Natasha Romanoff (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
outstandingbalance) wrote2016-03-05 02:55 pm
outstandingbalance) wrote2016-03-05 02:55 pm
Underground App
Player information
Name: Saro
Contact: saro.lynne @ gmail,![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
sarosaron
Are you 18 or over? Yes
Other characters played: None.
Character information
Name: Natasha Romanoff
Age: 78 (appears to be in her mid twenties)
Date of Birth: 22 November, 1938
Canon: MCU
Species: Vampire—Canon touches on Natasha’s sense of guilt for her past, the debt she owes Clint Barton for giving her the chance to go straight, and her insecurity that she can’t overcome her background. Being a vampire would give her the chance to explore a lot of the same themes and emotional beats in a new context.
Role: Natasha would look for a position in the Redbright Institute’s Outreach Group, with a focus on enforcing secrecy regarding supernatural society and protecting humans from supernatural predation.
Rank: 1-2
Background:Natasha was born in Stalingrad in 1938 and as a result her earliest memories were of the stress and insecurity of WWII. Her parents both died in the war, leading to her being shuffled around between grandparents and great aunts, until she finally ended up a ward of the state.
In the orphanages, Natasha was recognized for her potential, mostly because of repeated disciplinary problems ranging from stealing to fighting, to running away on more than one occasion to scrap out a living on the street until she was eventually found and hauled back. Through her actions, she revealed that she was crafty, motivated and bold. A few days after a particularly daring escape attempt that lead to her stealing the gun off a police officer and injuring him, a woman came to claim Natasha for a program meant to mold young women into KGB operatives, and Natasha traded orphanages for boarding schools and training facilities.
Natasha took to her new trajectory well. She wasn’t particularly patriotic, but she was very, very good at what her mentors wanted her to do, and she thrived in challenging environment. Eventually, she learned to thrive on the structure as well. By the time she took her place as an agent, she had earned the reputation of being the top student in her program. That distinction continued into her new career, and may have one day made her among the KGB’s premiere agents, if her life hadn’t taken another sharp detour.
It wasn’t a coincidence that Moscow’s most influential vampire nest took notice of her; more than one Russian regime had had ties with their bloodline, and the Communist Party was no exception. In exchange for their support, the nest was supplied with a steady stream of blood donors in the form of political dissidents as well as access to the occasional special recruit. In 1961, Natasha was loaned to the Moscow nest as a human servant. In 1964, the nest officially inducted her into their number and she was sired by one of the nest’s commanders. After years of grooming and a history of feeding, Natasha’s bond with her sire was intense, instilling an instinctive loyalty in her and creating an emotional connection unlike anything she’d experienced before. It’s at this point, that she would recognize herself as being the happiest, first while her sire helped her to adapt to her new life and then working alongside him to serve the nest and, when called upon, the USSR.
That period came to an abrupt end in 1969, when Natasha’s sire was killed by a hunter (rumor suggested with inside help from a political rival, though the connection was never confirmed). The loss of her sire hit Natasha hard—much harder than she liked to admit. She fell back on her KGB training and almost overnight, she began detaching herself from her own sentiment, becoming both more reserved and more ruthless. The next twenty-ish years were, for Natasha, a slow decent into useful apathy that was the result of her withdrawal. Even unnecessary violence began to feel like an excess, one that she avoided. This change, in turn, made her an even more valuable weapon to nest and country. On missions she was both remorseless and effective, and politically she had no ambitions.
Within the nest, she engaged with her peers superficially. While she was emotionally unavailable, she went through the motions: flirting, navigating political ploys, and feeding. Feeding became one of her only interactions with humans. Because of the vampires’ relative position of comfort in Soviet Russia, there was never much incentive or pressure not to hurt or kill the people that she fed on, and even during her time with her sire, she was rarely encouraged to hold back when feeding. While she didn’t actively seek to hurt or kill her victims, she also didn’t worry about not hurting them either. It became easy to view humans as prey.
