Anya Lehnsherr | Earth 97400 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fridgetothefire) wrote2012-03-01 12:15 am
fridgetothefire) wrote2012-03-01 12:15 am
Siren's Pull App
Player Information
Name: Isabelle
Age: 22
AIM SN: vibishantheshiny
email: ijargowsky@gmail.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? yes
Currrently Played Characters: the talking House
Conditional: Activity Check Link: AC is here.
Conditional: Official Reserve Link: Reserve is here.
Character Information
General
Canon Source: Marvel 97400
Canon Format: One comic. What-If, Volume 2, #96, “The Quick and the Dead.”
Character's Name: Anya Lehnsherr
Character's Age: 16
Conditional: If your character is 13 years of age or under, please clarify how they will be played.
What form will your character's NV take?
An old-fashioned looking leather diary, with a strap to tie it closed. I imagine it looking like this. I'd love it if, due to inexplicable core!magic around the NVs, only Anya could untie the string, but if that's not cool/would count as a power in itself, no worries, I don't need it.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: Anya is entirely human, with no supernatural powers. Given her parentage and the delicate sabotage she manages to perform on Pietro’s motorcycle with no formal training whatsoever, she’s clearly extremely good with machines. She’s well read and speaks several languages. She still has some lung damage from smoke inhalation in the fire, so 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.
Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them? The powers in her family all tend to fall into one of three types: metal-based, time-based, or luck/reality-warping-based. I’d like to give Anya time-based powers that are essentially the opposite of her speedster brother’s. Instead of moving super-quickly herself, she can compress time for people, objects, or locations outside herself.
At first it would be small and straightforward, like making an apple rot by compressing a few days of time into a few minutes. With more effort she could temporarily turn someone else into a speedster as long as they stayed in her range (I’m open to mod suggestions here, but I don’t imagine more than a few blocks at most), by compressing an hour into a few seconds for them, and so on.
As she gets practices and gets better, I want her to be capable of more subtlety in how the compressed time is experienced. For example, the ability to make a tree grow overnight as though it had several years worth of rain and sun, even though the weather is outside the compression bubble, by sort of looping the resources the sapling already has. And, conversely, the ability to make someone else exhausted/hungry/dehydrated after have several days crushed into seconds for them, without being aware of it or gaining temporary speedsterhood.
She can never speed up herself, and she can only compress time/make it go faster for others, not expand it/make it slower. Also, it requires continuous will on her part; she can’t just set it up and let it keep working while she’s unconscious. The more time she compresses, and tighter she compresses it (the bigger the ratio between the experienced time to the time passing outside) the more effort it takes for her. I’m willing to take modifications to this, but given her family tree, I think it’s pretty appropriate to have a dangerous, somewhat expansive and flexible power tied to a fundamental force that expresses itself in very particular ways.
Weapons: none
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: The timeline of Marvel Universe 97400 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 disapointment. 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.
Point in Canon: I’m taking Anya from pretty early on, two years before Pietro runs away. She’s very isolated and emotionally stunted by her father’s position on humans, and by the celebration of the twins’ powers, but she’s ruled more by fear and loneliness than the bitter hatred which eventually drives her to destroy her family – but she definitely already has that potential in her.
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history:
Character Personality: Anya is naturally curious. Before the fire, we see her as a toddler, delighted when she sees the big city for the first time, not at all afraid of the new, loud, bustling place. In 94700, she spies on her father’s meetings with his subordinates, hungry for knowledge about the world and his plans, in spite of the danger. Anya is extremely smart and driven to learn, becoming a good enough engineer to sabotage Pietro’s bike without being caught more or less entirely on her own, with few resources, and most likely in secret.
