Lady Shiva - Bijou Planks 168/365
“She was fantastic. I’ve never gone against anyone so quick, so coordinated, so cunning, so absolutely *sure*… I threw her twice, but I think she let me. I learned a tremendous amount, I’m twice the fighter I was an hour ago…”
– Black Canary (Dinah Lance), after sparring with Shiva.
Lady Shiva is thought to be the best martial artist on Earth.
When she fought Batman, clearly established as one of the greatest hand-to-hand fighters in the world, she had the advantage despite Batman’s far greater mass and strength. Batman stated that she had both the hitting power of Ra’s al Ghul and the speed and agility of the Sensei. Many of her opponents who survive the encounter describe Shiva as essentially invincible.
Though she was first seen as a swordswoman, Shiva evolved toward simple peasant weapons. She has further evolved and now prefers to fight empty-handed, though she might occasionally use throwing knives when facing opponents with firearms.
With her control over her body and defensive chi, Shiva is almost impossibly tough. It took an extended pounding from Batman and Robin (with Robin always hitting her in the back) to take her down. And even after that she could resist Batman’s truth serum without him noticing.
Shiva's knowledge of martial arts and anatomy is comprehensive and esoteric. She can quickly heal simple fractures with her hands. She can inflict wounds that are impossible to cure with modern medicine. She can deliver a soft tap that has no apparent effect, yet within 90 minutes the victim is incapacitated in excruciating pain.
Shiva's perception is supernatural. She effortlessly understands things at a glance. She processes new information in an instant. She is exceedingly difficult to trick, deceive, or fool. Shiva knows a person's health and illnesses upon sight. She knows their history of injuries. She can predict their speed, strength, and balance.
Shiva's knowledge and abilities allow her to stand out as the central focus in any crowd or not be noticed at all even when she stands in front of you. She looks young and, at the same time, as though she has spent lifetimes going everywhere and doing everything.
Shiva's training and skill allow her to harm and heal in equal proficiency. While any delayed death touch technique is exceptionally rare among even the elite martial artists, Shiva actually has multiple in her skillset. Likewise she has delayed healing touches which are almost unheard outside of her.
Shiva's "Leopard Blow" is so beyond most known martial arts that other fighters freely admit they can't even describe it.
History
Born Sandra Woosan, she began a solitary path across the world always looking for new knowledge, sometimes from teachers, sometimes from the raw experience of combat itself. Woosan found her lessons in temples and dark alleys, among coteries of assassins and well manicured power brokers. Her greatest teacher, however, was O-Sensei, literally "The Great Teacher".
As Woosan developed, she became increasingly inscrutable, driven only by the unpredictable waves of her personal interests. This shadowed life caused Woosan to be known more through conversations and tales rather than first person encounters, and so she became a figure of legend, mystery, and terror.
She met, fought and defeated numerous fighters in all styles, learning from many of them. She became a sort of modern ronin, a masterless warrior whose mysterious path was governed by whim and fate.
In 1986, she found herself in Hub City, an American town in a dire state of decay, corruption and poverty. Finding the place interesting, she offered her services to whoever would pay.
Shiva thus ended up in the employ of the corrupted puppet master of the Mayor – Rev. Jeremiah Hatch. She did some enforcing work from him, hoping it would put her in interesting situations, though it was abundantly clear that she was only following orders when she felt like it.
One such mission was to confront investigative reporter Vic Sage. After but a few months in Hub City, Sage had already exposed numerous scandals. He was known for his hard-hitting, untouchable approach of journalism and damaging Hatch’s business. Hatch had one of his men arrange for an ambush, and had Shiva go there to beat Sage up.
As it turned out, it was Sage’s alter-ego, the Question, who showed up. A fearsome and talented brawler, the Question could routinely take on packs of thugs, but found himself utterly outmatched by Shiva. She beat him and he was apparently executed and thrown into a river by Hatch’s men.
However, the Question had aroused the curiosity of Shiva. His anger, his cockiness, his talent for fighting, his courage, his curiosity reminded Shiva of herself when she was young. Furthermore, her extraordinary acumen seemingly made her aware of Sage’s deep identity issues, and of his ultimate potential to become a true master of the martial arts.
She somehow fished Sage out of the river after everyone else had left. Through unknown methods, she knew that he was miraculously still alive. She then used her esoteric medicinal skills to revive him despite his state of clinical death.
