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Description

JLA DOSSIER

n. IVZ - 502065 DBK

CIVILIAN NAME

Naomi McDuffie

SUPERHERO IDENTITY

Lightbringer

PERSONAL AND PHYSICAL DATA

Born: 7 April 1984
Age: 19
Civilian profession: member of L.E.G.I.O.N.
Marital status: uncertain; single at the time of her last contact with Earth denizens
Birthplace: parallel Earth (standard classification: यख - 2111 - ऌ - 8339)
Height: 173 cm (5' 8")
Weight: 65 kg (143 lbs.)
Eye color: cognac brown
Hair color: dark brown
Measurements: 36E-25-36
Blood type: A-
Shoe size: 10.5 US female
Distinguishing features: an extra vertebra in the lumbar zone

STATUS IN THE METAHUMAN COMMUNITY

- Member of the Titans from June 2001 to June 2002;

- Chairwoman of the Titans from November 2001 to June 2002;

- Officially invited to join the Justice League of America on the day of her 18th birthday (invitation declined);

- Voted Most promising young heroine for the year 2002 by the subscribers of Medley magazine (results published on Medley n. 2, vol. XX);

- Member of the Gotham Knights from August 2002 to April 2003;

- Member of Licensed Extra-Governmental Interstellar Operatives Network (q.v. JLA Dossier n. ETY - 847897 LLU for more info about L.E.G.I.O.N.) since April 2003. Current whereabouts unknown since then;

- 14 honorable mentions in the JLA register of young vigilantes (1 motion on 6-19-2002 to have them removed, denied by majority vote).

ORIGIN

1. Iridescent Lights. 23 centuries before Ms. McDuffie’s birth, on a day which would go on to be celebrated on her version of Earth ever since as the Day of the Iridescent Lights, a mysterious energy, perhaps generated somewhere in outer space, permeated the planet’s atmosphere. For one minute the sky and the clouds all over the world, whether it was high noon or nighttime, turned into all the colors of the visible spectrum in a continuous medley of hues. Once it was over, humans were no more the masters of the world. Twenty-nine men and women, randomly distributed across the six inhabited continents, were changed by that event, transcending their human nature and gaining abilities which made them look like deities to their former peers. Immortal, eternally young and displaying awesome powers, the members of this new pantheon gradually came in contact with each other and, to the dismay of some of them, they found out that peaceful coexistence was not going to be an option. A beautiful, ambitious young woman, who had gone from being a harem slave in Carthage to being the mistress of lightning and storm, and a hulking, quick-tempered man, who had quit his blacksmith shop in the land of Punt now that he had a nuclear furnace in his digestive system, struck an unlikely alliance shortly after meeting each other and from that moment on tirelessly worked on defeating and subjugating every fellow deity they could find. Propelled by their powerful abilities and driven by boundless ambition, over the centuries they built a gigantic empire covering more than four fifths of the planet’s surface and reduced all the other gods and goddesses (except four) to the status of vassals, serving either as regional governors or as members of the imperial court. Thandra of the Implacable Storm, sat on the golden throne of this theocratic-- but less oppressive than one would be led to believe-- state while her partner and only friend, Zumbado of the Eternal Forge, was content with roaming the Earth, spending his days either nipping rebellions in the bud or creating unique, almost otherworldly artifacts with the help of his ability.

2. That special somebody. However, even a position of unquestionable supremacy and eternal youth amid luxury and splendor can lose their appeal in the long term. Or at least, Thandra eventually came to think so. Looking to re-experience the excitement of her first few centuries as a goddess and a conqueror, she set her eyes on somebody who thought would make a worthy opponent: Sentle, a former sorghum farmer from Southern Africa turned god of the life force residing in every living being. He had taken part in a few battles against Thandra and Zumbado and in fact managed quite well in those apocalyptic clashes, but he had ultimately preferred exile to war, hiding somewhere in the scorching heart of the Kalahari Desert where, according to the scant information available to the goddess of lightning, he had assembled a community of worshippers. Leaving government duties to her court, she set out to find the elusive Sentle. If she hadn’t been back within one year, her orders were to sink the whole Kalahari into the ocean. We do not have many details about what happened in the months Thandra spent in southern Africa, but we know for sure that she indeed found the deity she had set out to find, got the battle she was looking for-- and lost. Quite humiliatingly, even. That she spent the following eleven months ‘prisoner’ of Sentle in his oasis city-temple. That they fell in love with each other and got married, celebrating-- or rather, declaring-- their union in front of his worshippers. And finally, that Thandra and her husband were back to her empire’s capital on the second-to-last day before the deadline she had set. She was with child.

3. End of a friendship. The deities of that Earth had tried for ages to start a second generation of their kin. Unfortunately, for some reason human eggs could not be fertilized by divine semen and human semen could not fertilize divine eggs. Also, every time a goddess had tried getting pregnant with her divine lover’s child, the endeavor had ended in a painful miscarriage. With time, the deities had given up on the idea, some of them rationalizing the loss of the ability to have children as a direct consequence of their presumed immortality. Who needs heirs if you’re never leaving the land of the living, after all? Now, the sight of Thandra’s abdomen shattered many a conviction among her fellow deities. Unfortunately for the happy couple, there was one god who didn’t like the way his queen had returned from the desert at all: Zumbado. From what info we can gather, he did not act the way he did out of envy for Sentle. Thandra had had thousands of lovers, both human and divine and of both sexes, over the centuries and it had never been an issue for him. In fact, early into their partnership, he had apparently turned down the goddess of lightning’s proposal to turn their alliance into marriage. It’s safe to say that Zumbado had no unrequited romantic feelings for his queen-- but that doesn’t mean he could not feel like his world had shattered when he saw her walking arm in arm with her newly-married husband along the main street of the capital. Thandra was his only friend, his confidant, the only one in that world’s pantheon he put at his own level. And now a puny god with no stomach for battle from a land not even worth conquering had dragged her down to his level. He was not going to hurt Thandra’s unborn child, the first second-generation deity in the history of the world-- but he would act so that everybody knew that he was the only one left at the top of the pantheon.

4. Rescued. Thandra and Sentle’s daughter was just one hour old when Zumbado and three other deities who accepted to be his accomplices out of loyalty to him over their queen acted. The battle was a grandiose, devastating affair, which reduced the whole Forbidden City-- the sprawling complex of 29 interconnected palaces where Thandra held court-- to a pile of rubble. The question “can a god die?” was finally answered when Zumbado gave the finishing blow to his old friend Thandra. As for Sentle, he left him to his acolytes to be torn apart. All four winners had received grievous wounds, but none of them ultimately proved to be fatal. Now that he had achieved his first goal, the new master of the world turned his attention to Thandra’s daughter. He would have personally raised her to adulthood, nurturing the part of her that came from her mother and helping her suppressing the weaknesses inherited from her father. Luckily for the baby, one deity had managed to precede him. Akira, the Breaker of Boundaries, had been a fierce opponent to Thandra’s faction at the time of wars between the gods. Her ability to cancel the distance between any two points made her a formidable threat in any battle and when the queen of the world finally managed to win her submission, many expected a rebellion to be a matter of ‘when’, rather than ‘if’. Instead, Akira had proved to be both very loyal and an extremely capable administrator, qualities which had earned her the governorship over a huge chunk of South Asia. In addition, she even joined the cohort of her queen’s lovers as a submissive partner, accepting to undergo humiliating treatments at the hands of her dominatrix for the latter’s amusement (and her own bliss). The bond between the two goddesses was incredibly deep and, when news of Zumbado’s coup reached her abode via the communication network that kept all deities connected, she immediately left for the capital. Regrettably, she was too late for her beloved Thandra and her husband. But she wasn’t too late for their baby daughter.

5. Her new home. Thanks to her powers, Akira managed to be always one step ahead of Zumbado’s forces for a few days. Unfortunately, the presence of a newborn child seriously limited the number of places where she could hide and in any case a life on the run was a cruelty she didn’t wish to inflict on Thandra’s daughter. However, she had an exit strategy. Centuries of testing the limits of her divine ability had brought her to discover that she couldn’t just cancel the distance between two places, but also the invisible walls that are the vibrational barriers between parallel universes (although she didn’t quite grasp the theory behind the latter). One of those mysterious ‘other worlds’, so similar and yet so different from the one she knew, would have been the perfect place for her and the baby to call home, way out of Zumbado’s reach. Regrettably, opening gates to different universes was not as quick a process as teleporting and in a remote cove on the western coast of North America, while the goddess was focusing all of her energies on the creation of the portal, she, her acolytes and the baby were attacked by the forces of the new king of the world. The battle was going poorly for Akira’s forces, but they still managed to buy her enough time to complete the ritual and open the portal to another Earth. Our Earth, to be precise. She dashed towards it with the baby in her arms, but her feet had barely touched the ground on this side of the gate (the football field of the Port Oswego High School) when she noticed that Zumbado was hot on her heels and would have crossed the portal before it could shut. So, in the blink of an eye, she set the baby girl down on the ground, turned around, threw herself at her enemy and teleported with him in tow as far from that cove as she could think of. One second later the gate disappeared. Thandra and Sentle’s daughter was safe. Two aliens, a Rannian and a Thanagarian, who happened to live in secrecy in Port Oswego (OR) and had reached the football field after their respective surveillance devices had detected the incoming trans-universal connection, had seen Akira’s noble sacrifice and picked up the crying baby. The former and his human wife adopted her and gave her the name Naomi.

