Meggan Puceanu (Earth-616)

Gloriana
Name	Meggan Puceanu-Braddock
Current Alias	Gloriana
Aliases	Goblin Princess, Tapestry, Meggan Puceanu
Affiliation and Relationships
Affiliation	Braddock Academy, MI-13 Formerly Excalibur; pawn of N'Astirh
Relatives	William Puceanu (father); unnamed mother; Brian Braddock (husband); Maggie Braddock (daughter); Betsy Braddock (sister-in-law); James Braddock, Jr. (brother-in-law, deceased); Sir James Braddock (father-in-law, deceased); Lady Elizabeth Braddock (mother-in-law, deceased)
Marital Status	Married
Physical Characteristics
Gender	Female
Height	5′7″ (1.7 m)
Weight	120 lbs (54.43 kg).
Eyes	Irises: Blue (variable)
Hair	Blond (variable)
Unusual Features	Pointed ears; hair purple as Goblin Princess; eyes white with no pupils in her true form.
Origin and Living Status
Origin	Mutant
Living Status	Alive
Reality	Earth-616
Place of Birth	Near Fenborough Station, London, England
Personal Information
Identity	Secret
Citizenship	English British
Occupation	Adventurer Formerly Queen of Otherworld
Base of Operations	Braddock Manor, Maldon, Essex, England Formerly Otherworld; Braddock Lighthouse
Creators and Appearances
Creators	Alan Moore, Alan Davis
First	Mighty World of Marvel (Vol. 2) #7 (December, 1983)
First	Mighty World of Marvel (Vol. 2) #7 (December, 1983)

 We haven't even met, but already -- you're trying to define me! No. No more. My name is Meggan Puceanu. My army called me Gloriana. 

—Meggan

History

Meggan is Romanichal (a British Romani), and was born in their camp near Fenborough Station. As a young child, Meggan was thought to be a wolf girl. However, thanks to her mutant shape changing power, she had simply grown fur because she was cold. As rumors escalated amongst the other Romani about the monstrous child in her father William's caravan, Meggan subconsciously began to manifest the attributes they speculated she had, such as fangs and bat wings. Because of this, her parents kept her isolated, and she was allowed to venture out only at night, with only television during the day as a link to the outside world. Because of this sheltered life and lack of education, Meggan was functionally illiterate.

However, the reality warping mutant Mad Jim Jaspers altered Britain. All superpowered beings were locked into camps; the Romani's caravans were raided, and both Meggan and William were taken into custody. Placed in a concentration camp, Meggan was separated from her family. She hoped the famous hero Captain Britain would save her. Jaspers was defeated and reality corrected itself for the most part, but though her memories of her imprisonment were hazy, Meggan was still aware that things had changed.

File:Meggan Puceanu as Baby (Earth-616) 01.jpg

Meggan stayed in an derelict warehouse where she was befriended by Josie and Micky Scott, two teenagers from a nearby council estate. The full moon would affect Meggan at this time, making the kids think she was some type of werebeast. Running into Captain Britain in this form, she battled him, but during the fight Mickey was accidentally killed by falling debris. Meggan fled the scene in anguish. About a week later, after Micky's funeral, Captain Britain visited the Scott family to apologize for his part in Micky's death. While he was there, Meggan, who had been watching the family from a distance, also struck up the courage to do the same. Taking pity on her, Brian offered Meggan to be his house-guest at Braddock Manor.

When they arrived, Psylocke's friend Alison Double sensed that Meggan was "beautiful and radiant". However, Meggan said she had always been in her monstrous form, and did not realize at the time she could alter it.

However, when dealing with the Warpies, Meggan transformed herself while battling the Cherubim Whirlwind, turning into a tall, blonde woman who matched Brian's idea of beauty. Brian fell for her, and the two adventured around the world while the Manor was filled with Warpies under the care of Betsy.

File:Meggan Puceanu (Earth-616) Captain Britain and MI-13 Annual Vol 1 1.png

Meggan in a flashback

Meggan began to improve her control of her powers by mimicking animals she saw. In Russia the witch Baba Yaga attacked them, but Meggan used the power of nature and magic to defeat her. Returning to the U.K. after a time-traveling trip to Incan Peru, Brian and Meggan bought a lighthouse, Braddock Lighthouse with Incan gold to settle down in.

Excalibur

When the X-Men were believed to have perished in Dallas, Meggan contacted Shadowcat, and Nightcrawler, and they, along with Brian were drawn into battle against the Technet and the Warwolves (Mojoverse) to save Shadowcat and Nightcrawler's fellow X-Man Rachel Summers. Defeating those threats, the five of them soon formed the team Excalibur, and based themselves in the Lighthouse.

