Post-Canon AU alterations for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
shadowcity
Sep. 8th, 2013 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scarlet_discordCanon History: Wanda and her twin brother Pietro are mutants, born into a world where human mutants are just starting to become discussed publicly--usually, as a threat. Her mother, Magda, and elder sister, Anya, were humans, but both died before she could know them. She and her brother were raised by human foster parents Django and Marya Maximoff from soon after birth until the age of four, when her father, Magneto, discovered them and took them back to upstate New York with him. After that, Wanda was raised in an atmosphere of xenophobia, exacerbated by her father's Holocaust experiences and general disdain of baseline humans.
When she was eight, her father gave up on helping her with her growing power and anger problems, and locked her away in a human run insane asylum in upstate New York. There, isolated, drugged and unable even to move her hands most of the time, she was left to rot. That is, except for occasional visits from Charles Xavier, who sought unsuccessfully to treat her deepening trauma and obsessive hatred of her father. However, the great Mutant advocate also (inexplicably) never did a thing to free her from a clearly abusive and emotionally damaging environment.
This hellish situation continued until she was fifteen, when the shapeshifting mutant Mystique released her and attempted to bring her into the fold of her Brotherhood of Mutants. In spite of the presence of her obnoxious brother, whom she viewed as having betrayed her by doing nothing to help during the years she was locked up, Wanda worked with the Brotherhood for a while, training under the witch Agatha Harkness to learn to control her powers. But her obsessions drove her to track down her father in search of revenge--something she would attempt several times before finally nearly killing him during a battle with the robotic Sentinels.
Desperate to stop her attacks, Magneto lured her to a secret base and captured her. He used the telepath Mastermind to rewrite her memories, replacing the asylum horror and her subsequent hunt of Magneto with memories of a happy and loving relationship. Magneto then released Wanda to a "rescue" by her friends (well, one acquaintance and the romantically-obsessed Toad). Her brother was complicit in her memory wipe, and made sure that neither Toad nor anyone else mentioned anything of Wanda's past to her, to keep from disturbing the memory alteration.
Wanda and her brother later participated in a gigantic battle with the world-conquering mutant Apocalypse, joining forces with the rest of the Brotherhood, the X-men and several other mutants. This was a catastrophic event for her young psyche; not only did she end up working with the X-men to save the world, but also rescued her father. This was her first taste of (genuine) heroism. According to the precognitive experiences of Charles Xavier, described at the end of the series, her destiny was to join the American defense force SHIELD along with the rest of the Brotherhood. But that left several questions: how did she go from a punk kid with some maybe heroic leanings to someone who heroes for a living? Did she ever backslide into villainy? And what would happen when her memory was restored?
Post Canon History: After helping her fellow mutants save the world from Apocalypse, Wanda started to have real doubts about remaining with the Brotherhood. She had experienced a lot of guilt about what they were doing--especially when they were faking rescues to get good publicity--and doing something genuinely heroic felt good after all the conflict and confusion. She started thinking about going off on her own, but her (artificially) improved relationship with her father and brother made her hesitate. She stayed with the Brotherhood, who continued to be sent on hazardous "prove yourselves" missions against enemies such as the Friends of Humanity. Four months after end of canon, she was nearly killed on one of these missions when she ended up buried under a collapsed roof.
Toad and her brother attempted to rescue her, and after being pulled away by a shocked Magneto, Toad asked Nightcrawler and Shadowcat to continue the search. The pair were uniquely suited to the task, and quickly discovered that there was no body. In an act of rebellion against his father, Pietro hid this fact from Magneto, and Toad, ever hopeful that his crush object was still alive somewhere, followed his lead.
In reality Wanda was convalescing in a small village on Mount Wundagore, having been rescued by one factor the mutants had not considered--Agatha Harkness, who had survived too many witch hunts to see her most promising apprentice die. The determined Salem veteran had healed her body...and after much consideration, kept her in a coma long enough to heal some of her psychic trauma as well--removing Mesmero's mental constructs and restoring her true memories. Awakening to the truth was a trauma--but the trauma was greatly lessened by being surrounded by the three people who had ever truly cared about her--Agatha, Django and Marya Maximoff, her adoptive parents. While insane things were going on in the Mutant community in the US, including he rise and fall of the Phoenix, Wanda was spending the next two years healing with the help of her newly-rediscovered family.
