Vixen

Mari McCabe is the former model, now businesswoman, who also happens to be an activist for women, animals, and Africa. Oh, she's also the superhero Vixen and doesn't bother even trying to hide it.

Vixen is the hero name used by the latest wielder of the Tantu Totem.

Background
The story begins ages ago when the semi-mythical warrior Tantu asked the trickster-god Anansi to create a Totem. It provided him, the story goes, with the powers of the animal kingdom to protect the innocent. The Tantu Totem, and thus the powers to go with it, were subsequently passed down through his descendents.

Mari's mother, Jeanne-Mari, one such descendent, grew up in Zambesi and mothered a child--Mari--to whom she told the legends of Tantu. Mari's father, the Reverend Richard Jiwe, village priest, took care of her after her mother was killed by poachers led by a man named Aku Kwesi. Reverend Jiwe himself was later killed by his half-brother General Maksai who was looking for all the totems of power he could find, including the Tantu Totem in his half-brother's possession.

Now an orphan, Mari fled to America, setting up an identity for herself as Mari McCabe and using her natural good looks to become a celebrated model in New York City. Her newfound wealth allowed her to join the world-travelling jet set, which further allowed her to steal back the Tantu Totem from her uncle on one trip to Africa. The power she found within the Totem allowed her to become the Vixen.

Initially, Mari was very much an unwilling hero. She concentrated on her career (and her burgeoning activism), keeping her powered self low-profile. The only high profile case she got involved with, in fact, during this time was helping Superman battling poachers of illegal furs from India for a crooked fashion designer.

This all changed when the Justice League of America was reorganized by Aquaman. Something about the change caused her to change her mind about heroics. She dropped her career and joined what later became known, derisively, as "Justice League Detroit". In her time with the League she battled alongside the members, forming close relationships with a couple of them while she was there.

It was in this phase that she got into direct conflict with General Maksai, her fratricidal uncle, who used a hostage to force her to surrender her Tantu Totem. The Totem, however, only worked properly for those who protected. Those who used it for selfish ends fell afoul of it and, in the case of Maksai it turned him into a raging, thoughtless beast. Mari was forced to fight him, then, and even without her powers, courtesy of the martial arts training she undertook to make her powered combat more effective, she won. Maksai fell to his death and Mari retrived the Tantu Totem and returned to being Vixen and fighting for justice and the innocent.

This "Justice League Detroit" continued until G. Gordon Godfrey's campaign led to a series of events that culminated in the disbanding of the League. Mari returned, then, to her modeling career and her business.

It was during a Caribbean photo shoot that Mari found herself returning to the world of heroics in a way that was upsetting and shocking to her. She'd been out for a swim, only to return to find all of her friends and colleagues dead. The group had stumbled upon the activities of a drug operation and the boat of the dealers had wound up in the background of some of the photos. Working with the Suicide Squad she helped track down the drug dealers responsible and destroyed the operation.

Unfortunately Mari lost control and slaughtered the drug lord responsible in a gory fashion.

Being wracked with guilt, she volunteered to work with the Squad while she underwent therapy to control her animal instincts. Over time, however, she grew disillusioned with the Squad in general (and Amanda Waller in particular) so, after the therapy took hold, and after the Squad disbanded, she walked away from heroics and into her old profession again, starting a successful fashion house in the process.

The next phase of her life in Team Spandex was in parallel with her fashion business life. Mari worked as a solo operator for much of this time, teaming up with various people and groups for limited operations only. She battled Grodd together with other heroes when he turned the animals of Keystone into a private army. She joined a cult for the Birds of Prey--unfortunately getting brainwashed by Brainiac until Huntress freed her. She briefly joined the International Ultramarine Corps, falling under Grodd's influence when he took it over for his own ends.

This solo period ended when her Totem was stolen by the Electrocutioner. Her powers going out of control, her mind slipping away, she desperately tracked her Totem, finding it had been used to merge Solomon Grundy's soul into Amazo. She located it as Amazo battled the newly-reformed Justice League and, in the ensuing melee, she smashed through Amazo and recovered her precious Totem.

