(no subject)
Player Name: Kitty
Personal LJ: quipquipquip
E-mail: iwillactuallycheckthis AT gmail DOT com
AIM: flipstentables
Other characters currently in-game: Tom Raymond, Bruce Banner, and Pepper Potts
Character Name: Nico Minoru
Canon source: Runaways
PB:
Personality:
Nico is a leader who never wanted to be a leader. She wanted to be a feminist literature student, a woman who would end up with a handful of crazy college stories, a degree she would do nothing with, and maybe two kids and a minivan. She wanted all kinds of things through the years, but what she got was villains for parents, no high school diploma, a series of gray-bordering-on-evil boyfriends, and an apocalypse. There has never really been any good choices in her life and it shows.
She is smart she is compassionate, but she is worn out. She is broken down. She is plagued by every decision she made incorrectly, all the relationships that have shriveled up no matter how hard she tried to keep them going. She's controlled by guilt and bound up by so many things she has done wrong that she is almost afraid to show how much she cares. Instead, she snaps at and tears down many of the people she cares about. It's a terrible habit, but it's how she balances her inability to get her emotions across.
Nico has a bad habit of mishandling stress and her feelings associated with high-tension situations---and unfortunately, her life since age sixteen has been nothing but high-stress situations. When she was younger, she admittedly was a stress-eater, but as soon as hormones entered the mix she moved onto a different kind of creature comfort. She yearns for physical contact whenever something bothers her---after a stressful situation, she goes for someone's arms. Nico doesn't love the person, but the shape of the person: she loved the stability and reason of Alex, the pseudo-reality he had offered in the face of the rest of the world falling out from under her like a funhouse floor; she loved the bright flickering humor that was Karolina, her sunny warmth and unquestionable loyalty; she loved the strength and masculinity of Chase, what a guy he was, the rougher, foreign edges of an adult outlining him when he had to step up and take a stand.
It isn't until there is a hole where that person has stood that Nico realizes that she loves them. Only then does the bright intensity of emotion press against her ribs, and it's probably only a cry to get them and the stability they represent back. This is why she goes from one person to another, and rarely for more than a night or two at a time. Nico is a serial one-night-stand-er, and the people around her know it. It's her comfort, her vice. She can't allow herself much---and having a relationship when it would paint such a massive target on her partner is completely out of the question---so she quietly and selfishly sleeps with a long string of people who won't pretend the sex is anything it's not. Many of these people are her friends, since she doesn't trust easily. Her boundaries between friends and lovers are muddled.
Her teammates mean the world to her. She loves them all for the family that they have become, and she works at being a good leader for them, even if her ascension into leadership has been a rocky one. She tries, and her heart is often in the right place, even if her emotions are a mess that she regularly has to rework and struggles to keep in check.
History:
Every teenage kid thinks that their parents are evil, right? Right. Parents are lame, parents are controlling, parents don't understand the complicated workings of their child's burgeoning ego, parents are kind of evil. Kind of. Usually. Nico thought that her parents were at least bearable, until the point in her tender young life where she found out that the “fund raiser” her parents attended every year was actually a blood sacrifice and her nice-and-normal Japanese-American parents were dark sorcerers. Evil dark sorcerers, who were working hand-in-hand with her friends' parents (also supervillains, going under the cabal name of The Pride) and a bunch of Biblical super monsters to bring about the annihilation on the human race. Talk about having skeletons in the closet.
Nico ran away from home with her friends after witnessing the ritual, hiding out in a dilapidated mansion that Chase had fondly dubbed “the Hostel”. She was rocked by the notion that her God-fearing parents might be dabbling in the Dark Arts, and even more so by the fact that this power was woven into her almost to the point of being genetic. During a fight with her parents, her body sucks up a weapon: the Staff of One, which becomes a literal part of her soul. From then on, the Staff is hers to control, summoned by an offering of her blood and able to cast almost any spell she can imagine---once. And only once.