Agatha Harkness trained Wanda in magic and disciplining her mind. Her father Django, a minor sorcerer capable of animating the wooden puppets he carved and performed with, taught her the art, which she used to make her psychokinesis much more precise, learn to animate more intricate and delicate objects, and learn to reshape objects when she realized she utterly failed at actual wood carving. He also worked with her to learn how to apply her powers to simple things like repairing, restoring and reinforcing objects and altering them as needed. Her mother Marya taught her all the practical down-to-earth things she had not been able to learn while being imprisoned and used--everything from cooking, to a bit of herbal healing, to the songs and traditions of her people. Wanda's personality stabilized quickly, and her emotional wounds became much less pronounced as her ugly memories started fading and being replaced with a better one.
But life interfered with a problem that neither Agatha nor Wanda's powers could directly solve; Django came down with liver cancer just after Wanda's 20th birthday. It was aggressive and the best treatment was only available from specialists in the city at a very high price. In desperation, Wanda left home for a month go go gambling in Budapest. She came home with a backpack full of cash from using her powers to cheat. Her father started treatment and responded well, and Wanda...had an idea.
Wanda went to "seek her fortune" in the United States, having changed her appearance by growing her hair out and avoiding wearing her former favorite color--red. Using fake ID and the underworld identity "Roulette", she started hitting every major gambling city in the English speaking world. Her plan was simple--femme fatale her way into a high stakes game in one casino and clean them out using subtle applications of luck, make sure that her image never stayed intact on a security tape, and move on to the next, where a chance fifty thousand dollar jackpot on a novelty slot machine awaited her. And so on. During her stay in the States, she suffered some hearing about how Magneto had "turned over a new leaf" and become a teacher at Xavier's academy. The irony was too awful, and she had a minor breakdown, retreating to the Humboldt hills in California for a while to regroup.
Back home, her father recovered slowly as the treatments went on uninterrupted. Unfortunately her family and village back home needed his support now that Django could no longer perform. The pressure on Wanda increased, and she responded both by sending more money, and finding an unusual outlet for her growing frustrations. Giving up her ripped red and black leathers for a coated, practical uniform of dark indigo body armor and features-obscuring goggles, she started patrolling off and on in San Francisco between jobs. The name "Roulette" ended up sticking, and she started working out in order to better handle the physical side of vigilante life. She took great care never to let anyone know who she really was.
After sending her last big Vegas score home to pay for Django's last treatments, Wanda found herself kidnapped to an entirely unfamiliar city....
Canon Point: About a total of three years post canon.
Appearance: Wanda is a young and slightly wary-looking woman who at age twenty has abandoned both the Goth clothing and limited color scheme for a wardrobe that varies widely according to her purposes--but never includes the color red. She is half-Roma, with thick, slightly wavy hair that is very black, her Polish father's pale skin and blue eyes, and a tendency to paint her lips and nails crimson and kohl her eyes like a femme fatale in a hard-boiled Forties mystery. Though she is still slightly thin for her frame, ongoing combat and athletic practice has given her good muscle definition. She speaks with a light Eastern European accent.
Wanda sometimes dresses up a little, but she never wears anything she can't run or fight in, and still prefers steel-toed boots. Her updated uniform is leather and kevlar, less revealing and more military-looking. The entire thing is dark indigo, from body armor to features-concealing night vision goggles. If she goes out at night, she's wearing it.
