Anya Lehnsherr | Earth 97400 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fridgetothefire) wrote2012-02-09 07:16 pm
fridgetothefire) wrote2012-02-09 07:16 pm
Entry tags:
- app,
- info,
- ooc,
- singularity
Singularity App
Player Information
Your Nickname: Isabelle
OOC Journal:vibishan
Under 18? Nope! 22.
Email/IM: vibishantheshiny on AIM, shipoftheseus on plurk
Characters Played at Singularity: none
Character Information
Name: Anya Lehnsherr
Name of Canon: Marvel Comics What-If Volume 2, Issue #96, The Quick and the Dead (Universe 97400)
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon, but a canonical alternate timeline. Because it’s a short canon, it’s a little supplemented by headcanon/extrapolation.
Reference: This is the only reference available online, sad and meager though it is.
Extra Background/Summary:
The timeline diverges from 616 on the night that the townsfolk of Vinnitsya set the Lehnsherr’s inn on fire. Eric saves his wife and daughter from the flames, and they all leave the town together. As they do, Eric murders the townspeople behind them, with the implication that Magda does not see it, that it is one more thing he tries to protect her from.
Several months later, Magda gives birth to the twins, Wanda and Pietro. By then, they are living in “a remote chateau in the mountains.” It’s never revealed how they went from homeless and penniless to a castle fortress, but presumably Eric’s powers were heavily involved. Eric does not witness the twins’ birth, already distancing himself from his family emotionally. Anya brings the news, and the newborn Pietro, out to him, and at the time she is excited, obviously fond of the babies and of him. Unfortunately, the narration reveals that Anya was sickly, in large part due to smoke she inhaled in the fire, and Eric found her a constant dissapointment. Wanda and Pietro, who manifested their powers young, were “just like him…and nothing made him happier.”
As teenagers, they are allowed outside, but never anywhere near other people. Anya, apparently healthier, takes them mountain climbing, and thirteen-year-old Pietro decides to run off and see the village, even though Anya’a furious and terrified injunctions against it – she knows that Eric will blame her, and she’s right. Pietro ignores her. Eric tracks Pietro down, and they play cat and mouse with their powers. Pietro argues that he is ready to see the world, and Eric refuses. Pietro runs again, this time vibrating himself so quickly that Eric’s EM pulse passes directly through him. To Eric, it seems as though his son has vanished.
Pietro goes to the city, steals money and impresses people with his powers, and mooches off rich college students. In the meantime, Eric – who has kept watch on Pietro, since he stopped vibrating – allows Pietro’s rebellion as he continues to plan the takeover of Earth from humans. He castigates Anya for losing him and demands that she track Pietro down. Pietro writes letters to Wanda, and it is strongly implied that Anya tortures Wanda. When she refuses to tell Anya where Pietro is, Anya kills her and manages to hide the act from her father, leading him to think that his followers had her abducted as a message to Eric. Pietro, busy becoming an international track star, is too distracted lapping up fame and fortune to notice when Wanda stops writing to him.
A year later, Anya contacts him – presumably she discovers where he is once he becomes a famous sports star – and he returns home. His father is a wreck, and Magda is even worse. Though not seen on panel, a broken shadow of Eric confides that she is “not well.” When Pietro asks where Wanda is, Eric, wanting to protect Pietro from news of her death, says he doesn’t know. Pietro immediately knows he’s lying, which plants the seed of his suspicions. Eric confesses that they woke up a year ago to find her gone. Pietro starts investigating Wanda’s disappearance, vowing to find her and punish any responsible for hurting her. Rather than let Pietro range all over the world in a useless search or be distracted any further by his Olympic ambitions, Anya sabotages his motorcycle. He crashes, paralyzing his legs, which forces him to stay in the mountain fortress as he recuperates and continue his search there.
