Xi'an Coy Manh

## Background

### 1984 - 2001: Xi'an Coy Manh

Xi'an Coy Manh is the daughter of General Nguyen Coy Manh in the Vietnamese army. She & her twin brother, Tran, were mutants with the power to take mental possession of the minds of others. While still a child, Xi'an saw a man attack Tran. Not realizing she had powers, Xi'an took possession of the man's mind & stopped him from attacking Tran. Tran then successfully attempted the same feat & forced the man to kill himself. While Tran took great delight in this use of his new-found power, Xi'an was frightened of her ability. Xi'an kept their powers secret but Tran told their father.

General Manh later arranged for his family to leave Vietnam but only Tran was sent abroad. Eventually, the rest of the family left Vietnam on a small, crowded boat. Her mother was murdered by attacking pirates just days before they were rescued by the United States Navy. Xi'an & her younger siblings were then sent to New York to be reunited with her father & Tran. Her father had become a powerful & prosperous criminal in the United States, although he was publicly known as a businessman, and Tran was using his powers in his father's employ. When her father asked Xi'an to use her powers in his service, she refused. She sought help from a Catholic priest, Father Michael Bowen. With Father Bowen's aid, she secured employment. Xi'an also discovered that she in fact had an older half-sister Susan from her father. The two got along quite well, with her new sister allowing Xi'an & their siblings to move into her house.

In an effort to blackmail Xi'an into working for him, General Manh kidnapped his children Leong & Nga. Desperate, Xi'an reached out to the Fantastic Four, who then agreed to help her. Tran used his powers to take control of them & have him attack Xi'an. Though she was unable to hold them off, Tran decided to take it a step further & he turned the team on their younger siblings. To save her siblings, Xi'an was forced to kill her brother by absorbing his life essence into herself.

Shortly thereafter, Xi'an was recommended by Reed Richards & accepted the invitation of Professor Xavier to enroll at the Xavier Institute to learn to use her powers better.

### 2001 - 2003: Xavier Institute

Shortly thereafter, Xi'an, now making Karma her codename, became the first leader of the new team of young superhuman mutants he was training, the New Mutants. Needing to support her two siblings, Professor Xavier also assigned her the position of secretary at the the institute so that she was able to send money to Susan to help take care of the twins.

When the twins were kidnapped by Viper, Xi'an agreed to one year’s service to her father in exchange for their whereabouts. But before the New Mutants could help, she disappeared in an explosion. Xi'an was believed to be dead but had fallen under the control of the Shadow King, a comrade of her father's. The Shadow King possessed Karma's body & used both of their powers to carve a criminal empire. Shadow King indulged his excessive appetites, causing Karma to become incredibly obese.

After months of believing Karma to be dead, the New Mutants learned she was in fact alive & decided to rescue her. After tracking Karma to Madripoor, then Cairo, the New Mutants ended up possessed by Karma except for Mirage & Magik. After Mirage was possessed, Magik was able to release Karma from the Shadow King. Karma then fought Shadow King in a psychic battle, which she won, forcing the Shadow King to flee back to the Astral Plane. Returning back to the Institute, Karma managed to lose the weight she had gained under the influence of the Shadow King & even caught up in her academics.

### 2003 - 2007: Karma

After graduating from the Xavier Institute, Karma got herself a job at the Hatchi Corporation under her sister. Life had begun to be stable for Xi'an as she split her time between working with her sister & helping Xavier out at the school.

When the massacre of the Morlocks took place, the New Mutants were charged with aiding the wounded. After things settled, Xi'an had Illyana teleport her to check on her younger siblings, only to discover they had disappeared. A bomb rigged to their apartment’s light switch destroyed all possible clues to their whereabouts but Ilyana was able to teleport them out before they were caught in the explosion. Returning to the Institute, Xi'an left a letter for Dani, now co-leader of the New Mutants, stating that she was leaving the team to work for her father & search for her siblings.

