Phantasm was born to a 'normal' working class family.  She was a middle child in a large family, and getting noticed wasn't ever really an option for her after her younger siblings came along.  For a while she tried manipulating her parents, acting out, playing everyone against each other, but after a brief visit to a therapist and the realization that her parents were barely hanging on to their marriage as it was, she gave up on her home life completely.

The young girl that couldn't get her parent's attention threw herself into school, joining track and field, and working hard on her studies in hopes of getting the hell out of her decaying northwestern suburb when she was old enough to go to college.  She dressed outlandishly, sliding into youth counterculture where she could find the intense relationships she couldn't get in her family.  She joined martial arts, paying for it with the money from a paper route, just to stay out of the house more.  When home was her only option, she locked herself in her room and immersed herself in worlds of dark fantasy, drowned in alternative rock music as she read comics and horror novels, or drew strange entities inhabiting stranger landscapes.  Staying busy kept the depression at bay, and drowned out the incessant sounds of her family; the siblings arguing, mom and dad screaming at each other, the dogs barking, and the constant tread of feet through the house.

She went so far into her own world that she barely noticed what went on around her.  Perhaps that was why it was so easy for the man to kidnap her.  Of course, he was also a nova, so it probably wouldn't have been very hard even if she'd seen him coming.  When she regained consciousness, she found herself in a basement, locked off from the world, a specimen to be studied and eventually consumed by an insane monster of a nova.

She didn't know how long she was there, but she felt her life slipping away bit by bit.  No food, no water, and constantly subject to the demented desires of her kidnapper, she eventually felt something inside her break, and rearrange itself.  Was it her perspective changing, showing her how petty her former concerns were?  Was it her mind, trying to dissociate from what was being done to her?  Was it the stress she was under causing her brain to stop working right?  Maybe it was the constant stream of fear induced adrenaline.  But whatever the case, her thinking, her outlook on the world, changed drastically in that dark basement, even as her body awakened to a new and strange power.  Everything seemed to fit together as that power flooded through her; she understood, finally, everything she had struggled for so long to comprehend.

On instinct, only partially aware, mutable limbs slipped their bonds, and naked flesh changed color to blend into the bricks of the damp walls.  Those same instincts told her when he was near, and guided her in attacking him.  She didn't attack with the clumsy attacks of a weekend martial artist though, but instead with the distilled skill of all the fighters she had ever seen, and the perfected motion of a master athlete.  But it still wasn't enough, he was still too powerful.  He would always be too powerful.  Her fear turned in on itself, eating at her, consuming her, harming her more than he ever could.

And then she decided not to be afraid.  He couldn't control that.  Inside, that was hers.  Her emotions were hers.  She let her fear leave in a torrent, and the world around her changed.  A green haze surrounded her, and a moan of pain escaped from dozens of ephemeral mouths, the pain she had felt but would feel no longer.  He ran then, but the spirits took him, they were faster than him.  They held him down as they consumed him, and he became a slave to his own fear then... he was her slave, her prisoner.  Forever.

When she came up the stares, out of the basement, she wasn't the girl that went in.  And never would be again.


---


Since the fateful day of her eruption, Phantasm has seen two wars and dozens of covert missions.  She has constructed new world wonders, swam in the deepest ocean trenches, and stood on other worlds.  She has become something more, greater, than she ever could have been.  In many ways she is thankful for the ordeal in the basement, because it has let her evolve into something amazing and balance at the edge of the future.  Sometimes she idly wonders about what might have been, but there is no going back.  She is fundamentally different, god and monster of a new age.