As the date of Magnus’s takeover approaches, Pietro fails to find the evidence Anya planted – a box of Wanda’s hair tucked among Eric’s things. So she calls him, offering an anonymous tip in exchange for Pietro’s exposing the mutant conspiracy. He finally finds the box and agrees to her terms, using his former glory and contacts as a sports star to call reporters to broadcast his accusations live. When Eric arrives to stop him, Pietro shoots him, expecting Eric to stop the bullet and reveal himself on television. Anya, however, knows their father better: he lets himself be shot rather than expose his powers. As the camera people flee, Anya reveals that it was she who killed Wanda, that she hates them for the years of indifference and abuse at their hands. Eric, dying, gasps that his followers will kill them all for breaking the secret too early, but Anya doesn’t seem to care; she doesn’t even respond. She gloats without smiling, and makes no attempt to run. The issue ends there.
Canon Point: Immediately after the end of The Quick and the Dead, after Anya gives Pietro her I DID IT ALL villain monologue.
Setting: Marvel Universe 97400 is – on the surface – much like our own world was in the late-sixties. Kids go to college and party to strange new music, colleges are obsessed with sports stars, and so on – at least kids in America and Western Europe. Much of Eastern Europe still lives in rural villages, and the scars of WWII and the holocaust have yet to fade.
There are a few seemingly minor differences; technology is farther along. Pietro briefly mentions working on a computer to try to track down information, presumably the sort of bulky-but-not-massive personal computer not seen in our world until the late seventies and early eighties, not easily or commonly used by non-computer-geeks until even later, and perhaps some very early version of the internet.
Unbeknownst to most people, however, there is a much more fundamental difference: the recent appearance in the last few generations of people with a genetic anomaly that grants them various superpowers: mutants. Unlike main Marvel continuity, however, the existence of these special people remains a fiercely guarded secret.
In the sixteen years since his wife and daughter were trapped inside an inn and set on fire, Eric Magnus (previously Lehnsherr, known in other worlds as Magneto) has made contacts and gathered followers among the roughest and angriest element of these hidden superhumans. He has steadily built up his support in far-flung networks, all in the service of a grand plan, with a single masterstroke against thousands of world leaders, to remove Earth from the control of treacherous, misguided, and unworthy humans in favor of mutants, who in Eric’s view are the rightful heirs and stewards of the planet’s future. Unfortunately, even though he is technically the leader, the movement grows too large for him to truly control it. Thousands of mutants are dedicated to his cause – but not necessarily to him. Many of them believe he is weak when he allows Pietro to explore the human world, and they question his loyalty to the cause due to the presence of his human wife and daughter. Eric is in a precarious position at the head of the abeyant revolution, and he is afraid of the zealousness of factions among his own followers. When Anya murders Wanda, Eric believes they have done it to prove their power to him, and it destroys Eric and Magda. When Pietro, believing Eric is actually responsible, tries to reveal the plot before it strikes on live international TV to hurt him, Eric is terrified that cabals among his own terrorists will see and extract retribution from the remnants of his family, to the point of allowing Pietro to shoot him rather than betray the cause by revealing his powers to stop the bullet before the coup.
Although most of the world is unaware of mutants, the world Anya lives in is populated almost exclusively with them, with herself and her mother as the only exceptions. In some ways Anya is very sheltered, trapped in a castle in the mountains. Her world is tightly circumscribed, and all she knows about the outside world is secondhand, filtered through books or the biased accounts of her father’s followers. She is forbidden to leave and cut off from all other outside contact; Pietro’s narration reveals that Magneto has killed dozens of humans for merely stumbling upon items changed by Wanda’s powers in the woods. At the same time, she isn't at all naive. The only people she does have contact with, outside of her own family, are her father’s human-hating terrorist followers, so she’s exposed to a very dark, violent, supremacist group of people, who largely despise her as one of the enemy.
Her father’s rhetoric and her brother’s boasting are little better: the world is starkly divided into humans and mutants, and Eric explicitly tells Anya that she is “incompent,” a “hindrance” and a “liability,” and that Pietro’s rebellion – which Eric could put a stop to at any time - is her fault and her responsibility to correct. It doesn’t even occur to him, as he orders Anya to find Pietro, that she just overheard him saying that he knows about Pietro’s activities, because he doesn’t think of her as an intelligent person, or really a person at all. By an accident of blood and sentiment, she is kept safely in the mutant stronghold, but she is considered no less worthless for it. She chafes against this, but on the other hand, she has internalized plenty of his teachings on humans, and her childhood burn scars offer a permanent reminder of how cruel humans can be. In the end, Anya doesn’t see herself as having much to live for, or any place in the world at all. As she sees it, there are no good people, no good cause, no deserving leaders of the future. Humans and mutants are inevitably opposed but equally despicable.
