Nothing happened. The doctor gave her a number to call if anything happened but as it proved she did not need it. No effect showed.
At least on the outside. Inside Tiffany’s womb something really interesting happened. The still untested chemical began to fuse with the bloodstream of the foetus and alter its genetical makeup. Chromosomes were changed and twisted, amino acids slightly transformed, new glands began to build. When it was done the baby was not entirely human anymore.
A few months later that baby was born and received a lot of care at the hospital and later on a big deal of attention at the trailer park. Tiffany instantly hated her own offspring. It went so far that one night she stood over the crib with a razor blade in her hand. If everyone found that baby so pretty she wondered if they would still hold that opinion after she took the blade to the baby’s facial features. She was about to start but then, as the baby screamed, an indescribable terror suddenly took hold of her. She could not tell why. It started with a shaking of her hand as she was about to cut the baby. Even as she took the other hand that started shaking, too. Slowly the feeling crept up inside her till it filled her wholly. Terrorized she fled into the night and let her child crying in the darkness.
After this event Tiffany learned to play the second role after the baby. Every time she wanted to hurt Barbie the same feeling rose up in her again. So she just accepted, fled into alcohol and men, simply gave up.
That did not go too well either. Instead caring about her the men were all about the baby, even rough, loveless man who usually cared about nothing in the world. Suddenly they were fathers, holding that baby in her arms like loving family heads. Sometimes it was hard to get them out of the trailer even.
All that changed once Barbie hit puberty with 12. The affection of the men changed abruptly. Suddenly she was not the cute girl anymore that everybody loved but a sexual object. Men dragged her into dark corners and sated their most basic lusts on her, left her crying in the dark alleys between the trailers after they were done. Left her abused and defiled. It happened more often a day than she would like to remember. One moment she walked over to her best friend to chat a little, the next some hairy hands shot forward from a hideout and dragged her into some stinky hiding place. It became so bad it almost became normalcy for her.
Tiffany’s affection did not grow either. Now she was even barred from the men as everybody preferred to “use” her daughter instead. Her rage grew and grew and grew. Grew till she could not bear it anymore and struck out for the last time. She had struck her before, hard, mean, abusing. But this time was different. This time both their rage boiled up to the extreme.
Contrary to other Barbies the girl who would later be known as The Mistress jumped at her mother right after the first strike. She was done with being struck, being abused. She struck back. Scratched her mother’s face, tore at her hair, bit her. Tiffany on the other hand was not better. Like to wildcats the two rolled over the dirty trailer floor and madly clawed at each other. On and on their fight raged till something unexpected happened.
No, it was not the edge of a cheap kitchen table that hit Tiffany’s head. It was a lead of pipe. To Barbie’s amazement Bob stood there. Bob was not a nice man by Barbie’s standards. He had been the one to rape her the most. But now he stood there and dragged Tiffany outside by her legs. Panickally Tiffany tried to prevent that, kicked at him and dug her long fingernails into the wooden floor. Useless. Her kicks had no effect and her fingernails simply broke. Screaming she was brought outside where the rest of the trailer park men waited. Armed with chains, baseball bats, kitchen knifes and other tools they made her death a quick but sure not an easy one. It was as if everything that she had ever done backfired on her. For the first time Tiffany did not appreciate the attention she got.
Barbie on the other hand went out laughing. Even if the men demanded a satisfaction she would gladly give it to them for the service they had just done her. Paradoxically they did not. Instead they reacted on every hint of her hand like a horde of love enchanted zombies. They were an army for her to command. They would do everything she wanted them to do. Kill. Maim. Rape. Torture. And as Barbie realized that she began to laugh louder and louder till her laughter was carried all over the starting point of her new empire. Paradise Garden. Yeah, for her sure from now on.
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
The superpower of this Barbie are her altered pheromones. Through the mixture of an untested chemical with her blood while she was still in the womb her glands mutated and enabled her to expel pheromones that are infinitely more effective than those of normal humans. Everybody susceptible to them (i.e. heterosexual men and lesbians) and able to sense them is forced under her sway and would literally do everything for her.
THE EXTREMIST
Barbie of Earth 1298 coming soon
THE SHIELDMAIDEN
Barbie of Earth 4597 coming soon
THE BOUNTY HUNTER
Living on the road is a necessity for the Barbies, that is for granted. An inner drive compels them to move and move and move. Many of them give in to that urge but only the Barbie of Earth 1892 made a kind of profession out of that.
She does not like talking about her past. Not a single bit. Commonly it is assumed that America’s most successful bounty hunter who even had an appearance on “Cops” had been a criminal herself but they could not be farer from the truth. Never had she been a criminal but the victim. But for her it is impossible to let others know that or her reputation would go to hell.
Barbie is like a bloodhound. Once on the trail of a subject she becomes nearly unstoppable, a juggernaut solely concentrated on bringing her target down, if necessary with force. Known through the TV and press she is immensely popular because she mainly concentrates on paedophiles and rapists. The picture of her knocking out one of the worst child abusers of the last twenty years with the hilt of her shotgun and breaking his jaw is legendary. She went to jail for about six months for that but it made her only the more popular.
She is tough. She is mean. And at the same time she is caring, doing charity work and donating large sums for those at the bottom of society. The reason for this is simple: She knows how it is to be there. But she managed to pull herself out of that and even dyed her hair completely different to represent her new start in life.