In some ways Anya very sheltered, trapped in a castle in the mountains; she’s also very cynical and damaged, both by her isolation and Magneto’s emotional abuse. 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 every contact with the outside world; 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, 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 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 “incompetent,” a “hindrance” and a “liability,” and 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. He is emotionally abusive and treats her like an idiot. By an accident of blood and sentiment, she is kept safely in the mutant stronghold, but she is considered no less worthless for it. Anya chafes against this, but at the same time, she has internalized plenty of his teachings on humans, and her childhood burn scars offer a permanent reminder of how cruel humans can be. Anya is deeply lonely in ways she can’t even acknowledge. She doesn’t see herself as having much to live for, or any place in the world at all. In her view, there are no good people, no good cause, no deserving leaders of the future. Humans and mutants are inevitably opposed but equally despicable.
As much as she would hate to admit it, Anya’s personality takes after her father’s in many ways. She’s profoundly distrustful of people, but part of her still cares for her family deeply even as she resents them and treats them hideously – otherwise she wouldn’t be so twisted by their rejection of her. She is imperious and bossy with what little scraps of power she has. In the very beginning, we see her ordering around Pietro and Wanda, with the slim authority she derives as an older sibling. But she wants to be a nurturing influence, to be a part of their lives at all. On-panel, she’s shown doing more to raise the twins than either of their parents are, at least emotionally. She corrects Wanda’s English briefly and gently, tells Pietro not to push her 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. Combined with her feelings of ‘losing’ her father to the mutant cause despite how close they were before the fire, their exclusion leaves her profoundly bitter and alienated. Anya is profoundly secretive, with no concept of trust at all, because has not had anyone she could rely on since her father saved her from the fire - after which she promptly became a lesser species to him.
Although she hasn’t reached this extreme at the canonpoint I take her from, eventually she is 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. Although she hasn’t done this, or even imagined it yet, a slightly younger Anya still has the emotional damage that leads her down that road; she already has the capacity for that kind of terrible cruelty and rationalization.
The fact that Anya actually manages to pull off her scheme to destroy their family, in spite of being human, under Eric’s eyes, 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 – all of them traits she possessed just as much before putting them to such terrible use.
Anya is a strong, vicious, duplicitous person, forged in hideous circumstances and under tremendous pressure. She is caught between despair at the life she is utterly and literally imprisoned in; a fierce, unquenchable instinct for survival; and a charming, harmless, demure façade she’s been cultivating for everyone around her out of both pragmatism and terror for most of her life, all while desperately wishing for someone, anyone, to care about her.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game:
Character Plans: More than anything, Anya wants to be free – and compared to the life she came from, Siren’s Port will offer her that. It will give her hope that her life can be something she wants, and people who don’t treat her as worthless, both of which will have a huge impact on her. Having a Magneto who treats her like a daughter instead of a useless pet will confuse, terrify, and elate her in different ways as she comes to accept it. I want to play Anya coming to terms with some of her hideous personal and family issues, while at the same letting her act a little like a normal teenager for the first time in her life, going to school, fighting with her dad, hanging out at the mall, and so on. Only with monsters and superpowers.
Appearance/PB: 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. She also has bad, old burn scars on her back, forearms, and shins. 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.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
[Anya keeps looking a little above her NV, eyes focusing in the distance beyond it. From the hazy sky and bland roofing behind her, it looks like she’s on top of the towers, sitting perched on the edge. She keeps taking low breaths and sitting up straight, trying to compose herself as she focuses on the NV, but then breaking out in a beaming smile again.]
This place is amazing. I mean – you guys already know that, I guess. Or maybe you don’t. Grabbed out of your lives and trapped on a crazy island with monsters and anyone on the street might blow your head off with fireballs – not that fireballs aren’t awesome! – might not seem like fun, but.
It must be such an adventure.
[Half wistful, half truly, irrepressibly elated.]
Oh gosh, I’m rambling, I should – I have some questions, not the same old boring ones, or at least I hope not.
First, most importantly, what’s emancipated minor law like here? Is there any, even? Will the city try to make me a ward or does it not care at all? I can handle myself, as long as I know what I need to do.
Second, is there a place I can get mechanical parts? A junkyard or something like that. It’d be handy.
Third, anybody have recommendations on the best schools here? For secondary and post-secondary. If you’re enrolled or you were recently, I’d love to hear favorite and least favorite things about whatever institutions you’ve been in. That goes double for anybody who isn’t from here, by the way. How easy was it for you to get set up and get integrated into the classes here? Obviously you can’t get credentials from your old schools, so…is there placement testing, or something like that?