METAHUMAN POWERS

- The most powerful photokinetic known to the scientific community. She can bend, manipulate and solidify all wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation in the 315nm – 1.2μm (i.e. ‘soft’ ultraviolet or UV-A, visible spectrum and ‘near’ infrared or IR-A);

- Possibly immortal and blessed with eternal youth, like the ‘deities’ from her native universe;

- Level-5 healing factor in the Kirk-St. Laurent scale;

- Improved metabolism which lets her extract 65-70% more energy from the food and drinks she consumes than an average human being, preserves all the muscle mass she acquires even during long periods of little physical exercise and prevents her from accumulating too much white adipose tissue no matter her training regime.

Ms. McDuffie is not classified as a metahuman, or even as part of the larger post-human set, despite her abilities having a genetic origin. This is due to the sheer number of genetic material involved in the manifestation of her powers. Normally, metahuman peculiarities start being manifested after the activation of 1 or more sequences in their genome previously hidden amid their non-coding DNA, the highest number of such sequences ever recorded being 127 (q.v. JLA Dossier ECE - 305841 RXS). Naomi’s genome, on the other hand, has double the amount of recognized protein-coding genes of a human being, nearly 94,000. Despite her appearances, Ms. McDuffie-- and probably all the other ‘deities’ in her native parallel Earth-- is for all intents and purposes part of a species completely distinct from homo sapiens.

OTHER SKILLS

- Blast power, either spread out as a ‘rain’ of laser beams to cover a wide area or concentrated in a single destructive impulse (maximum released energy: 12 gigaJoules, or ~3kt in TNT equivalent);

- Holographic and solid light projection. She perfected such techniques under the guidance of Green Lantern Kyle Rayner in mid-2002. Unlike Corps members, she can create invisible hard-light constructs and protective shields by manipulating wavelengths outside of the visible spectrum;

- Flight (maximum recorded speed: Mach 3.7);

- Psyonic connection with her costume, tailored from intelligent materials, which assists the owner with maintaining an invisible, nigh-indestructible protective shield around her body at all times, so that she’s not required to focus on keeping it up with her photokinesis after consciously forming it;

- Highly developed spatial intelligence, which helped her devise her flight technique (photokinetic manipulation of the radiation field, visible or infrared, which surrounds her body at all times) and crafting her unique superhero costume. In general, she possesses top-notch mental imagery and artistic skills;

- As a martial artist, she's specialized in the following disciplines: (1) Bōjutsu [teachers: Terry Thielman, Timothy Drake] and (2) Karate [teachers: Dinah Lance, Stephanie Brown].

LIMITATIONS

- Her style of leadership is questionable at best. Her single-minded insistence on leading by example and from the front, even when head-on confrontations were not the recommended course of action, often left her fellow Titans exposed to huge hazards which could have been easily avoided. It’s almost a miracle that the team never had any casualties on mission during her tenure as leader;

- Before the recent developments in her career which brought her to 96 Gorfinkel Street, she was completely clueless in the field of hand-to-hand combat. Used to approach physical confrontations by relying on her incredibly powerful abilities, the idea of studying martial arts had never even crossed her mind. To make up for lost time, during her time at the Mirai dojo she trained both under her teachers and with a pair of tutors chosen among her ‘classmates’;

- Her meteoric rise through the ‘ranks’ of the US superhero community made her develop a form of mental alienation which went unrecognized until it resulted in a nervous breakdown after a prolonged period characterized by high levels of psychological stress and frustration with her teammates in the Titans. While pharmaceutical aid and counseling helped her get out of that very difficult period, as of her last sighting by Earth denizens she was still considered at risk for similar episodes.

SEXUALITY

She’s used to saying that the perfect partner for her would be “somebody who can light my day up just by being there” without any mention to that person’s gender, implying that she’s open to same-sex relationships. However, her record in romantic relationships-- all of her former significant others were male-- raises a presumption that her interests lie exclusively in the opposite sex.

·       Andres Sloan was her first boyfriend, back in Port Oswego. When they got together, she was 15, one year younger than him. They formed a pretty happy couple, but circumstances pulled them apart when his father found a much better job prospect in San Mateo, bringing all of his family with him to California. Their relationship being less than one year old, after trying to keep it alive as a long-distance one for a couple of weeks, they eventually agreed to part ways. When Naomi moved to San Francisco to join the Titans, she got back in touch with Andres, who in the meantime had found a new fiancée. She was surprised by her own maturity when she felt genuine happiness for her ex-boyfriend and his new partner;

·       Isaiah Crockett, a.k.a. Hotspot, and Naomi looked like a match made in heaven at the time, especially to the magazines and websites dedicated to superhuman gossip, which now had a ‘power couple’ (bonus points for both of them being persons of color) to latch onto and put under a microscope. Of course neither Ms. McDuffie nor Mr. Crockett had intended getting together as a publicity stunt-- they just happened to like each other and wanted to see what happened if they took their mutual attraction to another level. Unfortunately, within five months their relationship had soured to the point that they felt they couldn’t go one day without having an argument. Naomi owed a lot to Isaiah, who had taken her under his wing on the day she had joined the Titans and offered her a lot of moral support during her first weeks as Chairwoman. But the stress of leadership was having an effect on Ms. McDuffie’s character. Mr. Crockett on one hand couldn’t recognize the woman he had fallen in love with anymore and on the other feared for the safety of all the Titans, himself included, under Lightbringer’s maladroit leadership. When she wrote their relationship off, putting an end to them being miserable together, he took an even more drastic decision and quit the team altogether, ending an association which had lasted more than 2 years;

·       Timothy Drake, a.k.a. Robin, was the right person at the wrong time and in the wrong place to fall in love with. Getting to know him better during her rehabilitation made Ms. McDuffie familiar with Mr. Drake’s often overlooked charisma, absolute candor and steely resolve. Love was a natural development, though for a time she had to keep it secret. Not only the Birds of Prey’s first student was already in a very solid relationship with Stephanie Brown, but Naomi feared that if her secret passion ever became known she would have been accepted no more by the population of 96 Gorfinkel Street. It was such a closely-guarded secret that she decided to shout it to the world only when she and Tim literally had their head on the chopping block and she didn’t want to die without being completely honest to him once. Since neither of them actually died, Naomi was ready to pack her things and leave forever, but Tim himself stopped her. He had some experience with love stories which were not meant to be and because of that he couldn’t let her leave and inflict further suffering upon herself. Indeed, when she actually left, at the time she chose to stay in outer space and join L.E.G.I.O.N., it was because she felt ready embark on the greatest adventure of her life rather than to hide her shame. From her point of view, Tim was the one to thank for that.

Due to the distances involved, we currently know nothing about any further developments in her romantic life.
When it comes to her sexual habits, Naomi is pretty ‘vanilla’, to borrow a common expression. She has never exhibited any particular fetishistic behaviors, even during her time living at 96 Gorfinkel Street, a place where every denizen is pretty comfortable with other people’s kinks and their own. The really noteworthy aspects of her sexuality are her incredible sex drive and endurance. To put it simply, she can go for several hours before feeling the first symptoms of fatigue. Also, if she avoids long pauses during intercourse her orgasms become more and more powerful over time and she’s quite keen on savoring those extreme sensations. Her former boyfriend Hotspot was very clear about the fact that lovemaking with Naomi is “one of the most draining experiences a man can undergo […] like keeping up with a sewing machine”. As she found out in her native dimension, her exceptional libido is actually the norm among the ‘deities’ of her native Earth, which may imply that it’s a product of their unique genome.

SPIRITUALITY

She received little religious guidance from her adoptive parents. Her mother is a lapsed Catholic with little interest in spiritual matters. Her father is a Rannian, a member of a species that, despite bearing a striking resemblance to humans and producing philosophers and ethics scholars for millennia like humans, see religious faith as something distinctly ‘alien’. Having spent the first 17 years of her life in a world where super-powered beings developing a god complex is usually seen as a major hazard for humanity, she finds the idea of being worshipped as a goddess-- like she would undoubtedly be if she still lived in her home universe-- simply ludicrous. She generally tends to give little attention to spiritual matters but, if pressed for a concise answer, she identifies as an atheist. She met enough deities-- including a huge chunk of the Ancient Egyptian pantheon, who mostly wanted to see her head separated from her neck-- to know that one shouldn’t depend on them for anything important.

KEY MOMENTS

- Her 17th birthday, for sure. On that fateful April 7th, 2001 Naomi McDuffie found out that Dee, the mechanic of her hometown of Port Oswego, was a deserter from the Thanagarian Army who had been living undercover on Earth for 20 years. Then that her own adoptive father was also an alien, a veteran of the Rannian Defense Forces who went back a long way with Dee. That she was also not from this Earth and the mysterious circumstances of her arrival. That she had superpowers, which promptly manifested for the first time. And finally that her peers from another universe had never stopped looking for her. The activation of her abilities acted as a beacon for Zumbado and his followers, who, using trans-dimensional sensors which combined technology with the supernatural, had been waiting for that precise day for 17 years. The portal between our universe and Naomi’s native one was re-opened and a crowd of deities and human beings, led by Zumbado’s most faithful acolytes, introduced themselves to the daughter of Thandra. They all bowed down to an utterly bewildered Naomi, paid tribute to her, gave her a reworked version of the story of the first few days after her birth and invited her to follow them back through the portal so that she could visit the world of her peers. And Naomi, who had developed a minor case of ‘Superman Complex’ growing up as an adopted child in a small American town, leaped at that chance to find out more about what made her special as soon as she got the McDuffies’ blessing;