She was invited, then, to rejoin the League to which she agreed.

Her time with the League was fraught with difficulties because her returned Totem was not working properly. Instead of taking powers from The Red, she was siphoning power from her teammates, weakening them. For a while she kept quiet, revealing this truth only toward the end, after which she was removed from the team as they tried to solve the issue. In the process the League was trapped in an alternate universe created by Anansi who was revealed as living in the Totem and using it to test her.

She won, despite his overwhelming power advantage, by threatening to destroy the Totem with a gun. This satisfied him that she was worthy to be his "champion" in some kind of upcoming challenge he sensed.

A while after these events, after Mari was reinstated in the team, it was discovered that an Intergan operation in her homeland of Zambesi was in progress. In the course of investigating it, Mari learned the truth of her mother's death: that Aku Kwesi, the "poacher" who'd killed her mother, was an operative of Intergang. In her headstrong style she chose to investigate and prosecute alone, returning to her home village which she found under Kwesi's control.

After challenging him, finding to her surprise that he had powers, and being left for dead, she was found by one Brother Tabo, a keeper of a local shrine. (His pet lion was Anansi in disguise.) Under his tutelage and care she found out she didn't need her Totem any longer to control the animal instincts she thought would overwhelm her without it.

The League arrived to fight Intergang while this was going on, with half their number being turned by a drug, in effect, to zombies under Intergang's control. The most powerful half. Mari, in the meantime, found the antidote to the drug Intergang was using to control beings as well as the secret to Kwesi's power. She quickly flew to the League's aid, administering the antidote in the nick of time and challenging Kwesi to a rematch. They fought again, only this time, knowing the source of his "powers", she tore away the vest that gave him his and then left his fate in the hands of the villagers he'd terrorized.

Before she could really get her breath back from the events in Zambesi, Mari was faced with the Crisis. She was vacationing solo in Zambesi, reconnecting to her roots, reaffirming and refining her activism for Africa, when the Labyrinth struck. She found herself in a never-ending series of confrontations and battles that sucked her deeply into the animal instincts she'd just learned how to control. She was taken over. She lost herself in the Red and fought instinctually for what seemed like an eternity.

At last she found a way to the human part of The Red and pulled herself back into the human world, a human world that had changed in ways both recognizable an unrecognizable. She was remembered by many, and unknown to many -- even in her own adopted home of New York where she was once a household name known by all. Much of her business empire remained intact, but a few new nations and a few changed national boundaries here and there gave her pause for thought while she struggled to fit herself back in. And to forget what she'd done while submerged in The Red as an unwilling witness to killings.

Personality

 * Short-Tempered - Mari is prone to rash decisions based on a short temper and a strong tendency to leap to the most negative conclusions from available data.


 * Self-Righteous - Mari is, among other things, a vocal feminist, a vocal environmentalist, an anti-corruption activist, and is not shy in the slightest about expressing those views, wrapping herself in a mantle of moral superiority.


 * Strong Moral Compass - Mari's self-righteousness is the unwise, unsubtle expression of the very powerful moral compass she has. She sees wrongs being done and she will right them to the best of her ability. She tries to navigate for the greatest good and avoids killing intelligent beings--and even animals unless it is needed.


 * Wild Child - Ever since acquiring the Tantu Totem, Mari has plugged into the Red, the force of life that binds all animals together. While she has much better control now than she used to, that link to the wild is still a part of her and occasionally infiltrates its way into her social interactions. Putting it bluntly she's fond of the three-Fs of nature: feeding, fighting, and fu...nning around.


 * African Roots - After a lot of years spent ignoring (and verging on denying) her African heritage, her trip back to Zambesi to deal with her mother's murderer, Kwesi, has tied her back to her roots and awakened an interest in her nation and continent of birth.


 * Prideful and Private - Mari does not like being indebted to others for help with problems she perceives of as solely her own and is thus likely to wind up going things alone that she really should call upon others for help with.

Logs

 * TBA