NIGHTINGALE

Real Name: Unrevealed

Identity/Class: Human mutate (pre-modern era);
    citizen of unspecified Caribbean island

Occupation: Healer

Group Membership: First Line (Black Fox/Robert William Paine, Blackjack, Doctor Mime, Effigy/Velmax, Firefall, Flatiron/Russell, Frank (see comments), Katyusha/Anya, Liberty Girl/Beverly, Major Mercury/Makkari, Mr. Justice/Timothy "Tim" Carney, Morph, Oxbow/Sam Matonabbe, Pixie, Positron/Veronica, Rapunzel, Rebound, Reflex, Squire, Templar/Ian Fitzwilliam Dare, Vulcan, Walkabout/William Carmody, Yankee Clipper/Patrick "Pat" Carney, Yeti) 

Affiliations: Mary Carmody, Jim Fitzpatrick, Gadfly (T. Ruth MacRae), the Hipster (Fred MacRae), Princess Khadijah, Cassandra Locke, Mako, Monster Hunters (Ulysses Bloodstone, Doctor Druid/Anthony Ludgate, Namora/Aquaria Nautica Neptunia, Zawadi), Namor the Sub-Mariner, NSA agent Mac Curry (Makkari), Riot-Act

Enemies: Axis, Chimera (Zuhn), Howler (Luke Garrow), Kang the Conqueror (Nathaniel Richards), Red Front, Scimitar, the Scythe, Skrull invasion forces, Typhoon, Yellow Claw (Plan Chu), Fritz von Voltzmann (Karl von Horstbaden); 
    formerly: Blackjack, Positron

Known Relatives: None

Aliases: "Birdie," "Florence Nightingale" (nicknames given by Liberty Girl), "Gale" (nickname used by Mr. Justice), "Birdie" (nickname used by Pixie)

Base of Operations: Unrevealed;
    formerly: Carmody Institute, New England;
    formerly First Line Headquarters, Colorado Rockies;
    an unspecified island in the Caribbean.

First Appearance: Marvel: The Lost Generation#12 (March, 2000)

Powers/Abilities: An empath, Nightingale could heal other people by absorbing an unrevealed but extensive amount of pain, injury and disease from them; though potent, Nightingale's healing abilities couldn't restore life once the person had actually perished. Whenever she used her powers in the early days with the First Line, a flurry of other, ghostlike shades would appear next to her. As the years progressed and she absorbed increasingly more potentially lethal injuries, the apparitions seemed to vanish one by one. Nightingale spoke in plural for much of her tenure with the First Line, only referring to herself as "I" during the final phase of her existence, when she sacrificed the last of herself to help restore Cassandra Locke. As an empath, Nightingale was exceptionally sensitive and vulnerable to different types of energy that non-adepts wouldn't so much as notice. Among the sensations she was aware of were human pain and suffering, and an unexplained awareness of significant disturbances in the temporal ebb and flow some likened to a mild form of precognition. Over the years, her skintone changed from a deep cobalt blue to brown, and finally light grey at the moment of her death. It's unrevealed whether she could use her additional life-force to heal herself or extend her natural lifespan.

Height: 5'8" (by approximation)
Weight: 120 lbs. (by approximation)
Eyes: Yellow
Hair: Bald

History:
(Marvel: The Lost Generation#2 (fb) - BTS) - While on a classified mission to the Caribbean in 1958, the Yankee Clipper met and befriended a local mystery woman capable of healing people.

(Marvel: The Lost Generation#2) - One month later, special agent Scott (secretly the stranded Skrull Velmax) assembled Yankee Clipper, Liberty Girl and the Black Fox to go to Long Island in hopes of retrieving his lost spacecraft that was being investigated at a local facility. During this mission, Scott was hit with a bio-moleculizer, courtesy of his former commander Zuhn (also in human guise). The moleculizer's energies destabilized Velmax's form, briefly revealing his Skrullian traits before he lapsed into a coma that defied medical analysis or treatment. The Yankee Clipper decided to bring in the Caribbean healer.

