"What would you do if you were the smartest, most intelligent being on Earth? Would you revolutionize technology? Would you cure AIDS or cancer? Or would you devise a special battlesuit and tackle professional, dangerous criminals? Yeah, I know. But I have my reasons."
— Mindmistress
Mindmistress
is a webcomic created by Al Schroeder. While having been completed to the extent it ever would be finished years before according to the creator, the passing of Al in 2021 has made any chance of a revival or future crossovers impossible at this time.
Lorelei Lyons is the mentally-challenged daughter of millionaire Ezekiel Lyons. Her mother was a scientist who was working on enhancing the human intellect. Experiments were a partial success—lab animals became as smart as humans, but after two weeks, they all died from rapidly growing brain tumors. One year after the death of Lorelei's mother, her last gift is delivered to Lorelei: a necklace with the intellect-upgrading device. Lorelei initially refuses to use it on herself, but when the bus on which she is riding crashes, she must use the necklace in order to save innocent lives.
With an intellect boosted far beyond the smartest human, she not only solves the immediate problem, but finds a way to counter the tumors by regularly changing back into Lorelei. She starts to live two lives, as the mentally-challenged Lorelei and as her super-genius self. When her father is kidnapped, Lorelei transforms and rescues him with her technology, and assumes the name of Mindmistress. From this moment, Mindmistress uses her intelligence as a force for good.
Mindmistress also takes a part in The Crossoverlord and its sort-of sequel, CrossoverKill. And, since there's no link on the Mindmistress site to go to the first page, follow this elegant and finely-crafted link to get there.
Mindmistress provides examples of:
- Alliterative Name: Lorelei Lyons and Mindmistress both fit this trope, even if the second M is in the middle of her name.
- Alternate Universe: Mindmistress is one of the few webcomics characters able to travel between them.
- Anti-Hero: As a rule Mindmistress only gets involved when she's curious or for her own interests. She is willing to use lethal force on occasion, though doesn't make a habit of it. While not overtly altruistic, she's not incapable of empathy, and her killing of the child kidnapper was an either-or situation. Then again, she's perfectly happy to mind rape good people if it suits her as both Ant and Lightbringer find out in The Crossoverlord, and has even erased an enemy's mind on at least one occasion, roughly totalling her out as an Unscrupulous Hero.
- Art Evolution: Al's art got noticeably better as the comic went on.
- Blind Without Them: A group of people who are actually blind can see by wearing special glasses that look like sunglasses.
- Blood Knight: The mercenary Bloodlust is a villainous example. His name says it all, really.
- Bullet Dodges You: Mindmistress has a "velocity redirection field" which redirects high-speed objects, and this works well on bullets.
- Clark Kenting: Averted. Aside from the hair and eye color change, Mindmistress designed her suit specifically to make her look naturally more curvaceous than Lorelai, with a bigger bust line, wider hips, more muscularity, and being several inches taller than her alter ego. Combining this with a voice that also is pitched differently and she honestly has a hard time being recognized when her mask is off even by people who know Lorelai firsthand.
- Comes Great Insanity: Forceful, created as a sidekick by Mindmistress, from the process which gave him super-strength.
- Crossover: With Magellan, Crossover Wars and The Crossoverlord.
- Dumb Blonde: Deconstructed with mentally-challenged Lorelei, who suffers from being seen as such by "normal people".
- The Empath: Moodswing. The procedure that fixed her body left her with the ability to feel the emotions of everyone around her. They could also influence her, leading to a lot of skeevy situations where she had to fight off the attention of men who didn't want to take no for an answer. Her husband eventually invents her a belt which allows her instead to regulate her own emotions and control those of others.
- Enemy Without: Hatrid, the personification of Mindmistress's id.
- Fate Worse than Death: She leaves Moodswing stuck in a hospital filled with pain but without her mood-regulating belt. This means she's feeling every single patient's pain and can't do anything to stop it. The last panels show her screaming.
- Good Luck Charm: Mindmistress designed but never built this luck charm. When it is colorful, it brings good luck, but when it goes grey, it brings bad luck. She refused to make it because she could not stop it from flipping modes. However, her design was stolen and the device was built. The wearer had massive good luck, until it turned grey. He kept wearing it for a full month, causing massive bad luck storm for him. Page where she explains it.
- I Have Many Names: Mindmistress maintains multiple personae on various message boards so as to disguise her dialogue as that of multiple talented people rather than one supergenius. She also has alternate identities for when she interacts with the regular world as a regular professional.
