Synodiporia: Application

[meanballerina]

P L A Y E R;
NAME: Cheshire
AGE: 16+
PLAYER JOURNAL: ivoryandhorn
TIMEZONE: EST
CONTACT: ivoryandhorn @ gmail/plurk
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Rosalie Chou (OC) and Iwamine Shuu (Hatoful Boyfriend)

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Natasha Romanova aka Black Widow
CANON: Avengers Academy
POINT IN CANON:

Pre-Ultron Revolution special event. Due to the nature of the game, I haven't completed all the special events and I haven't recruited all possible characters. However, for RP purposes, I would assume that Natasha's been present for all special events (even ones I missed) and that all characters (including premium characters requiring real $$$) have been recruited to her Academy. Basically, I would be assuming Nat comes from a 100% complete version of the game as opposed to my partially complete experience/instance of the game.

AGE: not specified, but late teens.

APPEARANCE:

The middle outfit in this image. In AvAc, the characters go through multiple costume changes, and also can acquire special outfits with special abilities. I'll be sticking with this one as her default outfit. Of note is that her bracelets are weaponized and function like firearms.

CANON HISTORY:

The world of Avengers Academy is pretty similar to our own except for having more advanced technology and, well, superheroes -- with everything that implies. Shortly before the game's storyline begins, there was a time/space catastrophe caused by a mysterious artifact. The catastrophe was centered around the old S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters (as with other Marvel canons, S.H.I.E.L.D. is a shady government intelligence agency with ties to the Avengers superhero team). As a result of the catastrophe, S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ was surrounded by a mysterious "timefog" where strange visions and anomalies constantly flicker in and out of existence, frozen in place. Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., found a portion of S.H.I.E.L.D. that was clear of the timefog, and decided to use that clear section to build a high school.

See, the time/space catastrophe hadn't only destroyed the area around S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ. It had apparently also rewritten the lives and histories of all the superheroes and supervillains in the world. Post-catastrophe, it looked like they had all been transformed into teenage versions of themselves, with their respective organizations and affiliations re-imagined as rival schools (Avengers Academy, Hydra School, the A.I.M. Institute of Super Technology, the Cosmic Conservatory, etc.). These new teenaged versions of the characters seemed to have similar histories and personalities to their adult counterparts, but are still, well...teenagers. As the game progressed, however, it became apparently that the students of the Academy were not deaged superheroes, but rather an alternate universe variation of them -- and that more alternate universes existed. Somehow, the catastrophe that had created the timefog was related to these dimensional anomalies as well. The implication is that Avengers Academy is one of many alternate universes which presumably include the comics canon and the MCU.

This is where Natasha Romanova, aka the Black Widow, comes in. While Avengers Academy definitely has an ongoing plot, individual character backstories have received relatively little attention. What we do get suggests that their lives follow those of their counterparts in other canons, in the broad strokes if not necessarily in details. For Natasha, several key hints have been dropped. She is originally from Russia, was trained as a spy by the government-funded Red Room, and once studied (or believed she had studied?) ballet. At some point, she defected from Russia and came to New York City, where Avengers Academy is located. There, Natasha was drawn to the newly created Avengers Academy.

Just before the plot of Avengers Academy begins, probably while the school was still being constructed, Natasha began digging into the mysteries surrounding Avengers Academy and the timefog. Pepper Potts (in this universe, a school administrator) notes that Natasha has been "lurking around for a while now" when the game starts. Natasha gathered enough information from her lurking to figure out two things. The first was that Nick Fury is hiding a significant and important secret. The second was that she was going to find out what that secret is no matter what. However, Natasha only revealed herself and her intentions once Nick Fury recruits the first students to the school (Iron Man/Tony Stark, Janet Van Dyne/The Wasp, and Loki), attracting the ire of Hydra School in the process.

Despite her distrust of Fury and the Academy, Natasha joins the school in order to help combat Hydra. Though technically a student, she spends her days more interested in digging into whatever Nick Fury is hiding, sneaking into the S.H.I.E.L.D. base hidden underneath the school. As the game's main storyline and the special events unfold, however, it becomes clear that there are other dangers to the Academy. Whatever secret Nick Fury is hiding is a dangerous herald of cosmic threats to the world. Someone is pulling Hydra's strings, throwing round after round of villains after the students. And there's still the question of what, exactly, happened to create the timefog, leading Nick Fury and Odin so determined to keep their secrets secret...

Meanwhile, Natasha's insistence that Fury is untrustworthy goes from being a point of amusement among her teammates to being taken seriously. She gains allies to help her in her quest for the truth. Along the way, she slowly starts to soften toward her teammates, defending her new friends from peril and learning the true joys of being a teenager.

