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| Psychic Vampirism: The Black Queen's primary power is her psychic vampirism. She drains the minds and psyche of her victims, gaining health and perpetual youth while leaving her victims desiccated and often entirely disintegrated. |
| Mental Powers: The Black Queen’s mental powers include telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and hypnotism. She possesses a psychic shield against outside mental attacks, and her mental powers have affected her body, giving her the equivalency of body armour. |
| Magic: The Black Queen wields various magical spells, although she often refrains from doing so as it tends to drain her strength. She has exhibited such spells as casting illusions, influencing or controlling others, and summoning low-level demons. |
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| Selene's origin is as yet unrevealed, but she is known to have lived for several millennia, and to have been a foe of the ancient sorcerer, Kulan Gath. In past ages, she was renowned as a sorceress whose power was feared and respected by other magic users. She eventually came to live in the ancient Roman Republic. At some point, Selene established herself as a goddess to those who would worship her. Over the millennia, her worshippers grew into a worldwide cult. |
| For unknown reasons, Selene led many to believe she had accompanied a large number of Roman citizens who fled the first century B.C. Italy and sailed to the New World, where they founded Nova Roma in a hidden section of the Amazon jungle in present-day Brazil. These Nova Romans supposedly lived there for roughly two thousand years, and was supposedly where Selene first founded her Cult of Fire as its Black Priestess. However, it has been since revealed that Nova Roma was a massive illusion maintained by Selene and her minion, the mutant known as Empath, to hold its citizens (in reality, kidnapped British and American tourists, including the mutant known as Magma) captive. This deception was eventually revealed by the mutant heroes of the New Warriors and X-force. |
| Prior to this revelation, however, Selene posed as the wife to Nova Roma Senator Marcus Domitius Gallo, whose plot to abolish the republican Nova Roman government led to her first encounter with the mutant teens of the New Mutants. |
| Selene soon after travelled to New York, where members of her worldwide cult had a church. The leader of the cult, Friedrich von Roehm, was also a member of the Hellfire Club, an elite group secretly dedicated to achieving world domination. With Von Roehm's help, Selene entered the Inner Circle of the Club and rapidly rose to the high rank of Black Queen. |
