Kelly
Kelly, later dubbed the Invincible Woman, was originally a dour New York City financier in Reality Z-25 31-H. However, after she and her long-suffering employee Jenkins were abducted by aliens, they ended up getting superpowers, with the catch that they only worked when they were in close proximity to one another (something which greatly bothered both of them, as they couldn't stand each other's company).
Description
Physical appearance
Kelly was a lithe woman with even features. She had long, straight, fair hair and dark eyes. As an investment broker, she wore a female business suit including a jacket and skirt, although she also wore more casual clothing when not on the job. As “the Invincible Woman”, her body was enveloped in a halo of flames. (COMIC: Journey Into Misery)
Personality
Kelly was a callous sort of capitalist, who placed her business first and anybody's personal needs (even her own) second, to the extent that she was more upset about aliens destroyign her company H.Q. than about them abducting her. She was anything but emotionless, however, being in a perpetual stuck of annoyance and capable of crescendoes into outright violent rage. She was particularly insensitive towards Jenkins, whom she perceived as weak and pathetic. (COMIC: Journey Into Misery) Jenkins once described her as “despicable”. (COMIC: Life… in the Heart of the City)
Powers & abilities
After Professor Xwumb'h experimented on her, Kelly acquired superpowers, although they only worked proprotional to how close she was to Jenkins. They included super-strenght sufficient to destroy an entire spaceship by herself, unaided levitation, and also the ability to burst into flames, which naturally left her unharmed. She could manipulate this fire to shoot it at targets. (COMIC: Journey Into Misery)
Biography
Early life
At some point prior to the latter moving to a secret laboratory in the Mojave Desert, Kelly somehow became friends with the friendly and cheerful scientist Professor Madison. For entirely mysterious reasons, Madison thought of Kelly as a warm and caring person. (COMIC: Ghost in the Apparatus of the Spirit in the Shell of the Machine)
Kelly tried to get ahead in Wall Street, but was stuck at the bottom of the pecking order as Junior Deputy Assistant Secretary to the brash, conniving businessman Mr Grangler. However, her luck turned when she was called upon to oversee a trio of student interns from NYU, Alicia, Jesse and Babs. As it turned out, they were not business students, but rather apprentice witches “with a minor in supervillainy”. They lent their talents to helping Kelly divine future trends in the stock market, dig up dirt on her colleagues and superiors via crystal ball, and other such tactics — such that by the end of their internship (for which she naturally gave each of them an “A+”), Kelly's career was set on a meteoric rise, with Grangler even being arrested for tax fraud. (COMIC: Blast From The Past)
Becoming the Invisible Woman
By 2010, Kelly was a successful investment broker with her own company H.Q.s in New York City. As she was reprimanding Jenkins for “not doing the work he'd been assigned” (he was instead threatening suicide), the building was rammed by a flying saucer. Though she tried to dodge out of its way, the two were captured and ended up onboard the ship, where they were confronted with K'orr'h, King of the Vanilla Puddings of Riegel 6. After introducing himself, K'orr'h attempted to eat them but proved unable to chew them. He spat them out, which Kelly couldn't help but make fun of.
Angered at her mockery, K'orr'h ordered the two humans to be used as experimental test subjects by Professor Xwumb'h. The erratic mad scientist, seemingly not realising the inherent problem of logistics involved, performed experiments on them which, while painful, he surmised might give them superpowers; indeed they did, and, letting her anger loose, Kelly destroyed the ship and its crew in a blast of fire. She also tried to kill Jenkins in the melee, but it turned out that the superpowers he had gained included mild invulnerability. After calming down, Kelly had no choice but to take him back to Earth with her, as they were still handcuffed to each other by chains of alien metal that defied even her strength. (COMIC: Journey Into Misery)
Turn to darkness
After spending some time fruitlessly trying to resume a normal life while handcuffed to Jenkins, Kelly contacted her old friend Professor Madison. An appointment was made, and she flew Jenkins and herself to Madison's laboratory in the Mojave Desert. There, Madison easily broke their shackles using a robot she'd been working on, but asked them to stay for a few days so that she could analyse the two's powers and help them understand them.
In the night, a Deathray built by Madison some time earlier was broken out of her vault. Kelly reluctantly went along with Jenkins's offer for the two of them to investigate the case as “the Terrific Two”, being gifted durable superhero outfits by Madsion for the occasion. It turned out the vault had been broken into by Madison's robot, controlled by her jealous assistant Hank Richards. Kelly and Jenkins began fighting the robot while Madison and Rodney Rabbit went to confront Richards; surprisingly, Kelly was briefly knocked out during the fight.
She came to just in time to finish the robot off — and this even though it had been freed from Richard' control in the intervening time and developed an individual conscience. Although Jenkins and Madison soon excused Kelly's apparent crime, suggesting that Kelly had still been unconscious when the robot had started to talk, it was clear from Kelly's confused reaction that she had known perfectly well what she was doing. (COMIC: Ghost in the Apparatus of the Spirit in the Shell of the Machine)
An oasis of horrors!