- The period between her return from her native universe and her being inducted in the Titans was marked by two important encounters. Firstly, with none other than the Man of Steel himself, who intercepted her while she was flying Metropolis to get some scientific answers to her questions about her supposed ‘divine nature’. Superman and Naomi’s personalities went together like bread and butter and the two of them developed an inter-generational friendship in a matter of days. Rather than a few days, her stay in Metropolis lasted a whole 3 weeks. She and the Man of Tomorrow lived under the same roof and, whenever she wasn’t busy with researchers who wanted her to undergo some new test, she spent her time learning from him the basic rules of being a superhero, even accompanying him during his patrols. The girl with a Superman Complex had met the person she looked up to the most and, rather than being left disappointed like it usually happens, found the resolve to become like him. Superman, on his part, would often act as Naomi’s sponsor in the superhero community, seeing immense potential in her. Secondly, with an eccentric Los Angeles-based nightclub owner who hides his secret identity by openly declaring it to everybody. Naomi had left from Metropolis following reports that metahuman crime was dramatically on the rise in the City of Angels and inferring that it was the perfect place for a rookie like herself to cut her teeth. She couldn’t guess that her first team-up as a debuting vigilante would not be with a fellow young hero, but rather with the First of the Fallen, Lucifer Morningstar. He might have held no interest in professional crime-fighting, but he and Naomi serendipitously ended up on the same side against the Mictlan’s Witnesses, a sect of dangerous fanatics who was getting busy with some arcane rituals neither Lucifer nor Naomi liked one bit. While they couldn’t be called friends, Mr. Mornigstar took a liking to Ms. McDuffie youthful enthusiasm and worked with her a couple more times before the Titans, impressed by her deeds in Los Angeles, invited her to join the team in San Francisco. He was also the one who encouraged her to adopt ‘Lightbringer’, the epithet the common people of her parallel Earth had bestowed on her, as her hero name. He was reportedly amused by the idea of there being a second ‘Lucifer’ with good publicity fighting evil and defending truth and justice;

- On June 11th, 2002, just moments before the beginning of a joint training session organized by the Titans and the Gotham Knights after their most recent team-up, Ms. McDuffie suffered a severe nervous breakdown. Her very short solo career as a vigilante and equally short time as a member of her team had left her psychologically unprepared for life as the leader of the premiere young superhero team in the US, with all the duties, responsibilities, external pressures and media exposition such a position entails. Months of accumulated stress had made her a time bomb, which fortunately deflagrated without anyone getting hurt, thanks to the swift intervention of her teammate Rose Wilson, a.k.a. Ravager, and Gotham Knights Gabriel Thompson-Everett, a.k.a. Amazing Man III, and Cassandra Thielman, a.k.a. Batgirl. Discharged from the Titans, she spent most of the following summer months in a psychiatric structure in Eastern Kentucky, the Cumberland Mental Health Hospital, one of the most advanced institutions in the field of treating metahumans with psychiatric issues. Once her behavioral issues were no more a cause of concern, she was promptly released. However, she was supposed to undergo a long rehabilitation process in the presence of other members of the hero community and her powers would stay inhibited by the micro-devices which had been grafted to her brain stem at the time of her commitment. Superman himself, who had never stopped speaking out in favor of her while she was institutionalized and was a frequent visitor of hers, had offered to assist with her rehabilitation, but Naomi politely declined. She had witnessed the terrific esprit de corps of the Gotham Knights during their numerous joint operations with the Titans and wanted to be part of that reality. At the very least, they sure had known how to handle her at her worst. Tim Drake, who personally went to her hospital to discuss this matter face to face with her, accepted.

OUTSTANDING FEATS

- Defeating Elsa the Shadow-Binder in her first battle with a super-powered individual. For an entire month Zumbado’s #1 acolyte and Naomi had been almost joined at the hip and the latter had come to see her as a true friend. When she found out the truth about the killer of her parents, though, the older woman also showed her true colors. Unfortunately for Elsa, she had been a little too generous with her advice while Ms. McDuffie was still in the process of mastering her powers and the17-year-old girl turned out to be a formidable opponent. The Battle of Light and Shadow ended with Naomi coming out on top and, despite having long-term negative implications since it brought her to rely on brute strength rather than developing strategies more complex than charging headfirst into her problem, it was still an unpredictable outcome against a fighter with 23 centuries of combat experience;

- She played a pivotal role in uplifting the Casteless masses of the Kingdom of Affoia, who for uncounted millennia had had to live under the threat of being sold into a lifetime of slavery as substitutive punishment for even minor crimes. Her majestic speech in front of the Grand Consistory-- the parliamentary body of the Kingdom, the polity covering most of Atalu—finally convinced the body to extend the protections offered by the Declaration of Inalienable Liberties to the Casteless population of the realm. It was something she felt she had to do (or maybe she was even fated to do) after she and Tim had both undergone that traumatic experience of being taken as slaves two years before (local time), after the tragic events at Bonfire Island which had separated the Gotham Knights for a long time. Tim would have been right at her side if he hadn’t been still recovering after being seriously wounded during a recent battle against brigands, so Ms. McDuffie had to face alone a multitude of people who hadn't gained their seats in the Consistory Hall because they were easily influenced by soppy tales of deprivation and victimhood. Nevertheless, driven by the self-confidence of the orators (many of them being allies of the Casteless, not Casteless themselves) who had taken the floor before her to expound the evils of the system, Naomi succeeded and her vivid, detailed account of her arrest, sham trial and time as a slave captured the audience. The fact that an actual noblewoman-- the same who had bought Naomi and Timothy at the slave market-- had guaranteed for the truthfulness of the young woman's words sealed the deal. Without stumbling even once or ever feeling intimidated by either the task she had been assigned or the people listening to her, Naomi was the best speaker that the assembled clan chiefs who were looking for freeing their people from the fear of arbitrary enslavement could hope for. With 1366 Ayes, an absolute majority of the 3700-member Grand Consistory, history was made in the Kingdom of Affoia and all of Atalu;

- She saved the lives of the 4.5 million colonists, plus those of four of her teammates (Tim, Stephanie, Thomas and Cassandra) and her own on the ninth moon of Enteron VI, as the final act of the Gotham Knights adventure in space. The five Earth heroes had intervened in the terrible space battle taking place in the orbit of the habitable satellite between a flotilla of Citadellian Starcruisers, the Defense Forces of the Enteron Hegemony and the single (but heavily-armed) L.E.G.I.O.N. ship which had found herself caught in the middle but their attempt to infiltrate the Citadellian flagship had been unsuccessful and all five had been captured by the enemy. Their objective was to reach the mysterious Diviner (q.v. JLA Dossier MHO - 006418 FFS), an entity which the local populace worshipped as a sort of capricious deity, capable of dispensing both blessings and curses in equal measure, in the underground cave complex it dwelled in and to steal it. The Diviner was actually an ancient Intelligent Colorbomb, which had been left behind by the Garamant Horde at the time of their passage in the Milky Way (ca. 270,000 years ago) and had found a new home on Enteron VI’s ninth moon, which at the time was still uninhabited. Devoid of a purpose, it had ‘lived’ as a hermit for the following millennia and its ‘blessings’ and ‘curses’ were actually just side-effects of the field of chaotic energy formed by the otherworldly energy source at its core. One thing Robin knew for certain, though: that energy field could short-circuit any electronic device, no matter how shielded it was. With the colonists refusing to be cooperative until all hope of victory against the invaders was lost, the leader of the Knights offered to bring a squad of Citadellians to the cave of the Diviner, which he had already visited-- provided that all of his teammates came with them, since he didn’t want to leave them in the middle of a space battle. Once the energy field fried her power inhibitors and she was back in control of her abilities, she was left with the task of coming up with the rest of the plan and by all means she delivered. Her arms and torso were still restrained when she departed the small company of humans and aliens looking quizzically at the nebula of indefinable color surrounding the Diviner and started walking on the waters of the bottomless lake 80 feet under it. Then her restraints dissolved in a flash of light and she started ascending to the mysterious entity. There, she entered in contact with the intelligent weapon and convinced it to detonate-- something she accomplished with remarkably little difficulty. Its destructive potential was released in the guise of its unfathomable color which, even if it defied objective observation, was still colored light and therefore she could control it. Citadellian culture doesn’t really put a stigma on superstition. Thus we can only imagine what went through the minds of the bulky aliens when they not only realized that the explosion hadn’t killed her, but also saw Naomi descending from the place formerly occupied by the Diviner, now suddenly clad in her superhero costume, her eyes lit by that otherworldly radiation and surrounded by an invisible shield which kept even the tall waves raised by the fall of chunks of the stone ceiling into the lake away from her form. The battle in the skies was over in a matter of minutes and the Citadellians left the system as quickly as they came. Naomi’s intervention was the most providential thing which could happen, since in the few seconds their mental contact had lasted the Colorbomb’s AI had warned her that any attempt at dislodging it from the cave would have caused its immediate detonation.