Anyway. Anything people could tell me about any of that would be great. Thanks in advance.
Third Person Sample:
She can barely see, she can barely breathe, but there’s a twisted thing behind her spitting fire and Anya is not going to die being hunted down like prey. Gasping and wheezing, she makes it to a building of gothic prominences and heavily barred windows. She doesn’t bang on the door – it never crosses her mind that anyone would offer shelter – but unlike the crumbling brownstones and sleek skyscrapers in other parts of the city, this she can climb.
She’s hasn’t been in a city since she was four years old, and Vinnitsya was nothing like this, but she’s been climbing mountains ever since, and the rules are the same. 1 – find a good handhold. 2 – find another one. And 3 – don’t look down. She hauls herself up the side of the – is it a church? Maybe, it doesn’t matter – only hoping that the monster behind her can manage to follow with its shriveled and skew-angled arms. She hisses as she spears her hand on a rusted nail in the impenetrable darkness, but doesn’t let herself slow. She tucks herself between the arching, stony wings of a gargoyle, right above a brightly window, staunching the blood from her hand with her shirt. She’s sure some of them can get up here, but hopefully the light will keep them off. Maybe she can wait it out.
She should find a weapon. A brick, a bit of broken scaffolding, anything she can hit things with until they’re convinced she’s not worth the trouble. And if that doesn’t work – well.
Anya remembers her fifteenth birthday with perfect clarity, the leaden weight of disappointment that another crucial year had come and gone, and Anya remained unmanifested, simply, merely human. She had climbed to the very highest point in her father’s stronghold, sat halfway out the window, perched and pondering. And she hadn’t jumped, because there was still a chance, there might still have been a way out. But she’d thought: I’d rather die with the wind on my face than live to be a hundred in this stone tomb.
She finds a loose board, warped and curling with age, and pries it up, one end studded with the same protruding nails that had left her hand throbbing. She takes a breath, watches the clouded sky, the putrid street far below. She feels the wind blowing, brash and salty off the ocean, and leans into it a little. Then she settles in to face the darkness.
Name: Isabelle
Age: 22
AIM SN: vibishantheshiny
email: ijargowsky@gmail.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? yes
Currrently Played Characters: the talking House
Conditional: Activity Check Link: AC is here.
Conditional: Official Reserve Link: Reserve is here.
Character Information
General
Canon Source: Marvel 97400
Canon Format: One comic. What-If, Volume 2, #96, “The Quick and the Dead.”
Character's Name: Anya Lehnsherr
Character's Age: 16
What form will your character's NV take?
An old-fashioned looking leather diary, with a strap to tie it closed. I imagine it looking like this. I'd love it if, due to inexplicable core!magic around the NVs, only Anya could untie the string, but if that's not cool/would count as a power in itself, no worries, I don't need it.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: Anya is entirely human, with no supernatural powers. Given her parentage and the delicate sabotage she manages to perform on Pietro’s motorcycle with no formal training whatsoever, she’s clearly extremely good with machines. She’s well read and speaks several languages. She still has some lung damage from smoke inhalation in the fire, so 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.
Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them? The powers in her family all tend to fall into one of three types: metal-based, time-based, or luck/reality-warping-based. I’d like to give Anya time-based powers that are essentially the opposite of her speedster brother’s. Instead of moving super-quickly herself, she can compress time for people, objects, or locations outside herself.
At first it would be small and straightforward, like making an apple rot by compressing a few days of time into a few minutes. With more effort she could temporarily turn someone else into a speedster as long as they stayed in her range (I’m open to mod suggestions here, but I don’t imagine more than a few blocks at most), by compressing an hour into a few seconds for them, and so on.
As she gets practices and gets better, I want her to be capable of more subtlety in how the compressed time is experienced. For example, the ability to make a tree grow overnight as though it had several years worth of rain and sun, even though the weather is outside the compression bubble, by sort of looping the resources the sapling already has. And, conversely, the ability to make someone else exhausted/hungry/dehydrated after have several days crushed into seconds for them, without being aware of it or gaining temporary speedsterhood.