Personality:
As much as she would hate to admit it, Anya’s personality takes after her father’s in many ways. She’s profoundly cynical about people, and part of her still cares for her family deeply even as she resents them and schemes against them – otherwise she wouldn’t be so twisted by their rejection of her. She can be imperious and bossy with what little scraps of power she has. In the very beginning, we see her ordering around Pietro and Wanda, using the slim authority she derives as an older sibling.
On the other hand, she is also incredibly lonely. She's half raised them since she was tiny herself, and she tries to be a nurturing influence, longing to be a part of their lives at all. She corrects Wanda’s English briefly and gently, tells Pietro not to push Wanda when he’s being an ass, puts up with Pietro’s lousy practical jokes on her, takes them mountain climbing with her and tries to explain to them how much it means to her. It’s obviously one of the only things in her life that actually brings her any happiness at all, and she wants to share it with them. But they look down on her just like Eric does, especially Pietro, and exclude her from their tiny twin world. It just compounds her bitterness and alienation.
She is very damaged, cruel enough to torture and murder one of the only people she’s ever cared for, the member of her family who has actually hurt her least. When Pietro first runs away, Wanda tries to comfort her, offering to tell their father what happened, even though it’s obviously ineffective. Anya is profoundly secretive, with no concept of trust at all, has not had anyone she could truly rely on since her father saved her from the fire.
She is naturally curious. In 616, before the fire, Anya as a toddler is delighted when she sees the big city for the first time, not at all afraid of the new, loud, bustling place. In 97400, she spies on her father’s meetings with his subordinates, hungry for knowledge about the world and his plans, in spite of the danger.
The fact that Anya actually manages to pull off her scheme to destroy their family, in spite of being human, under Eric’s watchful eye, cut off from all allies or resources is astonishing. She proves herself daring, stubborn, manipulative, ingenious, resourceful, highly observant, incredibly patient, and absolutely unwilling to give in, spite of what seem like impossibly odds. She is an exceptional liar, allowing everyone around her to underestimate her for years without slipping as she lays her plans, capable of anticipating other’s movements and playing a very long game, but also capable of adjusting her plans on the fly.
Anya is ultimately a vicious, hopeless person, who nevertheless is constitutionally incapable of giving up. She expects to die after her plot ends – she has no illusions about how her father’s followers perceive her, or how furious they will be with her for exposing their plans. She simply does not care. At the end of the issue, she has her revenge – on her family, on the exposed mutants, and even on humans, whose world will now be thrown into a long, bloody superpowered war, rather than the quick surgical strike her father planned – and that’s all she wants, because it was the most she could ever hope for. On Sacrosanct, (mostly) removed from the limits and politics of home, she may find other things to live for.
Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions:
Anya is entirely human, with no supernatural powers. She is, however, an accomplished liar and spy, used to dealing with metahumans, and a good though largely self-taught engineer. She’s well read and speaks several languages. She still has some lung damage from smoke inhalation in the fire, and although she’s mostly physically fit, she can’t keep up any kind of cardiovascular activity for more than a few minutes without having difficulty breathing.
Inventory: Clothes, boots, and a squashy blue hat. She has a lock of Wanda’s hair pressed between the pages of a battered copy of Gulliver’s Travels, a non-metal lockpick set, and a pocket sewing kit.
Appearance: Anya is a young woman of Romani and Ashkenazic heritage, with dark brown/auburn hair and blue eyes. She’s a little on the tall side, but hunches and makes herself look smaller than she is, and she’s slender but in decent physical shape. I don’t love the canon art, and there’s not a lot of it, so I’ll be using Sophia Black D’Elia as a PB. It should be noted that she bears a very strong resemblance to both Wanda and Magda.
Age: Anya is 19.