Barbie only knows the name of her mother but not much more. Judging from the police and youth ministry files she had been a drug addicted prostitute named Tiffany. Her father is unknown to the present day. What is known though is that one of her parents managed to “pass down an X-gene or two along the way”. Of course it did not take long until she was taken away from her mother by social welfare. And no minute too late. The apartment was a mess, trashed up to the roof and intolerably filthy. To make that even more terrible Tiffany had been about to stuff Barbie into the microwave because she screamed too much. The policemen stormed the dirty kitchen in the last second. According to the files Tiffany went to jail and died there two years later from some tainted drugs. Barbie on the other hand went to a hospital first and from there to an orphans’ home.
Unfortunately her bad luck had not been spent by just being born to such a horrible mother. She had the bad luck to be brought to the St. Florian’s orphanage, the same orphanage that would become known as “The Horror Orphanage” some years later. To the outside it was nice and clean, an example of what an orphanage should be. Disciplined, clean, neat. Lead by integer priests and nuns it had an excellent reputation in the whole city and housed even a fair number of obvious mutant kids. Convicted youths found back on the road of righteousness there. Paradise on earth.
At least on the outside. Things looked completely different when the gates were closed at night. Then things got ugly really fast and several “favourites” were called into the clergy’s rooms for “private confessions”. And gender did not play a role at all. No one could have guessed how much he celibate had suppressed their natural urges and created neuroses. Sick role plays, sado-maso, bizarre toys and far more sinister things awaited the poor kids there. And while the priests and nuns played their own special games previous victims climbed into the beds of terrified newcomers.
Of course Barbie was unfortunate enough to be chosen by Father John who would later be called “The Priest Of Satan”. Even at day he was feared like no other when he used the stick to teach the pupils in his lessons some old fashioned discipline and manners. He was always the first to strike out and dish out some hard pedagogical punishments. Where others carried a carefully maintained mask of decency and goodness the sadistic true self of Father John always shone through. At night he showed his true face and little Barbie experienced unspeakable depredating horrors, sometimes alone, sometimes with several companions in pain.
Brutal punishment ensured the children would never talk but as one of the young mutant inmates committed suicide the public’s eye turned on the orphanage. It did not take long and the horrible ongoings in the orphanage were uncovered. Understandably people were shocked and made sure the clergy were held responsible for their deeds. Most of them committed suicide themselves in prison later. The suicides of some, including Father John’s, are still debated.
The children whose names had never been revealed to protect them were transferred to other orphanages. Understandably Barbie, 13 at that time, was not very interested to spend more time in an orphanage after her previous experiences. She stayed there for only two weeks before her mutant abilities manifested and made it easy for her to run away. At first the officials started a big search for her but soon the fuzz cooled down and a month later the Barbie had become just another statistic in the “missed” files while she tried to survive between dumpsters and dead rotting animals.
Living on her own smarts and power was not hard for her the next 2 years and she for a street kid she had quite a high standard. She had never to sell her body or to do other unpleasant things to survive which meant she still lived better than back then in the Horror Orphanage. Sure, the nights were cold sometimes, food was scarce at times but at least no one touched her if she did not want it.
The big change came on her 18 birthday. She was sitting at her favourite corner down the road with some friends when she noticed a car speeding towards her. A yelling man jumped out, an Uzi in hand and tried to grab her out of all the people who sat there. He was a bank robber in desperate search for a hostage but when that big hairy hand came towards her Barbie had one of her all to familiar flashbacks and felt like in the orphanage again. And she did not react well to that. Screaming she took the Uzi away from him, broke it with bare hands and seconds later where seconds before a strong criminal had stood only a bloody pulp remained. The cops came only seconds too late and heaved the poor victim into the ambulance. Congratulating her they shook her hand and informed her that the press would be here soon and that the bank had promised a reward for whoever would return their money.
But to Barbie it did not matter. For the first time in her life she actually felt good, felt as if she had a reason in life and that this reason was positive, that she could actually do something to prevent what had happened to her happening to others. An epiphany.
The next day she showed up at the police station and applied for a bounty hunter’s licence. It took a few months of nationally supervised training but the generous reward from the bank helped as well as the public interest in the “people’s hero” and soon a new bounty hunter was out there. The scene from the movie (yeah, there was actually made a movie of her story) where she walks into the police station, bends over that desk in her famous cocky manner and says her most famous line is already legendary:
“I’m a hunter, no less, no more. Tell me who to find and I’ll do it!”
She quickly rose to prominence thanks to the nature of the criminals she persecuted. Her first was said paedophile wanted in all 50 states, Harry Cooper. He was a pro, hiding so well that no one could find him and mocking the USA with ever more disgusting child porn but somehow Barbie managed and dragged him out of that filthy warehouse with his jaw broken. It cost her six months of her life and she only retained her licence due to public pressure but according to her “It was worth it”.
Now she is out there, always on the hunt for the next criminal, never tiring like a shark. She loves her new life and to add comfort to feeling good it pays quite well collecting bounties on those criminal’s heads. Where her life had started so miserably she could not ask for more now.
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS:
The Bounty Hunter’s most famous mutant power is to find anyone she is actively looking for. It has been certified as a psychic form of tracking, subconsciously adjusting to the target’s brainwaves and following those, and only those, over any distance. As soon as she is “in tune” with her target her other powers manifest as well. Then she is able to fly at subsonic speeds via a limited form of telekinesis that lets pink feathered wings appear on her back, her senses are heightened to superhuman levels surpassing even metaphorical animals like the bloodhound, lynx and hawk by far. Some new senses like the ability to perceive all of the light and sound spectrums are also added then. Her durability and endurance grow and she can stand much stronger punches than before though she is far from being bullet proof. Interestingly she does not need sleep, food or water and develops a high temperature tolerance in both directions (heat and cold) when in the “Bounty Hunter mode”. Her reflexes are also enhanced to superhuman levels up to the point where she can dodge bullets. The only power that she does have even when not on the hunt is superstrength (about ten tons).