She can never speed up herself, and she can only compress time/make it go faster for others, not expand it/make it slower. Also, it requires continuous will on her part; she can’t just set it up and let it keep working while she’s unconscious. The more time she compresses, and tighter she compresses it (the bigger the ratio between the experienced time to the time passing outside) the more effort it takes for her. I’m willing to take modifications to this, but given her family tree, I think it’s pretty appropriate to have a dangerous, somewhat expansive and flexible power tied to a fundamental force that expresses itself in very particular ways.
Weapons: none
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: The timeline of Marvel Universe 97400 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 disapointment. 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.
Point in Canon: I’m taking Anya from pretty early on, two years before Pietro runs away. She’s very isolated and emotionally stunted by her father’s position on humans, and by the celebration of the twins’ powers, but she’s ruled more by fear and loneliness than the bitter hatred which eventually drives her to destroy her family – but she definitely already has that potential in her.
Character Personality: Anya is naturally curious. Before the fire, we see her as a toddler, delighted when she sees the big city for the first time, not at all afraid of the new, loud, bustling place. In 94700, she spies on her father’s meetings with his subordinates, hungry for knowledge about the world and his plans, in spite of the danger. Anya is extremely smart and driven to learn, becoming a good enough engineer to sabotage Pietro’s bike without being caught more or less entirely on her own, with few resources, and most likely in secret.
In some ways Anya very sheltered, trapped in a castle in the mountains; she’s also very cynical and damaged, both by her isolation and Magneto’s emotional abuse. 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 every contact with the outside world; 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, 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 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 “incompetent,” a “hindrance” and a “liability,” and 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. He is emotionally abusive and treats her like an idiot. By an accident of blood and sentiment, she is kept safely in the mutant stronghold, but she is considered no less worthless for it. Anya chafes against this, but at the same time, she has internalized plenty of his teachings on humans, and her childhood burn scars offer a permanent reminder of how cruel humans can be. Anya is deeply lonely in ways she can’t even acknowledge. She doesn’t see herself as having much to live for, or any place in the world at all. In her view, there are no good people, no good cause, no deserving leaders of the future. Humans and mutants are inevitably opposed but equally despicable.
As much as she would hate to admit it, Anya’s personality takes after her father’s in many ways. She’s profoundly distrustful of people, but part of her still cares for her family deeply even as she resents them and treats them hideously – otherwise she wouldn’t be so twisted by their rejection of her. She is imperious and bossy with what little scraps of power she has. In the very beginning, we see her ordering around Pietro and Wanda, with the slim authority she derives as an older sibling. But she wants to be a nurturing influence, to be a part of their lives at all. On-panel, she’s shown doing more to raise the twins than either of their parents are, at least emotionally. She corrects Wanda’s English briefly and gently, tells Pietro not to push her 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. Combined with her feelings of ‘losing’ her father to the mutant cause despite how close they were before the fire, their exclusion leaves her profoundly bitter and alienated. Anya is profoundly secretive, with no concept of trust at all, because has not had anyone she could rely on since her father saved her from the fire - after which she promptly became a lesser species to him.
Although she hasn’t reached this extreme at the canonpoint I take her from, eventually she is 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. Although she hasn’t done this, or even imagined it yet, a slightly younger Anya still has the emotional damage that leads her down that road; she already has the capacity for that kind of terrible cruelty and rationalization.
The fact that Anya actually manages to pull off her scheme to destroy their family, in spite of being human, under Eric’s eyes, 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 – all of them traits she possessed just as much before putting them to such terrible use.
Anya is a strong, vicious, duplicitous person, forged in hideous circumstances and under tremendous pressure. She is caught between despair at the life she is utterly and literally imprisoned in; a fierce, unquenchable instinct for survival; and a charming, harmless, demure façade she’s been cultivating for everyone around her out of both pragmatism and terror for most of her life, all while desperately wishing for someone, anyone, to care about her.