OC/AU Justification:
Although not AU, a lot of Anya’s life has to be extrapolated or fleshed out by headcanon. I usually assume things from 616 hold true unless stated or implied otherwise, and I draw things from real life culture and history as well. For example, we never see Anya interact with her mother on panel, but given Magda’s traditional Romani background in 616 and her willful blindness to Eric slaughtering the villagers of Vinnitsya behind them, it seems likely that Magda surrenders to her forceful husband’s will, allowing herself to be effectively imprisoned. Although Anya does not hate her mother, who is human like she is, neither can she understand or respect her, depriving Anya of an emotional connection that might have otherwise mitigated her rage and hatred.
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across?
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test?
And What Did You Score?
Samples
Log Sample:
“You are nothing.” The words roll off her tongue exultantly, finally free to say it after so, so long of hiding and scraping and playing the dull, quivering, unremarkable human. Poppa is bleeding out while Pietro flails in helpless denial. He can’t run from this. They won’t last long, none of them. But oh, she has this, these moments to grind them into the fact that she is the architect of all their miseries, she whom they thought powerless and insignificant and so very easy to dismiss, she has destroyed them. This is no doubt the last thing she will ever do. She savors it.
Crashing, shrieking metal – her spine locks in terror, honed over years of bearing her father’s temper. She moves faster than conscious thought, unable to comprehend how he’s using this much power when he can’t move or where all the metal even came from but it doesn’t matter as she scrambles desperately away. She doesn’t know why, when she expects to die any minute, but something fierce and unquenchable in her bares its teeth and growls, not yet, not yet. She escapes the twisted sheet of metal with only a shallow gash across her shoulder blades, blood dripping down to her lower back from a wound she can barely feel through the dead, nerveless skin of her old burn scars. She stares, catches her already-ragged breath – Poppa’s fortress is gone, and so are Poppa and Pietro, leaving a vast, unfamiliar hall filled with bizarre detritus.
Welcome to Sacrosanct. Please watch your step.
She has no idea what’s going on. What could possibly…Wyngarde. One of her father’s more canny and influential colleagues, a man who made illusions.
“Isn’t this a little bit elaborate, Mastermind?” she asks with a rueful smile, going along with the illusion as she’s hustled into something that resembles what she imagines a hospital might be like, her cut mended swiftly. She wonders if it’s real as she forces her body to relax, lets her head to duck down submissively. They’re old, effortless habits, and she slips automatically into her harmless persona. If not a real person, a human might at least be a cute enough pet to indulge. They weren’t here when she admitted to killing Wanda, she can pull it off, she can survive this. Perhaps this doesn’t need to be the limit of her revenge.
“I know plenty of you weren’t happy with Magneto’s leadership.” Mutant names, not human, not poppa. Distancing herself, showing proper respect. “And I can’t blame you, not after what he let Pietro get away with.” She lets her smile drop and break, as if his betrayal of the cause leaves her disgusted, as devastated as them. She’s so enlightened, for a human. It isn’t hard to fake. Pietro’s betrayal has disgusted her for years.
“Look, I know I’m not that important. But – whatever you want from me, just drop the weird futuristic junkyard thing for a little bit, awesome though it is,” a little flattery never hurt, “and we can talk about it, okay? I know about a lot of Dad’s contacts, things that’ll help you keep the brotherhood intact after this.” Her tone is an offer, not a bargain. Equals and threats might bargain, and Anya needs him to think she aspires to be neither. “Mastermind? Hello?”
But he never answers. Hypatia does.
Network Sample:
[The video feed clicks on, showing a slightly frazzled young woman, her squashy blue hat slightly askew, smiling nervously. She bears a strong resemblance to a younger Wanda, and to Wanda’s mother Magda.]
Erm, hello? I – am I using this properly? I think so.
[She laughs, a sound of self-consciousness more than amusement. She’s a little hunched over, glancing down and then back up again as though she’s shy.]
I can barely believe what I’m hearing. Is this place really – I mean, so huge, and a completely different world, just, just empty, and we get to – explore?
[Her voice breaks a little on the last word, something deep and pained and hopeful in her eyes. She’s trying to hide her true feelings behind her usual guileless mask, but it sounds like heaven to her, like things she hasn’t dared to want in years.]