FUN FACTS

- She’s a pretty decent clarinet player, though she has never pretended to be anything more than a hobbyist. She chose this instrument because of her adoptive father, who’s a great fan of jazz and in particular of the great clarinetists from the first half of the past century. She remembers that at age 8, when she started practicing, she even promised Mr. McDuffie that she would become as good as Johnny Dodds or Artie Shaw, his personal favorites. During her mid-teen years she started skipping her daily practice more and more-- she was completely self-taught, having never found a teacher in small Port Oswego-- and effectively gave up on it after her 17th birthday and everything that followed. She picked up her instrument again only after her institutionalization-- though only under at least two orderlies’ supervision-- when her parents managed to persuade the hospital authorities that the familiar object might have helped her mind’s healing process. She once told her teammate Thomas Drake, who somewhat regrets having never learnt how to play a musical instrument, that her life might have taken a different path if she had never thought she had outgrown her clarinet;

- She crafted her superhero costume with special materials provided by Zumbado himself, who had personally designed them so that they had “one foot in physical reality, the other in thoughtspace”. The costume exists only in Naomi’s mind until she summons it in our reality. She accomplishes that by focusing on a complex 3D mental image she specifically chose to act as the ‘trigger’. The costume then becomes a physical entity, clothing her body, until she needs to get out of it and focuses on a different mental image to trigger the inverse process. On one hand it’s a very convenient system since she doesn’t need to store her superhero attire in a physical place when she’s not wearing it and can put it on in the blink of an eye. On the other, she unfortunately has to strip naked before she can summon it, which can be the hardest step in the changing process depending on where she is. In cases of extreme necessity, she can just disintegrate her clothing using her photokinesis, a technique which conveniently generates a blinding flare that hides her form from prying eyes for the split second she needs to summon her costume. She prefers not to resort to it however since it destroys part of her wardrobe at every use;

- Her superhero outfit notably lacks footwear with the exception of a pair of fabric stirrups. It was purposefully designed that way by Naomi after she noticed that a large majority of her fellow ‘deities’ went barefoot at all times. Even Thandra, her biological mother, was never depicted wearing anything on her feet anywhere in the copious amount of artwork she had been immortalized in (the same thing was true for Sentle, her biological father, but Zumbado had made sure to destroy any trace of his existence in the previous 17 years). Once Naomi came back to her adoptive Earth, she thought about adding a pair of boots or something to her outfit, but she had to give up on that intent since there’s no known material in our universe which can replicate the properties of Zumbado’s creations and even the top scientists in Metropolis were unable to craft something with the same psyonic properties. Then again, since she can protect her whole body with invisible photonic shields, rough terrains are not a hazard for the skin of her soles;

- She didn’t make many friends during her days as a Titan, either because her teammates treated her like a superstar or a prodigy (Luke O’Brian, a.k.a. Offspring, and Celine Patterson, a.k.a. Skitter, were pretty blatant in their blind devotion to the newest superstar in the world of young vigilantes) or due to incompatibility of character (that was true especially for Rose Wilson). She grew very close very soon with Isaiah Crockett, but both of them were perfectly aware from day one that the other person wasn’t just interested in striking up a friendship. The one Titan Naomi regarded as a true friend was Eddie Bloomberg, a.k.a. Kid Devil. Her ‘partner’ in Los Angeles, Lucifer Morningstar, had put in a good word for him. It had been one of his subjects in Hell who had turned him into the demonic-looking entity he had become, after all, and in a very hands-off way he kind of cared for his welfare. Even without that, Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. McDuffie quickly found out that they worked really well together, starting at the time of Titans’ involvement in the hostage situation at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, where Lightbringer and Kid Devil played a crucial role. She trusted him so much that she made him her deputy after her election to the leadership of the group and he proved to be a voice of reason every time her plans got too ambitious if not downright reckless, let alone a great emotional crutch when she started second-guessing her position after breaking up with Hotspot-- she even briefly considered throwing herself into his arms, but she knew he had eyes only for their teammate Ravager. If she hadn’t given him that opportunity to be so close to the leadership of the Titans, it’s unlikely Mr. Bloomberg, after a short time as Acting Leader, would have been elected as her successor in early July 2002;

- She knows it’s a ridiculous assumption, but she cannot shake the feeling that she was cursed by the goddess Hut-hor (Hathor) at the time the Gotham Knights and a couple of local allies prevented a hostile takeover of Egypt by the ancient Egyptian pantheon. She was the one who, intrigued by Naomi’s desperate confession to Tim while their neck were on the chopping block, put the execution on standby so that Ms. McDuffie could better elaborate on her secret feelings for Mr. Drake (likely following her nature as goddess of love). Since that move ended up costing the cabal precious time and ultimately doomed their endeavor, Naomi suspects that Hut-hor, incapable of self-criticism like all deities, exacted revenge on the human girl for her shortcomings. Since that day, ‘suspicious’ events started happening with regularity-- events like Naomi falling tits-first on Tim’s face, the two of them having to go through 70 miles of forest on foot in late fall with only each other’s body as a source of heat during the cold nights or both of them ending up stark naked and in situations where finding clothes as soon as possible is not an option. The first prize though goes to the time when, during the trip to Atalu Naomi took part in, she and Timothy ended up being taken as slaves and sold to a filthy rich, young Countess named Priscilla Bariani. Since the latter had expressed her intention to keep Lightbringer as her personal handmaid and to send Robin to a distant and ill-famed plantation, a desperate Ms. McDuffie begged her mistress to keep Mr. Drake in the plantation right next to the Bariani mansion instead, since he was her husband. The two teenagers had to keep that act, which included being allowed 'night-time conjugal visits' once a week for 4 months-- without a doubt some of the most awkward moments in Ms McDuffie's life, considering that the Bariani Mansion was seemingly filled with women, including the noblewoman herself, who saw 'husband' and 'wife' having a healthy sex life as a matter of the first importance-- until a series of events brought their liberation as a reward for saving Countess Bariani’s life. To add insult to injury, before they parted ways Priscilla told them that she would have gladly given away everything she owned in exchange for the chance to experience something as beautiful and perfect as the feeling that tied Naomi and Tim together;

- She was genuinely concerned about following the Gotham Knights on their fourth trip to Atalu. She wasn’t afraid of the idea of leaving our universe-- she is a woman of two Earths, after all-- or the crazy adventures the Gotham Knights which usually awaited the Knights every time they paid a visit to that world of mystery and magic, but rather of the way aging works on that armillary world. As a side-effect of the magical energies permeating everything, after reaching puberty a person, whether native Atalese or mere visitor, starts getting older according to mental age rather than chronological age. People who had been hit by terrible tragedies had then literally withered away in a matter of days after spending millennia as vigorous adults. Hearing such accounts from her teammates, who had once or twice witnessed those terrible transformations first-hand during their previous three trips, made Ms. McDuffie fear that, regardless of her “divine blessings”, her youth would disappear as soon as she set foot on that world because her nervous breakdown had irreparably damaged her. Still, she didn’t want to back out because it was an opportunity to check how broken inside she actually was. One can only imagine her relief when, once the team had passed the portal, she saw no wrinkles or other signs of aging on the skin of her arms and hands. In a way, the team’s 5-year sojourn on Atalu-- the aforementioned crazy adventures did not fail to reach them-- helped Ms. McDuffie leave the last vestiges of her personal crisis behind;

- Accounts of the little show Ms. McDuffie had put on with the Citadellians in the Cave of the Diviner caught the attention of Vril Dox, the leader of L.E.G.I.O.N., who officially extended an offer to Naomi to join his organization, which is apparently perennially understaffed. Quite understandably, Lightbringer was hardly enthused at the prospect of leaving the Gotham Knights and the planet Earth to start working in an enterprise which the “scandalmongers”-- using Brainiac 2’s definition-- described as an interstellar mercenary company with good publicity. However, the return trip to Almerac, where the four Gotham Knights not involved in the crisis in the Enteron system were also facing some really huge troubles, on board of Dox’s ship gave her time to ponder on the offer and consulting with her friends. Her Gothamite friends and teachers knew that she had left that period of her life behind, but for the rest of the superhero community and the world at large, she would remain a demigoddess who once lost her mind. In space instead, surrounded by the infinite diversity of the wider inter-galactic civilization, where beings more powerful than her were a dime a dozen, she could find her own niche, see and learn things beyond her wildest dreams and test the full extent of her powers. Brainiac 2 was a dodgy individual to say the least, but she felt she was adult enough to be able to put up with him. At the moment of her final good-byes to her eight teammates, Naomi left them four pre-registered messages: one for her parents and all the childhood friends she left in Port Oswego, one for Superman, one for Kid Devil and one for the adults of 96 Gorfinkel Street, whom she regretted not being able to thank properly for everything they had done for her.

CONFIDENTIAL INFO

The cover-up of the real scope of Ms. McDuffie’s nervous breakdown was a clear breach of trust by the League towards the general public, but a necessary one. News that the immensely powerful leader of America’s #1 superhero team for young heroes had (1) developed an unhealthy obsession with the leader of the Gotham Knights, born from her insecurities about her performance as leader of the Titans and her repressed rage at the way everyone seemingly looked up to him whenever the two groups teamed up, (2) aggressively lashed out at him after the latest joint Titans/Knights mission where Naomi’s performance had definitely not stood out, challenging him to a duel to show who was the best, (3) come a hair’s breadth away from killing Robin in cold blood once his cunning had outdone Lightbringer’s powers and (4) been stopped from doing the unthinkable only because of the timely intervention of the members of the two teams would have done no favors to anybody. In particular, not to Ms. McDuffie’s superhero career, since the stigma of those events would have never gone away, and not to the man of the street, who has every reason to be terrorized by the prospect that members of the superhero community are ‘time bombs’ ready to explode and turn into menaces. For the same reason, rumors about her actual conditions at her psychiatric hospital-- aside from the power inhibitors grafted to her brain stem, she was kept isolated from all other patients and, throughout the summer months, kept under heavy medication and restrained for most of the time-- had to be suppressed at all costs lest somebody suspected that her nervous breakdown had not been the low-key affair depicted by the national media. On a more positive note, the Lightbringer Affair showed the deficiencies in the protocols for the handling of cases at risk in use at the time. The following investigations showed that Dr. David Choi, the Titans’ counselor, had correctly notified both the AFPAM and the JLA technical staff of Ms. McDuffie's stress-related psychological issues.

