Cathleen Bate

Eight tufts of blonde hair swept back from her head, styled after the pair All Might wore in his empowered form and multiplied as a statement of her own dedication. The rest of it hung long and flowing. She stood tall on a heavily muscled frame, with elegant features and narrow brown eyes.

Her costume was a skin-tight bodysuit with a high collar, shoulder pads, gauntlets and boots. Stripes covered the upper torso while metal stars studded the collar and gauntlets, tying the design to her country and her hero name, and a long striped cape hung behind her in the pattern of the U.S. flag. A red domino mask of the sort American comic heroes wear finished it.

She was not born to the look. As a girl her hair was long and brown, her eyes navy blue, and she wore glasses. The blonde came later, out of a bottle, and out of wanting to take after All Might.

Cathleen moved first and asked later. She set out for Japan to help take on All For One while the United Nations was still deliberating over international hero aid, and she was hazy enough on villains outside her own jurisdiction that she could not say for certain whether the man in front of her was All For One at all.

All Might was the reason for all of it. He had saved her and her family years earlier while studying abroad, and she took his two hair tufts as the symbol of heroism itself, answering them with eight of her own. His raw strength impressed her so deeply that she kept a permanent strength enhancement running through her Quirk. In training she had despaired of ever reaching his level and blamed her being a girl for it, until her teammates told her she had no need to imitate anyone, being formidable enough already. She treated her squadron as family from then on, calling them brothers and bros, and the pilots called her Star in return.

What she wanted was to protect people, and she would spend her reputation and her career doing it. She all but demanded the Tiamat missiles be used on Tomura Shigaraki despite the international fallout, and when told it would cost her hero license she waved it off. Timothy Agpar considered that defiance of the rules the very thing that made their nation shine brightest, though it made her reckless. Dying did not stop her: she sabotaged her own Quirk on the way out so it would turn on whoever took it, then tore into Tomura and All For One inside the vestige world, telling them they would never win so long as anyone still carried the resolve to protect others. She crumbled away smiling, saluting her comrades and thanking All Might for making a hero of her.

She held America's top hero ranking, and All For One called her the strongest woman around, noting that cheap tricks and petty tactics slid off her. He had meant to take One For All before facing her and admitted that going in without it was a massive gamble, reckoning that she and Izuku Midoriya together would beat Tomura even at 98 percent completion and that stealing her Quirk would have left no battle the villains could lose. She proved the point alone against Tomura at that same 98 percent, and she rode the Pacific crossing upright on the roof of her aircraft. Even without New Order shielding her she survived the Tiamat detonation at a distance. Her will outlived her body: from her vestige she battered both villains and destroyed several of Tomura's Quirk Factors, and an ember of her haunted him long after the Quirk was gone.

New Order let her impose a rule on her surroundings, reshaping herself or the world by declaring new properties into being. Activation took physical contact, the target's name spoken aloud, then a statement of the rule, and she could hold no more than two at once. She could grant herself abilities or dictate the state of an enemy's body, with no evident ceiling on how far she could hinder someone, killing included, but a firm ceiling on how far she could raise power. Air and laser fire obeyed as readily as flesh, and she shaped both into constructs, some of them enormous. The catch was identity: a living target only bound if that person recognized themselves as the identity she had named, so a fluid sense of self such as multiple personalities voided it, and an identity crisis did the same by accident, which is how Tomura escaped physical death. Nor could it lift a body past its natural limit, so on herself it only delayed Tomura's Decay.

Her standing rule kept her physical abilities permanently elevated, high though short of All Might, and dropping it freed a slot for Ultimate Moves. Fist Bump to the Earth hardened the air into an invisible copy of her body a thousand times her size that mirrored her every motion, and Keraunos armed that giant with a sword forged from laser fire poured in by her squadron of X-66 jets. State-of-the-Art Hypersonic Intercontinental Cruise Punch had the giant seize the Tiamat missiles, order them onto a new trajectory, and swing them into one blow whose explosion was visible from the mainland; Tomura survived only by opening a hole in the seabed with Decay. He stole New Order shortly before she died, and her revolt rule made it worthless to him, detonating him from within while it turned on his other Quirks and wiped several out. The Quirk then destroyed itself along with her vestige.