Legion World Forums LEGION OUTPOST Bits o' Legionnaire Business The Book of Talok

In case anyone was curious, this is the exact picture, taken circa 1988-1989, which Nightcrawler based my avatar upon:

And finally, for the moment at least, some Golden Age Hollywood glamour courtesy of Maria Montez, another Mexican actress. Like Patricia Manterola, she reminds me of Baxter-era Tasmia:

Victoria Justice would be my top choice, although the others evoke different aspects of Tasmia.

I really hope you continue your latest story. The post-Magic Wars period needs filling, and I like the idea that Tasmia would return to the Legion before exiling herself to a nunnery on Talok.

Your Fate in Threes tale is one of which you should be proud! It's a great approach to delving into the character; I think any of these fates could have developed for Tasmia. Like the pictures, they all show different sides of her.

I do find the Empress Tasmia the most interesting, since she's not fighting over a man, and could believe that all that passion, pride and power could have taken Tasmia down a path to tyrant - for all her good intentions. And what a shock for her to realize it at the end! A sad story, but powerful.

Now that you've written it, I have to wonder why Tasmia didn't turn to magic to try and save Lar. True, the U.P. was falling apart at that point, but she could have found somebody somewhere, at least as a last resort. This story would have been a logical bridge into the 5YL appearance of Glorith.

There certainly are grounds for a possible Brainy-Tasmia romance - and she would have taken the lead. The added complication of Supergirl still being in the picture was interesting, although an enraged-to-madness Supergirl is hard to imagine. Mind affected by time-travel? Red K? Why not, though? I have wondered why Tasmia and Querl weren't shown more to be good friends in the series.

Thank you, FC. Yes, my intention was definitely to show that there is more to her than meets the eye. And Fate in Threes is still my favorite of my own Bits stories to date.



I appreciate your observation that she's not fighting over a man in that alternate future. Too many writers have tried to define her by the men in her life IMO. That's one of the reasons why Umbra is my favorite of the several different versions of Tasmia, she was very much her own woman.



Regarding Supergirl gone mad, I think a lot of people, female and male alike, have a lot of repressed rage underneath their sweet surfaces, especially during adolescence. I normally don't like delving into the darker implications of the El family, but I think in this case it worked.

I agree with you 100% on why there should have been a friendship shown between Tasmia and Brainy. They shared an aloofness and a biting sense of humor which hid their more vulnerable sides.



I hope a prospective casting director for the proposed Legion movie is reading this.



I agree it would have made sense for her to do that, but since my intention was to set her on the road to putting Lar behind her and moving on, I don't think I would have gone there. It could make for an interesting story from one of the other Bits writers, though.



I'll probably return to that story after I've finished my novel. Since my two biggest objections to 5YL were Tasmia's self-imposed exile and Blok dying instead of Erin, and those have already been shown not to happen in this timeline, there's no reason for me not to press on.

Fate in Threes Part 1:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=820399#Post820399

Part 2:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=820503#Post820503

Part 3:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=820548#Post820548

Part 4:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=820650#Post820650

Part 5:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=820866#Post820866

Part 6 (Conclusion):

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=820872#Post820872

Rude Awakening Prologue:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=869901#Post869901

Rude Awakening Part 1:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=870167#Post870167

RUDE AWAKENING: PART 2 OF 12

Even if she had not been blessed with her command over the shadow forces, Tasmia knew she still would have never been afraid of the dark. Somehow, she had managed to retain, well into her adulthood, a childlike perception of the dark as a warm and safe place. A world apart, within which to escape from the stark, and often unpleasant, plainness of three-dimensional reality.

As far back as she could remember, Tasmia had been a fitful sleeper, with an inclination toward long, quiet walks in the dark, taken while most others reposed in a steadier fashion. So it was with Tasmia at this moment in time, her return to the Legion having coincided with a particularly turbulent passage in the existence of the U.P. galaxy's own once-beloved-now-reviled superhero team.

A significant bonus to the dark was the way in which, even to a sentient with extraordinary night-vision such as her, the dirty disarray of the Legion's headquarters current state became a hazy blur, producing the sensation of being in the midst of a bad dream which would, hopefully, end soon.

Suddenly, Tasmia's reverie was shattered by the muffled noise of two people laughing. It did not take her long to fixate on which of the several nearby doors the laughter lay behind.

And this had nothing to do with her sharper-than-average senses. Her deduction was entirely to do with the fact that this door had not shut itself completely, and a thin beam of light shone through the narrow opening. This was no surprise to Tasmia, as the recent galaxy-wide tech failure nicknamed "The Magic Wars" had forced all sentients to accept the painful reality of relying, at least for the moment, on older, lower, less-reliable tech.

Even so, Tasmia was both concerned about, and morbidly intrigued by, the mystery laying literally right under her naturally beautiful nose. Perhaps her being one with the shadow-forces had brought out a voyeuristic side to Tasmia which she had not been conscious of until now. Whatever the true reason, she found it impossible not to indulge herself with a smirk as she crept softly towards the opening in the door.