Shiva decided to bring Sage to the man who had been a sort of friend for her years ago – Richard Dragon. Richard no longer fought, but would teach. Months later, after Richard had trained the Question, Shiva came to briefly fight Sage. She stopped and left when she was satisfied that her assessment of Sage’s potential had been correct.
Months later, after nearly a century of teaching and reflecting, the O-Sensei summoned one of his greatest students, Shiva. He told her that he was soon to pass away. Before he died, however, he determined to visit three men and to tell to each of them a classic parable, to help them become even greater fighters.
The three men (who, unlike Shiva, Ben Turner and Richard Dragon, had never been students under the O-Sensei) were Bruce Wayne (Batman), Oliver Queen (Green Arrow) and Charles Szasz/Vic Sage (the Question).
Shiva escorted the serene teacher from China all the way to America, having smugglers and slave traders arrange transportation. Finding Szazs in Hub City, she had him contact the Batman, and the O-Sensei told him his parable. Shiva could not resist very briefly fighting the Batman before the O-Sensei told her to stop. Still she promised the dark knight that they would fight again, without interruption.
The Batman rejected the seemingly shallow wisdom of the O-Sensei. But a few days later he realized that the parable described the great emotional pain caused by his attraction toward Talia al Ghul, and helped him accept it.
The “inscrutable Asian ancient and his sexy sidekick”, as Queen dismissively put it, then met with the emerald archer in Seattle. At that point Queen was having a personal crisis and his talent with archery had been destroyed. The O-Sensei’s parable gave him the perspective he needed to reforge his bond with the bow.
On the side, Shiva noticed that Queen’s companion, Dinah Lance (aka the Black Canary, then retired)* was a martial artist. She sparred with her for an hour, leaving Lance with a variety of contusions and gushing enthusiasm about Shiva’s fantastic skill and how much she had learned from her as a fighter.
Years later, she would still remember about that one-hour session as the best training she ever received in defending herself. It had also been an uncannily accurate fix for the weakest points in her fighting skills.
A short time after that, Shiva reunited Batman, Green Arrow and the Question so the O-Sensei could honor his promise to his long-dead wife – that his bones would rest with hers. They eventually did so, in so doing the Question received the last, silent parable.
Some time later, as Shiva had predicted, her path crossed with the Batman. Batman and Robin (Jason Todd) were looking for Todd’s biological mother. Knowing her first name started with a S they sought three women in Todd’s father’s address book who fitted that clue. One of the three was Sandra Woosan (listed as “Shiva Woosan”).
They tracked her down to Beirut, and then to a pass in the Beqaa Valley. As it turned out, she had just been hired to train a squad of novice militia. After admiring Batman and Robin’s skill in stealthily taking out her inexperienced charges, she casually knocked Robin out and gleefully engaged Batman in a duel.
Although Batman was initially confident, he rapidly realized that Shiva could very well beat him, and he had to admit the possibility that she was at least his equal. He started fighting in a way that emphasized his sole advantage over her (his greater mass and physical strength) until Robin unexpectedly recovered and mauled Shiva from behind.
Some time later, Shiva ‘toured’ Brazil to test her skills against the numerous masters in this country. She was particularly interest in a mestre de capoeira named Marco, a fellow martial arts nut whom she defeated. She invited Marco to find and challenge her anew when he would be ready.
About three years after she tested the Question at the end of his training by Dragon, she came back to Hub. Shiva was, as always, looking for new and interesting situations and fights to drift into.
After briefly clashing with a few gangbangers, she announced that her services were available for a short period. Though she had no specific plan to meet the Question and just let events flow, they ran into each other after the Question kidnapped a gang leader Shiva intended to meet.
Having a certain base cunning, the man hired Shiva on the spot to defeat the Question, and she immediately accepted. As she was artistically mauling the Question, the gang leader changed his mind and had his arriving men attack both.
Shiva and the Question promptly allied. Since the pair could thrash all comers, Mayor Fermin leveraged these strange allies to turn two large gangs into a stopgap police force for Hub. The plan ultimately failed, though Shiva had long since drifted away.
Shiva would reappear not too long after that, hunting down the man called King Snake. He was said to be one of the deadliest men alive, and she wanted to fight him. Along the way she allied with a renegade DEA agent (Clyde Rawlins) and taught Robin (Tim Drake) some of her approach to fighting
Personality
Because of her solitary motivations and life, with her intense privacy, Shiva seems to many as being unbound. They perceive her as a person without bonds or care, who floats around at the whims of her own interests, with her curiosity and quest for martial perfection being her only driving motives.
