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Oh yeah, there's another obstacle females like Dream Girl have to overcome as well... (Oh, Mon, how could you?!)

A cleverly-disguised Nura battles Mystelor.

All this certainly qualifes Nura as an Important Legionnaire during planning sessions or in capturing criminals. What of her actual fighting ability, then? She is required, of course, to master the ordinary martial arts as part of her Legion training and ongoing education; but take a look at Adventure #374, in which Nura is pitted agaist the telepath/telekinetic Mystelor. Nura thinks, "I can predict Mystelor's every move... but she knows what I'll do, too, thanks to her ESP power! It's a stand-off!" Yes, for an opponent like Mystelor, Nura's ability to predict (or intuit) when an enemy will strike (or expose a weakness, or utilize a strategy) creates a stalemate. But against a non-telepath who had no overwhelming physical super-power such as super-strength, she would be practically unbeatable.

In Nura's case, option #3 is not a cop-out, but rather an extension of who and what she is. In Adventure #351, she demonstrates a power no other Legionnaire can compete with: she works magic. Using a spell that her sister the White Witch had taught her, Nura freed her sister from the sorcery that had turned her into the villainous Hag, one of the Devil's Dozen. Now, I'm strongly against magicians belonging to super-hero groups unless they have very specific magical powers, with very specific limitations. Otherwise, in the hands of a lazy writer, omnipotent magicians can snap their fingers and save the universe, much to the destruction of plot and general team camaraderie. Only characters such as Lilith (of the old Teen Titans, whose spells and intuitions backfired or were muddled in ambiguity as often as not) mesh successfuly with a super-group. And even then, they're often best left on the sidelines so as not to overshadow the rest of the team.

What if Dream Girl were to have a very specific, very small collection of spells in her repertory? They would have to be minor ones, or else available to her only in times of direst emergency. She has already demonstrated a spell to reveal a being's true form (in Adventure #351), and a spell that magically sends a call to her sister for help (could that be what she was concentrating on during the final sequence in Adventure #370? [at right]). But as much as I like the Witch as a character, I would deplore her sorcerous power being used like the Phantom Stranger's, the Miracle Machine's, et al, as a potential cop-out from cliffhanger situations.

Such spells would have to have been established either in past LSH continuity (and to my knowledge, only the above two have been so established; the transformation of Light Lass' powers by "Naltorian science" was likely neither science nor Nura's work, but the White Witch's) or in some manner revealed previous to the time she really needs to use it. We can't have the Legion about to be zapped out of existance only to have Nura chirp, "Oh, I just remembered a spell my sister taught me years ago!" and have her magick her way clear of the doom. Her spells would have to be low in strength, requiring secondary paraphernalia to carry them out (remember what it took to get te "hair from a magician's head; print of an enchanted shoe" in Adventure #351?), and limited in number.

But even with those limitations, what are we left with? Why, just another candidate for The Most Powerful Legionnaire Of Them All, all without changing the basic, established nature of Dream Girl's powers one iota. It just takes a little brainstorming to see the potential behind the flashy costume and sex-goddess pesonality. Now's the time to bring in option No. 1 and use this fascinating character!



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