AU Aspect: Wanda's additional canon history gave her an opportunity to recover from her childood some, heal her heart, train and find a new reason to fight--even if her target is largely the rich, corrupt casino owners and other wealthy individuals whom she sees as preying on everyone else. A magic-powered, Romani Robin Hood type as likely to use subtle magic and trickery as yank out the big guns against a cosmic threat, Wanda is no longer the vengeful, destructive and slightly anti-human Scarlet Witch. She does not even acknowledge that she is a mutant very often, and stays entirely out of mutant affairs. Her only family members are Agatha and her foster parents, her people are the Roma and the Salem Tradition witches, and she does not discriminate. Like her canon counterpart, she still dreams of vengeance against Magneto and Xavier, and holds her brother in disdain. But instead of doing them harm, she has simply withdrawn, only leaving Mount Wundagore to make money for her family and occasionally beat up bad guys from behind the visor of a new costume. She is more mentally stable, friendly and anarchic, just as camera-shy (she tends to instinctively make them glitch out) and cares about people of all races--but not social convention or the law.
Personality: Wanda is twenty years old now, and really has started to leave her tortuous past behind her. Although she is proud of her powers and of being a mutant, she does not identify easily with other mutants, does not believe in mutant solidarity and in fact is wary of her fellow mutants, as must of the suffering she has experienced in her life was caused by them. She has disowned her father and brother, and only acknowledges Agatha Harkness and the Maximoffs as family--a family she loves deeply and is grateful to now that he finally has it in her head that they won't abandon her too. She is very protective and loving toward those she cares about.
Being traumatized by leaders of both major factions of Mutants, and witnessing the systematic persecution of Roma and Mutants around the world, Wanda has developed a major distrust of authority and so-called "heroes". She feels she must become as self-reliant as possible, as relying on anyone else is an invitation to be disappointed at best and royally screwed over at worst. Governments are all flawed and corrupt, as are most smaller organizations. The rich and powerful are generally those most lacking in morals, and she feels a constant drive to not be like them. Laws are generally outdated, unfair, barely work, or are set up for the rich to exploit while the poor end up exploited; she ignores the law whenever she can get away with it without violence. Wanda knows there are good people out there, and struggles to help and protect them when she finds them, but is constantly disgusted by how many other people turn out self-interested, cowardly, or abusive.
On the other hand, all her bad experiences have left her with a ferocious hatred of injustice, corruption, hypocrisy and bullying. She is perfectly willing to jump in to save a complete stranger from some douchebag simply because it's the right thing to do and more people should do it. The shittier the world looks to her, the harder she is willing to fight just to make it a little better, although sometimes she burns out and becomes bitter and depressed. She will volunteer her time, effort and powers for a good cause with little hesitation. She has no bigotry against humans or any other race, and responds to mutant supremacists with open disgust. She has also sworn that no one else is going to get away with trying to screw up her life, and will get very creative with cursing people who try.
One of her goals is to find a way to make her power-scrambling ability semi-permanent or permanent, so that she can depower people like Magneto before they can cause any more deaths and misery. Wanda is as much a witch as a mutant vigilante, using magical ritual and gesture to focus her mind and powers. She also meditates daily, using techniques taught to her by Agatha to calm her mind and focus her powers. Her ultimate goal is to become a witch of great renown, and possibly Sorceress Supreme, before exposing and denouncing her abusers. Meanwhile she is happy enough learning, preventing assaults in San Francisco and bilking rich idiots out of their cash in various ways.
Wanda works hard to find new uses for the chaos-magic skills she already has, with a focus on building and fixing things instead of destroying them. For example, instead of just melting through walls and dropping ceilings on people, she can turn a floor into goop and solidify it around someone's ankles, extend part of a wall to provide her with cover, or soften and reshape an object. (The latter has been used more and more to create simple items, and she also does some sculpture to relax). Her progress has quickened as she has become more focused and has stopped being distracted by flashbacks.
To borrow from the old D&D ethical axis, Wanda is pretty much the embodiment of Chaotic Good. Given the opportunity, she'll gladly rip open the side of a closed grocery store to feed a bunch of homeless people, break into a house to squat, steal, deal with (similarly ethically aligned) criminals, inflict permanent curses or fairly severe injuries on those who seek to do her (or anyone she considers under her protection) harm, and use her powers to trespass, perform very artistic forms of vandalism, and subtly cheat at gambling. She'll give a stranger her last sandwich, but she'll also ruin a rich guy's fortunes if he's been heinous enough. She has a code of ethics, and a personal manifesto about the rights owed to all thinking beings which basically boils down to "do what you like but don't hurt each other". Big heart, big conscience...and still too quick a temper sometimes.