Hello? Is anyone out there?
Your Nickname: Isabelle
OOC Journal:
vibishanUnder 18? Nope! 22.
Email/IM: vibishantheshiny on AIM, shipoftheseus on plurk
Characters Played at Singularity: none
Character Information
Name: Anya Lehnsherr
Name of Canon: Marvel Comics What-If Volume 2, Issue #96, The Quick and the Dead (Universe 97400)
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon, but a canonical alternate timeline. Because it’s a short canon, it’s a little supplemented by headcanon/extrapolation.
Reference: This is the only reference available online, sad and meager though it is.
Extra Background/Summary:
The timeline diverges from 616 on the night that the townsfolk of Vinnitsya set the Lehnsherr’s inn on fire. Eric saves his wife and daughter from the flames, and they all leave the town together. As they do, Eric murders the townspeople behind them, with the implication that Magda does not see it, that it is one more thing he tries to protect her from.
Several months later, Magda gives birth to the twins, Wanda and Pietro. By then, they are living in “a remote chateau in the mountains.” It’s never revealed how they went from homeless and penniless to a castle fortress, but presumably Eric’s powers were heavily involved. Eric does not witness the twins’ birth, already distancing himself from his family emotionally. Anya brings the news, and the newborn Pietro, out to him, and at the time she is excited, obviously fond of the babies and of him. Unfortunately, the narration reveals that Anya was sickly, in large part due to smoke she inhaled in the fire, and Eric found her a constant dissapointment. Wanda and Pietro, who manifested their powers young, were “just like him…and nothing made him happier.”
As teenagers, they are allowed outside, but never anywhere near other people. Anya, apparently healthier, takes them mountain climbing, and thirteen-year-old Pietro decides to run off and see the village, even though Anya’a furious and terrified injunctions against it – she knows that Eric will blame her, and she’s right. Pietro ignores her. Eric tracks Pietro down, and they play cat and mouse with their powers. Pietro argues that he is ready to see the world, and Eric refuses. Pietro runs again, this time vibrating himself so quickly that Eric’s EM pulse passes directly through him. To Eric, it seems as though his son has vanished.
Pietro goes to the city, steals money and impresses people with his powers, and mooches off rich college students. In the meantime, Eric – who has kept watch on Pietro, since he stopped vibrating – allows Pietro’s rebellion as he continues to plan the takeover of Earth from humans. He castigates Anya for losing him and demands that she track Pietro down. Pietro writes letters to Wanda, and it is strongly implied that Anya tortures Wanda. When she refuses to tell Anya where Pietro is, Anya kills her and manages to hide the act from her father, leading him to think that his followers had her abducted as a message to Eric. Pietro, busy becoming an international track star, is too distracted lapping up fame and fortune to notice when Wanda stops writing to him.
A year later, Anya contacts him – presumably she discovers where he is once he becomes a famous sports star – and he returns home. His father is a wreck, and Magda is even worse. Though not seen on panel, a broken shadow of Eric confides that she is “not well.” When Pietro asks where Wanda is, Eric, wanting to protect Pietro from news of her death, says he doesn’t know. Pietro immediately knows he’s lying, which plants the seed of his suspicions. Eric confesses that they woke up a year ago to find her gone. Pietro starts investigating Wanda’s disappearance, vowing to find her and punish any responsible for hurting her. Rather than let Pietro range all over the world in a useless search or be distracted any further by his Olympic ambitions, Anya sabotages his motorcycle. He crashes, paralyzing his legs, which forces him to stay in the mountain fortress as he recuperates and continue his search there.
As the date of Magnus’s takeover approaches, Pietro fails to find the evidence Anya planted – a box of Wanda’s hair tucked among Eric’s things. So she calls him, offering an anonymous tip in exchange for Pietro’s exposing the mutant conspiracy. He finally finds the box and agrees to her terms, using his former glory and contacts as a sports star to call reporters to broadcast his accusations live. When Eric arrives to stop him, Pietro shoots him, expecting Eric to stop the bullet and reveal himself on television. Anya, however, knows their father better: he lets himself be shot rather than expose his powers. As the camera people flee, Anya reveals that it was she who killed Wanda, that she hates them for the years of indifference and abuse at their hands. Eric, dying, gasps that his followers will kill them all for breaking the secret too early, but Anya doesn’t seem to care; she doesn’t even respond. She gloats without smiling, and makes no attempt to run. The issue ends there.
