Tina Minoru

History

  

Origin

Before their wedding day, Tina and her fiancee Robert Minoru, discovered a passion for the dark arts.  Together they had dabbled with black magic spells, but rarely tried anything of notable strength or power.  Both of Japanese descent, they appear to like everything to be neat and tidy and hate being late or challenged.  Aside from the occasional attempts to learn black magic, they both appear to have been Catholics who lived relatively normal lives up until the day of the wedding.

The Pride 

On their wedding day, just as Robert placed the wedding ring upon his wife’s left hand, the newly wed Minorus were summoned by  The Gibborim.  One moment they were in front of their friends and family, the next they had been instantly teleported to the underwater  Vivarium where five other married couples had also been gathered.  After an initial threat on the lives of  Leslie and  Frank Dean caused all the various gathered couples to start using their powers and throwing insults about.  Tina and Robert combined their powers to create some sort of dark portal with which they threatened the Hayes couple, but were interrupted when The Gibborim appeared before them.  

The Gibborim made the offer of 25 years of unlimited power over Los Angeles and the possibility of immortality in exchange for an annual sacrificial human soul.  They classed Tina and Robert Minoru as “The Magicians”.  They agreed to have their powers enhanced, and the chance that they would be among the six offered immortality after The Gibborim destroy the Earth.  As such, they became founding members of  The Pride.  

As members of The Pride, Tina wore a similar outfit to her husband, with dark maroon robes and a raised neckline which obscured the lower half of her face.  Unlike her husband, Tina wielded the powerful Staff of One, while together they can focus their powers to create portals, teleportation spells, and presumably other magic that required greater amounts of strength.

Family Life

After Victor and  Janet Stein announced that they were going to have a baby and intended to give their chance of immortality to their child, the Minoru also hoped to have a family.  A few years later they had a baby girl, Nico Minoru.  They raised her to be a normal girl, and seemed to passive-aggressively attempt to steer her away from the gothic lolita tendencies she had begun to show.  Tina would use the advice she’s heard on Oprah as an excuse to throw away Nico’s black nail polish, while her father would complain about being late.

On the night of the Ritual of Blood, Nico with   Alex Wilder,  Chase Stein,  Gertrude Yorkes observed the sacrificial murder of a young prostitute.  The murder came as a horrific surprise and Nico screamed, which was heard through the two-way mirror through which they had watched the gruesome ritual.  Although the parents had suspected their children, they were easily deceived by the kids’ impromptu game of Twister.  They had no reason to suspect that their daughter was about to run away from home.
It wasn’t until Geoffrey Wilder was tipped off by a police informant that they realised what had happened.  Tina and Robert went to the Stein residence where they found the Runaways searching through the Stein’s various inventions.  After Victor Stein attacked his son Tina confronted Nico.  However, as she went to strike her daughter with the Staff of One, Tina was caught off guard as Nico’s body began to absorb the staff.  In the moment of silent surprise afterwards Nico grabbed the closest thing to her and struck her mother across the head with it, rendering Tina unconscious.  
 

Betrayal & Death

Tina and Robert were oblivious to the schemes of the Dean and Hayes couples.  A year before the Runaways ran away from home, both Alice and Gene Hayes had begun to conspire with Leslie and Frank Dean.  As aliens and mutants they felt aside and better than humanity; together they realised that instead of just giving their children the chance to become immortal, they could join them.  
The pact with The Gibborim meant that six out of the twelve members of The Pride would become immortal.  Together the Deans and the Hayes realised that if they were to remove the remaining eight members of The Pride, then they could become immortal along with their children, Karolina and Molly.  However, realising that the future of The Pride was already recorded in  The Abstract they set about decoding their own copies.  After they had identified which pages revealed their treacherous plot, they silently broke into the houses of the other Pride members to remove those pages from the other four copies of The Abstract.

While breaking into the Wilder residence, they were silently observed by Alex.  Discovering their scheme to murder his parents, Alex began to form a plan of his own.  Like the plan of the Deans and Hayes, Alex’s plan would guarantee immortality for his family, and for the entire Minoru family since he had fallen in love with Nico.  However, Alex’s plan begun to fail when Nico rejected him.  The Gibborim were angered when their human soul was released before they could devour it, and turned their wrath on all The Pride and the Runaways.  As a last act of familial loyalty, the Pride used their powers to hold The Gibborim back while their children escaped.  Tina’s last act as a mother was to order Nico to run with the words “I am still your mother…”.  

Tina Minoru has not been seen since the Vivarium was destroyed in an underwater explosion.  Both she and her husband have been presumed dead.