Her time with her Roma parents and their village has restored her sense of playfulness and even mischief. However, the one thing she has not yet sorted out is dating, since she has been a prisoner or occupied with other things her whole life. She's not romantic-comedy naive or anything, but she does have a baseline level of "How do I boy?"
She is confident to the point of near-recklessness in her powers. Her one overwhelming fear is imprisonment, though mind control is a close second. She tends to freak out of someone tries to drug her, pin her or restrain her hands.
Abilities/Powers: Wanda's reality-warping "chaos magic" powers are very flexible and can be used for a variety of effects. Technically, she may potentially be capable of doing almost anything with them some day...but she hasn't reached anywhere near the level of competence, confidence, practice and understanding she would need to access that kind of power. Still, she is one of the most powerful mutants of her generation. This is a fact that she takes a bit too much pride in.
Because she is deeply concerned with staying in control, and only makes a show of her powers when she has to or thinks she is alone, Wanda will tend to use the minimum amount of power possible to work her will. For example, instead of blasting an attacker off their feet, she might level him with a sudden burst of bad luck. Instead of exploding the head of a Sentinel, she will cause it to malfunction and misfire at one of its squadron. Direct attacks will aim to stun, entangle, or render unconscious as much as possible, and will often be backed up with a healthy helping of basic, but hard-practiced, combat skills. The only times she really uses dangerous amounts of power is when she is severely startled, desperate, or thoroughly enraged. At that time, the eerie blue glow that is a side effect of her power flares up from mere sparks to a nimbus that can at times cover her whole body. She has not yet figured out how to suppress this side effect, which gives away when she is using her power (and her position) nearly every time. Even if she veils her exact location with magic, she cannot hide the flash of blue light. If she is doing a minor casting, she might be able to hide around a corner or veil her hands somehow, but right now that is the best she can do.
Wanda's favorite uses for this power in canon include poltergeist-like psychokinesis, including moving (or animating) several objects at once, forcing junker cars to come to life Christine style and chase people down the street, and flinging people and large objects (including an entire walk-in freezer) around with a gesture. She is very good at glitching out, and to an extent taking over, machines, though extremely advanced and alien technologies are much more difficult, or even impossible, for her to affect. She can reshape matter, including warping it, liquefying it or shattering it--including large structures. She can alter the fortunes of herself and others in order to cause extraordinarily good (or bad) luck or timing, or unleash a curse which makes the very environment turn against them in bizarre ways.
Her attacks can partially or fully paralyze a victim, but only for the duration that she focuses on them. Finally, her "big gun" against other empowered beings is the ability to scramble, partly control, or counteract their powers. This causes such problems as Pietro getting his feet stuck to the floor, Nightcrawler randomly mis-teleporting, Jean Grey being forced to fling people around, and Magneto completely losing the ability to move or focus his powers. She cannot affect Apocalypse-level mutants or beings who are that much more powerful than she, but she hopes to some day change this. Meanwhile, she keeps this ability under her belt for when she really needs it, because she never wants to reveal just how strong she is until she has to.
Post-Canon Power Refinements: Wanda's raw power has not increased that much in a few years, but her focus and competence have skyrocketed with intensive practice and she is much more capable of doing fine work. She understands the basics of magic a lot more, and can do a host of little apprentice-level spells like conjuring a tiny fire ball or making a breeze carry a whispered message. Her major spell is the ability to put out fires by calming her mind, but doing so to a large fire will take time and (possibly dangerous amounts of) effort. She knows enough herbal magic to cure a headache or make someone fall asleep, can now enhance people's luck (including her own) as well as ruin it, fix things as well as break them, and make herself, something she is carrying or a certain object, vehicle or door less noticeable. She can now animate more complex devices, allowing her to do things like rig a roulette wheel, drive a car with her mind, or get an ATM to turn off its security camera and cough out all its twenties. She has not figured out flying but can now break a fall or pogo into the air with a psychokinetic blast. Finally and perhaps most importantly, her powers no longer run dangerously out of control when she is upset.