Constantly subconsciously modifying her form and behavior to match the empathic needs of those around her, Meggan still wondered which form was the 'real' Meggan. During the demonic invasion of New York City known as Inferno, Meggan was overcome by the demonic influences around her and altered herself into a demon-like form, calling herself the Goblin Princess. She attacked Brian, angry that he was seeing Courtney Ross on the side, but was disrupted by Shadowcat and the Soulsword.

During this time, Meggan also grew very close to her teammate Nightcrawler, to the point where Brian became jealous and attacked him. The fight between the two caused Meggan to run away with Rachel following her. The two women soon visited old friends, Josie and her family who helped Meggan come to realize that she wanted to locate her missing parents. So Meggan and Rachel went searching for her group Romani in France.

Later Meggan and Brian destroyed the Lighthouse to ensure their freedom from Merlyn (and secretly due to a subliminal suggestion by Roma.)

Sat-Yr-9

The team made Braddock Manor their new headquarters, and threw a housewarming party there. Among the guests was Brian's ex and mistress Courtney Ross, who had actually been murdered and replaced by her other-dimensional counterpart, the fugitive fascist dictator Sat-Yr-9. Sat-Yr-9 had her criminal forces attack the party-goers, and her pawn, Brian's reality-warping brother Jamie Braddock torture the guests, including Meggan, twisting their bodies into grotesque forms. Brian was drugged and controlled by Sat-Yr-9, who used him as her sex slave, but he broke free when she tried to make him kill Meggan. Shaking off the effects of drugs she'd been given, Meggan broke free of Jamie's reality warping, saying that as a shape-changer, the threads of order could not bind her. She beat Jamie senseless, saying it was the only language he would understand, and Betsy neutralized him with her 'psychic knife.' Breaking free from Jamie's control, Meggan discovered her 'true' form - an elfin, blonde, form, taller than the usual form Meggan took. However, Meggan had grown used to her normal form, and kept it as a rule. Sat-Yr-9 and Jamie escaped, however.

After this encounter, Brian became obsessed with stopping Sat-Yr-9, to the point where he ignored everyone else. Nightcrawler drew Brian's attention to his neglected relationship, and Brian took Meggan on a romantic holiday. Brian proposed to Meggan and she accepted. However, Brian soon lost control of his powers. Meggan admitted that she could see the power in Brian and that was part of why she felt for him. Meggan then asked him if he would have ever loved her if she had not assumed her blonde, beautiful form. The two eventually agreed it was more than just looks that they were interested in.

Soon after this, while Brian was trapped in the timestream, Meggan went into a catatonic state. However, she had somehow made contact with Brian, anchoring him to this reality, and knew that her teammate Rachel Summers being a time anomaly meant she could help him somehow. Meggan forced Rachel to help, turning into a feral state. Rachel replaced Brian in the timestream. All of this activity pushed Meggan's powers past their limits, and she began to display more power. Moira MacTaggert performed tests after Meggan suddenly manipulated lava. The test showed that she was now able to affect the forces of nature themselves.

Marriage

Meggan began to consider romance with Colossus while Brian was dealing with the temporary loss of his powers, but the feelings were mostly Peter's own which Meggan was mirroring. Upon Brian's return, the two married. They traveled to Otherworld to rule it in Roma's stead. While acting as rulers, they empowered Lionheart as the new Captain Britain.

The Scarlet Witch's altering of Earth-616 reality into the House of M caused a backlash of effects that threatened to destroy other universes. Meggan and Brian helped Roma against the suddenly returning Mad Jim Jaspers while Jamie Braddock destroyed a device of Saturnyne's that would have destroyed all of Earth-616 and the House of M.

Brian and Meggan were given 48 hours by Roma and Saturnyne to try and find the gap in reality before the energies flowed through. Upon arriving, they were briefly altered into being the royalty of Britain along with Psylocke and Rachel Summers, and helped Nocturne escape some of the House's forces. Meggan seemingly sacrificed herself in order to deflect a large amount of the chaotic energy so that the others could seal the gap.

When Brian was later trapped in an illusion created by the demonic entity Plokta, he was confronted with several figures from his past, including Meggan. Believing her to be an illusion, he escaped the illusion with the help of Alistaire Stuart, leaving her trapped in an unknown demonic realm.

She has since returned home and been reunited with her husband.

Attributes

Power Grid

Powers

Meggan is a mutant empath, metamorph and elemental of great power.