CANON PERSONALITY:

Natasha is brash, impatient, and independent. She came to the academy highly trained as a spy, with a strong preference for working alone -- something not helped by what she saw as frustratingly immature antics of her ostensible teammates. Natasha's easily annoyed and impatient, and hates feeling held back by others. Even so, she has respect for people who have talents that she doesn't, and seems to have a certain affinity for people like herself who have no superpowers but keep up with those who do anyway.

Despite her aura of competence and (relative) maturity, Natasha has her own foibles, chief among them being that she doesn't seem to get other people or how to relate to them. She's perfectly fine with manipulating other people if she feels it's necessary. For example, during a special event where Loki tried to mind-control Iron Man, who had a crush on her, Natasha took advantage of that crush to drag Iron Man out on a date in order to keep him away from Loki. It was not a nice thing to do since she had no interest in Iron Man herself, but it was something she did out of necessity. From this we see that she has a basic understanding of how to manipulate others by taking advantage of their feelings and faking her own.

However, when it comes to genuine feelings, her emotional acumen seems to fall flat. To illustrate, there was a quest chain where Natasha collaborated with the Falcon in order to sneak into S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ to steal some of Nick Fury's secrets. The end result of their collaboration was that Natasha felt like she and Falcon had sort of begun dating, but she didn't actually say this to or discuss this with Falcon. As a result, she was hurt when Falcon began dating another girl in earnest. The takeaway is: Natasha thought that burying the kind-of date situation in the midst of pretending to be just using Falcon as a helper made her intentions clear, and then was hurt when they were not. While she doesn't seem to necessarily blame Falcon for his lack of understanding, it seems pretty clear that Natasha struggled with expressing her attraction and hopes to Falcon in a way that was straightforward and clear, having difficulty figuring out how to set up a date in a way that was clear to all parties involved. From this we can see that despite having a basic idea of how to manipulate via emotion, Natasha doesn't have a really nuanced understanding of her own emotions or how to communicate them.

In her difficulty with Feelings and communication, some of Natasha's true teenager-hood shines through. No matter how well she fakes it, she's ultimately a kid like the rest of the cast, and while she might be more mature than some of them, she's still a youth too. Another way her teenager-hood shines through is in how brash and arrogant she is. Despite being a spy, whose job it is to sneak around, her initial recruitment quest to the Academy involves her saying to Nick Fury's face that she's coming after him. And in later quests she says much the same thing; when Nick Fury notes that her newly acquired white outfit is easy to see, Natasha confidently says that she doesn't care if he sees her coming. In these comments we can see that Natasha carries with her that sense of youthful invulnerability that so many teenagers have. And she's more than happy to share that fact, even when it works against her purposes. For all her skill and training, she still lacks the kind of experience and thoughtfulness that an adult counterpart might have, and falls prey to the impulses of her pride, making amateurish mistakes like this in the process.

The fact that she's a spy has also affected Natasha's personality significantly. Right from the start, it's clear that, pride and bragging to Nick Fury aside, she's a very secretive person. When she slips up and mentions that she used to learn ballet to her teammates, she's immediately annoyed at herself for messing up and with her teammates for taking advantage of that information to tease her. She also takes a long time to decide whether it's worth collaborating with her teammates to dig up information from Fury, at first asking them for help obliquely (i.e. she asks Wasp to make her a new spy outfit, for better spying, but doesn't mention why she wants it) before asking them to help her directly (i.e. asking Falcon to be a distraction while she sneaks into S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ). It takes her a long time to decide to trust her teammates enough to ask for their help and she's careful about what kind of information she chooses to share and with whom.

However, for someone with a lot of secrets, Natasha definitely has a problem with people keeping secrets, especially when they involve herself. This seems to stem from her need to know and control the situation around her. For example, when she finds out that Fury has surveillance cameras in the eyes of the school club's robot bartender, she immediately wrecks the cameras in order to keep him from watching her. Many of her actions in the game focus on her gathering information: studying, searching for clues, and eavesdropping. In a way, it seems like her hostility toward Fury's secret-keeping is an extension of this need for information and control, driven as much by her need to know as much as by her more altruistic conviction that the students deserve to know the truth about what dangerous artifact is literally hidden under their feet. In her quest for the truth, Natasha has no problem collaborating with the shadier characters of Avengers Academy, including Loki (god of mischief) and Ant-Man (thief).

However, while her quest for the truth and her open animosity toward S.H.I.E.L.D. are the major motivations of her character, Natasha can also be very pragmatic. She's more than capable of swallowing her feud in order to work with S.H.I.E.L.D. in times of crisis. In fact, this is the major thrust of her recruitment quest sequence -- she joins the academy to help them fight off Hydra. Of course, even when she chooses to compromise, she tends to have ulterior motives as well. After all, the result of joining the Academy is that she's now in a better position to spy on Fury and figure out what he's hiding.