Possessions: Her uniform, two sets of clothing (a jeans set and a slinky black silk slip dress), 18-hole Docs, battered sneakers, photos of her family, a $1000 wad of cash various purse contents, a small (animatable) wooden doll that her father carved, her study grimoire with notes on her current assignments, her communicator.
When she was eight, her father gave up on helping her with her growing power and anger problems, and locked her away in a human run insane asylum in upstate New York. There, isolated, drugged and unable even to move her hands most of the time, she was left to rot. That is, except for occasional visits from Charles Xavier, who sought unsuccessfully to treat her deepening trauma and obsessive hatred of her father. However, the great Mutant advocate also (inexplicably) never did a thing to free her from a clearly abusive and emotionally damaging environment.
This hellish situation continued until she was fifteen, when the shapeshifting mutant Mystique released her and attempted to bring her into the fold of her Brotherhood of Mutants. In spite of the presence of her obnoxious brother, whom she viewed as having betrayed her by doing nothing to help during the years she was locked up, Wanda worked with the Brotherhood for a while, training under the witch Agatha Harkness to learn to control her powers. But her obsessions drove her to track down her father in search of revenge--something she would attempt several times before finally nearly killing him during a battle with the robotic Sentinels.
Desperate to stop her attacks, Magneto lured her to a secret base and captured her. He used the telepath Mastermind to rewrite her memories, replacing the asylum horror and her subsequent hunt of Magneto with memories of a happy and loving relationship. Magneto then released Wanda to a "rescue" by her friends (well, one acquaintance and the romantically-obsessed Toad). Her brother was complicit in her memory wipe, and made sure that neither Toad nor anyone else mentioned anything of Wanda's past to her, to keep from disturbing the memory alteration.
Wanda and her brother later participated in a gigantic battle with the world-conquering mutant Apocalypse, joining forces with the rest of the Brotherhood, the X-men and several other mutants. This was a catastrophic event for her young psyche; not only did she end up working with the X-men to save the world, but also rescued her father. This was her first taste of (genuine) heroism. According to the precognitive experiences of Charles Xavier, described at the end of the series, her destiny was to join the American defense force SHIELD along with the rest of the Brotherhood. But that left several questions: how did she go from a punk kid with some maybe heroic leanings to someone who heroes for a living? Did she ever backslide into villainy? And what would happen when her memory was restored?
Post Canon History: After helping her fellow mutants save the world from Apocalypse, Wanda started to have real doubts about remaining with the Brotherhood. She had experienced a lot of guilt about what they were doing--especially when they were faking rescues to get good publicity--and doing something genuinely heroic felt good after all the conflict and confusion. She started thinking about going off on her own, but her (artificially) improved relationship with her father and brother made her hesitate. She stayed with the Brotherhood, who continued to be sent on hazardous "prove yourselves" missions against enemies such as the Friends of Humanity. Four months after end of canon, she was nearly killed on one of these missions when she ended up buried under a collapsed roof.
Toad and her brother attempted to rescue her, and after being pulled away by a shocked Magneto, Toad asked Nightcrawler and Shadowcat to continue the search. The pair were uniquely suited to the task, and quickly discovered that there was no body. In an act of rebellion against his father, Pietro hid this fact from Magneto, and Toad, ever hopeful that his crush object was still alive somewhere, followed his lead.
In reality Wanda was convalescing in a small village on Mount Wundagore, having been rescued by one factor the mutants had not considered--Agatha Harkness, who had survived too many witch hunts to see her most promising apprentice die. The determined Salem veteran had healed her body...and after much consideration, kept her in a coma long enough to heal some of her psychic trauma as well--removing Mesmero's mental constructs and restoring her true memories. Awakening to the truth was a trauma--but the trauma was greatly lessened by being surrounded by the three people who had ever truly cared about her--Agatha, Django and Marya Maximoff, her adoptive parents. While insane things were going on in the Mutant community in the US, including he rise and fall of the Phoenix, Wanda was spending the next two years healing with the help of her newly-rediscovered family.