Shiva is actually quite bound. She is bound to the discipline and law of martial arts that she has embraced. She is bound to seeking and recognizing exceptional people and achievements, and thus often surprises opponents by showing restraint or mercy.
Shiva is a thoroughly disciplined woman and rarely acts capriciously. Shiva is known for her capacity for violence, and she has earned that reputation well. However, it is not Shiva's to initiate violence for its own sake. The majority of Shiva's combat has always been reactive.
When she allows herself to be hired to visit violence on others, she will generally set the stage so that they invite it. The exceptions to this are when she is intrigued by someone's skill so that she invites them to combat.
Shiva's dispassionate approach to fighting has given her a reputation of being a "cold killer" and devoid of pity or consideration for human lives. And while those things are true to an extent, for make no mistake, Shiva is a villain in the truest sense, they are an oversimplification of a woman who thinks in multilayered complexity.
While she usually lets worthy opponents alive, this is chiefly so that they might grow and learn, and perhaps challenge her later. The main way to survive Shiva is to show a spark, the seed of something exceptional as a fighter.
She also can get interested in teaching truly exceptional people for reasons on her own, as she did with Dinah Lance (Black Canary) and Robin (Tim Drake).
As is notable in her quotes below, Shiva’s speech has an extremely precise and sharp quality to it. It sometimes acquires a poetic style as well. Her vocabulary is extensive and her grammar exact. Though she still doesn’t joke, her comments came to have a humorous value. They accurately but very detachedly point out the ridiculousness of some small, everyday detail or practice.
Her comments about the weaknesses in the martial proficiency of her opponents also manage to be at once scornful, accurate, trenchant and detached. Howbeit she will react very positively to somebody with genuinely superior skill, which... is rare.
Shiva always made a big show of not caring for the Question. She was abrasive about his supposedly unsatisfying progress in the martial arts and generally treated him harshly. But she actually cared for Charlie to an unusual degree. His development as a person, a seeker of answers and a fighter was so close to her own, that she could not help but to see herself in him.
Shiva cannot be said to have such things as a “friend”. Yet her banter and brief discussions with the Question may have been the closest thing to friendship she could have as she remained separate from such things.
There was even a vaguely romantic manner in how Shiva taunted the Question for not fulfilling her need for a worthy opponent. Howbeit, she may just have been making low-key, acidic fun of Sage’s involuntary attraction toward her.
When they found themselves working together, she would make a big show about her actions not being motivated by anything but her own interests, but it was fairly obvious that she was lying and actually liked Charlie.
Because Shiva is always acting according to her personal motivations of skill and learning, and she is not in the habit of explaining herself, she is unpredictable and, to the outside observer, often irrational.
She may develop a sudden and very strong interest in something new and cool (such as a the skills of a man destroying condemned buildings with explosives), or just drift away from a situation for no clear reason as she gets bored with it.
Worse, some of her seemingly senseless actions may suddenly start making sense much later, as new events she couldn’t possibly have known about reframe the situation.
The bottom line is that Shiva is not to be interacted with, much less trifled with. One cannot mistake Shiva's personal discipline and honor for any level of safety. Shiva will kill in an instant and often without apparent motivation.
The very best advice concerning Lady Shiva is to never come to the attention of Lady Shiva.
Quotes
“Do not torment yourself trying to understand me. Your mind is not ready to understand me. It may never be ready to understand me. Content yourself with this : I am outside.”
(With nearly imperceptible sarcasm) “I despise violence.”
“I provide my services for a fee. I do neither less nor more than I am requested. I was not requested to protect a video tape. Nor to nurture the inept.”
“If you ever touch me again, I shall shatter three bones in your arm – the humerus, the radius and the ulna. I shall shatter them in such a way that shards will protrude into the nerves, causing intense pain. I shall shatter them in such a way that no Western doctor will be able to repair them. Your arm will thereafter dangle from your shoulder like a dead fish. Do you understand ?”
“Do you have a preferred style of combat ?”
“You know I could not help myself. I had to test him. I *had* to.”
(With child-like enthusiasm) “Sensei, sensei… one of them actually cut me. I let *him* live, of course.”
“I do not have an avaricious bone in my body. I am an artist, not a laborer. You may keep the money.”
Question: “If I kissed you, you’d probably break a dozen of my bones.”