To sum up High School AU Black Widow: she is independent, impatient, arrogant, paranoid, driven, and probably thinks you're annoying and/or useless. But she's also an awkward teenager who doesn't quite get how to relate to other people and definitely doesn't know how to slow down and think ahead. And her respect -- once earned -- is loyal and true.

POINT OF DEPARTURE: n/a

VETERAN?: No.

ABILITIES:

Natasha is 100% human and 100% highly trained teenage spy, with a dash of over-the-top superhero thrown in. The game sums up Natasha's skills like so: "Stealth. Agility. Marksmanship. Extensive Butt-Kicking." They're not wrong, but here's a little more detail.

- hand-to-hand combat
- ballet
- gymnastics
- peak teenage girl athlete speed, strength, reflexes, stamina, etc.
- marksmanship (conventional firearms and specialized ones like her weaponized bracelets)
- bladed weapons
- hacking/systems intrusion
- general espionage techniques (eavesdropping, observation, etc.)
- acting/faking emotions
- stealth
- thiefy skills (lockpicking, safecracking, scaling buildings, etc.)
- linguistics (knows English and Russian at minimum, probably fluent in other languages because spy)
- ballroom dancing
- driving (cars and motorcycles at minimum)
- familiarity with future/superhero tech (HUDs, flying battle suits, holographic interface, AI, etc.)

This is all stuff pulled from the various actions she has in the game. While certain special outfits can give Nat extra-human abilities, for game purposes I will only incorporate anything that is a matter of mundane skill and training. The Red Room trains its students well.

INVENTORY:

- weaponized bracelets
- weaponized lipstick
- non-weaponized lipstick (and other cosmetics)
- smartphone
- lockpicks
- probably some other miscellaneous tools

ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? Nope!

M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION:

MAGICIAN: Many of the keywords for this Arcana match aspects of Natasha's personality. The biggest theme is the idea of forging ahead through determination and personal will and power, emphasizing Natasha's adaptability and flexibility.

CHARIOT: Same for Magician, though in a way that emphasizes different aspects of Natasha's personality. Thematically this matches more to the idea of Natasha as a cold, driven, implacable lone wolf, and also a bit to her being a brash and overconfident teenager.

JUSTICE: Natasha prides herself on being an intelligent and analytical person, someone who is focused and clear-minded. Justice also thematically captures some of Natasha's insensitivity to emotions; she can leverage the reactions of others much better than she can understand herself. Also, Natasha's quest for the truth is driven in part by her sense of idealism and rightness (that is, the students deserve to know what horrible thing is hidden beneath their school) so Justice fits in that way as well.

DEVIL: A bit of a stretch, but the Devil does capture some of the more flawed aspects of Natasha's personality. She's arrogant and overconfident, suspicious and distrustful, obsessed with her quest to expose Nick Fury's secrets, often anti-social and condescending toward the other students.

VETO:

No hard vetoes, but if possible, I'd like to avoid Hermit or Tower, since I already have characters with those Arcana.

S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: thread from CrossCheck test drive
PROSE SAMPLE: based off prompt #31

After the initial shock of arrival, Natasha had quickly applied herself to the problem at hand: the tournament. On the one hand, it was useful. Tournaments meant crowds, meant travelers, meant people too busy to ask questions of new faces. If she could just figure out a role that would make it easy for her to make people talk...

Fortunately, the outfit she'd been given by the Arcana was perfect for it. With her chest bound and her voice modified, Natasha made a passable teenage boy. Good enough for the distracted knights and nobles to assume that she was somebody's squire -- and once she nabbed a Traveler to play her knight, she made that assumption real enough for her to use. Running here and there on imagined errands gave her plenty of opportunities to ask questions, identify factions, and overhear juicy gossip.

Natasha wasn't quite sure what everything she'd learned would be useful for, but she was confident that it would come in handy. That was the thing about information: more was always better. And when it came to figuring out a Jaunt, you never knew where the breakthrough might come from.

At last came a lull in the proceedings. Natasha took the opportunity to grab some food, neatly swiping some from a distracted vendor. Regrettable, but she had no currency and she needed to eat somehow. As she ate, Natasha quickly checked in on the network. She didn't trust telepathy, but it was useful at times like this, when the Travelers were scattered and needed to pool info quickly. It would be stupid not to use the tools at hand.

Stolen meal finished, and satisfied that none of the other Travlers had gotten into too much trouble fitting in, Natasha considered her next move. That knight in the blue tabard, she decided. She was hiding something...and Natasha had a feeling that her secret was exactly what the Travelers needed. All she had to do was figure out how to make her talk.