Nico is a very emotional person, but has trouble expressing what she's feeling---or even recognizing what she's feeling. She clings to the first rock of stability that presents itself after a climactic event---Alex, first, though her feelings for him crumble once he betrays his friends in favor of his parents and their bid at immortality---and seeks out tactile comfort and warmth when she is at her lowest. This has complicated many of the relationships that she has formed with her friends, but it has also shaped who she is: a compassionate girl, an outcast, a confused teenager, and the leader of her rough-handed band of minor miscreants after Alex's betrayal and subsequent death. She's heavy on the sorcery and light on the leadership, but she does try her best to keep her new family together---even after Alex's betrayal, after they crushed the Pride, after Captain America split them all up into foster homes (didn't last long, of course, because Nico could handle Father Flanagan's Home for Unwanted Goth Kids for only so long) after a version of Gert came from the future to project the doom that the cyborg Victorious would eventually present, after Karolina jetted off to her interstellar honeymoon with another alien, and after the current-version of Gert died at the hands of Alex's father, after Chase tried to sacrifice himself in order to bring Gert back, after the adults started a Civil War and Iron Man and S.H.I.E.L.D. Superhero Registration came knocking at the hostel's door, after making a deal with the Kingpin and getting attacked by the Punisher and ninjas, the fall of Asgard, and everything else, Nico kept the Runaways under the radar and still on the side of good.
But then the Scarlet Witch was killed. And Billy lost it. And everything fell apart so drastically, even she couldn't hold it all together.
The Scarlet Witch was an unexpected casualty in a firefight over who would take her in. Wanda had depowered a huge chunk of the mutant population during one of her psychotic breaks, and when he witnessed her death---just a stray bullet, one nobody would be able to trace---Billy did the same thing. It is a constant in life that sins are repeated through generations---and with magic, those kinds of mistakes might as well be genetic.
Billy broke when Wanda died. He lost himself. He threw out one terrified, frenzied desire: no more adults. They were fighting, incomprehensible---and if they hadn't been squabbling over Wanda, she would never have been injured.
What he did that day changed the face of the world. In that instant, every man and woman over the age of twenty-one disappeared. Whether they were killed or simply tucked away into some other part of the cosmos is unclear, but they were gone. Millions of people disappeared and all that were left were children, teenagers, and a small handful of superpowered and smart kids who were there to pick up the pieces.
Nico had to step up. She went from den mother to public figure in less than a week; her flock grew exponentially. At first, it was nothing but chaos. She was approached by Amadeus Cho and the remainder of the Young Avengers---now just the Avengers---and helped them begin the arduous process of putting the world back together. It was important for them to became figureheads, some kind of leadership for the rest to follow---Nico's own Runaways had been minced down to Karolina, Victor, Klara, Molly, a wheelchair-bound Chase, and herself. They had to fill in slots, take up old mantles and familiar names.
Nico herself took up the name of the Scarlet Witch.
She figured she couldn't make the moniker even worse than it already was.
Over the next three years, the new heroes held together what they could. The world is still moving, humanity still making it...but only just barely.
How does your AU differ from canon? Shortly after the Siege of Asgard, all of the world fell to shit. After Wanda's death, Billy magicked away anyone on earth over the age of twenty-one. Nico stepped into a position of leadership that was necessary but infinitely difficult. She became more than just a den mother---she became Sorceress Supreme. And with that has come all kinds of responsibility and hardship that a girl that age---or any age---isn't ready for.
Strengths:
Strongest magic-user left alive, a sharp enough tongue to get her point across, a mantle of leadership that she has earned over the years, and the ability to use the Staff of One more capably than it has ever been used in the past. She is resourceful and remarkably adaptable.
Weaknesses:
The Sorcerer Supreme job comes with indelible rules, she has little to no martial arts or self defense training, she is malnourished and thin, she doesn't sleep well, her magic still can backfire if she repeats a spell or is emotionally compromised, she doesn't trust adults (STILL), never finished high school, puts a lot of responsibility on her shoulders and guilts herself to death when she drops any of the many, many balls she juggles. And she doesn't like herself very much. Nico is a whole, swiss-cheesy mass of weaknesses topped by a cherry of unstable Mary Sue powers.
Preferred drop-in point: Manhattan