Shiva: “Perhaps worse. Neither of us can know unless you try.”
(To the Question) “Put on your mask. It is your true face. It is as you see yourself. And therefore, if you die tonight, you die honestly.”
“Already you have exhausted your store of compliments? You disappoint me. When leering animals express interest in me, they can usually drool their puerilities for at least five minutes.”
“Ah, the inevitable — the weapons. A gun and a knife. Yes. Normally, guns are considered the more dangerous and so to be disposed of first. To demonstrate my respect for you both, I will deal with the blade.”
“I hope, my faceless one, that you have spent the time since we last met honing your martial skills. Because if you haven’t, the next few seconds will be boring to me. Quite boring.”
“You are stiff. You do not flow. You do not give yourself to the moment.”
(As their duel is interrupted by a large pack of thugs, the Question and Shiva have to fight as allies)
Shiva: “I had hoped for some stimulation from you. But you have lost any claim to being a worthy opponent — and so I may as well seek fulfilment in numbers.”
The Question (almost jokingly despite the pain): “You *do* know how to hurt a guy.”
Shiva (coldly): “Of course”.
“I respect promises. Tell me of it.”
“It will amuse me to accompany you.”
“The truly accomplished in the world shun applause. The truly great shun the world itself.”
“You need not ask my permission. I believe in letting people do as they wish, as do I myself. Sometimes, of course, what I wish to do is kill them and they do not wish to die. This gives life interest.”
Question: “But why [did you help me] ?”
Shiva: “Either because I see in you myself when I was unfocused and undisciplined and stupid. Or because I am basically irrational. Or neither. It makes no difference.”
Question: “Did you leave anyone alive ?”
Shiva: “No one important.”
Question: “You coming with me ?”
Shiva: “I have not decided. Perhaps not.”
“We can learn from the rats. They always leave when it is time, and they do not dream.”
⚡ Happy 🎯 Heroclix 💫 Friday! 👽
_____________________________
A year of the shows and performers of the Bijou Planks Theater.
Secret Identity: Sandra Woosan
Publisher: DC
First appearance: Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter 5 (December 1975)
Created by: Dennis O'Neil (writer)
Ric Estrada (artist)
* Black Canary was seen in BP 2022 Day 77!
Lady Shiva - Bijou Planks 168/365
“She was fantastic. I’ve never gone against anyone so quick, so coordinated, so cunning, so absolutely *sure*… I threw her twice, but I think she let me. I learned a tremendous amount, I’m twice the fighter I was an hour ago…”
– Black Canary (Dinah Lance), after sparring with Shiva.
Lady Shiva is thought to be the best martial artist on Earth.
When she fought Batman, clearly established as one of the greatest hand-to-hand fighters in the world, she had the advantage despite Batman’s far greater mass and strength. Batman stated that she had both the hitting power of Ra’s al Ghul and the speed and agility of the Sensei. Many of her opponents who survive the encounter describe Shiva as essentially invincible.
Though she was first seen as a swordswoman, Shiva evolved toward simple peasant weapons. She has further evolved and now prefers to fight empty-handed, though she might occasionally use throwing knives when facing opponents with firearms.
With her control over her body and defensive chi, Shiva is almost impossibly tough. It took an extended pounding from Batman and Robin (with Robin always hitting her in the back) to take her down. And even after that she could resist Batman’s truth serum without him noticing.
Shiva's knowledge of martial arts and anatomy is comprehensive and esoteric. She can quickly heal simple fractures with her hands. She can inflict wounds that are impossible to cure with modern medicine. She can deliver a soft tap that has no apparent effect, yet within 90 minutes the victim is incapacitated in excruciating pain.
Shiva's perception is supernatural. She effortlessly understands things at a glance. She processes new information in an instant. She is exceedingly difficult to trick, deceive, or fool. Shiva knows a person's health and illnesses upon sight. She knows their history of injuries. She can predict their speed, strength, and balance.
Shiva's knowledge and abilities allow her to stand out as the central focus in any crowd or not be noticed at all even when she stands in front of you. She looks young and, at the same time, as though she has spent lifetimes going everywhere and doing everything.
Shiva's training and skill allow her to harm and heal in equal proficiency. While any delayed death touch technique is exceptionally rare among even the elite martial artists, Shiva actually has multiple in her skillset. Likewise she has delayed healing touches which are almost unheard outside of her.
Shiva's "Leopard Blow" is so beyond most known martial arts that other fighters freely admit they can't even describe it.
