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Jeanne-Marie Beaubier and her twin brother Jean-Paul were separated in infancy after their parents died. Jean-Paul was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Louis Martin, who were cousins of his mother. The Martins could not afford to adopt Jeanne-Marie as well and arranged for Jeanne-Marie to be raised at Madame DuPont's School for Girls in LaVelle, Quebec, a reactionary religious school. Soon afterward the Martins moved to Northern Quebec. The Martins were killed in an accident several years later and Jean-Paul was placed in a foster home, unaware that he had a sister.

Extremely nervous and introverted, Jeanne-Marie Beaubier was miserable at Madame DuPont's School and at the age of thirteen, she attempted suicide by throwing herself from the roof of one of the school's buildings. Instead of falling to her death, Beaubier discovered that she could fly at great speed. Unaware that she was a mutant, the deeply religious Beaubier believed that her flight was the result of a divine miracle. The next morning she explained to the school's headmistress, what she believed had happened. Believing the young girl to be guilty of blasphemy, the headmistress had Beaubier severely disciplined. This incident triggered a dissociative identity disorder in Jeanne-Marie. A second personality, extroverted and far more uninhibited, emerged. Under the influence of this second personality, Beaubier secretly left the school that same night. On returning three days later, she had no memory of where she had been or what she had done and she was again physically punished. The resulting trauma was so great that Beaubier repressed her second personality.

Five years later, Beaubier's application to become a teacher at the school was accepted. By this time Beaubier had adjusted to life at the school and her everyday personality was that of a prim, proper, repressed woman. But the same night that her application was accepted, her second personality re-emerged and she left to enjoy herself in Montreal. Confronted by muggers, she knocked one unconscious by moving at superhuman speed. This was the first time that she had used her superhuman powers in five years. The second mugger was halted by Wolverine, who had witnessed the attempted assault. Recognizing that Beaubier had superhuman powers, Wolverine invited her to go to Ottawa to meet James MacDonald Hudson, who was organizing a team of superhumanly powerful agents for the Canadian government's Department H. Hudson accepted her as a recruit and reunited her with her brother. After a period of training, both Beaubier siblings joined the team that Hudson created, Alpha Flight, under the code names Aurora and Northstar.

Aurora has suffered from dissociative identity disorder for some time: Jeanne-Marie represents her normal persona while Aurora represents Jeanne-Marie's "darker" repressed personality traits. The personalities were later merged into one healthy personality although her sanity has deteriorated in recent years and they resplit.


POWERS:

Aurora possesses the ability to move and fly at superhuman speeds. Through an act of concentration, she can channel a portion of the kinetic energy of the atomic motion in her body’s molecules in a single direction, accelerating her body to a velocity in direct proportion to the amount of kinetic energy she has tapped. It is theoretically possible for Aurora to reach 99% of the speed of light (186,272 miles per second in a vacuum), but practical reasons - such as her inability to breathe at such speeds and the damage her body would suffer from wind and friction - prevent her from reaching anywhere near that speed. Even a fraction of such velocity of a solid object through Earth’s atmosphere would wreak havoc on the atmosphere and on the land or sea below. As a side effect of partially robbing her molecules of their atomic motion, the binding forces within and between the molecules increase which enhances the sheer toughness of Aurora’s entire body. This effect gives her skin enough durability to withstand speeds up to at least Mach 10 without injury. Formerly, by coming into physical contact with her brother, Aurora could vary the rate of acceleration of her molecules to release a cascade of photons as bright as a lighthouse beacon.

Following alteration of her cellular structure by Sasquatch, Aurora’s powers evolved from being able to generate light by herself to the point where she could transform into a being of pure light, the energy from which could bring inner peace to others. When these powers were exhausted, Aurora was still able to generate light and could alter its intensity from a hypnotic glow to dazzling brilliance or even concussive force.

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