BIOGRAPHY
Spiral originated as an Earth woman named Rita. Courageous, enthusiastic, adventurous, beautiful, loving and protective, Rita - affectionately known by her film-industry peers as “Ricochet Rita” - lived a carefree life until she made the critical error of falling in love with a guy named Longshot. A stunt-woman in Hollywood, Ricochet Rita was in the middle of shooting the film Raiders of the Lost Temple when she crossed paths with the mysterious Longshot, who came from an alternate dimension called the Mojoverse. Rita and Longshot bonded over their mutual taste for adventure and instantly became friends.
Unfortunately, Rita soon became embroiled in the amnesiac Longshot’s former life involving magic, slavery, alien races and idiotic reality TV shows. As it turned out, Longshot’s former slaver, Mojo, had sent several of his servants after him, including a six-armed, white-haired magic-user named Spiral. This squad of slave-hunters chased Longshot through a vortex that led to Earth, where they became stuck. Although the hunters managed to power their trip back home with some stolen diamonds, the things they had seen left an impression. Spiral informed her master, Mojo, about the bipedal, upright beings she saw on Earth - creatures uncannily similar to the monsters from the Mojoverse’s folklore. Both fascinated and horrified, Mojo insisted on traveling to the dimension of Earth to view them firsthand, as well as to capture Longshot before he returned to the Mojoverse and spread rumors of these free creatures to the Mojoverse’s bipedal slave race.
To trap Longshot, Mojo and Spiral took his friend Ricochet Rita hostage. They brought her back to the Mojoverse and made her into the figurehead of Mojo’s floating pirate ship, deliberately exposing her mind to the madness of the space between space. Rita went insane. As a cruel joke, Spiral and Mojo returned the catatonic Rita to her home, perhaps leaving her as a warning for Longshot. Fortunately, Longshot managed to revive her with the help of Doctor Strange. With her mind restored, Rita decided she enjoyed her taste of real-life adventure more than she did staged movie stunts. She enthusiastically teamed up with Longshot to halt Mojo’s plot to enslave the people of Earth. After defeating him, Rita accompanied Longshot back to the Mojoverse to help with his rebellion and further thwart Mojo’s nefarious schemes. [Longshot #1-6, X-Factor Annual #7]
The Mojoverse rebellion - like all the Mojoverse rebellions that preceded it - failed. Only after the rebellion’s failure did Rita learn that the denizens of the Mojoverse referred to Longshot as their Fallen Messiah, a man destined to fail again and again in a perpetual cycle of futility. [X-Factor Annual #7]
At some point, Mojo recaptured Rita, and again tied her to the prow of his ship as its figurehead. This time, however, she retained her sanity. She managed to escape with the help of Mojo’s newest potential TV stars, the X-Babies. [Uncanny X-Men Annual (1st series) #12]
Although the X-Babies made a clean getaway, Mojo apprehended Rita and transformed her into a bounty hunter called “The Agent.” She pursued the X-Babies as per Mojo’s orders, but they captured her with Excalibur’s help and salvaged her original personality in exchange for their own freedom. Rita felt so protective of them by that point that she willingly followed them back to the Mojoverse, to serve as their manager. [Excalibur: Mojo Mayhem]
At some point, Mojo turned on Rita, imprisoned her and tortured her. He once again opened her mind to “the time between time” and “the space between space,” thus teaching her to dance between them. This exposure permanently twisted Rita’s mind and distorted her memories. Her feelings for Longshot twisted into a grudge, and she seemingly forgot everything from her time living on Earth. However, her fascination with Earth would eventually compel her to ask Mojo for permission to spend time living there.