History
Born Sandra Woosan, she began a solitary path across the world always looking for new knowledge, sometimes from teachers, sometimes from the raw experience of combat itself. Woosan found her lessons in temples and dark alleys, among coteries of assassins and well manicured power brokers. Her greatest teacher, however, was O-Sensei, literally "The Great Teacher".
As Woosan developed, she became increasingly inscrutable, driven only by the unpredictable waves of her personal interests. This shadowed life caused Woosan to be known more through conversations and tales rather than first person encounters, and so she became a figure of legend, mystery, and terror.
She met, fought and defeated numerous fighters in all styles, learning from many of them. She became a sort of modern ronin, a masterless warrior whose mysterious path was governed by whim and fate.
In 1986, she found herself in Hub City, an American town in a dire state of decay, corruption and poverty. Finding the place interesting, she offered her services to whoever would pay.
Shiva thus ended up in the employ of the corrupted puppet master of the Mayor – Rev. Jeremiah Hatch. She did some enforcing work from him, hoping it would put her in interesting situations, though it was abundantly clear that she was only following orders when she felt like it.
One such mission was to confront investigative reporter Vic Sage. After but a few months in Hub City, Sage had already exposed numerous scandals. He was known for his hard-hitting, untouchable approach of journalism and damaging Hatch’s business. Hatch had one of his men arrange for an ambush, and had Shiva go there to beat Sage up.
As it turned out, it was Sage’s alter-ego, the Question, who showed up. A fearsome and talented brawler, the Question could routinely take on packs of thugs, but found himself utterly outmatched by Shiva. She beat him and he was apparently executed and thrown into a river by Hatch’s men.
However, the Question had aroused the curiosity of Shiva. His anger, his cockiness, his talent for fighting, his courage, his curiosity reminded Shiva of herself when she was young. Furthermore, her extraordinary acumen seemingly made her aware of Sage’s deep identity issues, and of his ultimate potential to become a true master of the martial arts.
She somehow fished Sage out of the river after everyone else had left. Through unknown methods, she knew that he was miraculously still alive. She then used her esoteric medicinal skills to revive him despite his state of clinical death.
Shiva decided to bring Sage to the man who had been a sort of friend for her years ago – Richard Dragon. Richard no longer fought, but would teach. Months later, after Richard had trained the Question, Shiva came to briefly fight Sage. She stopped and left when she was satisfied that her assessment of Sage’s potential had been correct.
Months later, after nearly a century of teaching and reflecting, the O-Sensei summoned one of his greatest students, Shiva. He told her that he was soon to pass away. Before he died, however, he determined to visit three men and to tell to each of them a classic parable, to help them become even greater fighters.
The three men (who, unlike Shiva, Ben Turner and Richard Dragon, had never been students under the O-Sensei) were Bruce Wayne (Batman), Oliver Queen (Green Arrow) and Charles Szasz/Vic Sage (the Question).
Shiva escorted the serene teacher from China all the way to America, having smugglers and slave traders arrange transportation. Finding Szazs in Hub City, she had him contact the Batman, and the O-Sensei told him his parable. Shiva could not resist very briefly fighting the Batman before the O-Sensei told her to stop. Still she promised the dark knight that they would fight again, without interruption.
The Batman rejected the seemingly shallow wisdom of the O-Sensei. But a few days later he realized that the parable described the great emotional pain caused by his attraction toward Talia al Ghul, and helped him accept it.
The “inscrutable Asian ancient and his sexy sidekick”, as Queen dismissively put it, then met with the emerald archer in Seattle. At that point Queen was having a personal crisis and his talent with archery had been destroyed. The O-Sensei’s parable gave him the perspective he needed to reforge his bond with the bow.
On the side, Shiva noticed that Queen’s companion, Dinah Lance (aka the Black Canary, then retired)* was a martial artist. She sparred with her for an hour, leaving Lance with a variety of contusions and gushing enthusiasm about Shiva’s fantastic skill and how much she had learned from her as a fighter.
Years later, she would still remember about that one-hour session as the best training she ever received in defending herself. It had also been an uncannily accurate fix for the weakest points in her fighting skills.
A short time after that, Shiva reunited Batman, Green Arrow and the Question so the O-Sensei could honor his promise to his long-dead wife – that his bones would rest with hers. They eventually did so, in so doing the Question received the last, silent parable.