When the healer arrived at the hospital where Scott was being treated, Liberty Girl was more than a little curious about the origins of this "Florence Nightingale" (thereby indirectly coining her codename). After the Clipper briefly explained how he met her, Nightingale went to work. She sensed an unnatural symmetry and great pain within Scott and proceeded to take it away, inadvertently causing Velmax to lose control over his shapeshifting. After Nightingale had restored him, Velmax acted as if the blast from the moleculizer had given him shapeshifting abilities, thereby covering his Skrullian origin. Inspired by the encounter, Velmax took on the name Effigy (also coined by Liberty Girl) and joined Nightingale and the other heroes into forming the First Line team.

(Marvel: The Lost Generation#3 - BTS) - Nightingale and the other members of the First Line moved to their headquarters in the Colorado Rockies, from which they operated during the first few years of their existence. Sometime in the early-1960s, Nightingale and the others welcomed Kid Justice (Tim Carney) to the team in a semi-official capacity. Among their enemies were the (presumably) communist group Red Front and the super-villain Blackjack.

(Marvel: The Lost Generation#3) - In the Spring of 1961, Nightingale and Liberty Girl were helping the Yankee Clipper test the limits of his endurance, when Kid Justice excitedly came into the First Line's training room to inform them President Kennedy had launched an initiative to put a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. Nightingale called it a great endeavor, unaware that it struck a cord with the Yankee Clipper, who realized the predictions made by Cassandra Locke back in 1955 were about to come true.

(Marvel: The Lost Generation#3 - BTS) - First Line member Black Fox was in San Francisco, where he was investigating the latest scheme of the Yellow Claw and his lackey Fritz von Voltzmann. When some the Claw's men happened to run into the super-powered beatnik hero Hipster and the Eternal Pixie, the Fox was annoyed at having so many loose cannons involved, and decided to call in the First Line for backup.

(Marvel: The Lost Generation#3) - The First Line met the Black Fox in San Francisco's warehouse district, where he led them to the lair of the Yellow Claw. As the team engaged the Claw's armored forces, joined by the newly-arrived Hipster, Nightingale noticed one of them was holding back, sensing he was in great pain. Walking up to him, she asked if he wanted to surrender, and then proceeded to cure the illness she sensed within him. Unaware she was actually treating the amnesiac Namor the Sub-Mariner, whom the Claw had pressed into his service, she undid the Claw's conditioning. Enraged at being used and, unseen by the First Line except for Black Fox, the Sub-Mariner attacked Yellow Claw directly. The master villain was forced to detonate a massive explosive hidden underneath his lair. Nightingale, Hipster and the others survived thanks to a force field emanating from the Yankee Clipper's powerbelt (inadvertently activated by the time-traveling historian Cassandra Locke, who was present during the events and severely injured by the explosion as she continued to jump further into the past). In the aftermath, Nightingale regretfully noted that she didn't sense any life remaining in the ruins of the Yellow Claw's base. Nightingale looked on as the Hipster refused Liberty Girl's offer to join the First Line.

(Marvel: The Lost Generation#4) - On the morning of November 21^st, 1963, Nightingale was puzzled by the unexplainable sensation that a great wrongness was about to occur, describing it to her teammate Liberty Girl as a premonition, yet not a premonition. Discarding Liberty Girl's suggestion that one of the voices inside her head might have become precognitive, Nightingale described it as a resonance of something yet to happen, cloudy images and feelings of imminent danger and great loss. Concerned, Liberty Girl took the healer to the other First Liners, who were training in the gym. After the team had gathered, Nightingale told the First Line she felt something terrible was going to happen in the next 24 hours in Dallas, Texas. Heeding her warnings, the First Line traveled to the Texas town, especially in light of the fact President John F. Kennedy was scheduled to speak there the next day.

(Marvel: The Lost Generation#4 - BTS) - When wanted super-criminal Howler (Luke Garrow) accepted an offer from Texas industrialist Winget (secretly the Skrull Zuhn, who also posed as the polymorph Chimera) to come to Dallas for a mission, he was spotted by the FBI, who immediately alerted the First Line. The team correctly figured Winget and Howler might target the local Stark Industries facility that held a new type of guidance system. They planned an ambush and waited there.