The two headed home by car, with Jenkins driving, but he managed to crash the vehicle into the one tree in the entire desert. Kelly used her flight to carry the two of them further, and they ended up finding an oasis. They bathed and rested there for a little while before being startled by a group of humanoid monsters. They took refuge in a house built near the oasis, whose seemingly human owner explained that he was being besieged by the monsters, and invited them to stay the night.
However, in the night, the "monsters" broke down one of the barricaded walls and abducted Jenkins. They explained to him that, although odd-looking, they were fairly normal and the actual owners of the house, while the farmer with the gun was the real villain. After he explained the same thing to Kelly, the two returned to the house; the villain had disappeared, living behind a bomb that Kelly disposed of. Thankful, the house's owners gave the Two their car with which to continue their journey home. (COMIC: Oasis of Horror)
Fleeing from the Bureau of Singularity
After returning to New York, Kelly officially decided to become a supervillain in order to fund her “expensive lifestyle”, despite Jenkins's weak protests. However, she had no time to put this into effect before the two were beset by agents of the Bureau of Singularity intent on erasing them from existence to correct a “temporal anomaly”; according to them, the two were meant to have died in space during their first adventure, and their ongoing existence was a breach of the laws of Time. Fleeing through New York, the two eventually found refuge among a community of amateur performance artists whose paradoxical eccentricity confused the Bureau's sensors, rendering the two harder to detect. (COMIC: Life… in the Heart of the City)
The Singularity War
Growing tired of hiding, Kelly and Jenkins decided to take the fight to the Bureau. They began to corner isolated agents of the Bureau to fight them, with Kelly ultimately managing to follow one back to one of the camouflaged portals to the Nexus of Realities which the Bureau maintained in Reality Z-25 31-H. After capturing the portal (damaging it somewhat in the process), Kelly brought it back to Professor Madison at the Fortress of Evening. Madison repaired it and helped put together a team of heroes to take the fight to the Bureau's headquarters, using the “Omega Protocol” of Captain Evening's computer. In the end, Kelly, Jenkins, Madison, Rodney, Terry Tornado and Mysto the Space-Wizard ended up going through the Portal.
The Reality Z-25 31-H heroes managed to breach the outer walls of the Bureau's headquarters. Turning invisible (in Madison's case, thanks to Mysto's magic), Jenkins and Madison went off to sneak into the office of the Director of Singularity, while the rest provided a distraction by starting a fight with the Bureau's agents on the ground floor. Kelly, owing to her fire-powers and superstrength, acquitted herself far better than the others, and was the only fighter still standing when Jenkins and Madison returned having won the day through trickery rather than brute force. There, Kelly gave sincere thanks to Madison and headed back home, voicing her intention to live a normal life for a little while, not using her powers. (COMIC: Singularity War)
A short time later, Kelly and Jenkins were among the heroes Captain Evening invited to a big party at the Fortress of Evening. Uncharacteristically relaxed, she enjoyed a jacuzzi bath on the sun-lit roof of the Fortress alongside Mysto the Space-Wizard, saying to herself “This is the life”. (COMIC: Meanwhile, On Earth)
Losing her powers
Eventually, while in the middle of a petty argument about Pippi Longstocking, Kelly snapped and destroyed Jenkins with her fire powers. Overjoyed at being “free” of his presence, she went out to party, only to realise that her powers were beginning to fade as a result of being away from Jenkins — which was especially inconvenient as a robot was attacking the city, with Professor Madison hurrying “the Terrible Two” to enter the fray. Tracking down her witchy former interns Alicia and Babs, she got them to execute a ritual to send her down to Hell, where she matter-of-factly traded her soul to the Devil in exchange for getting Jenkins back.
After returning to the mortal plane with Jenkins, she found her powers still had not returned. When she called Madison again, the scientist speculated that they needed to resync their biologies. Having no time to return to Madison's lab for this purpose, Kelly talked Jenkins into sleeping with her to achieve the same result. As soon as her powers returned, she interrupted said activity and flew to the place where the battle against the robot was occurring. However, her powers proved useless against the colossus, which swatted her away like a fly. Jenkins found this turn of events absolutely hilarious, and said it alone justified the survival of the world — which turned out to be just what a disguised agent of the Cosmic Order needed to hear to call off the robot, which was also doing the bidding of the Cosmic Order in its own way. With everything wrapped up, Kelly and Jenkins briefly debated staying together so they could keep their powers, but agreed it wasn't worth the irritation — though Kelly did take the chance to take her revenge on a couple of non-powered women who'd made fun of her in her depowered state before her super-strength faded away again. (COMIC: Journey Out Of Misery)
| Recurring elements of The Cosmic Beholder | ||||||||||
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