- I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Poor Troy. Mindmistress considers his death her worst failure, since if she'd only had her locket she could have protected him.
- It's Personal: Between Mindmistress and Bloodlust. He kills the love of Lorelai's life, a young autistic man named Troy, so she sets out to wreak the worst revenge she can upon him.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: Mindmistress takes this on both Moodswing and Bloodlust for their part in killing Troy. She takes Moodswing's belt that allows her to control her emotions and leaves her in a hospital, right between the burn ward and the maternity ward where several women are giving birth. All she can do is scream as she feels their pain, knowing the doctors won't let her leave because she appears to be having a psychotic break.
- When she then catches up with Bloodlust, she uses nanobites on him that make it so even the slightest injury he gives another person causes him excruciating pain. He's effectively rendered completely toothless and can no longer work as a mercenary or cause sadistic pain, which was one of his favorite past-times.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: Mindmistress finds out to her surprise the mysterious origins of who Moodswing used to be ties into Vengeance Inc. It turns out she was teenaged cousin of Maggie, one of the members. She helped them out after they escaped prison. When they became contaminated, she was their contact, but upon discovering the rainbow-colored eyes and realizing she was turning into one of them, she jumped from their boat into the water intending to commit suicide. Instead, she floated on her back to shore, with skin rotted after the fish were done nibbling it and Laser-Guided Amnesia about her past.
- No Fourth Wall: Subverted. Every time MM meets somebody aware that she's a webcomics character (like in Crossover Wars), she points out reasons why this is impossible.
- Papa Wolf: "When you're a parent, even a momentary childish scream as you're getting out of your car, brings you running".
- Pet the Dog: Despite itching for years to get revenge on Moodswing and Bloodlust, after she does act out her revenge, she lets them find some calm in living on an isolated farm. Since she's gotten what she wanted, Mindmistress knows that after what she's done to them, they'd just be constant victims in a real prison subject to rape and constant violence.
- The Plan: Mindmistress is good at this, always with another one up her sleeve.
- Power Armor: She invented a skin-tight padded metal armor that gives her increased strength (think Spiderman, not The Thing) and agility, her velocity redirection field and a handy place to put her staff.
- Reed Richards Is Useless: Justified. Mindmistress is afraid that her technology could change our society for worse. Most times she tries to help somebody in non-superhero ways, something bad happens.
- It's also averted with Forethought, the only man in the world smarter than Mindmistress, who tries to prevent The End of the World as We Know It, seen in visions, which will be caused by humans themselves.
- Just to drive the point home, MM is involuntarily taken to visit an alternate universe where her now-dead parallel self released all of her super-tech into the hands of the rest of humanity. The global economy is imploding and every nutjob on the planet has access to horrible new weaponry.
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Reality Subtext: Troy, Lorelai's autistic love interest, was heavily inspired by Al's own autistic son. He tragically died an early death in Al's arms, so Troy was Al's love letter to show how much he loved and missed his boy. - Roaring Rampage of Revenge: One of the members of Vengeance Inc. has this in her backstory. Her entire family is massacred thanks to her brother owing a gang money, so she firebombs the entire gang from a hangglider until not a single one is left alive.
- Self-Deprecation: On at least one occasion, Schroeder has openly admitted that his art style is somewhat... limited.
- Shared Universe: With Zebra Girl. However, Word of God says it can be her alternate counterpart, not the real one.
- Shoot the Dog: To revive a little girl, MM has to use the device that killed the girl's murderer.
- Space Master: MM used a spatial distortion shield as a defense against magic.
- Sticks to the Back: A recent costume upgrade has let her do this with her Psyche-Staff.
- Take That!: One whole chapter full of take that's aimed at Rob Liefeld, Stripperiffic Outfits, Frank Miller, retcons, Marvel Zombies, tentacle rape, Beware the Superman trope, and even webcomics. There's Self-Deprecation too.
- Time Abyss: When the Elder Gods were born, the Sisters of Twilight were already vastly old. And considering that Elder Gods are Time Abysses themselves, thinking about how old those two must be is horrific.
- They can even be older than some Outer Gods, if what they said about knowing Yog-Sothoth as a young god is true. And they said it in a way suggesting that they were already old back then. Which has interesting implications, considering Yog-Sothoth is eternal (it has always existed and will always exist). Then again, due to existing outside time and being able to freely move in it, Yog-Sothoth can indeed have been born at some point and have always existed (as nothing stopped it from appearing in time before it was born).
