Sundancer

<infobox> <title source="name"><default>Sundancer</default></title>

<image source="Image"></image> <image source="image"></image> <group><header>Basic Information</header> <label>Civilian Name</label> <label>Aliases</label> <label>Gender</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Death</label> <label>Age</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Post-timeskip</label> <label>Ward start</label> <label>Relations</label> <label>Family</label></group> <group><header>Professional Status</header> <label>Occupation</label> <label>Classification</label> <label>Unique Features</label> <label>Alignment</label>

<label>Status</label><format>

Alive

</format>

<label>Location</label> <label>Teams</label> <label>Previous Team(s)</label> <label>Base of Operations</label></group> <group><header>First Appearance</header> <label>Worm Debut</label> <label>Ward Debut</label></group> </infobox> Marissa "Mars" Newland, also known as Sundancer, is a member of the Travelers.

Personality

Marissa is a friendly girl that is shown to be at odds with Trickster's way of thinking, despite following his orders. She would prefer not to be involved with the Travelers and Coil, but it was her only hope of saving Noelle and returning to Earth Aleph.<ref name="Cast2">Sundancer, Marissa Newland (Returned home) – A young woman that has demonstrated the ability to create a miniature sun, hundreds or thousands of degrees in temperature, that she can manipulate at will. She has indicated some unhappiness with the group’s methodology, stating it is too high intensity and lonely for her tastes. - Cast (in depth)</ref>

She wanted to get away from her controlling stage show mother, she eventually did but not in the way she wanted.<ref name="SB1">There is a connection though.

Marissa's mother wanted her to shine, and she only found peace when she got away from the spotlight. Now she shines brighter than ever.

Luke was the pillar of the team, everyone's friend, the glue that held them together. Now he stands alone, and he destroys rather than support.

Jess was good at compartmentalizing her life, facing reality and entertaining fiction with monsters and superheroes in good measure. Now the lines between reality and dream are blurred, she has everything she secretly wanted for herself, and little else... Comment by Wildbow on Spacebattles</ref>

Appearance

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She is an attractive young blonde woman with delicate features and a long neck.<ref>Plague 12.3</ref> Her costume is a suit of black body armor emblazoned with red suns.<ref name="5.1 e1">“I’ll be taking a chair, I think,” someone spoke from the door. Most heads turned to check out a male figure in a black costume with a red mask and tophat. It gave me sort of a Baron Samedi vibe. His teammates followed him into the room, all in matching costumes of red and black, differing only in design. A girl with a sun motif, a guy with bulky armor and a square mask, and a creature so large it had to crawl on its hands and knees to get through the door. It was hard to describe, approximating something like a four armed hairless gorilla, with a vest, mask and leggings in the red and black style its team was wearing, six-inch claws tipping each of its fingers and toes. - Excerpt from Hive 5.1</ref>

Abilities and Powers

Marissa's power allows her to create a miniature sun, hundreds or thousands of degrees in temperature, that she can manipulate at will,<ref name="Cast1">Sundancer – A traveler, Sundancer wears a red and black costume with a sun motif. Her power lets her create a miniature sun, an intensely hot orb that can melt concrete and turn rock to ash. - Cast (spoiler free)</ref> even while the orb is out of sight.<ref>“Then tell me where to move it,” Sundancer’s eyes were closed. “I can’t see that far.”

“Out further, left, left, left,” the miniature sun slid twenty or so feet with every order I gave as I tracked the enemy’s position and the movements of the orb with the binoculars. “Short bit left and then out!”

I couldn’t look directly at the thing, but I saw Mannequin and Siberian wheel around as the blinding light of the orb caught their attention. Mannequin ran, and Siberian lunged forward. - Excerpt from Snare 13.6</ref> It is bright enough to leave spots in the vision of anyone who looks at it, even for a second.<ref name="5.9 e1">“Doubt it,” Sundancer replied. But she raised her hands in front of her, and there was a brilliant flare of light, only a fraction of a second, but enough to leave a black-blue spot in the center of my vision. There was a brief roaring sound as the light faded.

