Metaspace

"I'm damaged, I know that. What Redline did to me, that betrayal... it broke me, it really did.

...but I'll be damned if I let myself stay broken."

Summary
A skilled doctor and professor of physics in her civilian life, Miriam is a teleporting cyborg with a side-specialty in being a skill monkey, and can enhance her versatility if given time to construct Inventions. Her most iconic powers are her Dimensional Blade and her Subspace Door, and her most iconic traits are her brilliance and the trauma she suffers from.

Early Life
Miriam Kundin Mendel was born to two DMO agents - Devon and David Mendel, a field agent specializing in hypertech and a doctor respectively - who were among the highest level in their field. Both were prodigies in their own right, and Miriam - and her younger brother Lucas, born five years after her - was no different.

She was always more advanced than her peers, in terms of intellect, maturity, and social skills - as such, she skipped several grades, eventually graduating highschool at just 15, college with three degrees by 18, medical school by 21 and finished her residency by 25 with an impressive collection of degrees collected along the way. MS in Physics, BS in Engineering, BS in Biology, PhD in dimensional mechanics, MD with a focus in abnormal biology...

The Hero and her Partner
That wasn't all there was to her, however. Since she was 20, she had also been the superheroine Metaspace, a force for good in Pittsburgh alongside her steadfast partner, Redline.

Metaspace defeated Redline, who was convicted and sent to a maximum security prison, where he's remained ever since. However, his influence over her remains - having worked together for three years, she found reminders of him all throughout Pittsburgh, and found it difficult to recover from her trauma.

Recovery and Escape
She spent a year recovering from her trauma and - collaborating with fellow cybernetics specialist Dr. Cassard - created cybernetic arms not just to replace her own but also integrated the devices she used as Metaspace into them, rebuilt her HUD goggles into cybernetic eyes, implanted devices previously part of her costume into her back, and has plans for more... all to prevent herself from ever being helpless again.

Fortunately, she may have escaped him once and for all - after finishing her residency, Dr. Mendel received a job offer from Vanderburg University, in Starlight City. States away from her home and Redline, can she find a place to finally heal from his betrayal?

Present
Miriam is currently employed by Vanderburg University in two posts - as a tenure-track professor of physics, and as the college's resident doctor specializing in abnormal medicine. She worked with the administration to create a schedule which would allow her to serve in both posts without neglecting either, although she is less available than some other staff members. Unknown to the college, she also arranged the schedule to allow her as much availability as a heroine as she could.

Miriam has found a steadfast friend in her colleague Nimue le Fay, with whom she is spotted often enough that students speculate constantly about their relationship.

She has a fluffy black cat named Doctor Jonas Edward Salk, MD. Jo was the run of the litter, and is small enough to fit in the palm of a person's hand.

She sees a therapist employed by the DMO to serve heroes and qualified to know classified information - such as her identity - on a weekly basis.

Nadya Romanova recently commissioned her to design and install several cybernetic implants, promising to pay obscene amounts of money for her to do so, and she has begun looking for a nicer place to live than her current cozy apartment in anticipation of this.

Trivia
Prior to giving herself cybernetic implants, Miriam's eyes were brown. However, she created her eyes in blue, which is her favorite color.

Miriam plays several instruments and is a decent singer, but her preferred art forms are sculpture - using fine wire to produce small but elaborate pieces - and poetry.

Miriam's longest relationship prior to coming to Starlight City was with a fellow doctor named Laura Langstrom. The relationship broke up after Laura finished her residency and moved across the country for her residency - Miriam continued working on a custom motorcycle that she had begun building for her. The motorcycle is now finished, and named after Laura.

Since childhood, Miriam has suffered from selective mutism in particularly stressful situations. She learned sign language to help get around this, but often must resort to using a text-to-speech application on her phone or simple pen and paper to communicate, as few understand ASL.

Her friend and colleague Dr. Mira Cassard created the first set of cybernetic arms she used for herself, which still serve as her backups and the arms she uses while performing maintenance on the arms of her own design.

She was invited to join the New Champions some time after beginning to operate in Starlight City, having interacted with several of their members. She has taken it upon herself, as the only medical doctor on the team, to look after their health.

