Laika got a new lot on life after a lucky stray thought hit for a funny superhero game, so behold the Red Giant! A cosmonaut and Deep Space Watch Officer of the Soviet Luna Kollektiv-3 moonbase, Laika was observing the age of the Pioneer-10 probe as it neared Jupiter, when she saw...something. Base CCTV entirely lost track of her at this point, as she simply seemed to vanish. When she returned to view, she was in the airlock, all-but-clawing her way to try and exit on to the lunar surface, and had to be forcibly extracted from the chamber before it could cycle, and remanded to custody for potential psychosis.

But it soon became apparent something more had occurred during her absence and that the watch officer had changed, and she was transferred Earthside for study and, eventually, training, as it became clear she had gained paracausal powers, and eventually groomed into the new Soviet answer to the American pantheon of superbeings as Red Giant. Touched by the stars, Laika is no longer a mortal being, or at least not traditionally-mortal; she is a nascent starcreature, now, a being slowly becoming pure stellar essence, a living star with all the budding power that that entails, infused and filled with a scale of power that a mere mortal form cannot fully contain.

These powers mostly manifest in a few ways: Projecting energy from herself as intense beams of sheer stellar radiation, typically fashioned as beams of pure starlight and heat, control over her own personal gravity (flight), AND the ability to swell with this power, with stellar gas and stardust to become her own namesake, a brimming red giant thrumming with INTENSE amounts of energy, waiting to nova and blast her foes away before reforming from the nebular remains (let alone, turning this around and infusing said foes into nascent, rumbling starbeings themselves, and even make THEM go nova likewise~.

As is, Laika remains a staunch, devoted communist, holding to the idealistic interpretations of the worker's revolutionary world struggle against capitalism, in aims of creating a classless utopia. This ideological core is what pins her to altruistic heroism, of helping the underclasses and common man against predation and suffering. However, especially now, it is also colored by a kind of new-age stellar transcendent belief that all sapients are potential starbeings; a bit in line with Carl Sagan's idea of mankind being starstuff made to know itself, taken a fair bit more literally after she has literally felt the endless, cosmic power of the stars, suffused with those known on the charts, and those far beyond sapient knowledge. She believes it is the ultimate fate of furkind to ascend to the same state as her and become living stars themselves in all the fwoompy, euphoric glory she also experiences as one now, a mindset that seems at odds with the otherwise-materialistic nature of Soviet communist thought. There is no God, but to her, it is mankind's fate to become as gods, dotting the cosmos in grand new constellations. It is to be seen how this hybrid belief influences her as her state drifts further and further from mortal being to something...more.

Extra details hereA rare one on our roster, given how many critters we've concocted, oftentimes a lot of them just kind of get dreamt up and then kind of fall by the wayside or become secondary to other OCs; Laika got shockingly lucky for how utterly *enthused* we got for her retooled idea when this superhero game allowed her to move away from being a Solatorobo OC (a game/setting that's very cute, but wasn't formative to us) and into her own thing, and HOO boy was it fun to concoct this new doggo as she is now! Hell, we didn't even really like super-stuff right up until Red here hit us as an in, and now we adore the thought of her getting up to super-antics!Art ©  Indigo

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