It is no secret that Nightcrawler’s teleportation power is one of the more impressive (and deadly) mutant powers in X-Men canon, but his abilities have never really been pushed to their absolute limits–that is, until now, as Nightcrawler’s ‘daughter’ exposes the R-rated potential of his powers.
Kurt Wagner aka Nightcrawler is the mutant child of Mystique and Azazel born with the inherent ability of teleportation. Nightcrawler is able to achieve teleportation through his access to the Brimstone Dimension–hopping into it in an instant and then appearing back in his home dimension having traveled to his desired location. When he does this, Nightcrawler’s momentum is maintained as he travels through the Brimstone Dimension, which means that upon mastering this interdimensional access, he can produce a melee attack packed with immense kinetic energy or even fire weapons through manifested portals. However, the greatest aspect of Nightcrawler’s powers is also the most obvious. He’s practically untouchable while capable of getting the drop on basically anyone he’s attacking. Unfortunately, Kurt is just missing one added power that would make him the ultimate killing machine, and his ‘daughter’ makes up for that particular shortcoming perfectly.
Nightcrawler’s ‘Daughter’ Combines His Powers with Domino’s
In Nightcrawlers #1 by Si Spurrier and Paco Medina, the fusion of Banshee and the otherworldly Spirit of Variance (visually akin to Ghost Rider) are searching for artifacts or informations–anything, really–that can be used against Mr. Sinister. This comic is taking place within the ongoing event Sins of Sinister in which Nathaniel Essex has stolen the mutants’ ability to resurrect their own kind and corrupted it with his consciousness–effectively making mutant hybrids with a little piece of himself in every one (hybrids known as Chimeras). Once Sinister becomes aware of what Banshee and S.V. are doing, Essex deploys his ultimate hit-squad: the Legion of the Night. Every member of the Legion is a powerful Chimera with the baseline power of Nightcrawler’s teleportation, making him the unwitting ‘father’ of every Legion member. There’s a Wolverine-Nightcrawler, a Spider-Man-Nightcrawler, and a Sabretooth-Nightcrawler–though the most powerful of them all has to be the Domino-Nightcrawler named Auntie Fortune.
Auntie Fortune is the perfect combination of Nightcrawler and Domino in that she has Nightcrawler’s teleportation power and Domino’s ‘luck’ power. The original Domino has the power to manipulate probability to always work in her favor, and she can do this on a subconscious level, which is why her powers are perceived as ‘luck’ (even to herself). This means that everywhere Auntie Fortune teleports is exactly where she needs to go, and every attack she launches through the Brimstone Dimension hits its target dead-center. Given she’s a member of an elite hit-squad (who ends up leaving Sinister’s side, but who still does a lot of killing), Auntie Fortune is able to pull off some pretty nifty, and incredibly brutal murders with an ease and flippancy that could only exist in an R-rated movie, should it ever be brought to the big screen.
Nightcrawler has used his powers to pull off some pretty hardcore feats in battle–including that one time Nightcrawler teleported Deadpool’s head off his body, effectively beating an unkillable opponent in one second–nothing can compare to Auntie Fortune. In this issue alone, the Nightcrawler/Domino hybrid used her powers to fire a bullet through the Brimstone Dimension to achieve a triple headshot, and then again to steal a valuable weapon from Shaw’s armory because she ‘got lucky’ and just ended up there. Domino’s power offers Nightcrawler’s power the directionality it needs to reach its fullest potential, and more often than not, that ‘full potential’ exposed by Nightcrawler’s ‘daughter’ in this X-Men issue is going to be used in pretty R-rated ways.
Nightcrawlers #1 by Marvel Comics is available now.