Agatha Harkness trained Wanda in magic and disciplining her mind. Her father Django, a minor sorcerer capable of animating the wooden puppets he carved and performed with, taught her the art, which she used to make her psychokinesis much more precise, learn to animate more intricate and delicate objects, and learn to reshape objects when she realized she utterly failed at actual wood carving. He also worked with her to learn how to apply her powers to simple things like repairing, restoring and reinforcing objects and altering them as needed. Her mother Marya taught her all the practical down-to-earth things she had not been able to learn while being imprisoned and used--everything from cooking, to a bit of herbal healing, to the songs and traditions of her people. Wanda's personality stabilized quickly, and her emotional wounds became much less pronounced as her ugly memories started fading and being replaced with a better one.
But life interfered with a problem that neither Agatha nor Wanda's powers could directly solve; Django came down with liver cancer just after Wanda's 20th birthday. It was aggressive and the best treatment was only available from specialists in the city at a very high price. In desperation, Wanda left home for a month go go gambling in Budapest. She came home with a backpack full of cash from using her powers to cheat. Her father started treatment and responded well, and Wanda...had an idea.
Wanda went to "seek her fortune" in the United States, having changed her appearance by growing her hair out and avoiding wearing her former favorite color--red. Using fake ID and the underworld identity "Roulette", she started hitting every major gambling city in the English speaking world. Her plan was simple--femme fatale her way into a high stakes game in one casino and clean them out using subtle applications of luck, make sure that her image never stayed intact on a security tape, and move on to the next, where a chance fifty thousand dollar jackpot on a novelty slot machine awaited her. And so on. During her stay in the States, she suffered some hearing about how Magneto had "turned over a new leaf" and become a teacher at Xavier's academy. The irony was too awful, and she had a minor breakdown, retreating to the Humboldt hills in California for a while to regroup.
Back home, her father recovered slowly as the treatments went on uninterrupted. Unfortunately her family and village back home needed his support now that Django could no longer perform. The pressure on Wanda increased, and she responded both by sending more money, and finding an unusual outlet for her growing frustrations. Giving up her ripped red and black leathers for a coated, practical uniform of dark indigo body armor and features-obscuring goggles, she started patrolling off and on in San Francisco between jobs. The name "Roulette" ended up sticking, and she started working out in order to better handle the physical side of vigilante life. She took great care never to let anyone know who she really was.
After sending her last big Vegas score home to pay for Django's last treatments, Wanda found herself kidnapped to an entirely unfamiliar city....
Canon Point: About a total of three years post canon.
Appearance: Wanda is a young and slightly wary-looking woman who at age twenty has abandoned both the Goth clothing and limited color scheme for a wardrobe that varies widely according to her purposes--but never includes the color red. She is half-Roma, with thick, slightly wavy hair that is very black, her Polish father's pale skin and blue eyes, and a tendency to paint her lips and nails crimson and kohl her eyes like a femme fatale in a hard-boiled Forties mystery. Though she is still slightly thin for her frame, ongoing combat and athletic practice has given her good muscle definition. She speaks with a light Eastern European accent.
Wanda sometimes dresses up a little, but she never wears anything she can't run or fight in, and still prefers steel-toed boots. Her updated uniform is leather and kevlar, less revealing and more military-looking. The entire thing is dark indigo, from body armor to features-concealing night vision goggles. If she goes out at night, she's wearing it.
AU Aspect: Wanda's additional canon history gave her an opportunity to recover from her childood some, heal her heart, train and find a new reason to fight--even if her target is largely the rich, corrupt casino owners and other wealthy individuals whom she sees as preying on everyone else. A magic-powered, Romani Robin Hood type as likely to use subtle magic and trickery as yank out the big guns against a cosmic threat, Wanda is no longer the vengeful, destructive and slightly anti-human Scarlet Witch. She does not even acknowledge that she is a mutant very often, and stays entirely out of mutant affairs. Her only family members are Agatha and her foster parents, her people are the Roma and the Salem Tradition witches, and she does not discriminate. Like her canon counterpart, she still dreams of vengeance against Magneto and Xavier, and holds her brother in disdain. But instead of doing them harm, she has simply withdrawn, only leaving Mount Wundagore to make money for her family and occasionally beat up bad guys from behind the visor of a new costume. She is more mentally stable, friendly and anarchic, just as camera-shy (she tends to instinctively make them glitch out) and cares about people of all races--but not social convention or the law.