TEACHER REVIEW
(with suppressed powers)

Barbara Gordon (electronics and IT):

Dinah Lance (tactics and hand-to-hand combat):

Helena Bertinelli (discipline):

Jason Bard (detective work):

Ma Kai (psychological profiling):

Karen Kent (strategic approach to metahuman foes):

Ray Thielman (survival in hostile environments and armed combat):

Terry Thielman (infiltration and dissimulation):

Description

JLA DOSSIER

n. IVZ - 502065 DBK

CIVILIAN NAME

Naomi McDuffie

SUPERHERO IDENTITY

Lightbringer

PERSONAL AND PHYSICAL DATA

Born: 7 April 1984
Age: 19
Civilian profession: member of L.E.G.I.O.N.
Marital status: uncertain; single at the time of her last contact with Earth denizens
Birthplace: parallel Earth (standard classification: यख - 2111 - ऌ - 8339)
Height: 173 cm (5' 8")
Weight: 65 kg (143 lbs.)
Eye color: cognac brown
Hair color: dark brown
Measurements: 36E-25-36
Blood type: A-
Shoe size: 10.5 US female
Distinguishing features: an extra vertebra in the lumbar zone

STATUS IN THE METAHUMAN COMMUNITY

- Member of the Titans from June 2001 to June 2002;

- Chairwoman of the Titans from November 2001 to June 2002;

- Officially invited to join the Justice League of America on the day of her 18th birthday (invitation declined);

- Voted Most promising young heroine for the year 2002 by the subscribers of Medley magazine (results published on Medley n. 2, vol. XX);

- Member of the Gotham Knights from August 2002 to April 2003;

- Member of Licensed Extra-Governmental Interstellar Operatives Network (q.v. JLA Dossier n. ETY - 847897 LLU for more info about L.E.G.I.O.N.) since April 2003. Current whereabouts unknown since then;

- 14 honorable mentions in the JLA register of young vigilantes (1 motion on 6-19-2002 to have them removed, denied by majority vote).

ORIGIN

1. Iridescent Lights. 23 centuries before Ms. McDuffie’s birth, on a day which would go on to be celebrated on her version of Earth ever since as the Day of the Iridescent Lights, a mysterious energy, perhaps generated somewhere in outer space, permeated the planet’s atmosphere. For one minute the sky and the clouds all over the world, whether it was high noon or nighttime, turned into all the colors of the visible spectrum in a continuous medley of hues. Once it was over, humans were no more the masters of the world. Twenty-nine men and women, randomly distributed across the six inhabited continents, were changed by that event, transcending their human nature and gaining abilities which made them look like deities to their former peers. Immortal, eternally young and displaying awesome powers, the members of this new pantheon gradually came in contact with each other and, to the dismay of some of them, they found out that peaceful coexistence was not going to be an option. A beautiful, ambitious young woman, who had gone from being a harem slave in Carthage to being the mistress of lightning and storm, and a hulking, quick-tempered man, who had quit his blacksmith shop in the land of Punt now that he had a nuclear furnace in his digestive system, struck an unlikely alliance shortly after meeting each other and from that moment on tirelessly worked on defeating and subjugating every fellow deity they could find. Propelled by their powerful abilities and driven by boundless ambition, over the centuries they built a gigantic empire covering more than four fifths of the planet’s surface and reduced all the other gods and goddesses (except four) to the status of vassals, serving either as regional governors or as members of the imperial court. Thandra of the Implacable Storm, sat on the golden throne of this theocratic-- but less oppressive than one would be led to believe-- state while her partner and only friend, Zumbado of the Eternal Forge, was content with roaming the Earth, spending his days either nipping rebellions in the bud or creating unique, almost otherworldly artifacts with the help of his ability.

2. That special somebody. However, even a position of unquestionable supremacy and eternal youth amid luxury and splendor can lose their appeal in the long term. Or at least, Thandra eventually came to think so. Looking to re-experience the excitement of her first few centuries as a goddess and a conqueror, she set her eyes on somebody who thought would make a worthy opponent: Sentle, a former sorghum farmer from Southern Africa turned god of the life force residing in every living being. He had taken part in a few battles against Thandra and Zumbado and in fact managed quite well in those apocalyptic clashes, but he had ultimately preferred exile to war, hiding somewhere in the scorching heart of the Kalahari Desert where, according to the scant information available to the goddess of lightning, he had assembled a community of worshippers. Leaving government duties to her court, she set out to find the elusive Sentle. If she hadn’t been back within one year, her orders were to sink the whole Kalahari into the ocean. We do not have many details about what happened in the months Thandra spent in southern Africa, but we know for sure that she indeed found the deity she had set out to find, got the battle she was looking for-- and lost. Quite humiliatingly, even. That she spent the following eleven months ‘prisoner’ of Sentle in his oasis city-temple. That they fell in love with each other and got married, celebrating-- or rather, declaring-- their union in front of his worshippers. And finally, that Thandra and her husband were back to her empire’s capital on the second-to-last day before the deadline she had set. She was with child.

3. End of a friendship. The deities of that Earth had tried for ages to start a second generation of their kin. Unfortunately, for some reason human eggs could not be fertilized by divine semen and human semen could not fertilize divine eggs. Also, every time a goddess had tried getting pregnant with her divine lover’s child, the endeavor had ended in a painful miscarriage. With time, the deities had given up on the idea, some of them rationalizing the loss of the ability to have children as a direct consequence of their presumed immortality. Who needs heirs if you’re never leaving the land of the living, after all? Now, the sight of Thandra’s abdomen shattered many a conviction among her fellow deities. Unfortunately for the happy couple, there was one god who didn’t like the way his queen had returned from the desert at all: Zumbado. From what info we can gather, he did not act the way he did out of envy for Sentle. Thandra had had thousands of lovers, both human and divine and of both sexes, over the centuries and it had never been an issue for him. In fact, early into their partnership, he had apparently turned down the goddess of lightning’s proposal to turn their alliance into marriage. It’s safe to say that Zumbado had no unrequited romantic feelings for his queen-- but that doesn’t mean he could not feel like his world had shattered when he saw her walking arm in arm with her newly-married husband along the main street of the capital. Thandra was his only friend, his confidant, the only one in that world’s pantheon he put at his own level. And now a puny god with no stomach for battle from a land not even worth conquering had dragged her down to his level. He was not going to hurt Thandra’s unborn child, the first second-generation deity in the history of the world-- but he would act so that everybody knew that he was the only one left at the top of the pantheon.

4. Rescued. Thandra and Sentle’s daughter was just one hour old when Zumbado and three other deities who accepted to be his accomplices out of loyalty to him over their queen acted. The battle was a grandiose, devastating affair, which reduced the whole Forbidden City-- the sprawling complex of 29 interconnected palaces where Thandra held court-- to a pile of rubble. The question “can a god die?” was finally answered when Zumbado gave the finishing blow to his old friend Thandra. As for Sentle, he left him to his acolytes to be torn apart. All four winners had received grievous wounds, but none of them ultimately proved to be fatal. Now that he had achieved his first goal, the new master of the world turned his attention to Thandra’s daughter. He would have personally raised her to adulthood, nurturing the part of her that came from her mother and helping her suppressing the weaknesses inherited from her father. Luckily for the baby, one deity had managed to precede him. Akira, the Breaker of Boundaries, had been a fierce opponent to Thandra’s faction at the time of wars between the gods. Her ability to cancel the distance between any two points made her a formidable threat in any battle and when the queen of the world finally managed to win her submission, many expected a rebellion to be a matter of ‘when’, rather than ‘if’. Instead, Akira had proved to be both very loyal and an extremely capable administrator, qualities which had earned her the governorship over a huge chunk of South Asia. In addition, she even joined the cohort of her queen’s lovers as a submissive partner, accepting to undergo humiliating treatments at the hands of her dominatrix for the latter’s amusement (and her own bliss). The bond between the two goddesses was incredibly deep and, when news of Zumbado’s coup reached her abode via the communication network that kept all deities connected, she immediately left for the capital. Regrettably, she was too late for her beloved Thandra and her husband. But she wasn’t too late for their baby daughter.

5. Her new home. Thanks to her powers, Akira managed to be always one step ahead of Zumbado’s forces for a few days. Unfortunately, the presence of a newborn child seriously limited the number of places where she could hide and in any case a life on the run was a cruelty she didn’t wish to inflict on Thandra’s daughter. However, she had an exit strategy. Centuries of testing the limits of her divine ability had brought her to discover that she couldn’t just cancel the distance between two places, but also the invisible walls that are the vibrational barriers between parallel universes (although she didn’t quite grasp the theory behind the latter). One of those mysterious ‘other worlds’, so similar and yet so different from the one she knew, would have been the perfect place for her and the baby to call home, way out of Zumbado’s reach. Regrettably, opening gates to different universes was not as quick a process as teleporting and in a remote cove on the western coast of North America, while the goddess was focusing all of her energies on the creation of the portal, she, her acolytes and the baby were attacked by the forces of the new king of the world. The battle was going poorly for Akira’s forces, but they still managed to buy her enough time to complete the ritual and open the portal to another Earth. Our Earth, to be precise. She dashed towards it with the baby in her arms, but her feet had barely touched the ground on this side of the gate (the football field of the Port Oswego High School) when she noticed that Zumbado was hot on her heels and would have crossed the portal before it could shut. So, in the blink of an eye, she set the baby girl down on the ground, turned around, threw herself at her enemy and teleported with him in tow as far from that cove as she could think of. One second later the gate disappeared. Thandra and Sentle’s daughter was safe. Two aliens, a Rannian and a Thanagarian, who happened to live in secrecy in Port Oswego (OR) and had reached the football field after their respective surveillance devices had detected the incoming trans-universal connection, had seen Akira’s noble sacrifice and picked up the crying baby. The former and his human wife adopted her and gave her the name Naomi.