THE BRAWLER
Fighting is an essential part of all the Barbie’s life. Normally it is fighting against the odds that want to grind them down, against a world that does not want them. The Barbie of Earth 629 took that concept one step further.
It all began with cage-fighting. That easy and that simple. Years of sexual and physical abuse had already hardened her to the point where she could not break anymore. No, breaking was not an option anymore. At times she cracked but she never actually broke and never lost that will to live on, to somehow get out of there. Punches that she received at home from her mother’s lovers or in the darkness between the trailers from those filthy white trash gangs lost their force. Or maybe they didn’t loose their force as she bled and bruised as always, maybe she simply lost her feeling of pain. But the real thing started when she hit the road after the death of her mother.
Leaving the burning trailer behind she tried really hard. Tried hard to make a life for herself from the scraps. Tried hard to let all of her terrible past behind her. Life did not make it easy but she chewed her way through taking whatever miserable job she could get just to earn some money. Pole dancer, waitress, dish washer, McDonald’s employee, scrubber, trash sorter, dock worker, whatever was available. For one night she even became a prostitute. But it was the cage-fighting that would finally grant her a life that she deemed worth living.
It was one of those nights. Cigarette and cigar smoke hung heavily in the air like a thick curtain. The bar was filled to burst and brimmed with activity. The night outside was cold and trucks thundered past that little place in nowhere beside some unnamed highway. Inside disappointed screams and happy cheering did not stop a minute as the customers followed the brutal spectacle inside the cage in the midst of the shady room. Two muscular men stood there and beat each other senseless with cruel persistency. No rules, no mercy in a no-break till-you-drop all-out cage match. Black eyes, broken and unnaturally bent fingers, lost teeth, all that only served to maximize the onlooker’s blood-mad frenzy. Barbie did not look. She was too busy jetting between the tables and serving the customers their whiskey and beer. The job itself was not one to enjoy. Dirty machos and chauvinists that were drawn to this place like flies to a rotting corpse sometimes thought the service included more than just drinks and had to be taught differently. The foldable baton in her bra saw its use more than once. The road had taught her more than to be just hard, it had taught her to be strong and mean as well.
Of course most of those “clients” were if not nice than at least integer and adhered to the rules of the etablissement. The violence was more interesting than a pretty waitress and as hot as Barbie was month- if not life-long banishment from this bar was not worth it. It was their modern Circus Maximus where a new kind of gladiator celebrated the old ways of survival of the fittest. They appreciated it more than the short intercourse with a woman could ever have pleased them. Out of those one was still special.
To the present day Barbie does not recall his face, just that he wore a long black leather duster and was “special”. How long he had sat there she could not tell. He ordered beer after beer after beer and after every third beer a whiskey but that massive amount of alcohol did not seem to impair him a bit. He simply sat there and enjoyed the fights. It was after his tenth whiskey that he suddenly turned towards Barbie and said:
“You know, I always wanted to participate in those fights as well but somehow I don’t have what it takes. Looks like I have to be content with discovering new talents. Somehow a shame. Say… Do you have what it takes?”
Then he did something that was normally forbidden. He grabbed her by the arm. No, not grab, rather touch her. It happened to fast for her to react and reach for the baton in her bra but on the other hand it was nothing aggressive, it was rather… casual. A soft touch like a wind breeze caressing her skin for a moment before it was suddenly gone. Shocked and puzzled she looked at the stranger. Only to notice that he wasn’t there anymore. Disappeared from one second to the other, a few empty glasses being the only thing that spoke of his former presence. As if he would have existed for a few minutes only. The effect it did have on Barbie was tremendous though. She felt electrified, agitated to the border of hyperactivity. The temperature inside her rose and filled her with an energy unknown to her before. Her course of action was clear. With indescribable clearness it tore through her mind like a scalpel: She had to fight.
Theoretically everyone was free to go into that cage and challenge the fighter or get challenged himself. But as the cute waitress in her hip jeans and her red top entered the ring and called the fighter out the amusement was big. Slights and insults flew into the ring, whiskey glasses and beer bottles only held back by the fence around the battle arena. Barbie herself did not notice that. She was focussed on the brutal looking mountain of a fat man before her. He had just brutally beaten another man in 30 seconds. Instead of saying anything he just laughed his slack jawed laughter. As his golden teeth flashed Barbie suddenly felt thrust back into the darkness of the trailer where the gold reflected the spare light as another body rocked back and forth above her. Her rage grew because for the first time she realized what she had done wrong back then. Never had she fought back, only endured. Hoped that it would end some day. Today would be the day when she would strike back. And as his breath heavy from alcohol and cheap meat hit her she knew it was the right decision. He did not take her serious, like all those scumbags back then had not but she would teach him.
