Andromeda

Statistics
Real name Laurel Gand
Status Inactive
Affiliations Legion of Super-Heroes, White Triangle
Group: Legion of Super-Heroes
Origin: Daxam
Known Relatives: descendant of Valor (M'Onel-Lar Gand)
First appearance: Legion of Super-Heroes (3rd series) # 66
Notable powers Super-strength, super-speed, unaided flight, heat vision, telescopic and X-ray vision, super-hearing, ability to survive and move in a vaccuum Laurel Gand, codenamed Andromeda, is a fictional character, a superheroine in the future of the DC Comics universe, and a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes

Biography
Laurel Gand spent most of her life in a White Triangle community, being indoctrinated in the "horrors" of interspecies co-operation before the Triangle's political clout led her to become the Daxamite representative in the Legion. Away from Daxam's red sun, she gained powers similar to Superman's, but the race-wide hypersensitivity of Daxamites to lead that meant even minuscule amounts could prove fatal even to a powered-up Daxamite, forcing her to wear a transuit at all times. This did not trouble her, since it meant she never had to actually touch any non-Daxamites.

Her Triangle-derived beliefs hampered her effectiveness as a Legionnaire, thanks to her reluctance to physically engage with any enemies, but the real problems started after she let several Triangle members go after a mugging, shortly after which they beat and almost killed Triad. Angered more for their defiance of her than for the beating, when she was ordered away to prevent the Composite Man gaining her powers, she flew after them. Immediately, they tore her transuit and directly exposed her to lead, and she barely managed to turn them over to the Science Police before crashing through the walls of Legion HQ.

While Brainiac 5 worked on devising an anti-lead serum, he confronted her about her beliefs, and after discovering the serum Vril Dox II, his direct ancestor, had created for Valor and tailoring it to her genetic structure to allow it to work properly on her (much to her surprise, as she had been taught that all members of the same race were identical), he forced her to confront the fact that he wasn't her inferior before giving her the serum. While this was happening, however, Shrinking Violet discovered a White Triangle necklace in her room and connected it to the group which had assaulted Triad and destroyed Trom, before telling the rest of the team.

Confined to quarters after an unsuccessful attempt by Cosmic Boy to have her removed from the team, she used her super-senses to see Ambassador Roxxas gloating, but he managed to bully her into giving him the anti-lead serum. Taking it himself and giving it to four other Daxamites, they proceeded to cause mass destruction on Earth. When Andromeda herself confronted Roxxas over what he was doing & had made her do, she was almost defeated when Violet began thrashing around in his head, before coming out and telling Andromeda to take him down. As she pummelled him repeatedly, he destroyed the covering of an "atomic furnace", and both were thought to have died in the resulting inferno (causing Brainiac 5 severe depression). Only Cosmic Boy told that she had survived and voluntarily exiled herself to Planet Hell.

Later, she was brought out of this exile by Live Wire after Cosmic Boy had told him where she was as part of a way to build up a "Legion Rescue Squad", and she was awed by Valor himself being another member. However, she declined to rejoin the Legion after the Squad had served it's purpose, preferring to head off into deep space.

Powers
Great super-strength, the ability to fly unaided, to move in space without breathing apparatus and at superluminal speed, heat vision, telescopic vision and super-hearing.

BRIEF HISTORY
Laurel Gand grew up on Daxam, in a village run by the White Triangle cult, which was devoted to racial separation and purity. She was more than a little horrified, therefore, to find herself drafted by her government to join the Legion of Super-Heroes, the United Planets' living symbol of racial co-existence and harmony.

The Legion was happy enough to have a member with super-speed, super-strength, laser vision, x-ray vision, super-senses, and invulnerability to everything but lead. Laurel, code-named Andromeda, was less pleased to have to deal with members of "lesser races," and was thankful for the fact that the transsuit that protected her from lead poisoning protected her from the other Legionnaires' touch. She got very lonely, and the only thing that prevented her from leaving the Legion was the fact that she'd have to return to Daxam if she did.

Slowly but surely, her attitude changed. When some White Triangle-affiliated thugs that she had kept free of imprisonment used their freedom to beat up her teammate Triad, she decided, with some guilty prodding from Shrink ing Violet, to track them down and take them in. They, though, had other plans, and poisoned her with lead. A sickbed conversation with Brainiac 5 and his subsequent curing of her condition convinced her that individuals of all races should be treated equally. But the discovery, soon afterward, of her White Triangle ties, earned her the suspicion of her teammates and made her long for home once again. Playing on these vulnerable feelings, Roxxas, the White Triangle's leader, tricked her into handing the cure for lead poisoning over to him. When she realized how she had been used, she entered the fight between the Legion and the White Triangle, taking on Roxxas himself. The two of them got caught inside a fusion reactor, and the nuclear flames shooting out of the reactor convinced witness Shrinking Violet that she was dead. The world has mourned her as a heroine who atoned for her mistakes, but she had actually survived the blast. She turned herself in voluntarily to the President of the United Planets, and has since been living alone on the abandoned prison Planet Hell in an act of self-punishment, a fact revealed only to the President and Cosmic Boy. However, Cosmic Boy later decided to send Live Wire to free her from there to become part of an undercover rescue squad for the Legion, and, after fellow squad member Jan Arrah offered her forgiveness on behalf of his dead race, she agreed to join, and with the squad, she helped save the active Legion from the Fatal Five. Once R. J. Brande assumed the presidency of the U. P., she was officially pardoned and her status as both living person and Legionnaire was reinstated, but she declined to rejoin the Legion, feeling guilty and out of place(A vision of an older Andromeda was seen in the timestream, battling some unknown evil. It is unknown whether this future Andromeda is the true one or a divergent counterpart)