Invisible Woman

Sue Storm Richards is a formidable heroine with the ability to render herself and others invisible at will. After her genes are mutated, she co-founds Earth’s first team of super heroes, the Fantastic Four and becomes their unifying maternal figure.

Born Susan Storm, Sue and her brother Johnny have a happy childhood until their mother Mary dies in a car crash. Their father, celebrated surgeon Dr. Franklin Storm, survives the accident. His spirit broken, Dr. Storm abandons his practice, becoming a gambler and a drunk, and eventually goes to prison after he accidentally kills an underworld loan shark during a struggle.

Sue embodies a motherly role towards Johnny thereafter, though both were soon placed in the custody of their loving aunt, Marygay who ran a boardinghouse. While living there, Sue became smitten with her aunt’s handsome and brilliant tenant, science prodigy Reed Richards, then a university student. Though, does not encounter him again until her college years in California when she pursues an acting career.

When a sudden funding loss threatens to derail Reed’s experimental starship project, Reed urges his pilot, Ben Grimm, to join him in making an unauthorized test flight before the project is shut down. Grimm’s reluctant, but accepts the challenge after Sue questions his courage. Sue and her brother Johnny insist on coming along as well, wishing to share the risk. The quartet successfully launches into space, but intense cosmic rays penetrate the ship’s shielding and irradiates the crew, forcing them back to Earth. Upon landing, they discover they had mutated into super humans, and Sue became the Invisible Girl. Dedicating their new powers to super-heroics and scientific exploration, the quartet became the Fantastic Four (FF). She later takes the name Invisible Woman after an encounter with Psycho-Man that changes her.

Sue Richards can render herself wholly or partially invisible at will. She can also render other people or objects invisible, affecting up to 40,000 cubic feet of volume. To achieve these feats, she mentally bends all wavelengths of light in the vicinity around herself, or the target in question, without causing any visible distortion effects.

While ordinary retinas register objects using reflected light, Sue’s retinas also interpolate shapes based on reflected cosmic rays, which are always present within the atmosphere in minute concentrations. Her extended vision allows her to see invisible people and objects, though not in technicolor since the cosmic-ray reflections bypass her eyes’ rods and cones; her vision may be similarly monochromatic when she herself is invisible since her eyes do not reflect light in that state, though she otherwise seems to possess a full range of vision while she’s invisible. She can detect anything made invisible by means outside her powers, and can restore those targets to a visible state at will. If she wishes, she can render her targets only partially invisible – enabling her, for instance, to expose the inner workings of machinery or the internal organs of living beings.

Invisible Woman can project and manipulate near-indestructible invisible force fields, making her a more effective combatant. She can generate these force fields physically and psionically around herself and other targets; within an object, which she can expand to cause explosions or within a target’s body to render people unconscious or induce more serious physical distress; and vary the texture and tensile strength, rigid for defense and soft for to cushioning impacts. She is also capable of generating and manipulating multiple psionic force fields simultaneously.

Furthermore, she can shape invisible fields into constructs, turning them into offensive weapons as small as a marble or as large as 100 feet in diameter. Her hollow projections, such as domes, can extend up to several miles in area. She can generate more massive force fields large enough to envelop a 20-story building, including the 10 acres of foundation beneath it, or a network of invisible scaffolding strong enough to hold a building as tall as the Empire State Building.

She is also able to shield her mind from some types of telepathic intrusion or influence, detect and locate nearby people or objects using an invisible force that pulses out from her body as radar, and can track psionic energy sources over great distances or snare and redirect psionic energies active in her general vicinity.

Visible light frequencies mostly pass through her standard force fields unaltered and unimpeded, a condition which sometimes leaves her vulnerable to light-based attacks. She can bend and shape a force field so that it captures ambient light, enabling her to create a makeshift low-intensity torch or flashlight composed of suspended light. This ability extends to bending the sunlight’s invisible ultraviolet rays with a force field an inch before they reach her skin, rendering herself immune to sunburns. Sue once briefly swaps powers with her brother Johnny, and during that time can generate and manipulate flames for various effects.

Sue has some experience and ability in the fields of acting and teaching. A capable unarmed combatant and an excellent swimmer, she is fluent in both English and Latverian. Like the rest of the FF, she wears a highly durable costume composed of unstable molecules that shift to accommodate the wearer’s physical form.