Her first strike came as a surprise. It hit him broad in the chest and the sheer amount of force drove him back against the fence. At first he was stunned but then the disgust rose up in him
distorting his face to even uglier forms. How could a bitch like this dare to strike him? He would teach her manners. Enraged he struck out at her only to find Barbie not where she had stood seconds before. Somehow Barbie had sensed what he had been up to and changed position. As the big fleshy arm flew past her she hammered two short hooks into his kidneys and grabbed his hairy limb. For a moment when he realized what she was going to do his eyes widened but then she already slammed down his arm on her knee and next his scream of pain roared through the room. The audience was mad, cheering Barbie on and tossing dollar bills towards the ring. It embarrassed the fat man further, robbing him of his dignity like he had robbed others before, like Barbie had been robbed of hers. Furious the fat man struck out with his intact arm. Barbie’s reaction was one that was met with encouraging howling from the audience: She ducked and punched his balls. Moaning her opponent bent down. Her chance. As she had foreseen it she gave him a head nut, grabbed him by the ears and slammed her knee into his face. Like a tree the man fell. The ring trembled as he hit the bottom. Barbie on the other hand had lost interest in him. She brought her arms up in a victor’s pose and was already looking for the next challenger. Given the brutal way she had just finished her last opponent no one was too eager to do this tonight. Barbie’s lust for carnage was awakened though.
It took only a few arguments and a refusingly spent night with the owner of the bar to convince him to employ her as the new “house champion”. Soon it became known that Barbie was invincible and only the foolish, brave, desperate or those alien to the bar were suicidal enough to engage her on the small battlefield. Somehow she was able to instinctively sense what her opponent was up to and counter it accordingly. Her strength had also marvellously risen and served her as well as her heightened inability to feel pain. Of course it did not take long till she was “discovered”.
Her rise in the Mixed Martial Arts Fighting League was without equal. Within a few months she ranked at the top without loosing one fight. A favourite of the fans as well as a dreaded opponent she received a lot of attention with the added benefit of a lot of advertisement contracts. Not once did she see that stranger in the duster again but she always thanked him for that special first night in the ring.
Her downfall came when she agreed to participate in a charity tournament for the benefit of street children. The list of participants was illustrious, several martial arts champions, boxers, extreme sportsmen, some gangsta rappers with a tough image, even a few celebrities. The most prominent of them being a masked crime fighter with superpowers who promised to “go easy”. It was in the final round when she met him. The previous rounds had been fair game for both of them and even Barbie did not doubt that his nigh invulnerability and inhuman strength would ensure him the victory. The result proved to be pretty disturbing for both of them though.
The moment he stepped into the ring he felt something lacking, something that he was very used to. He could not name it, somehow he did not feel like usual. What was lacking became clear when he attacked her. His strength, his speed, his endurance and durability were diminished to a point were he almost attacked like a normal human. With a swooshing sound his fist passed past her like back then in her first fight and she countered it with a straight fist to his nose. The audience held its collective breath as it broke. How could that happen to a man who could take a shotgun shot to the face without injury? His turn again. A kick of him that could normally tumble over cars was met without difficulties with a high block. The following hook she caught with her arm, bound him in a lock and fired two punches at his breast that left him breathless. A last elbow to the face ended that unworthy spectacle. It had been less than a minute and then the symbol of righteous vigilantism lay there in the hot light of the spotlights gasping for air, beaten and broken, his blood flowing out of his nose and forming a small almost black puddle on the floor. The audience itself was uncharacteristically silent as Barbie stood atop him and looked down at him with an expression of simple disbelief frozen on her face. What had happened here?
Of course Barbie got the trophy and the whole tournament was a success, the help for street kids in America got a cheque of several dozen million dollars but the question remained. What had happened? The newspapers asked it again and again, the public frequently demanded an explanation and most of all the MMA-League was interested if it had been cheated. Almost despairing under the public pressure Barbie gave in to some examinations to clear that. Against the advice of her lawyers though. As expected the result was disastrous.
The source of her powers was unclear, mysterious even but Barbie was obviously a superhuman. No magic, no X-gene, no radiation, no cybernetic alien implants, nothing could be found or even explain those strange superpowers but nevertheless Barbie had them. She just had the vague idea that this stranger back in the bar gave her those new abilities but that did not help a single bit.
The MMA-League sued her for fraud and she lost. Everything. Her lawyers fought like lions but for naught. The process was unlike anything ever seen in that sport. The judge made an example of the poor white trash girl who the newspapers demeaningly called “The Brawler” now. The fee forced her to sell her house, her cars and everything else she possessed.
In the end she landed where she had begun, back in “Paradise Garden”. She took it like a champ and appointed herself as the “law keeper” of that trailer park teaching the gangs and the brutal bullies some manners.
Today Paradise Garden my not be on of America’s prettiest trailer parks as the unemployment rate there is still very high but at least it is a safe place. Once a year when other news is sparse a TV-show comes there to interview her on her old career and her new environment and every time they finish the interview she closes it with the same sentence.
“I don’t know who that stranger in that bar back then was but I’d like to thank him for teaching me the most important lesson in my life…
Stranger, if you hear me: Thank you for teaching me that violence is not always the answer and that even the mightiest fall one day!”
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS:
Unlike the name suggests The Brawler actually has an extensive training in martial arts, especially in Jeet Kune Do and Wing Chun where she achieved the 2 grade black belt in both shortly before the league threw her out. She has some very basic knowledge of others like Karate, Jiu Jitsu, Krav Maga, Escrima, Sambo and Capoeira but usually relies on the former two because she is much better in them. Not surprisingly she has a minor degree of superhuman strength (between 1 and 2 tons) but no other superhuman attributes though she is otherwise on the level of an excellent martial artist. Though she possesses no superhuman durability or endurance she is able to last much longer in a fight than any normal human due to her inability to feel pain at any time. This of course cancels out her sense of touch and temperature as well but prevents her from falling unconscious from shock no matter how severe the wound. Theoretically her arm could be ripped of and she would not even flinch. Her most mysterious power is her ability to foresee what her opponent is going to do though. Much has been theorized, from low level telepathy over limited precognition to some sort of bio-kinesis “reading”, but none could be certified so far. Fact is that Barbie is able to subconsciously know what her opponent is up to and can react to it on a reflexive level. With this ability she is able to win almost any fight. Her big edge in a fight against superpowered enemies is her ability to cancel out powers though. She constantly radiates a field of unknown energy that disturbs and shuts off superhuman powers of all kind and brings super humans down to a level that a person of their height, build and age should have. All those abilities together form a very powerful opponent who can take on virtually everyone without the fear of ever loosing.
