Valkyrie
Background
Ingrid had always felt a bit out of place. She always felt she was too tall and a bit big boned, always wishing she was a bit more petite like the other girls. Perhaps that was why she turned to academia. She was was a good student, though she had to work at it, but she did have a knack for languages, in particular the Scandinavian tongues. She just assumed it was her heritage, and that her grandmother has spoken Norwegian around the home when she was little.
She was able to land a job with the US Depart of Occult Research (US DoOR), a government branch that researches, catalogues and collects mystical artifacts. With her proclivity for both reading and speaking Norse languages, she was selected as a junior researcher on a trip to Main to look into a the wreckage of a Viking ship that was recently discovered.
Among the items found was an ornate box, damaged and crushed in the wreckage. inside was a 6 inch wooden staff, carved with writing. As the junior member of the team she was tasked with transcribing and photographing the etchings for translation. The artifacts found in these digs are often damaged, and it can be difficult to decipher the markings.
Translating this particular artifact, however, was simple, as the writing was quite clear. "Take flight Valkyrie of the Air!" it said.
Several others had already looked it over, including Professor Hammish, who was leading the dig. He had noted that the box it was found in clearly had slots for 9 of the staves, though only one remained. He posited, that the set may have had religious significance, though he detected no mystical nature to the item.
He was wrong.
Once in the right hands, a daughter of the Valkyrie lineage, and the words spoken aloud, the full might and power of the ancient warriors was unleashed upon Ingrid!
With a blazing blue flash and crackle of energy, her muscles rippled with strength. She jumping back from the flash of light only to find herself several dozen feet away, with the work tent wrapped around her as she hovered above the trees.
"Typical." she thought. "I can suddenly fly and the fist thing I do is look like an idiot."
But she didn't care. Soon the shock wore off and she was zipping above the trees like a bird. Professor Hammish and her colleagues could just stare, eyes wide It wasn't until the next day that things began to go really crazy.
The site was cordoned off, with armed guards all around. The professor was replaced with a serious looking guy in a black suit and lab coat. Many of the items, including her stave, and it's container, were whisked away in a helicopter. And a serious guy with a limp and a scarred face came to talk to her.
She recognized him from when she was a teenager. He had lead a super-team, Redemption, maybe, but thought they were killed in action back when she was in highschool. He asked her, in one of those ways that you know it isn't really asking, if she wanted to serve her country, and help fight the forces of evil.
She didn't hesitate to say "yes". Somehow she knew she could do this. Her life to this point was boring, nothing. She always felt out of place, but this opportunity to fight, and make a difference was what she was born to do. Her entire existence to this point was all leading up to this.
"Good", he said, "Because there are eight more of those things out there, and we have no idea where they are or if anyone has found them."
Heroes Unlimited Character Sheets
Images
Here are few alternate images I had cooked up for the character prior to the player sending in an official character pic.
All of the above were based on Buggs Bunny's look in What's Opera Doc.
All of the images were created using HeroMachine 3, which is a fantastic, easy to use, character image generator.