Canon Point: Immediately after the end of The Quick and the Dead, after Anya gives Pietro her I DID IT ALL villain monologue.
Setting: Marvel Universe 97400 is – on the surface – much like our own world was in the late-sixties. Kids go to college and party to strange new music, colleges are obsessed with sports stars, and so on – at least kids in America and Western Europe. Much of Eastern Europe still lives in rural villages, and the scars of WWII and the holocaust have yet to fade.
There are a few seemingly minor differences; technology is farther along. Pietro briefly mentions working on a computer to try to track down information, presumably the sort of bulky-but-not-massive personal computer not seen in our world until the late seventies and early eighties, not easily or commonly used by non-computer-geeks until even later, and perhaps some very early version of the internet.
Unbeknownst to most people, however, there is a much more fundamental difference: the recent appearance in the last few generations of people with a genetic anomaly that grants them various superpowers: mutants. Unlike main Marvel continuity, however, the existence of these special people remains a fiercely guarded secret.
In the sixteen years since his wife and daughter were trapped inside an inn and set on fire, Eric Magnus (previously Lehnsherr, known in other worlds as Magneto) has made contacts and gathered followers among the roughest and angriest element of these hidden superhumans. He has steadily built up his support in far-flung networks, all in the service of a grand plan, with a single masterstroke against thousands of world leaders, to remove Earth from the control of treacherous, misguided, and unworthy humans in favor of mutants, who in Eric’s view are the rightful heirs and stewards of the planet’s future. Unfortunately, even though he is technically the leader, the movement grows too large for him to truly control it. Thousands of mutants are dedicated to his cause – but not necessarily to him. Many of them believe he is weak when he allows Pietro to explore the human world, and they question his loyalty to the cause due to the presence of his human wife and daughter. Eric is in a precarious position at the head of the abeyant revolution, and he is afraid of the zealousness of factions among his own followers. When Anya murders Wanda, Eric believes they have done it to prove their power to him, and it destroys Eric and Magda. When Pietro, believing Eric is actually responsible, tries to reveal the plot before it strikes on live international TV to hurt him, Eric is terrified that cabals among his own terrorists will see and extract retribution from the remnants of his family, to the point of allowing Pietro to shoot him rather than betray the cause by revealing his powers to stop the bullet before the coup.
Although most of the world is unaware of mutants, the world Anya lives in is populated almost exclusively with them, with herself and her mother as the only exceptions. In some ways Anya is very sheltered, trapped in a castle in the mountains. Her world is tightly circumscribed, and all she knows about the outside world is secondhand, filtered through books or the biased accounts of her father’s followers. She is forbidden to leave and cut off from all other outside contact; Pietro’s narration reveals that Magneto has killed dozens of humans for merely stumbling upon items changed by Wanda’s powers in the woods. At the same time, she isn't at all naive. The only people she does have contact with, outside of her own family, are her father’s human-hating terrorist followers, so she’s exposed to a very dark, violent, supremacist group of people, who largely despise her as one of the enemy.
Her father’s rhetoric and her brother’s boasting are little better: the world is starkly divided into humans and mutants, and Eric explicitly tells Anya that she is “incompent,” a “hindrance” and a “liability,” and that Pietro’s rebellion – which Eric could put a stop to at any time - is her fault and her responsibility to correct. It doesn’t even occur to him, as he orders Anya to find Pietro, that she just overheard him saying that he knows about Pietro’s activities, because he doesn’t think of her as an intelligent person, or really a person at all. By an accident of blood and sentiment, she is kept safely in the mutant stronghold, but she is considered no less worthless for it. She chafes against this, but on the other hand, she has internalized plenty of his teachings on humans, and her childhood burn scars offer a permanent reminder of how cruel humans can be. In the end, Anya doesn’t see herself as having much to live for, or any place in the world at all. As she sees it, there are no good people, no good cause, no deserving leaders of the future. Humans and mutants are inevitably opposed but equally despicable.