METAHUMAN POWERS

- The most powerful photokinetic known to the scientific community. She can bend, manipulate and solidify all wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation in the 315nm – 1.2μm (i.e. ‘soft’ ultraviolet or UV-A, visible spectrum and ‘near’ infrared or IR-A);

- Possibly immortal and blessed with eternal youth, like the ‘deities’ from her native universe;

- Level-5 healing factor in the Kirk-St. Laurent scale;

- Improved metabolism which lets her extract 65-70% more energy from the food and drinks she consumes than an average human being, preserves all the muscle mass she acquires even during long periods of little physical exercise and prevents her from accumulating too much white adipose tissue no matter her training regime.

Ms. McDuffie is not classified as a metahuman, or even as part of the larger post-human set, despite her abilities having a genetic origin. This is due to the sheer number of genetic material involved in the manifestation of her powers. Normally, metahuman peculiarities start being manifested after the activation of 1 or more sequences in their genome previously hidden amid their non-coding DNA, the highest number of such sequences ever recorded being 127 (q.v. JLA Dossier ECE - 305841 RXS). Naomi’s genome, on the other hand, has double the amount of recognized protein-coding genes of a human being, nearly 94,000. Despite her appearances, Ms. McDuffie-- and probably all the other ‘deities’ in her native parallel Earth-- is for all intents and purposes part of a species completely distinct from homo sapiens.

OTHER SKILLS

- Blast power, either spread out as a ‘rain’ of laser beams to cover a wide area or concentrated in a single destructive impulse (maximum released energy: 12 gigaJoules, or ~3kt in TNT equivalent);

- Holographic and solid light projection. She perfected such techniques under the guidance of Green Lantern Kyle Rayner in mid-2002. Unlike Corps members, she can create invisible hard-light constructs and protective shields by manipulating wavelengths outside of the visible spectrum;

- Flight (maximum recorded speed: Mach 3.7);

- Psyonic connection with her costume, tailored from intelligent materials, which assists the owner with maintaining an invisible, nigh-indestructible protective shield around her body at all times, so that she’s not required to focus on keeping it up with her photokinesis after consciously forming it;

- Highly developed spatial intelligence, which helped her devise her flight technique (photokinetic manipulation of the radiation field, visible or infrared, which surrounds her body at all times) and crafting her unique superhero costume. In general, she possesses top-notch mental imagery and artistic skills;

- As a martial artist, she's specialized in the following disciplines: (1) Bōjutsu [teachers: Terry Thielman, Timothy Drake] and (2) Karate [teachers: Dinah Lance, Stephanie Brown].

LIMITATIONS

- Her style of leadership is questionable at best. Her single-minded insistence on leading by example and from the front, even when head-on confrontations were not the recommended course of action, often left her fellow Titans exposed to huge hazards which could have been easily avoided. It’s almost a miracle that the team never had any casualties on mission during her tenure as leader;

- Before the recent developments in her career which brought her to 96 Gorfinkel Street, she was completely clueless in the field of hand-to-hand combat. Used to approach physical confrontations by relying on her incredibly powerful abilities, the idea of studying martial arts had never even crossed her mind. To make up for lost time, during her time at the Mirai dojo she trained both under her teachers and with a pair of tutors chosen among her ‘classmates’;

- Her meteoric rise through the ‘ranks’ of the US superhero community made her develop a form of mental alienation which went unrecognized until it resulted in a nervous breakdown after a prolonged period characterized by high levels of psychological stress and frustration with her teammates in the Titans. While pharmaceutical aid and counseling helped her get out of that very difficult period, as of her last sighting by Earth denizens she was still considered at risk for similar episodes.

SEXUALITY

She’s used to saying that the perfect partner for her would be “somebody who can light my day up just by being there” without any mention to that person’s gender, implying that she’s open to same-sex relationships. However, her record in romantic relationships-- all of her former significant others were male-- raises a presumption that her interests lie exclusively in the opposite sex.

·       Andres Sloan was her first boyfriend, back in Port Oswego. When they got together, she was 15, one year younger than him. They formed a pretty happy couple, but circumstances pulled them apart when his father found a much better job prospect in San Mateo, bringing all of his family with him to California. Their relationship being less than one year old, after trying to keep it alive as a long-distance one for a couple of weeks, they eventually agreed to part ways. When Naomi moved to San Francisco to join the Titans, she got back in touch with Andres, who in the meantime had found a new fiancée. She was surprised by her own maturity when she felt genuine happiness for her ex-boyfriend and his new partner;

·       Isaiah Crockett, a.k.a. Hotspot, and Naomi looked like a match made in heaven at the time, especially to the magazines and websites dedicated to superhuman gossip, which now had a ‘power couple’ (bonus points for both of them being persons of color) to latch onto and put under a microscope. Of course neither Ms. McDuffie nor Mr. Crockett had intended getting together as a publicity stunt-- they just happened to like each other and wanted to see what happened if they took their mutual attraction to another level. Unfortunately, within five months their relationship had soured to the point that they felt they couldn’t go one day without having an argument. Naomi owed a lot to Isaiah, who had taken her under his wing on the day she had joined the Titans and offered her a lot of moral support during her first weeks as Chairwoman. But the stress of leadership was having an effect on Ms. McDuffie’s character. Mr. Crockett on one hand couldn’t recognize the woman he had fallen in love with anymore and on the other feared for the safety of all the Titans, himself included, under Lightbringer’s maladroit leadership. When she wrote their relationship off, putting an end to them being miserable together, he took an even more drastic decision and quit the team altogether, ending an association which had lasted more than 2 years;

·       Timothy Drake, a.k.a. Robin, was the right person at the wrong time and in the wrong place to fall in love with. Getting to know him better during her rehabilitation made Ms. McDuffie familiar with Mr. Drake’s often overlooked charisma, absolute candor and steely resolve. Love was a natural development, though for a time she had to keep it secret. Not only the Birds of Prey’s first student was already in a very solid relationship with Stephanie Brown, but Naomi feared that if her secret passion ever became known she would have been accepted no more by the population of 96 Gorfinkel Street. It was such a closely-guarded secret that she decided to shout it to the world only when she and Tim literally had their head on the chopping block and she didn’t want to die without being completely honest to him once. Since neither of them actually died, Naomi was ready to pack her things and leave forever, but Tim himself stopped her. He had some experience with love stories which were not meant to be and because of that he couldn’t let her leave and inflict further suffering upon herself. Indeed, when she actually left, at the time she chose to stay in outer space and join L.E.G.I.O.N., it was because she felt ready embark on the greatest adventure of her life rather than to hide her shame. From her point of view, Tim was the one to thank for that.

Due to the distances involved, we currently know nothing about any further developments in her romantic life.
When it comes to her sexual habits, Naomi is pretty ‘vanilla’, to borrow a common expression. She has never exhibited any particular fetishistic behaviors, even during her time living at 96 Gorfinkel Street, a place where every denizen is pretty comfortable with other people’s kinks and their own. The really noteworthy aspects of her sexuality are her incredible sex drive and endurance. To put it simply, she can go for several hours before feeling the first symptoms of fatigue. Also, if she avoids long pauses during intercourse her orgasms become more and more powerful over time and she’s quite keen on savoring those extreme sensations. Her former boyfriend Hotspot was very clear about the fact that lovemaking with Naomi is “one of the most draining experiences a man can undergo […] like keeping up with a sewing machine”. As she found out in her native dimension, her exceptional libido is actually the norm among the ‘deities’ of her native Earth, which may imply that it’s a product of their unique genome.

SPIRITUALITY

She received little religious guidance from her adoptive parents. Her mother is a lapsed Catholic with little interest in spiritual matters. Her father is a Rannian, a member of a species that, despite bearing a striking resemblance to humans and producing philosophers and ethics scholars for millennia like humans, see religious faith as something distinctly ‘alien’. Having spent the first 17 years of her life in a world where super-powered beings developing a god complex is usually seen as a major hazard for humanity, she finds the idea of being worshipped as a goddess-- like she would undoubtedly be if she still lived in her home universe-- simply ludicrous. She generally tends to give little attention to spiritual matters but, if pressed for a concise answer, she identifies as an atheist. She met enough deities-- including a huge chunk of the Ancient Egyptian pantheon, who mostly wanted to see her head separated from her neck-- to know that one shouldn’t depend on them for anything important.

KEY MOMENTS

- Her 17th birthday, for sure. On that fateful April 7th, 2001 Naomi McDuffie found out that Dee, the mechanic of her hometown of Port Oswego, was a deserter from the Thanagarian Army who had been living undercover on Earth for 20 years. Then that her own adoptive father was also an alien, a veteran of the Rannian Defense Forces who went back a long way with Dee. That she was also not from this Earth and the mysterious circumstances of her arrival. That she had superpowers, which promptly manifested for the first time. And finally that her peers from another universe had never stopped looking for her. The activation of her abilities acted as a beacon for Zumbado and his followers, who, using trans-dimensional sensors which combined technology with the supernatural, had been waiting for that precise day for 17 years. The portal between our universe and Naomi’s native one was re-opened and a crowd of deities and human beings, led by Zumbado’s most faithful acolytes, introduced themselves to the daughter of Thandra. They all bowed down to an utterly bewildered Naomi, paid tribute to her, gave her a reworked version of the story of the first few days after her birth and invited her to follow them back through the portal so that she could visit the world of her peers. And Naomi, who had developed a minor case of ‘Superman Complex’ growing up as an adopted child in a small American town, leaped at that chance to find out more about what made her special as soon as she got the McDuffies’ blessing;