THE SHERIFF
Barbie of Earth 1492 coming soon
THE REDEEMER
Barbie of Earth 378 coming soon
THE SIREN
Barbie of Earth 3778 coming soon
THE DRIFTER
It is true that the one thing that ties the Barbies together aside from their unearthly looks and their troubled past is their strong survival instinct but the Barbie of Earth 537 takes this truly to the extreme.
B.A.R.B.I.E.
Biotechnically Advanced Robotic Body Inherent Enhancements
BULK
It is strange that although each version of Barbie is a profound change only a few of those Barbies’ powers actually include changing into some other form. Of those the inhabitants of Earth 1945 came to call “Bulk” is perhaps the most drastic.
It all began like it begins for most Barbies. Cursed to an existence between the white trash trailers, days filled with violence and later on nights filled with abuse. From time to time a worthless attempt to defend herself only to huddle together like a crying baby in the dark. Something was created in this darkness. Something born from desperation… and wrath.
Year after year it grew inside her, festered there. Each strike, each insult was an obstetrician to the thing within. And then, some fateful day, it came out to play.
The event itself was horrible. Her mother Tiffany had been even more drunk than usual as she tried to gain some protection from her mother, prevent that those intolerable things would be done to her. But as she spoke out Tiffany’s hag face contorted to an even uglier expression than normal. In her boozed mind a storm of rage was brewing and when a wrong neutron hit the wrong synapse it thundered aloud.
Barbie felt the first few strikes but after that her mind became hazy. She had never been a smart one, never overly perceptive or quick-minded but although she was maybe a bit slow she was not impaired, saw the world as it was, unhindered by a veil of unknown origin. This, however, was different.
She witnessed how she reached for that bottle after the first vicious strike had hit her but it was not her spirit that guided her hand. The second strike came but then she struck back. Her mother fell. But in this reality it was different. Tiffany did not hit the table. Instead she fell to the floor, angry, the pain subdued by the vast amount of alcohol. In a stupor rage she tried to get up again to let her daughter pay for this insolence only to notice that Barbie was faster.
Suddenly she was over her mother, the bottle still in hand. Down and down it came again and again. Soon Tiffany lost conscience after the first few hits. Still Barbie’s rage was not sated. She kept hitting and hitting and hitting. Not even as the bottle was tinted red from her mother’s blood did she stop. Even as it broke it was no hindrance to her. Fired on by this strange feeling inside her she just went on. And on. And on. And on.
When she was finally done the once living being named Tiffany was not more than a red pulp. Covered in her mother’s blood Barbie stood above the newly created corpse heavily panting and trying to recollect what she had just done. Slowly the anger went away and the comprehension came. As it finally dawned to her she set the trailer on fire to hide the evidence and fled in terror.
After that incident she tried to bury those feelings inside her, bury them in her mind and put a heavy stone on top of that grave. As she shuffled through a series of cheap jobs and cheap apartments afterwards she seemed to be successful at that but she always knew it was there. It. Whatever had caused her to brutally murder the woman who had born her. Waiting. Lurking in its grave to jump out again and claim another victim. Afraid of what might happen she suppressed it with all might.
The big turn was about to come when she had another underpaid cleaning job in a facility in Nevada. Nobody knows how she came to that job, neither military nor public. Maybe it was just fate. Theoretically she should not have been in this top secret government facility and would it have not been for a single good-hearted man all of this would have not happened: Bruce Banner.
He found her in a cheap restaurant on his way to his new job in the base. It was supposed to be just a quick stop to gulp down a coffee and grab a sandwich for the road but when he saw her in her miserable state how she collected empty or half eaten dishes with her blonde hair glittering in the golden Nevada desert sunlight he could not bear the look. Banner was a an intelligent man and too good for this world, a brilliant mind with a golden heart. At first Barbie was reluctant but when he promised her to pay her double of what she earned now she accepted. This way Barbie came to the Gamma Base and the whole sad story started.
Life was good to her in the base. She earned more than ever before and lived for free, even though she was just a charwoman. Twice a week she dined with Doctor Banner who she came to call Bruce and although they knew what she earned the other professionals treated her with friendliness and respect. Perhaps she was the only one who did not know that the Doctor who was too shy to explain himself to her was hopelessly in love with her but she was not interested in a relationship at that point anyway.
Of course it could not last.
The fateful day came when Bruce Banner’s great day came: The testing of his biggest project ever, his masterpiece. The Gamma Bomb. It was supposed to be his greatest day, the day all his hard work finally paid off. A new green sun would rise and usher a new age of mankind. On that day he was as excited as child on Christmas eve. And Barbie as his great love and in the mean time his closest confidant was invited.
Once again the details are a bit hazy, she just remembers how Banner ran outside yelling something about stopping the test and civilians. The next thing she remembers is running right after him trying to drag him back into the safety of the bunker. Even to a simple mind like hers it was obvious that “bomb” equaled destruction and that the man who had been so good to her would be reduced to single atoms if he was caught in the blast. And she would be damned if one of the few persons to ever treat her well in life would perish into nothingness. No, she would show gratitude and prevent that. Screw that world if it thought otherwise.
