Ionara

Origin

Layla Haddad spent her twenties chasing storms across deserts with a battered pickup and a weather radar, trying to predict the dry lightning that starts wildfires. One night in the Sahara a storm turned without warning. She was reaching for a stranded tourist's hand when ball lightning rolled across the sand and went straight through her.

She woke at dawn with the tourist safe beside her, her instruments fried, and faint blue lines glowing under the skin of her hands. The lines did not fade. Over the following weeks she learned that she could hear the hum of every power line in a city, and that when she ran fast enough she stopped being a body at all and became a streak of light.

Powers

Ionara can convert herself into a beam of light and current and travel along any path, including wires. She moves faster than anything else in the Universe over short distances, but she has to return to her body to touch, lift or talk, and that takes a moment she cannot always afford.

She feels electricity the way other people feel heat. She can sense a failing pacemaker from across a room, feed a dying hospital generator from her own charge, or black out a block to stop a fire. Every use costs her stored energy, and when she runs dry she is just a tired woman with glowing hands.

Costume and look

Her suit is white and ion blue, with circuit-like veins that glow brighter the more charge she holds. There is no cape and no emblem, because she started as a scientist who hated anything that would catch in a storm. Her eyes glow softly when she is listening to the grid.

She carries a storm chaser's habits: she checks the sky before she checks her phone, and she still keeps a notebook of every lightning strike she has ever seen.

Her rule

Ionara's rule is the one she learned the night she changed: reach for the hand first, think about yourself second. It is the rule every hero in the Next Level Universe shares, because each of them leveled up at the moment they chose someone else over their own safety.

She is the leader of the group not because she is strongest but because she arrived first, and because she keeps the lights on. All of the Universe's heroes are original characters made for this brand; their art is drawn on our own computer and belongs to us.

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