Some time later, as Shiva had predicted, her path crossed with the Batman. Batman and Robin (Jason Todd) were looking for Todd’s biological mother. Knowing her first name started with a S they sought three women in Todd’s father’s address book who fitted that clue. One of the three was Sandra Woosan (listed as “Shiva Woosan”).
They tracked her down to Beirut, and then to a pass in the Beqaa Valley. As it turned out, she had just been hired to train a squad of novice militia. After admiring Batman and Robin’s skill in stealthily taking out her inexperienced charges, she casually knocked Robin out and gleefully engaged Batman in a duel.
Although Batman was initially confident, he rapidly realized that Shiva could very well beat him, and he had to admit the possibility that she was at least his equal. He started fighting in a way that emphasized his sole advantage over her (his greater mass and physical strength) until Robin unexpectedly recovered and mauled Shiva from behind.
Some time later, Shiva ‘toured’ Brazil to test her skills against the numerous masters in this country. She was particularly interest in a mestre de capoeira named Marco, a fellow martial arts nut whom she defeated. She invited Marco to find and challenge her anew when he would be ready.
About three years after she tested the Question at the end of his training by Dragon, she came back to Hub. Shiva was, as always, looking for new and interesting situations and fights to drift into.
After briefly clashing with a few gangbangers, she announced that her services were available for a short period. Though she had no specific plan to meet the Question and just let events flow, they ran into each other after the Question kidnapped a gang leader Shiva intended to meet.
Having a certain base cunning, the man hired Shiva on the spot to defeat the Question, and she immediately accepted. As she was artistically mauling the Question, the gang leader changed his mind and had his arriving men attack both.
Shiva and the Question promptly allied. Since the pair could thrash all comers, Mayor Fermin leveraged these strange allies to turn two large gangs into a stopgap police force for Hub. The plan ultimately failed, though Shiva had long since drifted away.
Shiva would reappear not too long after that, hunting down the man called King Snake. He was said to be one of the deadliest men alive, and she wanted to fight him. Along the way she allied with a renegade DEA agent (Clyde Rawlins) and taught Robin (Tim Drake) some of her approach to fighting
Personality
Because of her solitary motivations and life, with her intense privacy, Shiva seems to many as being unbound. They perceive her as a person without bonds or care, who floats around at the whims of her own interests, with her curiosity and quest for martial perfection being her only driving motives.
Shiva is actually quite bound. She is bound to the discipline and law of martial arts that she has embraced. She is bound to seeking and recognizing exceptional people and achievements, and thus often surprises opponents by showing restraint or mercy.
Shiva is a thoroughly disciplined woman and rarely acts capriciously. Shiva is known for her capacity for violence, and she has earned that reputation well. However, it is not Shiva's to initiate violence for its own sake. The majority of Shiva's combat has always been reactive.
When she allows herself to be hired to visit violence on others, she will generally set the stage so that they invite it. The exceptions to this are when she is intrigued by someone's skill so that she invites them to combat.
Shiva's dispassionate approach to fighting has given her a reputation of being a "cold killer" and devoid of pity or consideration for human lives. And while those things are true to an extent, for make no mistake, Shiva is a villain in the truest sense, they are an oversimplification of a woman who thinks in multilayered complexity.
While she usually lets worthy opponents alive, this is chiefly so that they might grow and learn, and perhaps challenge her later. The main way to survive Shiva is to show a spark, the seed of something exceptional as a fighter.
She also can get interested in teaching truly exceptional people for reasons on her own, as she did with Dinah Lance (Black Canary) and Robin (Tim Drake).
As is notable in her quotes below, Shiva’s speech has an extremely precise and sharp quality to it. It sometimes acquires a poetic style as well. Her vocabulary is extensive and her grammar exact. Though she still doesn’t joke, her comments came to have a humorous value. They accurately but very detachedly point out the ridiculousness of some small, everyday detail or practice.
Her comments about the weaknesses in the martial proficiency of her opponents also manage to be at once scornful, accurate, trenchant and detached. Howbeit she will react very positively to somebody with genuinely superior skill, which... is rare.
Shiva always made a big show of not caring for the Question. She was abrasive about his supposedly unsatisfying progress in the martial arts and generally treated him harshly. But she actually cared for Charlie to an unusual degree. His development as a person, a seeker of answers and a fighter was so close to her own, that she could not help but to see herself in him.
Shiva cannot be said to have such things as a “friend”. Yet her banter and brief discussions with the Question may have been the closest thing to friendship she could have as she remained separate from such things.
