Reprinted from the University of Paragon Gazette

WHO IS LADYMAGE?

By Melinda Asseltine

 

Several weeks ago the Clockworks took interest in the same warehouse that the school was running its recycling drive, trapping several of the student volunteers.  I, like the others with me, were forced to wait in terror, praying that one of Paragon City’s heroes would come and rescue us.  Our prayers were answered, but not in the way many of us expected. 

 

I’m sure most of us expected a team of heroes working side by side, or perhaps some large and aloof man to take down the clockwork menace.  Instead we got LadyMage.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the heroine, LadyMage appears to be a surprisingly small young woman dressed in white: boots, leotard, skirt, gloves.  Even her eyes glow an iridescent white.  Many she may not have been, or large, but she took the clockwork on either way, focusing mental energies on them to interrupt their workings.  She even made sure we were healed of any hurts before sending us to safety. 

 

As I left the warehouse I was suddenly remembering someone from a long time ago telling me a story about being rescued by a group with a heroine named LadyMage.  Yet the heroine who rescued me looked far too young to be the same person.  I was intrigued.  Was this woman like our Statesman, the years simply not touching her?  Or have multiple heroes worn the name, and the one I saw simply the latest?

 

The earliest reference found referring to a heroine named LadyMage is in the 1938 roster of the English SuperGroup, the Dawn Patrol.  She was the first heroine listed amongst them, but little is known about her.  She was reported as having died in the Battle of Britain, but a year later was spotted helping the Freedom Phalanx against Nemesis at the White House. 

 

It appears that she settled here after the war, and there are sporadic reports of her for the next twenty years, and while she was never acknowledged as a full fledged member of the Phalanx, she did apparently lend her healing abilities on occasion.  In 1964 there is a government conscription record that sent LadyMage overseas to an undisclosed location, and there is a reference, hastily penned after the Might for Right act was repealed, about the deaths in the group that was sent with her.  Her name was among them. 

 

For nearly ten years after there is no record of a LadyMage.  Then in the late seventies she reappeared, this time affiliated with the mysterious Midnight Squad.  For over twenty years she and others, always a controller named Reverse Gravity, would appear to save the city from evil, and disappear just as quickly.  Both LadyMage and Reverse Gravity were presumed dead after the Ritki war like so many other members of Midnight Squad, who were disintegrated in a Ritki blast. 

 

Then a few months ago again she resurfaced.  Any ties she might have had to the groups she was a part of seem to have evaporated, and this time it’s the fledgling, yet talented Ion Force who’s colors she has been seen sporting.  But while the history is interesting it does not answer our question.  Seventy years ago LadyMage made her first appearance, and the public knows little more of her today than they did then. 

 

Even the picture that the sightings paint is inconsistent.  The woman herself has never worn a mask, and has been guessed to be anywhere from her late teens to her early forties.   One thing has never changed.  LadyMage has always had those incandescently white eyes.  Other than that the costume has changed significantly.  The silver tiara is new since the late seventies, yet the recent iteration, the one I saw was missing the purple cape adorned with arcane symbols.  Yet even with these changes, the white and purple has remained the same. 

 

Who is LadyMage?  No one who knows is saying.  Is she one woman, who re-invents herself every time she is forced to rise from the ashes, phoenix-like, from another death?  Or is she several women, each picking up the torch when the one before her passes?  My money is on the latter, but who ever she is, I wish her the best of luck.  Paragon needs more heroes like her.