As she peered through the opening, her suspicions were confirmed that one of the laughing voices belonged to Vi. There had always been a distinctive rasp to Vi's voice, one which arguably fit the abrasive persona which recent misfortunes had brought out in her. The next observation which Tasmia made was that this was the conference room, followed by the conclusion that the room was occupied by only one other sentient besides Vi -- one which Tasmia was having difficulty recognizing.

This other sentient was, like Vi, a young, physically fit woman, albeit taller and more angular in her build. Bizarrely, this mystery girl had clearly draped a blanket over her wider-than-average shoulders and placed a long blonde wig on her head. After a few seconds of focusing on the girl's oddly blurry face, Tasmia felt compelled to raise an eyebrow when she realized that the girl was actually wearing a stocking pulled over her entire face!

The next moment, the mystery girl began to speak, and that was when everything within Tasmia's mind tumbled into place. The girl's voice was naturally deeper-than-average, but it also possessed an extraordinarily pure clarity, and an impressive versatility of range. Yet all of these qualities were currently being wasted on a cruel, albeit pitch-perfect, mockery of Projectra's regal alto and precise diction.

"OOOOHHH...heed my words, Legionnaires. For I am your leader. Why am I your leader? It must be because of my extra-special gift of higher perception. That gift which I refuse to explain to you, because I must remain an ENIGMA! Oooooh! Otherwise, I shall stand revealed before you as a good-for-nothing posh girl who doesn't do anything that our other members do better!"

With that, the girl -- by now it was obvious that she was Ayla -- could no longer keep a straight face and began laughing, in a somewhat grating chortle. Vi responded in kind with the same scratchy cackle which Tasmia had recognized a minute earlier.

Pitiful, thought Tasmia, simply pitiful! Here I have rejoined a team which is duty-bound to try to pull civilization back together, and two of our senior members are behaving like ignorant schoolgirls! The unmitigated gall of them, to disrespect their commander in such a puerile fashion -- when Projectra was no less than a scion of her planet's royal lineage, yet! No wonder this team's morale was in the abyss, and its very foundations coming undone.

It was at times like this that Tasmia found herself wishing she had never volunteered, all those years ago, to be inducted into the Legion. She backed away from the door, straightened out her back, flicked her long hair out of her face, and resumed her walk.

I like your descriptions here...I never thought of Vi as having a bit of a raspy voice but now that you've said it, that fits perfectly! It kinda makes her seem a bit Margot Kidder which I think suits post-Yera Vi very well.

I also liked the way you described Ayla in a way where it makes sense someone might conceivably have mistaken her for Garth when they were younger...it used to bug me that once Ayla joined the Legion in her own right she was drawn just like every other conventional superheroine and looked nothing like the brother she replaced aside from hair colour sometimes!

Thanks, Raz. Much appreciated.

Yes, Margot Kidder (R.I.P.) would indeed have been a good match for Vi, both voice-wise and feisty-attitude-wise. Sometimes I suspect that her pariah status in Hollywood during the later decades of her life had less to do with her mental health than it did with her being as feisty and challenging in real life as she was onscreen. She will be missed.

And I think Ayla's gender-fluidity and bisexuality have been unforgivably underexplored by the Legion's canon writers. I remember, in the Ayla spotlight issue, Levitz shrugged off her Garth-impersonation as "stupid." I know, I know, it was over 30 years ago, but still...sigh.

It is kinda interesting looking at her impersonation of Garth when you consider how the 5YL Legion treated Mekt (ie: repressing his sexual orientation was implied to be one of the things that led him down the path to becoming a villain)...you could make a case for Winath maybe not being so culturally advanced as other UP worlds. They've already got the single birth prejudice anyway so it wouldn't be out of line for that prejudice to extend to LGBTIQ+ people as well, and you could argue Mekt's repression contributed to his bad mental state just like Ayla maybe saw replacing her brother as a way of escaping her stifling homeworld and expressing her own gender identity. It's an interpretation that works with what we've seen in print already

Thanks for filling me in on Mekt's backstory, as I don't recall ever reading any issues that dealt with it.

As for Ayla, my personal take on her is that she decided, at an early age, that the very concept of a gender binary was absurd, and she's spent her entire life mocking it. I perceive her in a similar fashion as the way I currently perceive Miley Cyrus -- some days, Miley seems to want to be Billy Idol; other times, Miley seems like she would rather be Dolly Parton.

I like that idea...in the 31st century where humanoids routinely interact with races as diverse as Hykraians and those eyestalk guys that Giffen used to throw in the background all the time you'd hope that more people would be comfortable expressing diversity. I had a throwaway line in my fanfic series a while ago that showed the average person doesn't even have a label for different sexual orientations because it's such a non-issue