Then the USSR fell. Suddenly the nest no longer had a secure ally in the new regime, society around them was in upheaval, and the Cold War was over. The Moscow nest was forced to act as a free agent now, partnered with people who would have been beneath them before. In this environment, Natasha found herself growing restless. More and more the jobs she was given struck her as unnecessary. She started to resemble the girl she’d been in the late 40s, rebelling, running off on her own for days at a time without disclosing where she was going, picking fights rather than deflecting conflict civilly. Most importantly, she found herself actually pushing back politically against the what she viewed as the nest decaying and spiraling out of control.
Recently a human hunter brought on by one of Natasha’s rivals within the nest to kill her finally brought the situation to a head. He stalked her for weeks, watching her moves, and when the time came to take the shot something stopped him. He told her he’d thought he was doing the right thing by taking the contract and helping the nest wipe itself out; now he thought he’d had it wrong. Something he’d seen in her convinced him that she wasn’t evil.
For his failure to complete his mission, he would have been killed if Natasha hadn’t stepped in to protect him by killing the other vampire. In the aftermath, she fled Moscow for London, where she is currently attempting to go straight.
Personality: Natasha Romanoff is a woman who had to learn to adapt at a young age, and as a result she can superficially seem like a chameleon. The way that she presents herself changes constantly based on the needs of the moment—she puts on different colors based on the needs of the moment. She can be outgoing and flirtatious, or she be intimidatingly stoic. She can thrive on structure, in a hierarchal system, or she can be rebellious. Depending on the situation, she can seem professional or informal. She invents new personas easily, until it can seem like she’s a subtly different person for everyone she meets.
However, she does have a strong core personality underneath.
She’s smart. She’s strategic. She’s self-contained in a way that tends to make her reserved when it comes to her emotions and past. She’s observant, good at reading people and a good judge of character. She’s competent and she values competence. She’s a pragmatist and pushes herself to be as realistic and unbiased as possible in her decision making. She doesn’t shy away from hard choices, and she accepts the fact that accomplishing anything (even just staying alive) will usually mean making compromises and sacrifices.
At heart Natasha is a survivor. Much of her personality is shaped by that, if it doesn’t spring from it directly. At each stage of her life, she’s been forced by circumstances to evolve, and at each stage she’s become a person who can thrive in her present situation. When that person stopped being adaptive, she learned to shed the old identity while retaining the pieces of it that are still useful.
While this adaptivity has kept Natasha alive and even successful for the better part of a century, it’s not without a price. Natasha sometimes struggles with who she’s become, and what she’s lost. While she can change, there’s a degree to which she can’t go back. She can’t undo becoming a pragmatist. She can try to stop killing, but she can never go back to being a person who hasn’t killed often and easily. She can’t stop being a vampire.
This leads to internal conflict for her, because on some level she’s also a person with a strong impulse to do the right thing. However the changes, lessons and compromises that she’s made over the decades as part of her evolution have left her with a pretty faulty moral compass. She’s so used to ignoring or not trusting her own feelings on right and wrong that it’s become hard for her to even know what her conscience is saying.
In some ways, this accounts for her preference for structure. It’s easier for her to let other people take the lead and provide a moral vision when she doesn’t feel like she can trust her own instincts on the matter. First the KGB and then her nest provided her with direction and gave her the sense of serving something bigger than herself, with better goals. She felt like she was taking care of her country and her family.
When her faith in country and nest deteriorated, she looked for and found other outside influences that better seemed to match her own, muddled impulses, which it what inspired her first to connect with the hunter who inspired her to try to go straight, and then, after she fled to London, to seek out the Redbright Institute.
Powers & Possessions: By default, Natasha isn’t especially powerful for a vampire her age. She’s never sired another vampire, so she hasn’t developed the associated powers. What makes her intimidating is that her training and skill enable her to utilize the powers she does have incredibly effectively; KGB training doesn’t make her any faster or stronger, though.
She’s currently trying to live on animal blood, which weakens her further. This situation may or may not last long depending on how things develop IC.
When Natasha fled Moscow, she left with a duffel containing:
Two Glock 26 pistols & rounds
One Soviet issue combat knife
A substantial amount of cash
Samples:
Test drive top level.