- The period between her return from her native universe and her being inducted in the Titans was marked by two important encounters. Firstly, with none other than the Man of Steel himself, who intercepted her while she was flying Metropolis to get some scientific answers to her questions about her supposed ‘divine nature’. Superman and Naomi’s personalities went together like bread and butter and the two of them developed an inter-generational friendship in a matter of days. Rather than a few days, her stay in Metropolis lasted a whole 3 weeks. She and the Man of Tomorrow lived under the same roof and, whenever she wasn’t busy with researchers who wanted her to undergo some new test, she spent her time learning from him the basic rules of being a superhero, even accompanying him during his patrols. The girl with a Superman Complex had met the person she looked up to the most and, rather than being left disappointed like it usually happens, found the resolve to become like him. Superman, on his part, would often act as Naomi’s sponsor in the superhero community, seeing immense potential in her. Secondly, with an eccentric Los Angeles-based nightclub owner who hides his secret identity by openly declaring it to everybody. Naomi had left from Metropolis following reports that metahuman crime was dramatically on the rise in the City of Angels and inferring that it was the perfect place for a rookie like herself to cut her teeth. She couldn’t guess that her first team-up as a debuting vigilante would not be with a fellow young hero, but rather with the First of the Fallen, Lucifer Morningstar. He might have held no interest in professional crime-fighting, but he and Naomi serendipitously ended up on the same side against the Mictlan’s Witnesses, a sect of dangerous fanatics who was getting busy with some arcane rituals neither Lucifer nor Naomi liked one bit. While they couldn’t be called friends, Mr. Mornigstar took a liking to Ms. McDuffie youthful enthusiasm and worked with her a couple more times before the Titans, impressed by her deeds in Los Angeles, invited her to join the team in San Francisco. He was also the one who encouraged her to adopt ‘Lightbringer’, the epithet the common people of her parallel Earth had bestowed on her, as her hero name. He was reportedly amused by the idea of there being a second ‘Lucifer’ with good publicity fighting evil and defending truth and justice;

- On June 11th, 2002, just moments before the beginning of a joint training session organized by the Titans and the Gotham Knights after their most recent team-up, Ms. McDuffie suffered a severe nervous breakdown. Her very short solo career as a vigilante and equally short time as a member of her team had left her psychologically unprepared for life as the leader of the premiere young superhero team in the US, with all the duties, responsibilities, external pressures and media exposition such a position entails. Months of accumulated stress had made her a time bomb, which fortunately deflagrated without anyone getting hurt, thanks to the swift intervention of her teammate Rose Wilson, a.k.a. Ravager, and Gotham Knights Gabriel Thompson-Everett, a.k.a. Amazing Man III, and Cassandra Thielman, a.k.a. Batgirl. Discharged from the Titans, she spent most of the following summer months in a psychiatric structure in Eastern Kentucky, the Cumberland Mental Health Hospital, one of the most advanced institutions in the field of treating metahumans with psychiatric issues. Once her behavioral issues were no more a cause of concern, she was promptly released. However, she was supposed to undergo a long rehabilitation process in the presence of other members of the hero community and her powers would stay inhibited by the micro-devices which had been grafted to her brain stem at the time of her commitment. Superman himself, who had never stopped speaking out in favor of her while she was institutionalized and was a frequent visitor of hers, had offered to assist with her rehabilitation, but Naomi politely declined. She had witnessed the terrific esprit de corps of the Gotham Knights during their numerous joint operations with the Titans and wanted to be part of that reality. At the very least, they sure had known how to handle her at her worst. Tim Drake, who personally went to her hospital to discuss this matter face to face with her, accepted.

OUTSTANDING FEATS

- Defeating Elsa the Shadow-Binder in her first battle with a super-powered individual. For an entire month Zumbado’s #1 acolyte and Naomi had been almost joined at the hip and the latter had come to see her as a true friend. When she found out the truth about the killer of her parents, though, the older woman also showed her true colors. Unfortunately for Elsa, she had been a little too generous with her advice while Ms. McDuffie was still in the process of mastering her powers and the17-year-old girl turned out to be a formidable opponent. The Battle of Light and Shadow ended with Naomi coming out on top and, despite having long-term negative implications since it brought her to rely on brute strength rather than developing strategies more complex than charging headfirst into her problem, it was still an unpredictable outcome against a fighter with 23 centuries of combat experience;

- She played a pivotal role in uplifting the Casteless masses of the Kingdom of Affoia, who for uncounted millennia had had to live under the threat of being sold into a lifetime of slavery as substitutive punishment for even minor crimes. Her majestic speech in front of the Grand Consistory-- the parliamentary body of the Kingdom, the polity covering most of Atalu—finally convinced the body to extend the protections offered by the Declaration of Inalienable Liberties to the Casteless population of the realm. It was something she felt she had to do (or maybe she was even fated to do) after she and Tim had both undergone that traumatic experience of being taken as slaves two years before (local time), after the tragic events at Bonfire Island which had separated the Gotham Knights for a long time. Tim would have been right at her side if he hadn’t been still recovering after being seriously wounded during a recent battle against brigands, so Ms. McDuffie had to face alone a multitude of people who hadn't gained their seats in the Consistory Hall because they were easily influenced by soppy tales of deprivation and victimhood. Nevertheless, driven by the self-confidence of the orators (many of them being allies of the Casteless, not Casteless themselves) who had taken the floor before her to expound the evils of the system, Naomi succeeded and her vivid, detailed account of her arrest, sham trial and time as a slave captured the audience. The fact that an actual noblewoman-- the same who had bought Naomi and Timothy at the slave market-- had guaranteed for the truthfulness of the young woman's words sealed the deal. Without stumbling even once or ever feeling intimidated by either the task she had been assigned or the people listening to her, Naomi was the best speaker that the assembled clan chiefs who were looking for freeing their people from the fear of arbitrary enslavement could hope for. With 1366 Ayes, an absolute majority of the 3700-member Grand Consistory, history was made in the Kingdom of Affoia and all of Atalu;

- She saved the lives of the 4.5 million colonists, plus those of four of her teammates (Tim, Stephanie, Thomas and Cassandra) and her own on the ninth moon of Enteron VI, as the final act of the Gotham Knights adventure in space. The five Earth heroes had intervened in the terrible space battle taking place in the orbit of the habitable satellite between a flotilla of Citadellian Starcruisers, the Defense Forces of the Enteron Hegemony and the single (but heavily-armed) L.E.G.I.O.N. ship which had found herself caught in the middle but their attempt to infiltrate the Citadellian flagship had been unsuccessful and all five had been captured by the enemy. Their objective was to reach the mysterious Diviner (q.v. JLA Dossier MHO - 006418 FFS), an entity which the local populace worshipped as a sort of capricious deity, capable of dispensing both blessings and curses in equal measure, in the underground cave complex it dwelled in and to steal it. The Diviner was actually an ancient Intelligent Colorbomb, which had been left behind by the Garamant Horde at the time of their passage in the Milky Way (ca. 270,000 years ago) and had found a new home on Enteron VI’s ninth moon, which at the time was still uninhabited. Devoid of a purpose, it had ‘lived’ as a hermit for the following millennia and its ‘blessings’ and ‘curses’ were actually just side-effects of the field of chaotic energy formed by the otherworldly energy source at its core. One thing Robin knew for certain, though: that energy field could short-circuit any electronic device, no matter how shielded it was. With the colonists refusing to be cooperative until all hope of victory against the invaders was lost, the leader of the Knights offered to bring a squad of Citadellians to the cave of the Diviner, which he had already visited-- provided that all of his teammates came with them, since he didn’t want to leave them in the middle of a space battle. Once the energy field fried her power inhibitors and she was back in control of her abilities, she was left with the task of coming up with the rest of the plan and by all means she delivered. Her arms and torso were still restrained when she departed the small company of humans and aliens looking quizzically at the nebula of indefinable color surrounding the Diviner and started walking on the waters of the bottomless lake 80 feet under it. Then her restraints dissolved in a flash of light and she started ascending to the mysterious entity. There, she entered in contact with the intelligent weapon and convinced it to detonate-- something she accomplished with remarkably little difficulty. Its destructive potential was released in the guise of its unfathomable color which, even if it defied objective observation, was still colored light and therefore she could control it. Citadellian culture doesn’t really put a stigma on superstition. Thus we can only imagine what went through the minds of the bulky aliens when they not only realized that the explosion hadn’t killed her, but also saw Naomi descending from the place formerly occupied by the Diviner, now suddenly clad in her superhero costume, her eyes lit by that otherworldly radiation and surrounded by an invisible shield which kept even the tall waves raised by the fall of chunks of the stone ceiling into the lake away from her form. The battle in the skies was over in a matter of minutes and the Citadellians left the system as quickly as they came. Naomi’s intervention was the most providential thing which could happen, since in the few seconds their mental contact had lasted the Colorbomb’s AI had warned her that any attempt at dislodging it from the cave would have caused its immediate detonation.