Personality:
As much as she would hate to admit it, Anya’s personality takes after her father’s in many ways. She’s profoundly cynical about people, and part of her still cares for her family deeply even as she resents them and schemes against them – otherwise she wouldn’t be so twisted by their rejection of her. She can be imperious and bossy with what little scraps of power she has. In the very beginning, we see her ordering around Pietro and Wanda, using the slim authority she derives as an older sibling.
On the other hand, she is also incredibly lonely. She's half raised them since she was tiny herself, and she tries to be a nurturing influence, longing to be a part of their lives at all. She corrects Wanda’s English briefly and gently, tells Pietro not to push Wanda when he’s being an ass, puts up with Pietro’s lousy practical jokes on her, takes them mountain climbing with her and tries to explain to them how much it means to her. It’s obviously one of the only things in her life that actually brings her any happiness at all, and she wants to share it with them. But they look down on her just like Eric does, especially Pietro, and exclude her from their tiny twin world. It just compounds her bitterness and alienation.
She is very damaged, cruel enough to torture and murder one of the only people she’s ever cared for, the member of her family who has actually hurt her least. When Pietro first runs away, Wanda tries to comfort her, offering to tell their father what happened, even though it’s obviously ineffective. Anya is profoundly secretive, with no concept of trust at all, has not had anyone she could truly rely on since her father saved her from the fire.
She is naturally curious. In 616, before the fire, Anya as a toddler is delighted when she sees the big city for the first time, not at all afraid of the new, loud, bustling place. In 97400, she spies on her father’s meetings with his subordinates, hungry for knowledge about the world and his plans, in spite of the danger.
The fact that Anya actually manages to pull off her scheme to destroy their family, in spite of being human, under Eric’s watchful eye, cut off from all allies or resources is astonishing. She proves herself daring, stubborn, manipulative, ingenious, resourceful, highly observant, incredibly patient, and absolutely unwilling to give in, spite of what seem like impossibly odds. She is an exceptional liar, allowing everyone around her to underestimate her for years without slipping as she lays her plans, capable of anticipating other’s movements and playing a very long game, but also capable of adjusting her plans on the fly.
Anya is ultimately a vicious, hopeless person, who nevertheless is constitutionally incapable of giving up. She expects to die after her plot ends – she has no illusions about how her father’s followers perceive her, or how furious they will be with her for exposing their plans. She simply does not care. At the end of the issue, she has her revenge – on her family, on the exposed mutants, and even on humans, whose world will now be thrown into a long, bloody superpowered war, rather than the quick surgical strike her father planned – and that’s all she wants, because it was the most she could ever hope for. On Sacrosanct, (mostly) removed from the limits and politics of home, she may find other things to live for.
Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions:
Anya is entirely human, with no supernatural powers. She is, however, an accomplished liar and spy, used to dealing with metahumans, and a good though largely self-taught engineer. She’s well read and speaks several languages. She still has some lung damage from smoke inhalation in the fire, and although she’s mostly physically fit, she can’t keep up any kind of cardiovascular activity for more than a few minutes without having difficulty breathing.
Inventory: Clothes, boots, and a squashy blue hat. She has a lock of Wanda’s hair pressed between the pages of a battered copy of Gulliver’s Travels, a non-metal lockpick set, and a pocket sewing kit.
Appearance: Anya is a young woman of Romani and Ashkenazic heritage, with dark brown/auburn hair and blue eyes. She’s a little on the tall side, but hunches and makes herself look smaller than she is, and she’s slender but in decent physical shape. I don’t love the canon art, and there’s not a lot of it, so I’ll be using Sophia Black D’Elia as a PB. It should be noted that she bears a very strong resemblance to both Wanda and Magda.
Age: Anya is 19.