Character Plans: More than anything, Anya wants to be free – and compared to the life she came from, Siren’s Port will offer her that. It will give her hope that her life can be something she wants, and people who don’t treat her as worthless, both of which will have a huge impact on her. Having a Magneto who treats her like a daughter instead of a useless pet will confuse, terrify, and elate her in different ways as she comes to accept it. I want to play Anya coming to terms with some of her hideous personal and family issues, while at the same letting her act a little like a normal teenager for the first time in her life, going to school, fighting with her dad, hanging out at the mall, and so on. Only with monsters and superpowers.
Appearance/PB: 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. She also has bad, old burn scars on her back, forearms, and shins. 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.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
[Anya keeps looking a little above her NV, eyes focusing in the distance beyond it. From the hazy sky and bland roofing behind her, it looks like she’s on top of the towers, sitting perched on the edge. She keeps taking low breaths and sitting up straight, trying to compose herself as she focuses on the NV, but then breaking out in a beaming smile again.]
This place is amazing. I mean – you guys already know that, I guess. Or maybe you don’t. Grabbed out of your lives and trapped on a crazy island with monsters and anyone on the street might blow your head off with fireballs – not that fireballs aren’t awesome! – might not seem like fun, but.
It must be such an adventure.
[Half wistful, half truly, irrepressibly elated.]
Oh gosh, I’m rambling, I should – I have some questions, not the same old boring ones, or at least I hope not.
First, most importantly, what’s emancipated minor law like here? Is there any, even? Will the city try to make me a ward or does it not care at all? I can handle myself, as long as I know what I need to do.
Second, is there a place I can get mechanical parts? A junkyard or something like that. It’d be handy.
Third, anybody have recommendations on the best schools here? For secondary and post-secondary. If you’re enrolled or you were recently, I’d love to hear favorite and least favorite things about whatever institutions you’ve been in. That goes double for anybody who isn’t from here, by the way. How easy was it for you to get set up and get integrated into the classes here? Obviously you can’t get credentials from your old schools, so…is there placement testing, or something like that?
Anyway. Anything people could tell me about any of that would be great. Thanks in advance.
Third Person Sample:
She can barely see, she can barely breathe, but there’s a twisted thing behind her spitting fire and Anya is not going to die being hunted down like prey. Gasping and wheezing, she makes it to a building of gothic prominences and heavily barred windows. She doesn’t bang on the door – it never crosses her mind that anyone would offer shelter – but unlike the crumbling brownstones and sleek skyscrapers in other parts of the city, this she can climb.
She’s hasn’t been in a city since she was four years old, and Vinnitsya was nothing like this, but she’s been climbing mountains ever since, and the rules are the same. 1 – find a good handhold. 2 – find another one. And 3 – don’t look down. She hauls herself up the side of the – is it a church? Maybe, it doesn’t matter – only hoping that the monster behind her can manage to follow with its shriveled and skew-angled arms. She hisses as she spears her hand on a rusted nail in the impenetrable darkness, but doesn’t let herself slow. She tucks herself between the arching, stony wings of a gargoyle, right above a brightly window, staunching the blood from her hand with her shirt. She’s sure some of them can get up here, but hopefully the light will keep them off. Maybe she can wait it out.
She should find a weapon. A brick, a bit of broken scaffolding, anything she can hit things with until they’re convinced she’s not worth the trouble. And if that doesn’t work – well.
Anya remembers her fifteenth birthday with perfect clarity, the leaden weight of disappointment that another crucial year had come and gone, and Anya remained unmanifested, simply, merely human. She had climbed to the very highest point in her father’s stronghold, sat halfway out the window, perched and pondering. And she hadn’t jumped, because there was still a chance, there might still have been a way out. But she’d thought: I’d rather die with the wind on my face than live to be a hundred in this stone tomb.
She finds a loose board, warped and curling with age, and pries it up, one end studded with the same protruding nails that had left her hand throbbing. She takes a breath, watches the clouded sky, the putrid street far below. She feels the wind blowing, brash and salty off the ocean, and leans into it a little. Then she settles in to face the darkness.