Personality: Wanda is twenty years old now, and really has started to leave her tortuous past behind her. Although she is proud of her powers and of being a mutant, she does not identify easily with other mutants, does not believe in mutant solidarity and in fact is wary of her fellow mutants, as must of the suffering she has experienced in her life was caused by them. She has disowned her father and brother, and only acknowledges Agatha Harkness and the Maximoffs as family--a family she loves deeply and is grateful to now that he finally has it in her head that they won't abandon her too. She is very protective and loving toward those she cares about.
Being traumatized by leaders of both major factions of Mutants, and witnessing the systematic persecution of Roma and Mutants around the world, Wanda has developed a major distrust of authority and so-called "heroes". She feels she must become as self-reliant as possible, as relying on anyone else is an invitation to be disappointed at best and royally screwed over at worst. Governments are all flawed and corrupt, as are most smaller organizations. The rich and powerful are generally those most lacking in morals, and she feels a constant drive to not be like them. Laws are generally outdated, unfair, barely work, or are set up for the rich to exploit while the poor end up exploited; she ignores the law whenever she can get away with it without violence. Wanda knows there are good people out there, and struggles to help and protect them when she finds them, but is constantly disgusted by how many other people turn out self-interested, cowardly, or abusive.
On the other hand, all her bad experiences have left her with a ferocious hatred of injustice, corruption, hypocrisy and bullying. She is perfectly willing to jump in to save a complete stranger from some douchebag simply because it's the right thing to do and more people should do it. The shittier the world looks to her, the harder she is willing to fight just to make it a little better, although sometimes she burns out and becomes bitter and depressed. She will volunteer her time, effort and powers for a good cause with little hesitation. She has no bigotry against humans or any other race, and responds to mutant supremacists with open disgust. She has also sworn that no one else is going to get away with trying to screw up her life, and will get very creative with cursing people who try.
One of her goals is to find a way to make her power-scrambling ability semi-permanent or permanent, so that she can depower people like Magneto before they can cause any more deaths and misery. Wanda is as much a witch as a mutant vigilante, using magical ritual and gesture to focus her mind and powers. She also meditates daily, using techniques taught to her by Agatha to calm her mind and focus her powers. Her ultimate goal is to become a witch of great renown, and possibly Sorceress Supreme, before exposing and denouncing her abusers. Meanwhile she is happy enough learning, preventing assaults in San Francisco and bilking rich idiots out of their cash in various ways.
Wanda works hard to find new uses for the chaos-magic skills she already has, with a focus on building and fixing things instead of destroying them. For example, instead of just melting through walls and dropping ceilings on people, she can turn a floor into goop and solidify it around someone's ankles, extend part of a wall to provide her with cover, or soften and reshape an object. (The latter has been used more and more to create simple items, and she also does some sculpture to relax). Her progress has quickened as she has become more focused and has stopped being distracted by flashbacks.
To borrow from the old D&D ethical axis, Wanda is pretty much the embodiment of Chaotic Good. Given the opportunity, she'll gladly rip open the side of a closed grocery store to feed a bunch of homeless people, break into a house to squat, steal, deal with (similarly ethically aligned) criminals, inflict permanent curses or fairly severe injuries on those who seek to do her (or anyone she considers under her protection) harm, and use her powers to trespass, perform very artistic forms of vandalism, and subtly cheat at gambling. She'll give a stranger her last sandwich, but she'll also ruin a rich guy's fortunes if he's been heinous enough. She has a code of ethics, and a personal manifesto about the rights owed to all thinking beings which basically boils down to "do what you like but don't hurt each other". Big heart, big conscience...and still too quick a temper sometimes.
Her time with her Roma parents and their village has restored her sense of playfulness and even mischief. However, the one thing she has not yet sorted out is dating, since she has been a prisoner or occupied with other things her whole life. She's not romantic-comedy naive or anything, but she does have a baseline level of "How do I boy?"