OC/AU Justification:
Although not AU, a lot of Anya’s life has to be extrapolated or fleshed out by headcanon. I usually assume things from 616 hold true unless stated or implied otherwise, and I draw things from real life culture and history as well. For example, we never see Anya interact with her mother on panel, but given Magda’s traditional Romani background in 616 and her willful blindness to Eric slaughtering the villagers of Vinnitsya behind them, it seems likely that Magda surrenders to her forceful husband’s will, allowing herself to be effectively imprisoned. Although Anya does not hate her mother, who is human like she is, neither can she understand or respect her, depriving Anya of an emotional connection that might have otherwise mitigated her rage and hatred.
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test?
And What Did You Score?
Samples
Log Sample:
“You are nothing.” The words roll off her tongue exultantly, finally free to say it after so, so long of hiding and scraping and playing the dull, quivering, unremarkable human. Poppa is bleeding out while Pietro flails in helpless denial. He can’t run from this. They won’t last long, none of them. But oh, she has this, these moments to grind them into the fact that she is the architect of all their miseries, she whom they thought powerless and insignificant and so very easy to dismiss, she has destroyed them. This is no doubt the last thing she will ever do. She savors it.
Crashing, shrieking metal – her spine locks in terror, honed over years of bearing her father’s temper. She moves faster than conscious thought, unable to comprehend how he’s using this much power when he can’t move or where all the metal even came from but it doesn’t matter as she scrambles desperately away. She doesn’t know why, when she expects to die any minute, but something fierce and unquenchable in her bares its teeth and growls, not yet, not yet. She escapes the twisted sheet of metal with only a shallow gash across her shoulder blades, blood dripping down to her lower back from a wound she can barely feel through the dead, nerveless skin of her old burn scars. She stares, catches her already-ragged breath – Poppa’s fortress is gone, and so are Poppa and Pietro, leaving a vast, unfamiliar hall filled with bizarre detritus.
Welcome to Sacrosanct. Please watch your step.
She has no idea what’s going on. What could possibly…Wyngarde. One of her father’s more canny and influential colleagues, a man who made illusions.
“Isn’t this a little bit elaborate, Mastermind?” she asks with a rueful smile, going along with the illusion as she’s hustled into something that resembles what she imagines a hospital might be like, her cut mended swiftly. She wonders if it’s real as she forces her body to relax, lets her head to duck down submissively. They’re old, effortless habits, and she slips automatically into her harmless persona. If not a real person, a human might at least be a cute enough pet to indulge. They weren’t here when she admitted to killing Wanda, she can pull it off, she can survive this. Perhaps this doesn’t need to be the limit of her revenge.
“I know plenty of you weren’t happy with Magneto’s leadership.” Mutant names, not human, not poppa. Distancing herself, showing proper respect. “And I can’t blame you, not after what he let Pietro get away with.” She lets her smile drop and break, as if his betrayal of the cause leaves her disgusted, as devastated as them. She’s so enlightened, for a human. It isn’t hard to fake. Pietro’s betrayal has disgusted her for years.
“Look, I know I’m not that important. But – whatever you want from me, just drop the weird futuristic junkyard thing for a little bit, awesome though it is,” a little flattery never hurt, “and we can talk about it, okay? I know about a lot of Dad’s contacts, things that’ll help you keep the brotherhood intact after this.” Her tone is an offer, not a bargain. Equals and threats might bargain, and Anya needs him to think she aspires to be neither. “Mastermind? Hello?”
But he never answers. Hypatia does.
Network Sample:
[The video feed clicks on, showing a slightly frazzled young woman, her squashy blue hat slightly askew, smiling nervously. She bears a strong resemblance to a younger Wanda, and to Wanda’s mother Magda.]
Erm, hello? I – am I using this properly? I think so.
[She laughs, a sound of self-consciousness more than amusement. She’s a little hunched over, glancing down and then back up again as though she’s shy.]
I can barely believe what I’m hearing. Is this place really – I mean, so huge, and a completely different world, just, just empty, and we get to – explore?
[Her voice breaks a little on the last word, something deep and pained and hopeful in her eyes. She’s trying to hide her true feelings behind her usual guileless mask, but it sounds like heaven to her, like things she hasn’t dared to want in years.]
Hello? Is anyone out there?