I turned my focus to my bugs as another flicker of light appeared, longer and stronger than the first, again, accompanied by that faint roar.

“Hey, Skitter, was it?” Sundancer spoke.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Get back. Way back.”

[...]

Sundancer had managed to get her power going. A ball of light, larger than a basketball, smaller than a beachball, sat between her hands.

Light? That was it?

Then I saw the floor.

The warehouse had clearly been raised above a flat expanse of asphalt, maybe an old parking lot, and the surface had cracked and been patched a fair bit over the years. It still bore the oil stains from the old days.

Directly below Sundancer, the floor was normal. Starting around five feet from her, though, the ground looked wet, glassy.

The asphalt was melting.

She dropped her hands, and the ball of light rose. Like it had a mind of its own, it darted towards Lung, zipping left and right and up and down as it moved. I saw how it rose higher as it moved over Lung’s people, who were still nailed to the floor. At one point, it moved only ten or so feet over one of the tables, and the plastic surface of the table seemed to crumple up in fast motion, turning black and smouldering with tongues of flame.

I scattered my swarm, all too aware they weren’t doing a thing to Lung, knowing they’d just die when Sundancer got her orb to Lung.

She didn’t make it touch him, but seeing what it had done to the table, I thought maybe that was a good thing. Lung raised a hand towards the light and I could see the heat shimmers in the air. She pushed it a little closer to him, and his legs buckled.

Kaiser was apparently unwilling to let Sundancer steal the show, because he brought a shaft of metal out of the wall behind Lung, shoving Lung toward the orb. Sundancer moved the ball back, but just the second or so of close proximity to the ball was enough to take the fight out of Lung. He fell to all fours, tried to move, and found the asphalt like a molten tar beneath him.

Wasn’t he supposed to be fireproof? Or was that immunity only to the flames he made with his own power? Or, I thought, was that ball of light -Sundancer’s miniature sun- that hot?

I was lingering at the exit, watching and waiting to see the outcome. My bugs were prepared and ready, lingering as close as they could get without being wiped out by the superheated air.

Even with his superhuman constitution, even with his pyrokinesis to maybe take the edge off the effect, Lung was clearly suffering. Just a matter of time, I realized, before he collapsed. Probably, I supposed, much longer than one would think, with his regeneration. - Excerpt from Hive 5.9</ref>

The orbs she could create ranged from the size of a beech ball, to a room,<ref name="14.3 e1">“Where is she!?” Tattletale shouted. Sundancer was leaning back, her hand out to one side. The orb she was creating was small.

I pointed.

The orb was getting larger. The size of a baseball, a beachball, an armchair. As it grew, it drifted farther away, higher.

By the time it was directly overhead, it was large enough to swallow up my bedroom whole.

[...]

We passed out of the darkness just in time for me to catch sight of the orb. It was larger now. Large enough that when it fell, it had to be touching both of the sidewalks on the four lane road. Even with a building between us and the impact zone, I could feel the wave of heated air, and I saw the billowing steam. Grue took the reins and guided Sirius away before it could reach us.

Sundancer hadn’t hit Siberian. She’d dropped the orb straight into the road a hundred feet ahead of them, and she’d plunged it down, hard.

My bugs died as Siberian approached the impact site, burned up by the heated air. I could imagine what had happened. The miniature sun would have burned a hole into the ground, melted or even vaporized pavement.

Affected by Siberian’s power or not, they were still affected by gravity.

I couldn’t say what would have happened in the long run. Had they hit the wall or floor of the pit and used Siberian’s power to make it as invulnerable as they were? Or had they plunged through it, burying themselves some distance underground.

A nearby building was burning. I saw Sundancer forming another orb near the site, I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but the flames on the building were shrinking and dying out. - Excerpt from Prey 14.3</ref> to the size of a three-story building,<ref>Echidna materialized out of the darkness the Grue had created.  She was nearly twice the height she’d been before, to the point that the human body on the top was miniscule, a speck by comparison.  A human figure atop a broad three-story building. - Excerpt from Scourge 19.4</ref><ref name="19.7 e1">Sundancer hung her head. She started approaching Echidna, her hands cupped in front of her.