FUN FACTS

- She’s a pretty decent clarinet player, though she has never pretended to be anything more than a hobbyist. She chose this instrument because of her adoptive father, who’s a great fan of jazz and in particular of the great clarinetists from the first half of the past century. She remembers that at age 8, when she started practicing, she even promised Mr. McDuffie that she would become as good as Johnny Dodds or Artie Shaw, his personal favorites. During her mid-teen years she started skipping her daily practice more and more-- she was completely self-taught, having never found a teacher in small Port Oswego-- and effectively gave up on it after her 17th birthday and everything that followed. She picked up her instrument again only after her institutionalization-- though only under at least two orderlies’ supervision-- when her parents managed to persuade the hospital authorities that the familiar object might have helped her mind’s healing process. She once told her teammate Thomas Drake, who somewhat regrets having never learnt how to play a musical instrument, that her life might have taken a different path if she had never thought she had outgrown her clarinet;

- She crafted her superhero costume with special materials provided by Zumbado himself, who had personally designed them so that they had “one foot in physical reality, the other in thoughtspace”. The costume exists only in Naomi’s mind until she summons it in our reality. She accomplishes that by focusing on a complex 3D mental image she specifically chose to act as the ‘trigger’. The costume then becomes a physical entity, clothing her body, until she needs to get out of it and focuses on a different mental image to trigger the inverse process. On one hand it’s a very convenient system since she doesn’t need to store her superhero attire in a physical place when she’s not wearing it and can put it on in the blink of an eye. On the other, she unfortunately has to strip naked before she can summon it, which can be the hardest step in the changing process depending on where she is. In cases of extreme necessity, she can just disintegrate her clothing using her photokinesis, a technique which conveniently generates a blinding flare that hides her form from prying eyes for the split second she needs to summon her costume. She prefers not to resort to it however since it destroys part of her wardrobe at every use;

- Her superhero outfit notably lacks footwear with the exception of a pair of fabric stirrups. It was purposefully designed that way by Naomi after she noticed that a large majority of her fellow ‘deities’ went barefoot at all times. Even Thandra, her biological mother, was never depicted wearing anything on her feet anywhere in the copious amount of artwork she had been immortalized in (the same thing was true for Sentle, her biological father, but Zumbado had made sure to destroy any trace of his existence in the previous 17 years). Once Naomi came back to her adoptive Earth, she thought about adding a pair of boots or something to her outfit, but she had to give up on that intent since there’s no known material in our universe which can replicate the properties of Zumbado’s creations and even the top scientists in Metropolis were unable to craft something with the same psyonic properties. Then again, since she can protect her whole body with invisible photonic shields, rough terrains are not a hazard for the skin of her soles;

- She didn’t make many friends during her days as a Titan, either because her teammates treated her like a superstar or a prodigy (Luke O’Brian, a.k.a. Offspring, and Celine Patterson, a.k.a. Skitter, were pretty blatant in their blind devotion to the newest superstar in the world of young vigilantes) or due to incompatibility of character (that was true especially for Rose Wilson). She grew very close very soon with Isaiah Crockett, but both of them were perfectly aware from day one that the other person wasn’t just interested in striking up a friendship. The one Titan Naomi regarded as a true friend was Eddie Bloomberg, a.k.a. Kid Devil. Her ‘partner’ in Los Angeles, Lucifer Morningstar, had put in a good word for him. It had been one of his subjects in Hell who had turned him into the demonic-looking entity he had become, after all, and in a very hands-off way he kind of cared for his welfare. Even without that, Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. McDuffie quickly found out that they worked really well together, starting at the time of Titans’ involvement in the hostage situation at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, where Lightbringer and Kid Devil played a crucial role. She trusted him so much that she made him her deputy after her election to the leadership of the group and he proved to be a voice of reason every time her plans got too ambitious if not downright reckless, let alone a great emotional crutch when she started second-guessing her position after breaking up with Hotspot-- she even briefly considered throwing herself into his arms, but she knew he had eyes only for their teammate Ravager. If she hadn’t given him that opportunity to be so close to the leadership of the Titans, it’s unlikely Mr. Bloomberg, after a short time as Acting Leader, would have been elected as her successor in early July 2002;

- She knows it’s a ridiculous assumption, but she cannot shake the feeling that she was cursed by the goddess Hut-hor (Hathor) at the time the Gotham Knights and a couple of local allies prevented a hostile takeover of Egypt by the ancient Egyptian pantheon. She was the one who, intrigued by Naomi’s desperate confession to Tim while their neck were on the chopping block, put the execution on standby so that Ms. McDuffie could better elaborate on her secret feelings for Mr. Drake (likely following her nature as goddess of love). Since that move ended up costing the cabal precious time and ultimately doomed their endeavor, Naomi suspects that Hut-hor, incapable of self-criticism like all deities, exacted revenge on the human girl for her shortcomings. Since that day, ‘suspicious’ events started happening with regularity-- events like Naomi falling tits-first on Tim’s face, the two of them having to go through 70 miles of forest on foot in late fall with only each other’s body as a source of heat during the cold nights or both of them ending up stark naked and in situations where finding clothes as soon as possible is not an option. The first prize though goes to the time when, during the trip to Atalu Naomi took part in, she and Timothy ended up being taken as slaves and sold to a filthy rich, young Countess named Priscilla Bariani. Since the latter had expressed her intention to keep Lightbringer as her personal handmaid and to send Robin to a distant and ill-famed plantation, a desperate Ms. McDuffie begged her mistress to keep Mr. Drake in the plantation right next to the Bariani mansion instead, since he was her husband. The two teenagers had to keep that act, which included being allowed 'night-time conjugal visits' once a week for 4 months-- without a doubt some of the most awkward moments in Ms McDuffie's life, considering that the Bariani Mansion was seemingly filled with women, including the noblewoman herself, who saw 'husband' and 'wife' having a healthy sex life as a matter of the first importance-- until a series of events brought their liberation as a reward for saving Countess Bariani’s life. To add insult to injury, before they parted ways Priscilla told them that she would have gladly given away everything she owned in exchange for the chance to experience something as beautiful and perfect as the feeling that tied Naomi and Tim together;

- She was genuinely concerned about following the Gotham Knights on their fourth trip to Atalu. She wasn’t afraid of the idea of leaving our universe-- she is a woman of two Earths, after all-- or the crazy adventures the Gotham Knights which usually awaited the Knights every time they paid a visit to that world of mystery and magic, but rather of the way aging works on that armillary world. As a side-effect of the magical energies permeating everything, after reaching puberty a person, whether native Atalese or mere visitor, starts getting older according to mental age rather than chronological age. People who had been hit by terrible tragedies had then literally withered away in a matter of days after spending millennia as vigorous adults. Hearing such accounts from her teammates, who had once or twice witnessed those terrible transformations first-hand during their previous three trips, made Ms. McDuffie fear that, regardless of her “divine blessings”, her youth would disappear as soon as she set foot on that world because her nervous breakdown had irreparably damaged her. Still, she didn’t want to back out because it was an opportunity to check how broken inside she actually was. One can only imagine her relief when, once the team had passed the portal, she saw no wrinkles or other signs of aging on the skin of her arms and hands. In a way, the team’s 5-year sojourn on Atalu-- the aforementioned crazy adventures did not fail to reach them-- helped Ms. McDuffie leave the last vestiges of her personal crisis behind;

- Accounts of the little show Ms. McDuffie had put on with the Citadellians in the Cave of the Diviner caught the attention of Vril Dox, the leader of L.E.G.I.O.N., who officially extended an offer to Naomi to join his organization, which is apparently perennially understaffed. Quite understandably, Lightbringer was hardly enthused at the prospect of leaving the Gotham Knights and the planet Earth to start working in an enterprise which the “scandalmongers”-- using Brainiac 2’s definition-- described as an interstellar mercenary company with good publicity. However, the return trip to Almerac, where the four Gotham Knights not involved in the crisis in the Enteron system were also facing some really huge troubles, on board of Dox’s ship gave her time to ponder on the offer and consulting with her friends. Her Gothamite friends and teachers knew that she had left that period of her life behind, but for the rest of the superhero community and the world at large, she would remain a demigoddess who once lost her mind. In space instead, surrounded by the infinite diversity of the wider inter-galactic civilization, where beings more powerful than her were a dime a dozen, she could find her own niche, see and learn things beyond her wildest dreams and test the full extent of her powers. Brainiac 2 was a dodgy individual to say the least, but she felt she was adult enough to be able to put up with him. At the moment of her final good-byes to her eight teammates, Naomi left them four pre-registered messages: one for her parents and all the childhood friends she left in Port Oswego, one for Superman, one for Kid Devil and one for the adults of 96 Gorfinkel Street, whom she regretted not being able to thank properly for everything they had done for her.

CONFIDENTIAL INFO

The cover-up of the real scope of Ms. McDuffie’s nervous breakdown was a clear breach of trust by the League towards the general public, but a necessary one. News that the immensely powerful leader of America’s #1 superhero team for young heroes had (1) developed an unhealthy obsession with the leader of the Gotham Knights, born from her insecurities about her performance as leader of the Titans and her repressed rage at the way everyone seemingly looked up to him whenever the two groups teamed up, (2) aggressively lashed out at him after the latest joint Titans/Knights mission where Naomi’s performance had definitely not stood out, challenging him to a duel to show who was the best, (3) come a hair’s breadth away from killing Robin in cold blood once his cunning had outdone Lightbringer’s powers and (4) been stopped from doing the unthinkable only because of the timely intervention of the members of the two teams would have done no favors to anybody. In particular, not to Ms. McDuffie’s superhero career, since the stigma of those events would have never gone away, and not to the man of the street, who has every reason to be terrorized by the prospect that members of the superhero community are ‘time bombs’ ready to explode and turn into menaces. For the same reason, rumors about her actual conditions at her psychiatric hospital-- aside from the power inhibitors grafted to her brain stem, she was kept isolated from all other patients and, throughout the summer months, kept under heavy medication and restrained for most of the time-- had to be suppressed at all costs lest somebody suspected that her nervous breakdown had not been the low-key affair depicted by the national media. On a more positive note, the Lightbringer Affair showed the deficiencies in the protocols for the handling of cases at risk in use at the time. The following investigations showed that Dr. David Choi, the Titans’ counselor, had correctly notified both the AFPAM and the JLA technical staff of Ms. McDuffie's stress-related psychological issues.

TEACHER REVIEW
(with suppressed powers)

Barbara Gordon (electronics and IT):

Dinah Lance (tactics and hand-to-hand combat):

Helena Bertinelli (discipline):

Jason Bard (detective work):

Ma Kai (psychological profiling):

Karen Kent (strategic approach to metahuman foes):

Ray Thielman (survival in hostile environments and armed combat):

Terry Thielman (infiltration and dissimulation):