This was when IT rose in her again. Repressed the usual simple but kind Barbie and took her place. Pulled the last out of her subtle naturally-trained muscles and made her use the full potential of her body. But it looked as if Banner had the same beast within him. He managed to keep ahead of her while the beast within Barbie hunted him. Only when he pulled that young man out of his car did she get a hold on him and hurled both, the good doctor and the young hippie, into a trench.
Only to be hit by the blast wave.
Banner and the young man Rick Jones felt the deadly radiation wash over them and witnessed in horror how the heat turned the surrounding desert into glass. Only a cosmic coincidence prevented them from being radiated themselves as the trench they lay in housed an enormous iron vein. Barbie on the other side was unprotected.
She felt the radiation invading her body, flowing through every cell, dissolving everything and… restructuring it. Once again the beast within her refused to be a victim, refused to give up and lashed out with all strength available instead. It used the radiation to build a stronger body how it had used the rage before to build a stronger self. The radiation and IT merged. Became something more and at the same time something less than human. Created a separate form filled with nothing more than the bestial rage-filled thrashing of itself. Conscious thought was left to Barbie but strength and viciousness remained within her.
Banner was shocked when he resurfaced and did not see what he had expected. He had foreseen a worst case scenario wherein he would weep over the molten corpse of the woman he had loved so much. His worst case had not been bad enough. There was not a molten human body there, no there was something worse. Before him towered a 7 feet red skinned amazon with nearly infinite strength in the glassland. For a moment they eyed each other, intellect clashed with instinct and Banner witnessed what could have happened to him if this woman had not sacrificed herself for him. In this moment a terrible oath was born. He would save the woman who meant more to him than the world.
The new born being on the other hand was not really capable of conscious thought. All it could think about was smashing the puny human before it into the ground. It needed all of the caged Barbie’s strength to prevent that. With her last control she caused it to flee into the desert leaving only a sand cloud and a disappointed Bruce Banner behind.
When she awoke naked and miserable the next day Barbie knew something had changed. Her life would never be the same again. She had to hide this monster inside her from the rest of the world, more like protecting the world from it. With nothing more than a sigh she returned to her old life of the cheap jobs and cheap apartments, hiding from the military as well as possible and IT surfacing from time to time and wrecking destruction when she was angered or threatened.
Banner on the other hand had sworn to find and redeem her, to take this terrible burden from her and save the woman he loves with all means possible. Whenever she appears on the news again he and the army are there with some other device. So far none of his ideas has worked and the thing he calls the “Barbie-Hulk” or “Bulk” for short has nearly killed him on two occasions when his technical wondertoys were destroyed by the impossible might of the Bulk. Still he will not give up.
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS:
Barbie in her human form has no powers whatsoever. Bulk who she transforms into whenever she is angered or threatened on the other hand is a totally different matter. The army constantly despairs about her invulnerability when even mortar and tank shells bounce off her near impenetrable skin and her agility is also beyond every human standard though she is not on par with most super-agile superheroes. Her most infamous ability is her super strength though. She starts at levels where she can lift an excess of more than one hundred tons but when she becomes angrier (which is pretty much a given fact thanks to the second personality in her mind) she also becomes stronger. In theory her strength is unlimited and she has been seen leveling a whole skyscraper on one occasion.
Saint Barbara
Universe 40.000 is a bleak and dark place, marked by the constant infighting between all space faring species, be they Orks, Human, Eldar, Tau or even more exotic. But the most dreadful conflict is the one that splits humanity in half. The old fight between the Emperor and Chaos. Is it a wonder an abused and neglected person like the Barbie of universe 40k turned to the dark gods to finally achieve some affection?
Not much is known about the woman who would later on be called “one of the arch-traitors”, only that she was born in the Age Of Apostasy as the daughter of Imperial officials. Apparently they were killed during a raid of the Night Lords Chaos Space Marines who killed the whole planet save Barbara so that the terrified child could spread the news of the cruelty of the traitor legion and thus increase the fear of them.
Always in need of more fighters the subordinates of the tainted usurper Goge Vandire took her in, first as a part of the Schola Progenium and a bit later as a part of the Brides Of The Emperor, the exclusively female bodyguard of the usurper. And Barbara served well. She became a paragon under the sisters in faith, battle prowess, valour and weapon skill. Eventually she even became part of the personal bodyguard of Goge Vandire himself. For her this was like the fulfilment of a dream. The Schola Progenium and the order had instilled a deep wish to obey in her, to serve and to follow any order the crazed would-be emperor and head of the Ecclesiarchy would give. Given her previous trauma of being the lone survivor of a whole slaughtered world, the witnessing of the slaughter and the resulting survivor guilt had created a dark core in her, one that was only to eager to follow even the most depraved instructions she was given. While it made her a masterful assassin, brutal executioner, superiorly skilled dancer, wonderful singer and wicked courtesan that served every perverse whim of her master it was also what made her susceptible to the whispers of the Ruinous Powers.
At first her iron faith in what she did protected her when she lay in her poor quarter or next to the usurper with other Brides Of The Emperor and heard the dark litanies in her mind. Like snakes they slithered through the damaged building of her barely kept sanity but were held but were kept back by these walls of iron that posed her conviction. But during those snakes unsuccessfully tried to tear those walls down Tzeentch, the Changer Of Ways, sat in his realm snickering and biding the time when his fate strings would finally snare his newest toy.