She is confident to the point of near-recklessness in her powers. Her one overwhelming fear is imprisonment, though mind control is a close second. She tends to freak out of someone tries to drug her, pin her or restrain her hands.
Abilities/Powers: Wanda's reality-warping "chaos magic" powers are very flexible and can be used for a variety of effects. Technically, she may potentially be capable of doing almost anything with them some day...but she hasn't reached anywhere near the level of competence, confidence, practice and understanding she would need to access that kind of power. Still, she is one of the most powerful mutants of her generation. This is a fact that she takes a bit too much pride in.
Because she is deeply concerned with staying in control, and only makes a show of her powers when she has to or thinks she is alone, Wanda will tend to use the minimum amount of power possible to work her will. For example, instead of blasting an attacker off their feet, she might level him with a sudden burst of bad luck. Instead of exploding the head of a Sentinel, she will cause it to malfunction and misfire at one of its squadron. Direct attacks will aim to stun, entangle, or render unconscious as much as possible, and will often be backed up with a healthy helping of basic, but hard-practiced, combat skills. The only times she really uses dangerous amounts of power is when she is severely startled, desperate, or thoroughly enraged. At that time, the eerie blue glow that is a side effect of her power flares up from mere sparks to a nimbus that can at times cover her whole body. She has not yet figured out how to suppress this side effect, which gives away when she is using her power (and her position) nearly every time. Even if she veils her exact location with magic, she cannot hide the flash of blue light. If she is doing a minor casting, she might be able to hide around a corner or veil her hands somehow, but right now that is the best she can do.
Wanda's favorite uses for this power in canon include poltergeist-like psychokinesis, including moving (or animating) several objects at once, forcing junker cars to come to life Christine style and chase people down the street, and flinging people and large objects (including an entire walk-in freezer) around with a gesture. She is very good at glitching out, and to an extent taking over, machines, though extremely advanced and alien technologies are much more difficult, or even impossible, for her to affect. She can reshape matter, including warping it, liquefying it or shattering it--including large structures. She can alter the fortunes of herself and others in order to cause extraordinarily good (or bad) luck or timing, or unleash a curse which makes the very environment turn against them in bizarre ways.
Her attacks can partially or fully paralyze a victim, but only for the duration that she focuses on them. Finally, her "big gun" against other empowered beings is the ability to scramble, partly control, or counteract their powers. This causes such problems as Pietro getting his feet stuck to the floor, Nightcrawler randomly mis-teleporting, Jean Grey being forced to fling people around, and Magneto completely losing the ability to move or focus his powers. She cannot affect Apocalypse-level mutants or beings who are that much more powerful than she, but she hopes to some day change this. Meanwhile, she keeps this ability under her belt for when she really needs it, because she never wants to reveal just how strong she is until she has to.
Post-Canon Power Refinements: Wanda's raw power has not increased that much in a few years, but her focus and competence have skyrocketed with intensive practice and she is much more capable of doing fine work. She understands the basics of magic a lot more, and can do a host of little apprentice-level spells like conjuring a tiny fire ball or making a breeze carry a whispered message. Her major spell is the ability to put out fires by calming her mind, but doing so to a large fire will take time and (possibly dangerous amounts of) effort. She knows enough herbal magic to cure a headache or make someone fall asleep, can now enhance people's luck (including her own) as well as ruin it, fix things as well as break them, and make herself, something she is carrying or a certain object, vehicle or door less noticeable. She can now animate more complex devices, allowing her to do things like rig a roulette wheel, drive a car with her mind, or get an ATM to turn off its security camera and cough out all its twenties. She has not figured out flying but can now break a fall or pogo into the air with a psychokinetic blast. Finally and perhaps most importantly, her powers no longer run dangerously out of control when she is upset.
Possessions: Her uniform, two sets of clothing (a jeans set and a slinky black silk slip dress), 18-hole Docs, battered sneakers, photos of her family, a $1000 wad of cash various purse contents, a small (animatable) wooden doll that her father carved, her study grimoire with notes on her current assignments, her communicator.