“Move!” Chevalier shouted. “Clear out of the way!”

Capes began to retreat. Final patch-up jobs were thrown onto the mound of rock, forcefields and ice before the respective capes turned and ran.

It took Sundancer a long few seconds to form the miniature sun. When it was formed, she held it over her head, letting it grow with every passing second.

I had to back away as the heat reached me. I could note how the ice was melting, even though it was a hundred feet away.

Echidna roared and threw herself against her temporary prison. Rock and melting ice tumbled away. She began to claw free, until her upper body was exposed. Capes opened with ranged fire, tearing into her forelimbs and limiting her mobility. Alexandria dropped Tattletale and cast off her cape, before flying in and helping to hold Echidna in place.

“Marissa!” Echidna screamed, her voice guttural, voiced from five different mouths. “Mars! It’s too soon! I want to kill them! I want to kill them all! Kill this world! Destroy this universe that did this to me! Not yet, Mars!”

The sun flew forward, melting pavement as it traveled, before it enveloped Echidna, Alexandria and the prison of ice and stone.

It hung there for nearly a minute, deafening with its sizzling and crackling.

The sun flickered and went out. Echidna wasn’t there any more. Only sections of her feet were still in contact with the ground, bones and claws scorched black, crumbling and decaying like any part of her did when disconnected from the core that supplied her with power.

Alexandria was there in the midst of it, panting for breath. Her costume had burned away, and only the metal pieces remained, including helmet, belt and metal underwear, each so hot they were melting and running over her skin. - Excerpt from Scourge 19.7</ref> but even small orbs are dangerous.<ref>Sundancer created her flaming ball – small, but still far too bright to look at – and sent it after Kid Win. The young hero scrambled for cover, dropping his gun in his hurry to get away from the superheated orb. - Excerpt from Sentinel 9.3</ref> One the size of a beach ball was capable of forcing a fifteen-foot-tall Lung to collapse from the heat.<ref name="5.9">Hive 5.9</ref> It took time to form the sun, with repeated flickers of flame appearing between her hands. When sufficiently transformed, Lung's pyrokinesis was able to prevent her attempts to form the orb.<ref name="5.9">Hive 5.9</ref>

Overtime she showcased more versatility with her sun. Using it to put out fire by flash burning oxygen and absorbing heat and flame into her sun,<ref name="14.3 e1"/><ref name="14.3">Prey 14.3</ref><ref name="12.3 e34">A few seconds later, Tattletale was back on the phone, “Genesis is already making a body that can withstand the fire. Sundancer thinks she can clear away some of the blaze by flash-burning the oxygen from the area and drawing the heat and flame into her sun. If she can, it might give us some elbow room.” - Excerpt from Prey 14.5</ref> or creating a small light.<ref name="12.3">Sundancer formed a tiny ‘sun’ and held it up for light, while Regent turned on the flashlight he’d brought. - Excerpt from Plague 12.3</ref>

A from of Manton Effect is that temperature completely normalizes close to her, preventing her from getting burned.<ref>There’s other limitations or advantages that come with the powers. Sundancer over there can’t be burned. Temperature completely and one hundred percent normalizes within a certain range of her body. - Excerpt from Scourge 19.3</ref> This effect extends to her clothes and the ground beneath her for about five feet. It doesn't extinguish flames, but prevents them from damaging anything.<ref name="5.9"/>

History

Background

Marissa was a member of a professional-level video game team on Earth Aleph.

Migration

When the Simurgh attacked Madison, WI on Earth Bet, she took several buildings from Earth Aleph - including the building Marissa was in - which left her stranded on Earth Bet with her friends. After Francis found a suitcase full of Cauldron superhero serum, they each took one except for Noelle and Oliver who only took half a dose.

Trivia

• Marissa took a combination of the Cauldron vials 55% of C-2-0-6-2, 'Prince' along with 30% of O-0-1-2-1 'Aegis' and 15% of C-0-0-7-2 'Balance'.<ref>Migration 17.6</ref><ref>Migration 17.7</ref>

References

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