Ironically this time would begin when Barbara and five of her sisters were granted the honour of an audience with the Emperor himself during the siege of Terra. No one knows what happened in the sacred chambers but it effectively ended the Age Of Apostasy. The six sisters remerged changed on a fundamental level. The Emperor was with them and it shone out of their eyes, most of all in the eyes of their leader Alicia Dominica, in a holy glowing. In a display of iron unity they appeared from the catacombs of the Imperial palace and marched righteously into the chambers of Goge Vandire himself. Alicia Dominica only stopped for a few seconds to condemn Vandire for his actions before she beheaded the corrupted man. And as his head rolled on the floor with a surprised look still on his face and his blood fanned out over the marble floor in a breathtaking but at the same time terrible mosaic, two things happened. One was obvious to all: The darkest age of the Empire had ended at last. The second one eluded even the most attentive observer: Of the six Daughters Of The Emperor gathered in this place only Barbara showed a cruel smile upon the death of the usurper.
The following times where not easy for the Adepta Sororitas. Cleansings were necessary, the last remnants of the corrupt Ecclesiarch Vandire had to be purged from the order and that was not an easy task. The six sisters were at the vanguard of those cleanings and fought valiantly like lions to get rid of even the last adherer to the heretic teachings. And when it was finally done, the order was restructured.
According to their ardent faith the Sisters Of Battle became a part of the Inquisition because the Ecclesiarchy needed a strong military arm but were prohibited to employ “men at arms”. But the most important change was the dividing of the Adepta Sororitas into different orders. Each of Barbara’s sisters was awarded with the command over her own order. One after another left the group following a holy vision that Alicia Dominica had received from the Emperor himself. All but Barbara. She was kept close to Alicia Dominica because it was “Our Divine Emperor’s will” even when she asked for a command of her own. Consequently she was punished with fasting and meditating for the sin of arrogance. Grudgingly and deeply hurt Barbara went to her private chamber to sulk.
This was the moment the dark gods struck and Tzeentch’s plan came to completion. Slaanesh the Prince Of Pleasures implanted the pride in her to ask why she was left out, she who had been even more faithful and disciplined than her sisters. Nurgle The Old Rotter implanted the plague of doubt in her to let her ask if the faith in the Emperor had died like the Emperor’s faith in her had died. And after many hours of meditating it was finally Khorne The Berserker who awakened the rage that had so long slept in her. Why was she ignored? Had she not served faithfully? Did she not deserve better? The aggression rose and rose in her like a tide and when it finally swept over the iron walls of her self discipline those walls fell, not from the outside but from within. In droves the temptations of the Ruinous Powers climbed over the ruins of her former faith to infiltrate her mind. Tzeentch’s shrill laughter echoed through the warp this day.
With a bestial roar Barbara stormed out of her chamber and killed everyone she encountered in her way with her bare hands. Her legendary bloodstained beauty enticed the onlookers and made them a second too slow while horrible plagues struck those that attempted to touch her. More a wild beast than a human she made her bloody way through the palace partly gorging herself on the blood and flesh of the guardians only to disappear into a warp rift right infront of the Imperial Palace. It is passed down that when Alicia Dominica saw what her former sister had done she just shook her head, said “The Emperor told me to watch her closely, I didn’t listen because I loved my sister who went through all this with me too much…” and ordered that all records of Saint Barbara to be erased.
Barbara who kept the title of “Saint” out of pure spite to mock the Ecclesiarchy that had betrayed her so bad on the other hand set out on a journey to prove herself to the dark gods, the ones who would reward her for her service. Many are the tales of her exploits, how she killed Empirial officials, how she fooled Space Marine orders, how she wiped out entire Ork tribes, how she tricked Eldar and Dark Eldar, how she took the heads of Tau of the evasive Celestial Caste, even how she battled demon princes to rise higher in the esteem of the Dark Gods. Her incredibly strong new found faith carried her through all those adventures and was even awarded by the Four Gods like the Emperor would never have done. But among those stories rank those as the most legendary that deal with the original nine traitor legends.
The infamous Black legion sees her for what she is, a devout follower of the dark gods, and at one instance she fought her way through a tournament the legion staged among their champions only to kneel at the throne of Abaddon The Despoiler to gain his blessing which he laughingly gave by laying the Claw Of Horus on her head.
The Emperor’s Children, Slaanesh’s chosen legion, despise her for obvious reasons. When she came to their demon world to gain the blessing of Fulgrim himself Fulgrim took an unhealthy liking to her beauty. With his incredible power the demon primarch overpowered her and put her in his personal harem. Here the former Battle Sister endured hideous tortures of lust for weeks if not even months only able to survive this by her exceptional stamina before she was able to flee this fleshly hell. Being the capricious monster he is Fulgrim took her escape as a personal insult and declared her an enemy of the legion.
The countless war bands that make up the World Eaters memorize her the most for the battle of Ossimand V. Here Barbara fought at the side of Kharne The Betrayer himself, the two slaying more than all the other members of the war band combined. The division of the Imperial Army stationed on the primal world was beheaded and their skulls offered as sacrifices to Khorne. And when there was no one left to slay, Kharne and Barbara turned at each other in their bestial rage, fighting for hours before the World Eaters separated them. Later on, when Barbara had already left the dead world, Kharne stated his deepest respect for this woman. Still Barbara prefers to stay away from this maniacs in all but the most extreme cases for they are too unpredictable.
