Application for Abraxas

[widows_kiss]

OOC INFORMATION

Player Name: Rynn
Are you over 18?: yes
Contact: chaneystarr, chaneystarr#5689 (discord)
Other Characters in Game: Sylvain Gautier

IC INFORMATION

Character Name: Natasha Romanoff
Canon: MCU
Canon Point: Avengers: Endgame (Vormir)
Age: 38
Background: Wiki

Arrival Scenario: She will be arriving in Thorne

Suitability:

Some of this will be repeated in the section below, since much of it ended up applying to both sections. But Natasha was trained from an early age to be the perfect spy and weapon. She was owned by a corporation called the Red Room that employed her as a spy and assassin for many years until her reputation got her noticed in a bad way by SHIELD. Instead of ending her career as he'd been ordered, Clint Barton recruited her, and she was happy to leave the Black Widow program behind for a fresh start.

That led to years of assisting first SHIELD and later the Avengers against a multitude of threats, both mundane, superpowered, magical, and extraterrestrial. Natasha herself claims that "I get emails from a raccoon, nothing sounds crazy anymore." While she's always been adaptable and quick to improvise, her experiences up to this point have given her a very wide arsenal of both knowledge and finely-honed skills to put to use no matter what situation she's dropped into. She's quick-thinking but there's little she does without a deliberate reason for it (and if it is more spontaneous, it's often because she's following her instincts - she'll make up a believable reason to bluff about her intentions later). She's not afraid to fight for what she believes in but she's also reasonable enough to look at more than one perspective and is often the voice of moderation and reason among her teammates, cool-headed under pressure.

She's going to be separated from most of her team while being Summoned to Thorne, but I think it will be a fun challenge for her. Reforming connections and new allies from the ground up, but also looking for answers perhaps not available in the other factions. It might turn out to be a long game of infiltration and espionage on her part, straddling a careful line of where her loyalties lie and what she's willing to do for her family now that they're in an entirely new sort of conflict.

There's also the fact that her last memory from home is her own death, so there's going to be some trauma all its own to be worked through here, especially with a few fellow teammates she never got to bid farewell to.

Powers:

While she is not super-powered like many of her teammates, Natasha has honed everything about herself into becoming the perfect weapon. According to the MCU Wiki, she’s mastered karate, judo, aikido, savate, boxing, lucha-libre style wrestling and multiple styles of kung fu. Combined with her strength, speed, and agility, this makes her deadly in close combat. She is an Olympic-class athlete, gymnast, acrobat, and aerialist capable of many difficult feats. She’s a deadly accurate marksman, skilled in sharpshooting and knife throwing.

She is fluent in Latin, Russian, English, French, German, Chinese, and various other languages. She’s an effective strategist, tactician, and field commander. She has extensive skill with technology and hacking, as shown in Iron Man 2 and Captain America 2 The Winter Soldier. In Avengers, she is the only one of the team to figure out and use the Chitauri weapons and vehicles against them in the battle of New York.

Natasha is a dangerous secret agent trained in espionage, stealth, disguise, infiltration, interrogation, and demolitions. Her talents and years of experience enabled her to reach a high rank as an agent and specialist of SHIELD and later as one of the core members of the Avengers. After Thanos' snap, she is shown to be leading (or co-leading) what is left of the Avengers and coordinating their efforts across the planet and beyond it in the five years half their population is missing.

PERSONALITY QUESTIONS

Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.

This was very hard to choose, because there have just been so many that altered the course of her life over her time spent with the Avengers. Budapest was fundamental in setting her on her path. The attack on New York brought her a team that became her family and opened up the understanding and possibility of the world being much larger than any of them realized. Her relationship with Bruce Banner showed a different side of her but also helped to firm her view of herself and what she stood for. Civil War tested her loyalties and how far she was willing to bend the rules and her own beliefs. And finally, the Snap had her hitting rock bottom and having to reshape her life in the wake of devastation, defeat, and overwhelming grief.

But the important event I think impacted her the most - or at least showed the most impactful change in her - were the events that happened in The Winter Soldier. Up until that point, she'd still been a good agent, a good spy, for an organization she'd believed was dedicated to the protection and betterment of the people under its care. She'd thought it worthy enough to abandon her old loyalties (as coerced/forced as they'd been) to the Red Room to become someone Better. To make a difference.

The events in TWS shatter that perspective entirely and Natasha has to deal with the devastating reality that she traded in one evil organization for another. That she was still just following orders blindly and telling lies for the bad guys. Her confidence in what she was doing and why had to be completely reassessed and we see in several conversations with Steve Rogers - and in some of her reactions to Nick Fury - just how much she's questioning everything she knows and everything she's done. The consequences of her actions - twice over now - have deep repercussions for her and it strengthens her resolve and sets her on a new path. One she forges without taking orders from someone else or just blindly following another's morality. She starts making decisions on her own.

And on top of that, she stops hiding. Up until that point, her identity and her secrets had been hidden away, concealed by SHIELD when she defected. In bringing down a Hydra-controlled SHIELD, she released all their confidential secrets to the world - including her own dark past. All her ugly secrets bared before the world. It's an act of courage that not even Pierce thought she'd actually take, exposure to a level that was terrifying for her, someone who worked best in the shadows.

But in taking the stand she did in TWS, she fully stepped out of the shadows. Stopped hiding behind others, and took charge of her own actions and the fight for what she believed in. The cause that motivated her was now fully hers and that was liberating in a way that none of her former actions could compare to. It brings her the start of a bond strong enough to withstand anything and it gives her a new level of confidence in herself and what's important to her.

Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?