Mojo also coerced his servant Arize into adding biocyberonic implants to Rita’s body, who emerged from this operation with six arms instead of two. Now resembling the Hindu deity Shiva the Destroyer, Rita answered to the name “Spiral.” Also during this operation, Rita’s raven-black hair turned stark white. [X-Factor Annual #7] Spiral’s additional arms, meanwhile, allowed her to practice more sophisticated magic spells, which she activated by dancing. She became a formidable magician with the one drawback of needing room to move her arms when she dances. In fact, her magicks at one point earned her the attention of the Eye of Agamotto as a candidate for the new Sorcerer Supreme. [New Avengers (1st series) #53]
However, Mojo had an ulterior motive with the addition of her arms. They made her a freak in the eyes of regular humans, which ensured she would hate humanity - a hatred Mojo could harness for his own destructive ends. Mojo even made a point of constantly reminding Spiral of how monstrous she appeared and how the humans of Earth would never accept her as one of their own, should she think of escaping. [Longshot #5-6] Mojo’s cruelest act of all was what he made Spiral do next. He programmed her to time-dance backward to Earth and attack her former self, Ricochet Rita. She and Mojo opened Rita’s mind to insanity, just so she could escape, join Longshot in his doomed quest and fall prisoner to Mojo. Therefore, it was Ricochet Rita, in the form of Spiral, who initiated her own downfall and descent into insanity. Because she was under Mojo’s tight control and possibly brain-damaged, Spiral could only watch as she destroyed the life of the woman she used to be. Additionally, Mojo sent her far enough back in time for her to stop the rebel messiah Longshot from ever escaping to Earth. [X-Factor Annual #7]
[Note: Because of the cross-dimensional nature of time-travel, it is unclear whether the Ricochet Rita from the 616-timeline and Spiral are in fact the same person. Adding to this uncertainty is Mojo’s claim that only one Mojoverse dimension existed in the Multiverse. [Exiles (1st series) #18] If true, this would allow for paradoxical time-travel without creating divergent timelines. However, it is possible that the Rita whom Mojo and Spiral tortured and turned into the Spiral who frequents the 616-timeline came from an alternate-reality. This article assumes that 616 Rita and Spiral are the same person]
The woman now known as Spiral led a group of fellow bounty hunters and pursued Longshot as he fled Mojo’s captivity through a rift that led to Earth. The portal to Earth closed on the hunters, however, and left them in an immaterial, intangible state when they arrived. Little more than living ghosts, the bounty hunters sought a way home and found one in Spiral’s formidable magic. They just needed an infant sacrifice to power the spell home - an act Spiral had no qualms about performing. Fortunately for the baby, Longshot foiled their scheme. Spiral and the bounty hunters eventually resorted to using a large collection of diamonds to magically fuel their trip home. [Longshot #1-3]
Upon returning to Earth with Mojo to show him the biped race of humans not dissimilar to the horrible creatures of their mythology, Spiral became subject to Mojo’s cruelty. He made a point of mentioning that Spiral’s six arms differentiated her enough from these regular humans to make her feel like a freak. He even once instructed her to hide her extra arms from his sight because he found them ugly. Clearly, he only did this to be cruel, as he found all humans ugly anyway. [Longshot #5]
Even though Spiral tried to disguise her feelings as hatred, Mojo sensed his slave’s feelings for Longshot and often mocked her taste in men. He once even offered to make her a new version of Longshot to play with, if she helped pull him free from a dimensional void. Spiral’s reactions to these comments indicated that she resented both her feelings for Longshot and Mojo’s detection of them. Worse, even Longshot seemed to sense Spiral had feelings for him, despite that he didn’t know she was his former love interest. Spiral once practically went mad during a battle when Longshot asked her about these conflicting feelings.
Mojo’s attempt to appoint himself as ruler of Earth earned him and Spiral the attention of Longshot and his allies, Doctor Strange, Ricochet Rita and Quark. During the ensuing battle, Doctor Strange opened an interdimensional portal into which Mojo fell - without Spiral. Mojo became desperate. It seemed only Spiral could navigate the “space between space.” Without her, Mojo feared getting lost for eternity. He pleaded with her to save him, offering to remove her extra arms and give her a kingdom, among other things if she complied. Although Spiral could have been rid of Mojo forever, she followed and rescued him. [Longshot #6]
Despite the dire situation Mojo and Spiral found themselves in falling in the space between space, Mojo was not ready to be done with Longshot. Mojo complained to Spiral that she was taking too long to get them out of the teleport but she managed to ignore his bleating and concentrate enough to bring them back to Mojoworld with Longshot in their possession. He soon started fighting back, using his luck powers which Spiral stated she despised but she managed to tie him up regardless. Soon the trio were in Mollywood, ready to exploit Longshot as an actor in a bunch of creatively bankrupt movies. Mojo gloated about how grafting extra arms onto Spiral was a stroke of genius, as she was the perfect tripod, to which Spiral emphatically stated that she was not his appliance. Even though Mojo continued to treat her like a dog, she still stepped between him and Longshot when he broke free and threw one of his knives. Spiral took the blade directly into one of her eyes, which fortunately did not permanently maim her.
In the meantime, Mojo wanted Spiral to teleport in a couple more earthlings for his picture and the lucky duo she abducted happened to be Wolverine and Kitty Pryde of the X-Men, having been in the area investigating Longshot’s recent Earth appearance as a possible mutant. With the pair captured, Spiral put her body modification shop to work in order to dress up and brainwash the mutants for the movie. She had secretly put in some fail safes, though, as she had the intention of betraying Mojo and hijacking the movie production for herself. As the movie started to go off the rails due to the brainwashing of the three heroes started to wear off, Spiral criticized Mojo for his lack of directing skills, to which he angrily declared she could never do better as women can’t direct. So, behind his back, Spiral took the footage and magically edited the film to be one for which she could take the credit and accolades. As a final piece of revenge on Mojo, she sent the X-Men back home with their memories wiped of the events. [X-Men Legends (2nd series) #3-4]