The devious Night Lords nearly see her as one of their own. She mastered the jump pack nearly as well as them and took many cities with them, leaving only devastated husks with one survivor in an homage to how she was found. It is a special act of pleasure for Barbara to plant deeply hidden corruption in the minds of these children and many Captains of this cruel legions appreciate her for the laugh it gives them.
The enigmatic Thousand Sons remain neutral to her to the present day. Even when she used the diversion as the psionic legion battled the defenders of an Eldar artefact to steal the same artefact from the Imperial shrine world the Sons were after the witch-leaders did not declare her an anathema. Since then at times they have tried to catch her and at other times fought alongside her, even aided her in some instances and only random precognitions have saved her from the times when the descendents of Magnus meant harm to her.
Lorgar of the Word Bearers is very fond of her. Many times the enormous demon primarch and the in relation petite looking former Battle Sister have gathered to discuss theological things concerning their dark religion. As a token of his appreciation Lorgar even awarded her with the title of an honorary Dark Apostle. Screaming the credo of the dark gods loudly Barbara charges into battle among the fanatical hordes of the word bearers and is ready to prove her dedication to Chaos in battle and with sacrifices afterwards. Still she makes sure not to meet Lorgar more than once in a century so that he can’t become overly possessive about her.
The Death Guard laugh at her for being a “weakling”and it is a constant thorn in her enormous ego that Nurgle’s chosen legion does not accept her. The reason for this lies in her not exclusive dedication to Nurgle. Barbara may be immune to nearly all known diseases but still she only dedicates part of her prayings to Nurgle and he who is egoistical like all Chaos gods doesn’t give her his full blessing. She learned this the hard way when she came to the demon world of Mortarion to receive a blessing there and caught a very virulent disease that would have nearly killed her if she had not left. Since this day the Death Guard look down on her and the enormously proud Barbara refuses to fight in their ranks.
Perturabo is another primarch she counts among her personal friends. If two Chaos cultists can be friends at all. Perturabo and her meet for an epic meal once a century where they exchange stories, drink and laugh all night. There is a twist to that though. She is only invited to this meal if she can make it past his legion’s security. So once a century the former Saint sneaks through the Iron Warriors’ defences and enrages them more and more. Every century the security measures become harder and harder but still somehow she manages to somehow slip into the Iron Citadel. As a result the Iron Warriors become madder and madder while Perturabo greets her in his private chambers with a hearty laugh about how his legion aspires to become even better next time.
The Alpha Legion is at the same time her greatest joy and her greatest pain. She loves working with them. The subterfuge, the espionage, the assassination, the terrorism, the cult funding and all the other activities the Alpha Legion engage in rank among her favourite. The intense tactical planning that preludes every operation and the resulting conversation with the captains cause great anticipation in her. But although the Alpha Legion highly respects her for her tactical acumen the paranoid legion does not trust her simply because she is not one of them and is far more devout than them. The Alpha Legion trusts only the Alpha Legion and as an outsider she may be respected but will never be let into the greater plans, even if she is allowed to take part in planning the smaller operations.
So one of the Emperor’s most devout followers became one of the Dark God’s most eager cultists. If she had lived for the empire she would have fought for him maybe 50 years or more, in the service of the dark gods she wrecks havoc in the universe since nearly 3000 years. The irony was not even lost on the otherwise rather humourless Empire.
TALENTS AND SUPERPOWERS
The gifts of the dark gods made a formerly well trained woman into an engine of destruction. In fact it is rumoured she might be short of demon-princehood.
Khorne gifted her with enormous strength bordering on that of the most feared Space Marines Captains of both loyal and traitor legions. With this gift a woman of roughly 5’3” is able to lift up to 2 tons if she really overstressed her body. Further Khorne granted her his holy rage in which she becomes a furious monster. If she invokes that rage she does not feel pain anymore and is able to make full use of her strength although she mostly looses conscious thought in a berserker-like state.
Slaanesh gifted her with incredible beauty and grace. Many onlookers are entranced by her sheer look and fall prey to her while others are usually at least shaken, unsure what to do and thus react slower. Also her agility, speed and reflexes were heightened to a level where she can dodge bolter salvos and bend in unnatural ways making it possible for her to dodge even the mightiest blows.
Nurgle gifted her with unnatural stamina and resistance. She is not only immune to the most diseases and toxins save the most malignant ones of Nurgle himself but also able to withstand terrible amounts of injury and sustain for days on end rivalling the constitution of a Space Marine. If she is on an especially Nurgle-compliant mission like poisoning a water source or the like her enemies might even be struck by horrible diseases.
Tzeentch gifted her with the most erratic of all awards. Like it is appropriate for the changer of ways his gift manifests in various forms. Most often she is given precognitive visions of things concerning herself but even that is not reliable. Sometimes this dark gift has also manifested as psionic lightnings that whip her enemies, other times a great inferno has consumed them while on other occasions demons have appeared to tear them apart. It is pretty unpredictable what can happen, an enemy can turn to stone, be blinded by a sudden flash of light or any other sudden manifestation of psionic energy can happen. Barbara herself does not know what might happen but she enjoys the obvious signs of the favour of her patron.
Furthermore Barbara still possess the now demon-infused servo armour of her Sister Of Battle days which she adorns with the signs of the Ruinous Powers and her two bolter pistols that she lovingly calls “Death and Vengeance”. She was also entrusted with a special tainted energy crozius that can appear in her hand on command by her friend Lorgar.
As if all that was not enough to make her a threat Saint Barbara looks back on 3000 years of combat expertise making her an expert in shooting as well as armed and unarmed combat.
THE COMMANDO
THE EXECUTIVE
THE RUNAWAY
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