(Marvel: The Lost Generation#4) - Howler fell for the ambush at the Stark Industries plant and was attacked by the First Line. After the Yankee Clipper managed to knock him out, Zuhn showed himself in his Chimera form. Shapeshifting to avoid the heroes, he found Liberty Girl in his path--she somewhat over-confidently figured she could handle him. Chimera brutally lashed out with a swipe of his giant claw, wounding Liberty Girl beyond the point Nightingale could help her, despite the healer's best efforts. Moments after she admitted defeat, Nightingale spotted the arrival of the time-traveling historian Cassandra Locke, whom she somehow recognized as "The Cassandra." Nightingale found herself standing between Locke and the Yankee Clipper when their identical time belts inadvertently interacted with one another and created a temporal feedback loop that sent both Locke and the Clipper bouncing through time. Nightingale, caught in the brunt of the temporal collision, was left a frantic, rambling mess, claiming she'd gained all the knowledge and secrets, but at a terrible price. Black Fox tended to the inconsolable empath, who continued on to say a living circuit had been made, rippling through all their lives, positively identifying the event as the source of her premonition. Even as Nightingale carried on about seeing so much unavoidable death with no turning back, the Fox comforted the remaining members of the First Line until Effigy returned to inform them Chimera had dissolved away (in reality, he had actually fought and accidentally killed him, only learning the villain was his old commander Zuhn after he had mortally wounded him).

(Marvel: The Lost Generation#6) - On July 20th, 1969, at 4:58 AM, Nightingale and the other members of the First Line answered a summons from their leader Effigy (Velmax). After cursing out Black Fox for being incommunicado (he was enjoying a romantic interlude with the Russian defector Katyusha), Effigy explained that he had sufficient evidence the alien race that had built the ship they had encountered back on Long Island in 1958 was planning to destroy the Apollo 11 spacecraft scheduled to land on the Moon. Nightingale and the others boarded the semi-restored ship to reach the Moon, where they fought Earth villains Positron, Typhoon, Howler, Axis and the Scythe, who had all been hired by three disguised Skrull agents to make sure the Apollo mission would end in disaster. In the aftermath, only Positron and the Scythe survived the encounter and were taken into custody by the First Line. While Blackjack took the Scythe's trademark blades, Nightingale healed Mr. Justice, who sustained a minor injury to his left arm.

(Marvel: The Lost Generation#9) - In the late-1970s, Nightingale was one of the First Line members who agreed to go to Halwan to rescue Mr. Justice, who had been taken captive after his jet was shot down. They were unaware that the First Line's presence in Halwan was actually meant as a diversion (so that CIA agent Nick Fury and a team of covert agents could carry out Operation: Clean Sweep, intended to free a number of diplomats being held hostage, which was the reason Mr. Justice was there in the first place). After the First Line gained access to the Halwani royal palace, Nightingale ran into the time-traveling Cassandra Locke again (who at that point in time still had yet to meet the First Line in 1963). A little confused that Nightingale already knew who she was, Locke listened to the healer explain she had many lives, and that only when all but one were spent, she'd be known as "I." Cassandra then remembered the Halwani mission was when it all went wrong for the First Line and ran off in an attempt to save Blackjack, only to find history didn't like to be rewritten. Blackjack was killed by the Halwani hereditary hero Scimitar, disemboweled beyond Nightingale's restorative powers. Hours later, after rescuing Mr. Justice and bringing him to Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Medical Center, Nightingale and the newly defected Halwan Doctor Khadijah tended to his many, severe wounds. Much to the surprise of Khadijah -- who had predicted the hero couldn't possibly recover fully from some of his injuries -- Nightingale completely cured her fellow First Liner, even though the effort visibly drained her. Meanwhile, the Black Fox quit in protest over the CIA lying to them about the true nature of the mission.

(Marvel: The Lost Generation#12 - BTS) - Nightingale was among First Line members past and present summoned by Effigy when it became apparent a Skrull invasion fleet was headed for Earth. She boarded one of the ships bound to meet the armada in space.