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[meanballerina]

♚ OOC
Name: Cheshire
Age: 26
Contact: ivoryandhorn/ivoryandhorn
Character In-game: n/a

♛ IC
Name: Natasha Romanova/Black Widow
Canon: Avengers Academy (mobile game)
Canon Point: Level 29 (current level cap) + beginning of the Guardians of the Galaxy event (current limited event)
Age: mid-teens
Gender: female
Species: human
Appearance:

Natasha is a teenage girl in her mid-teens. She has a lithe, athletic build and is in excellent shape. She's very pale, with bright red shoulder-length hair and pale blue eyes. She has a goth aesthetic to her clothes, staying covered up and sticking to red and black with silver accents. A red hourglass symbol, signalling her identity as the Black Widow, often shows up on her accessories, most notably on a necklace that she wears all the time. Other notable constants of her look are her chunky bracelets (which are weaponized) and her heavy goth make-up.

History/Background:

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 also rewritten the lives and histories of all the superheroes and supervillains in the world. Post-catastrophe, 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.

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, and once studied ballet. At some point, she defected from Russia and came to the nameless US city where Avengers Academy is set. All of this remains true of her teenaged self, but she naturally has no memories of being an adult superhero. Still, the now-teenage Black Widow was drawn to the timefog, what remained of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Nick Fury's new 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, now 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 reveals 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 plot slowly progresses, Hydra's plots are foiled, more heroes (and villains) are recruited to the Academy, and together they continue to fend off various attempts on the school. Nick Fury starts to push back against Natasha's rebellious ways and attempts to figure out what's really going on. Natasha's insistence that Fury is untrustworthy goes from being a point of amusement among her teammates to being taken seriously by all. She gains allies to help her in her quest for the truth. Along the way, she slowly starts to soften toward her teammates, tentatively making friends and learning the true joys of being a teenager.

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 or special equipment 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 idealistic conviction that the students deserve to know the truth about what dangerous artifact is literally hidden under their feet.

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.

Magic Weapon:

Rossolina's Ribbon, a metal bracer that covers the wearer's forearm and comes to slight point over the back of the wearer's hand. The bracer is decorated with swirling patterns that emanate from a red gem sitting on the pointed front portion. When activated, the gem shoots out a thin but strong cord of red light, the tip of which can stick to surfaces. The user can then reel the cord in, causing it to shorten rapidly. Initially, the cord will only last a very brief period of time, making timing a crucial concern. Only the initial cord manifestation requires mana. With practice, the user can become more efficient with how much mana is required for a basic usage as described here. Examples of usage: shooting a cord across a hallway to create a surprise trip wire, or shooting a cord at a roof and reeling in the cord, using it as a grappling hook to quickly reach rooftops.

With practice, the user can also gain greater control over how the cord manifests. Some factors that the user could learn to control would be: maximum length of the cord, how long the cord exists, how quickly it unspools/reels in, the trajectory of the sticky tip, and the strength of the cord. However, the more the user manipulates the cord for advanced usages, the more mana will be required to manifest the cord. Furthermore, once manifested, the cord's characteristics can't be changed; they're all "set" the moment the user chooses to create it and can only be changed by deactivating the cord and reactivating it with a new set of characteristics in mind. Examples of advanced usage: creating a short, persistent cord with the end attached to her free hand to use as a garrotte; mentally guiding the tip so it has a better chance of landing on a moving target; using a stronger, slowly unspooling cord to lower herself and a friend off a rooftop.

Given the versatile nature of this weapon, it would take a very long time to fully master all aspects of manipulating of the cord, with all the mishaps that entails. However, while its direct attack ability is low, it can be a very versatile tool in the hands of a creative user.

Carrier: Randomize, please!

Sample:
Tagging Ema Skye on the test drive.
Test drive top-level.