And one more.
Name: Saro
Contact: saro.lynne @ gmail,
Are you 18 or over? Yes
Other characters played: None.
Character information
Name: Natasha Romanoff
Age: 78 (appears to be in her mid twenties)
Date of Birth: 22 November, 1938
Canon: MCU
Species: Vampire—Canon touches on Natasha’s sense of guilt for her past, the debt she owes Clint Barton for giving her the chance to go straight, and her insecurity that she can’t overcome her background. Being a vampire would give her the chance to explore a lot of the same themes and emotional beats in a new context.
Role: Natasha would look for a position in the Redbright Institute’s Outreach Group, with a focus on enforcing secrecy regarding supernatural society and protecting humans from supernatural predation.
Rank: 1-2
Background:Natasha was born in Stalingrad in 1938 and as a result her earliest memories were of the stress and insecurity of WWII. Her parents both died in the war, leading to her being shuffled around between grandparents and great aunts, until she finally ended up a ward of the state.
In the orphanages, Natasha was recognized for her potential, mostly because of repeated disciplinary problems ranging from stealing to fighting, to running away on more than one occasion to scrap out a living on the street until she was eventually found and hauled back. Through her actions, she revealed that she was crafty, motivated and bold. A few days after a particularly daring escape attempt that lead to her stealing the gun off a police officer and injuring him, a woman came to claim Natasha for a program meant to mold young women into KGB operatives, and Natasha traded orphanages for boarding schools and training facilities.
Natasha took to her new trajectory well. She wasn’t particularly patriotic, but she was very, very good at what her mentors wanted her to do, and she thrived in challenging environment. Eventually, she learned to thrive on the structure as well. By the time she took her place as an agent, she had earned the reputation of being the top student in her program. That distinction continued into her new career, and may have one day made her among the KGB’s premiere agents, if her life hadn’t taken another sharp detour.
It wasn’t a coincidence that Moscow’s most influential vampire nest took notice of her; more than one Russian regime had had ties with their bloodline, and the Communist Party was no exception. In exchange for their support, the nest was supplied with a steady stream of blood donors in the form of political dissidents as well as access to the occasional special recruit. In 1961, Natasha was loaned to the Moscow nest as a human servant. In 1964, the nest officially inducted her into their number and she was sired by one of the nest’s commanders. After years of grooming and a history of feeding, Natasha’s bond with her sire was intense, instilling an instinctive loyalty in her and creating an emotional connection unlike anything she’d experienced before. It’s at this point, that she would recognize herself as being the happiest, first while her sire helped her to adapt to her new life and then working alongside him to serve the nest and, when called upon, the USSR.
That period came to an abrupt end in 1969, when Natasha’s sire was killed by a hunter (rumor suggested with inside help from a political rival, though the connection was never confirmed). The loss of her sire hit Natasha hard—much harder than she liked to admit. She fell back on her KGB training and almost overnight, she began detaching herself from her own sentiment, becoming both more reserved and more ruthless. The next twenty-ish years were, for Natasha, a slow decent into useful apathy that was the result of her withdrawal. Even unnecessary violence began to feel like an excess, one that she avoided. This change, in turn, made her an even more valuable weapon to nest and country. On missions she was both remorseless and effective, and politically she had no ambitions.
Within the nest, she engaged with her peers superficially. While she was emotionally unavailable, she went through the motions: flirting, navigating political ploys, and feeding. Feeding became one of her only interactions with humans. Because of the vampires’ relative position of comfort in Soviet Russia, there was never much incentive or pressure not to hurt or kill the people that she fed on, and even during her time with her sire, she was rarely encouraged to hold back when feeding. While she didn’t actively seek to hurt or kill her victims, she also didn’t worry about not hurting them either. It became easy to view humans as prey.