The Herobook account she set up for Metaspace is used almost exclusively for its secure messaging service, although she'll occasionally answer polite questions posted on her profile.

Description
"Her office was tastefully decorated in shades of brown and blue, cerulean blue walls with a false-wood paneled floor and dark, dark blue ceiling. A handful of wire sculptures were set on the table or sitting on shelves - a green snake curled possessively around a bronze staff, a silvery egg with a skeletal figure curled inside it, an anatomical heart of red copper - as well as an apparently-unsigned poem framed on the wall, rephrasing the hippocratic oath into the rhyme and meter of a sonnet. A small photo of a tiny black cat sat on the desk, as did a family portrait of Dr. Mendel with her parents and younger brother."

Description
"Her office didn't look too different from most of the offices in Alexandra Hall - a cozy room with walls of dark wood, an ancient looking desk, and comfortable, well-upholstered chairs. To that classic look had been added a few wire sculptures - a pendulum, the leaning tower of pizza, an apple - as well as an apparently-unsigned poem framed on the wall, which rephrased the laws of theromodynamics to fit into the rhyme and meter of a sonnet. A small photo of a tiny black cat sat on the desk, as did a family portrait of Dr. Mendel with her parents and younger brother."

Description
"A smallish but cozy one-bedroom apartment, tastefully decorated in shades of blue and brown. Much of its adornment was in handmade art, intricate wire sculptures sitting on shelves - a tree of copper and gold wire, a ship in a bottle made from fine silver thread, a dragon curled around a fountain - as well as an apparently-unsigned poem framed on the wall, about the importance of fantasy to reality. A trio of bookshelves in one corner, behind a small home office desk, were stuffed full of science reference books, while through the crack in her bedroom door it was clear that her own room had several more bookshelves filled with fiction."

The Golden Age: Iron Space
In another world, Miriam and her family lived in Germany shortly before WWII began. They managed to flee the country, but her parents were caught and her arms badly injured. After reaching America, she prevailed on her younger brother, Lucas, to help her build a set of cybernetic replacements. Her new arms were good enough for her to function normally, but they lacked the precision to let her to do the kind of fine work that hypertech required, and she needed Lucas to continue serving as her hands in that. Lucas eventually convinced her to produce a set of power armor to enhance his physical abilities, allowing him to strike back at the Nazis as Iron Space.

In-Fiction: Night Sky Comics
In the context of Night Sky Comics, the character of Metaspace was a recent creation - the Marvelous Metaspace was first published in 2016, and was something of an experiment. While the series was named after her, it focused much more on her supporting cast - her little brother, her parents, her friends, and her girlfriend Laura. Metaspace wasn't incredibly fleshed out, many of her adventures taking place entirely offscreen - the character was relatively inexpressive, her supporting cast's reactions to her telling more than her own.

The title wasn't very popular, although it had a small core of dedicated readers, and in 2017 Redline was introduced in hopes of bolstering readership with an additional main character - however, even then the series floundered.

By 2018, the management was ready to cancel it, and the original writer had no objections - another writer, however, asked to take over the series and be given a year to save it. They were allowed to, and designed a plan for the last year of the book.

Over the first half of that year, the new writer shifted the comic to be more from Metaspace's perspective, fleshing her out more, while also beginning to strip away her supporting cast - her younger brother left for college, her girlfriend moved away for work - and focused more on Redline, who was shown to grow increasingly obsessed with her. At the six month mark, Redline kidnapped Metaspace.

Following the kidnapping and Redline being consigned to prison, the comic focused in on Metaspace, dropping the heroics entirely and taking a deep dive into her struggles with the trauma of what he had done to her. This - as well as the introduction of Mira Grant, a colleague who had undergone similar trauma - proved significantly more popular in part for introducing new flaws to a character who had previously been criticized as a Mary Sue and in part for realistically showing the consequences of the tragedy.

The series did well enough that it was extended for an additional year, to mid-2021, which was used to have Metaspace begin heroics once more - that year was also used to prepare for Metaspace moving to Starlight City, where she would join the supporting cast of the New Champions - while her character would remain popular and receive occasional spotlight issues, she no longer had her own series.