• Empathy: A telepathic talent which enables Meggan to sense the emotions and feelings of all living creatures (from people, to animals, to plants) and can broadcast her own feelings in order to influence other people's emotions.

• Natural Perception: Meggan has the ability to “See” and “hear” natural/biological patterns of forces in the world around her. This power links her with natural/biological patterns of forces in the world around her. This power links with her own empathy/shapeshifting. Meggan can sense electromagnetic forces, air currents, chemical reactions and even detect “visibly” telepathic communications. Meggan can also see and sometimes talk to ghosts.

• Empathic Metamorph: A shapeshifter who can assume the form of any living creature, even those who only exist in legends (once she became a Godzilla-like dragon and actually breathed fire, and another occasion she became a werewolf that looked like fellow mutant Wolfsbane, and had all of a wolf's natural abilities). Meggan can assume the form of other people as well. Thanks to her empathic ability, Meggan's body will actually change in response to the emotions around her, becoming beautiful when she feels loved, or hideous when she feels fear or anger. Her elemental powers also cause Meggan to change in response to her surroundings, such as growing fur in extreme cold, or gills when she is submerged underwater. She has also demonstrated the abilities to turn into sentient sand or water.
  • Power Duplication: If she takes on the appearance of another superhuman, Meggan can also gain their powers. This also worked when she turned into a female mirror of the Silver Surfer.
  • Multilingual Comprehensive Adaptation: She was able to understand the dialect of Mbangawi without effort.

• Elementalist: In her true form, Meggan can manipulate, absorb or release elemental energy - this includes earth, fire, water, air and even ether(energy). Thanks to Meggan's empathy, she has a psionic link to the natural forces of the Earth. By "speaking" to the elements, Meggan can command the environment around her, and her emotional state can affect the local ecosystems. She can extinguish forest fires with a thought, summon gale force winds or part the waters of a lake with wave of her hand, or even cause earthquakes in a flash of anger. Meggan has even been observed causing electromagnetic pulses by commanding the magnetic fields around her, freezing opponents by rapidly dropping the air temperature around them, or increasing the powers of elemental mutants (such as increasing the temperature of her teammate Peter Wisdom's heat blasts). Meggan has used her elemental powers to affect man-made objects, such as actually making the atoms in a building's roof move apart, creating a hole in the roof that resealed itself (without a trace of ever having had a hole in it) once Meggan had passed though it (which suggests that Meggan's elemental powers may have a Telekinetic quality).
  • Energy Blasts: Meggan can focus the elemental energies around her into devastating energy blasts. When she absorbs power, she begins to glow.
  • Earth Energy Manipulation: Meggan has the ability to manipulate the energy from the Earth. She can use this power to augment her abilities to shape change, generate bio-blasts or fly.

• Flight: Meggan has the ability to propel herself through the air at high speeds by force of will. While she does so, her hair streams out behind her to a length far longer than it usually is. Whether this is a conscious use of her shapeshifting power is unknown. Meggan can apparently support great weights even when flying.
• Environmental Immunity: Meggan can adapt to her physical environment, becoming impervious to cold without changing shape to adapt.
• Magical Energy Manipulation: In her true form, Meggan can manipulate magical energy, i.e. deflecting spells.
• Magical Affinity: Meggan's powers grow more fluid and manageable and stronger while she is in magical realms.
• Reality Warp Resistance: Because of her shapechanging power, Meggan has some resistance to the reality-warping powers of others. She was able to break free of the power of Jamie Braddock, and was one of the few to remember the effects of the Jaspers Warp.

Abilities

Meggan is an experienced hand-to-hand combatant, though she has little formal training in that area. She is apparently a skilled swordswoman, having disarmed the otherdimensional Captain Britain Chevalier Bretagne in a fencing match (although her skill conceivably could have just been a mimicry of his own).

Weaknesses

Meggan's mind does not have the same level of psychic 'blocks' that most humans and especially beings with psionic power do. This can make her impulsive and impressionable; often acting on the present with little concern for the past or future.

Paraphernalia

Transportation

Flight under her own power.

See Also

• 260 appearance(s) of Meggan Puceanu (Earth-616)
• 12 appearance(s) in handbook(s) of Meggan Puceanu (Earth-616)
• 21 minor appearance(s) of Meggan Puceanu (Earth-616)
• 8 mention(s) of Meggan Puceanu (Earth-616)
• 9 mention(s) in handbook(s) of Meggan Puceanu (Earth-616)
• 192 image(s) of Meggan Puceanu (Earth-616)
• 7 quotation(s) by or about Meggan Puceanu (Earth-616)

Links and References

• uncannyxmen.net Spotlight On... Meggan