Eleanor Price, DBE

Eleanor Price, Agent of U.N.I.T. (circa 1969)

The daughter of Colonel Sir James Price, a highly-decorated covert operations officer sent into Nazi-occupied Europe to contact and organize resistance cells, Eleanor grew up with stories of her father's exploits. She attended university with the intent of following her father into government service. As she neared graduation, she was contacted by an agent of a newly-forming counter-intelligence organization, codenamed "Glass Slipper." The agent wanted to recruit her to their growing ranks, and Price accepted. She rose quickly in the ranks of the agency that would later be known as U.N.I.T. (United kingdom National Intelligence Taskforce). By the late 1970's, she was running the operations side of the organization.

In the mid-1980's, after the American superhero Inferno set fire to Parliament and created a national panic over super-powered operatives, the Harrows Act was passed banning the use of super-powers and many high-tech weapons in the United Kingdom. Several within U.N.I.T. saw this as an opportunity to increase the influence of their agency; with the heroes outlawed, the government would have to increase funding to U.N.I.T. Eleanor Price, who had developed great working relationships over the years with many in Britain's small hero community, saw the writing on the wall: U.N.I.T. would become an outdated organization with inadequate equipment and a ever-expanding bureaucracy in five years. In one last impassioned plea to save the organization she had dedicated her life to, Price addressed Parliament in a now-famous speech where she invoked the words of Sir Winston Churchill:

"One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half."

The words, however, fell on deaf ears and Eleanor Price, Dame Commander of the British Empire, resigned.

Since her retirement from government service, Price has worked behind the scenes to restore super-powered operatives to the United Kingdom. She is the head of a secret organization called "The Sceptre." The growing ranks of this secret society include some of the highest-ranking officials in government and some of the business sector's most powerful and influential. The Sceptre has been able to finance and equip "Templar," a very small super-team that is rapidly gaining popularity among the people of Britain. Though, officially, they are on the wanted list of U.N.I.T., there are several in that organization that have become valuable contacts for Templar and The Sceptre.

Eleanor Price left England in the late 1990's in order to avoid an ever-growing suspicion of her involvement with an "anti-government element." She came to the United States hoping to recruit a number of super-powered British expatriates to her cause, most notably Import of the Paragons, a vocal critic of the Harrows Act. She also hoped to gain financial and material support for The Sceptre among like-minded Americans. She contacted an old friend, Alex Nelson, whose companies had supplied U.N.I.T. for several years while she was running operations. He offered her a job as Vice-President of Field Operations for Armor Security, under the condition that she does nothing to tarnish the image of Armor with her political views. She accepted the position, realizing the value of having such an organization as a resource in her ambitious goal. So far, she has managed to fly under Nelson's radar with her recruiting and fundraising activities.