No longer apart of the New Mutants, Karma embarked on a long search for Leong & Nga. For a time, she served her father in Madripoor, in the hope that he could locate her siblings. For a time, her siblings were the prisoners of Shinobi Shaw, who made them the subjects of genetic experiments. He then turned them over to Karma's longtime foe & Madame Hydra, Viper. Karma reluctantly asked for help from the X-Man Beast, who eventually joined her in rescuing the two children. Beast, with the help of another doctor, was able to undo the damage her siblings had suffered. However, when she returned, she learned her sister has been killed by Viper's forces in retaliation..

### 2007 - 2010: Karma

Karma returned to the Xavier Institute, where Xavier allowed her younger siblings to enroll & stay on campus to be close to their sister. Crossing paths with her old friend Dani, she confessed to her that she was a lesbian & even confessed an unreciprocated attraction to Kitty Pryde.

Over the years, Xi'an has gained lots of responsibility at the Institute. She was the school's librarian before becoming the French teacher & adviser for students too young to be assigned to a training squad. With Wolfsbane leaving the Institute after her affair with a student was exposed, Karma also began supervising her squad, the Paladins. Luckily for Xi'an, the role was eventually passed to her good friend Amara Aquilla aka Magma.

## Powers & Abilities

* **Mutant Physiology:** Xi'an is a mutant with telepathic & psionic based powers dealing in possession, mind scanning & limited telepathy. She has limited to moderate telepathic & empathic capabilities which were never truly touched upon by Xavier. She's received some training with Emma Frost in that regard but her psychic prowess was nowhere near that of the White Queen's.
	+ ***Psychic Possession*:** This psionic ability allows her to project a mental energy surge that overwhelms her victims' consciousness while placing her mind in command, operating their bodies as if they were an extension of her own, experiencing what the subject's senses perceive. During the possession, her subject's higher brain functions revert to diminished levels, similar to their state in a dreamless sleep & the subject is left with no memory of the actual possession. When Karma first takes possession of someone, she can only move her subject's body awkwardly until she acclimates herself to her new host.
		- ***Mass Possession*:** Although Karma can possess multiple subjects simultaneously, her control over her subjects is fragmented as she shifts her attention from one to another.
		- ***Remote Possession*:** Xi'an can host individuals over a distance while maintaining her original body, but her control is limited.
	+ ***Mind Control*:** She can control her subject's actions & thought patterns allowing her to alter their perceptions and memories, and command entranced opponents to divulge information.
	+ ***Psychic Shield*:** She can generate a psychic shield that disrupts incoming psi-signatures, protecting her from all manner of psychic assaults.
	+ ***Sensory Link*:** Karma may establish a scrying link either through partial or remote possession and gain the feelings and sensations of the target. While ranged possession means controlling a body in another location and requires her to see through her victim's eyes, she needs greater focus to control them and has sometimes appeared to be in a meditative state.
	+ ***Telepathy*:** Karma can read an individual's thoughts & feelings, sift through memories, or discharge mental blasts to overwhelm opponents.

* **Hand to Hand Combat:** As an X-Man, Karma has been trained in various self defense practices by great many militant specialists ranging from Cable to her own father from an early age. Over the course of decades as a mutant rights activist & in life in general, she has broadened her combat capability & become a very capable fighter in her own right.
* **Firearms:** Being an avid guerrilla fighter & costumed adventurer, she is very adept at using various long-range batteries while locked in combat with an opposing force.
* **Multilingualism:** Karma speaks Vietnamese, English & French.

### Weaknesses

* **Subordinate Personality:** If she remains in possession of a host for too long, she will begin to act as her host would & eventually her own personality would become subordinate to one identical to the host's.
* **Tran's Influence:** Ever since Xi'an assimilated her malefic twin brother into her genetic matrix, her personality has considerably darkened to the point that her evil sibling barely even needs to exert his influence over her actions from time to time as a consequence of their fusion.

### Ratings

* **Acumen:** Unknown
* **Might:** Unknown
* **Quickness:** Unknown
* **Mysticism:** Unknown
* **Gadgetry:** Unknown
* **Projection:** Unknown
* **Tactics:** Unknown
* **Battle:** Unknown
* **TOTAL:** Unknown

## Trivia

* Her sister Susan Hatchi was the legal guardian of their younger siblings. Following her death, their siblings came to live with Xi'an at the Institute.

## Notes

* The original character of Karma belongs to the Marvel Universe.