While she probably wouldn't claim to have a set code or standards, Natasha does have them, and they've mostly been shaped by her time as an Avenger. While her morals might be made up of slightly more shades of gray than some of her teammates, Natasha is very aware of the length of distance between right and wrong. For the most part, she sticks to those morals, but she's also the one who is more flexible in occasionally cutting corners and she might often be the one to temper those who are more rigid in their stances over something - though she's not always successful at that. Although she also knows her teammates well enough to know when to pick her battles.

Her outlook is shown several times throughout the franchise but it is contrasted the most in her interactions with Steve Rogers (who she would consider the team's moral compass). In some of her earlier conversations with him, her outlook comes across pretty clearly in "Truth is a matter of circumstance. It's not all things to all people, all the time. And neither am I." Another example would be "Just because it's the path of least resistance doesn't mean it's the wrong path. Staying together is more important than how we stay together." While her inclination might be 'the ends justifies the means' more often than not, she does have lines she won't cross and on those, she'll stand firm and not waver.

When she first starts working with the Avengers, she is still very much a SHIELD agent; she puts her skills in espionage, intel, and infiltration to good use and she's proud of the work she does. It's only after SHIELD is revealed as corrupt that she starts questioning everything she knows. "When I joined SHIELD, I thought I was going straight. Turns out I just traded the KGB for Hydra. I thought I knew whose lies I was telling but I guess I can't tell the difference anymore." It was a harsh wake-up call but she learned from it, adjusted her viewpoint yet again and tried to do better. Having people come to depend on her, having teammates who genuinely trusted her to have their back - and trusting them with the same in turn - it shifted her alignment considerably.

And while she would still often take up the roles she was most skilled in, her motivation and mindset during them have been forever altered. She shifts from a stance of survival and protection of just herself to the protection and well-being of those most important to her. And, in effect, the things important to them became something important to her - something worth fighting for.

What quality or qualities do they admire most?

The ones that come to mind first and foremost are "loyalty" and "the belief in a cause you're willing to fight for", something or someone worthy of taking a stand for. They are some of the qualities that have affected her most in her journey and what have dragged her out of many dark places when she lost sight of any source of light.

Clint embodies it and he was the first example she based this ideal around when she first came to SHIELD. He wasn't perfect, but she wasn't looking for perfection. He was real and in coming from the dangerous and backstabbing world she'd just stepped out of, he was such a breath of fresh air that it probably felt like breathing for the first time.

Steve sort of becomes the ultimate ideal for these qualities as she gets to know him. Honestly, this entire section could just be her emphatically gesturing at Steve in general. But the one exchange they have in TWS is something that always stands out to me as one of the hugely important moments in her character growth. "If it was the other way around and it was down to me to save your life, would you trust me to do it?" "I would now." The emotion on her face at that moment, the understanding that she'd earned that trust, that loyalty - that moment meant more to her than any successful mission she could have pulled off.

Becoming the person worthy of that is what guides her steps through the next several years. The found family that forms from what was originally just a chaotic and dysfunctional team ends up earning that same loyalty from her. There are things she admires in each of them - some she emulates and others she just appreciates that it's their strength even if it will never be hers. It's that loyalty that ties them together and it's a loyalty that endures, even in the hardest of times, and for her, it's what sustains her, what keeps her going.

Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?

This is pretty hard to narrow down for Natasha, because if there's something she doesn't like, she sets out to change it. If she finds something she's afraid of, she flings herself at it until she overcomes it. So I think the part that comes closest to what she dislikes about herself is her past, and her regrets over past actions, that she can do nothing to make up for. The lives she took, the damage she caused. The red in her ledger that will never wash clean. She can say she's working to pay off that debt as much as she likes, but she knows that's not really true. She doesn't actually believe she can pay off that debt.

She hates who her past self was and what she did while she was that person. She doesn't talk about her past very often - only once or twice in the series as a whole, in fact, and even then it's usually only vague references rather than actual details or facts. The only comfort in her mind is that she ended the threat that controlled her when she abandoned the Red Room for SHIELD, even though she discovers, years later, that that wasn't true at all - she'd just driven them underground and they emerged more deadly than ever. And her abdication to SHIELD was actually handing herself into Hydra's control, which she didn't find out until later either. But while the innocent blood she spilled to gain her freedom might have seemed very in line with her 'ends justifies the means' perspective at the start of her career with SHIELD and even as an Avenger, it's definitely something that weighs on her heavily as time goes on. Enough that her composure even falters when Loki taunts her about it, along with the other sins that stain 'her ledger'.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons she was content to make the ultimate sacrifice for a cause that would save millions of lives - not once but twice. She was the one to suggest it on Sokovia when it seemed like the rising rock of land was going to doom the entire planet. She carries the weight of her failures, of her responsibilities to make up for what she's done, and it colors many of her decisions later on when the motivations and morals that guide her actions and outlook shift considerably.

What is their sign, and why?

I'm giving Natasha The Lovers for a couple reasons. There were some others that were very high in the running for her too, but when it comes down to it, her loyalty to "her people" - her friends, her teammates, her family - are what have motivated so many of her decisions, including the one that cost her her life. She states it herself, "I used to have nothing. And then I got this. This job. This family. And I was better because of it. I'm still trying to be better." And it was her unshakable loyalty that led her to her final decision of "Whatever it takes." ("Even if there's a small chance, we owe it to everyone who's not in this room to try"). We see it in the earlier movies, when she was ready to throw everything away, her safety, her secrets, everything she'd built for herself, because the people important to her needed her help. If they needed her, she would do everything in her power to meet that need. When the people that became her family started putting their trust in her, something she never thought she'd really have, or earned for herself, she knew she could do nothing less than return that with everything she had.

SAMPLES & ARRIVAL

Samples:

TDM Top-Level
TDM Tagout