There was even a vaguely romantic manner in how Shiva taunted the Question for not fulfilling her need for a worthy opponent. Howbeit, she may just have been making low-key, acidic fun of Sage’s involuntary attraction toward her.
When they found themselves working together, she would make a big show about her actions not being motivated by anything but her own interests, but it was fairly obvious that she was lying and actually liked Charlie.
Because Shiva is always acting according to her personal motivations of skill and learning, and she is not in the habit of explaining herself, she is unpredictable and, to the outside observer, often irrational.
She may develop a sudden and very strong interest in something new and cool (such as a the skills of a man destroying condemned buildings with explosives), or just drift away from a situation for no clear reason as she gets bored with it.
Worse, some of her seemingly senseless actions may suddenly start making sense much later, as new events she couldn’t possibly have known about reframe the situation.
The bottom line is that Shiva is not to be interacted with, much less trifled with. One cannot mistake Shiva's personal discipline and honor for any level of safety. Shiva will kill in an instant and often without apparent motivation.
The very best advice concerning Lady Shiva is to never come to the attention of Lady Shiva.
Quotes
“Do not torment yourself trying to understand me. Your mind is not ready to understand me. It may never be ready to understand me. Content yourself with this : I am outside.”
(With nearly imperceptible sarcasm) “I despise violence.”
“I provide my services for a fee. I do neither less nor more than I am requested. I was not requested to protect a video tape. Nor to nurture the inept.”
“If you ever touch me again, I shall shatter three bones in your arm – the humerus, the radius and the ulna. I shall shatter them in such a way that shards will protrude into the nerves, causing intense pain. I shall shatter them in such a way that no Western doctor will be able to repair them. Your arm will thereafter dangle from your shoulder like a dead fish. Do you understand ?”
“Do you have a preferred style of combat ?”
“You know I could not help myself. I had to test him. I *had* to.”
(With child-like enthusiasm) “Sensei, sensei… one of them actually cut me. I let *him* live, of course.”
“I do not have an avaricious bone in my body. I am an artist, not a laborer. You may keep the money.”
Question: “If I kissed you, you’d probably break a dozen of my bones.”
Shiva: “Perhaps worse. Neither of us can know unless you try.”
(To the Question) “Put on your mask. It is your true face. It is as you see yourself. And therefore, if you die tonight, you die honestly.”
“Already you have exhausted your store of compliments? You disappoint me. When leering animals express interest in me, they can usually drool their puerilities for at least five minutes.”
“Ah, the inevitable — the weapons. A gun and a knife. Yes. Normally, guns are considered the more dangerous and so to be disposed of first. To demonstrate my respect for you both, I will deal with the blade.”
“I hope, my faceless one, that you have spent the time since we last met honing your martial skills. Because if you haven’t, the next few seconds will be boring to me. Quite boring.”
“You are stiff. You do not flow. You do not give yourself to the moment.”
(As their duel is interrupted by a large pack of thugs, the Question and Shiva have to fight as allies)
Shiva: “I had hoped for some stimulation from you. But you have lost any claim to being a worthy opponent — and so I may as well seek fulfilment in numbers.”
The Question (almost jokingly despite the pain): “You *do* know how to hurt a guy.”
Shiva (coldly): “Of course”.
“I respect promises. Tell me of it.”
“It will amuse me to accompany you.”
“The truly accomplished in the world shun applause. The truly great shun the world itself.”
“You need not ask my permission. I believe in letting people do as they wish, as do I myself. Sometimes, of course, what I wish to do is kill them and they do not wish to die. This gives life interest.”
Question: “But why [did you help me] ?”
Shiva: “Either because I see in you myself when I was unfocused and undisciplined and stupid. Or because I am basically irrational. Or neither. It makes no difference.”
Question: “Did you leave anyone alive ?”
Shiva: “No one important.”
Question: “You coming with me ?”
Shiva: “I have not decided. Perhaps not.”
“We can learn from the rats. They always leave when it is time, and they do not dream.”
⚡ Happy 🎯 Heroclix 💫 Friday! 👽
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A year of the shows and performers of the Bijou Planks Theater.
Secret Identity: Sandra Woosan
Publisher: DC
First appearance: Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter 5 (December 1975)
Created by: Dennis O'Neil (writer)
Ric Estrada (artist)
* Black Canary was seen in BP 2022 Day 77!