Starshine

Ariel Levi Asch was an astronomer who was in a committed to Elijah Asch and Delilah Asch for many years, even changing her name to signify that the three considered themselves to be married. She spent most of the last two decades as a housewife, raising their children Abigail and Susan.

Secretly, however, she was Starshine, a superheroine and one of the founding members of the Starlight Champions. Ariel’s family had for many generations been skilled mages of various stripes - her mother, for example, was known as Nimbus - and she maintained the tradition, specializing in nyctomancy and its subsets, umbramancy and lumomancy.

When Abigail turned 16, Ariel began teaching her magic in the tradition of their family, and on her 18th birthday allowed her to join her in heroing as her protege, Vega.

As a hero, Starshine was considered stern and highly professional.

She operated as a hero for nearly two decades before being killed by Tyrant during his assault on the Champions’ base, the Cheque.

In Fiction: Night Sky Comics
In the context of Night Sky Comics, Starshine was first introduced in the Silver Age as the daughter of Nimbus and the reason she was shifting from an active heroism role to a mentor role. She was never given focus in the Silver Age, but was introduced as a hero in the Bronze Age when the Starlight Champions were created. It was decided that Nimbus’ family had a tradition of magic, each teaching their daughters, and so Starshine had learned magic of her own.

Starshine was a leading figure through the Bronze Age, her stories being consistently popular. She was characterized as being stern and having trouble expressing herself - her stories tended to be very inwardly focused, with lots of inner monologues and thoughts that established her as being a deeply feeling woman who simply had trouble showing it.

She was given a romantic interest in the form of Elijah Asch, wealthy young heir to the family that had created Aschwood. After some time of them being an on-and-off thing - Elijah now having become a rock musician - she was given a romantic rival in the form of Delilah Cohen, a young actress. Delilah was bright, empathetic, and emotional to contrast Starshine’s difficulties expressing herself.

In the early 1980s, the writers gave her a storyline where she had to rescue Delilah, thinking it would be a fun romp to make her save her rival. However, in the story they ended up having a remarkably amount of chemistry as friends, which many fans read as even more. For the next few years the writers played on this, the love triangle now being full mutual in all directions - which was revolutionary as it was one of the first depictions of queer women without it being depicted as bad. It was in the late 1990s that the writers ended up having all three of them - who at this point were aware of the shared feelings they all felt - simply decide that they didn’t have to fight since they all wanted each other, which was similarly revolutionary.