Then the USSR fell. Suddenly the nest no longer had a secure ally in the new regime, society around them was in upheaval, and the Cold War was over. The Moscow nest was forced to act as a free agent now, partnered with people who would have been beneath them before. In this environment, Natasha found herself growing restless. More and more the jobs she was given struck her as unnecessary. She started to resemble the girl she’d been in the late 40s, rebelling, running off on her own for days at a time without disclosing where she was going, picking fights rather than deflecting conflict civilly. Most importantly, she found herself actually pushing back politically against the what she viewed as the nest decaying and spiraling out of control.
Recently a human hunter brought on by one of Natasha’s rivals within the nest to kill her finally brought the situation to a head. He stalked her for weeks, watching her moves, and when the time came to take the shot something stopped him. He told her he’d thought he was doing the right thing by taking the contract and helping the nest wipe itself out; now he thought he’d had it wrong. Something he’d seen in her convinced him that she wasn’t evil.
For his failure to complete his mission, he would have been killed if Natasha hadn’t stepped in to protect him by killing the other vampire. In the aftermath, she fled Moscow for London, where she is currently attempting to go straight.
Personality: Natasha Romanoff is a woman who had to learn to adapt at a young age, and as a result she can superficially seem like a chameleon. The way that she presents herself changes constantly based on the needs of the moment—she puts on different colors based on the needs of the moment. She can be outgoing and flirtatious, or she be intimidatingly stoic. She can thrive on structure, in a hierarchal system, or she can be rebellious. Depending on the situation, she can seem professional or informal. She invents new personas easily, until it can seem like she’s a subtly different person for everyone she meets.
However, she does have a strong core personality underneath.
She’s smart. She’s strategic. She’s self-contained in a way that tends to make her reserved when it comes to her emotions and past. She’s observant, good at reading people and a good judge of character. She’s competent and she values competence. She’s a pragmatist and pushes herself to be as realistic and unbiased as possible in her decision making. She doesn’t shy away from hard choices, and she accepts the fact that accomplishing anything (even just staying alive) will usually mean making compromises and sacrifices.
At heart Natasha is a survivor. Much of her personality is shaped by that, if it doesn’t spring from it directly. At each stage of her life, she’s been forced by circumstances to evolve, and at each stage she’s become a person who can thrive in her present situation. When that person stopped being adaptive, she learned to shed the old identity while retaining the pieces of it that are still useful.
While this adaptivity has kept Natasha alive and even successful for the better part of a century, it’s not without a price. Natasha sometimes struggles with who she’s become, and what she’s lost. While she can change, there’s a degree to which she can’t go back. She can’t undo becoming a pragmatist. She can try to stop killing, but she can never go back to being a person who hasn’t killed often and easily. She can’t stop being a vampire.
This leads to internal conflict for her, because on some level she’s also a person with a strong impulse to do the right thing. However the changes, lessons and compromises that she’s made over the decades as part of her evolution have left her with a pretty faulty moral compass. She’s so used to ignoring or not trusting her own feelings on right and wrong that it’s become hard for her to even know what her conscience is saying.
In some ways, this accounts for her preference for structure. It’s easier for her to let other people take the lead and provide a moral vision when she doesn’t feel like she can trust her own instincts on the matter. First the KGB and then her nest provided her with direction and gave her the sense of serving something bigger than herself, with better goals. She felt like she was taking care of her country and her family.
When her faith in country and nest deteriorated, she looked for and found other outside influences that better seemed to match her own, muddled impulses, which it what inspired her first to connect with the hunter who inspired her to try to go straight, and then, after she fled to London, to seek out the Redbright Institute.
Powers & Possessions: By default, Natasha isn’t especially powerful for a vampire her age. She’s never sired another vampire, so she hasn’t developed the associated powers. What makes her intimidating is that her training and skill enable her to utilize the powers she does have incredibly effectively; KGB training doesn’t make her any faster or stronger, though.
She’s currently trying to live on animal blood, which weakens her further. This situation may or may not last long depending on how things develop IC.
When Natasha fled Moscow, she left with a duffel containing:
Two Glock 26 pistols & rounds
One Soviet issue combat knife
A substantial amount of cash
Samples:
Test drive top level.
And one more.