!application, posted on SEP 14th, 2011

[checkthetapes]

Player Information ;
Your Nickname: Roy!
OOC Journal: royali
Under 18? Nope. o7
Email/IM: Email: royalia at hotmail dot com| AIM: vonnerdyce | Plurk: also vonnerdyce!
Characters Played at Singularity: thom_293 and self_governance. A note on Pietro – although he and Charles are from the same sort of 'universe', Charles is completely unaware of his existence and Pietro wouldn't be terribly inclined to seek him out. Although he sees the man as a sort of surrogate uncle, he's also used to him being old and bald and in a wheelchair, and his stance on bb!Charles would fall more in line with UGH AN IMPOSTER AWAY WITH IT than 'UNCLE!!' This isn't going to change. And while Charles would probably be pre-disposed to communicate with him, it just. Isn't going to happen on Pietro's end.

Character Information ;
Name: Pietro Lehnsherr
Name of Canon: Marvel Ultimates (Earth-1610)
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon
Reference: Pietro at the Marvel Wikia and Earth-1610 at the same.
Canon Point: Ultimates Volume 2, issue 12, just after Pietro grinds Hurricane into dust by literally circling the planet with her at super-sonic speed. OOPS DID HE ACTUALLY HIT WARP AND STUMBLE INTO ANOTHER DIMENSION, god, people, this is why you don't pick on his friends.

Setting: First, In my abject nerdery, I transcribed a (semi-relevant) bit of rhetoric about mutants in the Ultimate universe, as written by Charles Xavier. It's not necessary, nor will I be relying on it to make the setting comprehensive, but it's an interesting insight into the setting regardless.

The Ultimates universe was created to be a sort of comprehensive reboot of some forty years of Marvel storytelling compressed into a series of issues and storylines that mirrored their originals, but with a modern, ~updated~ feel. The fact that it came out around the launch time of the X-Men movies is probably not coincidental – the guys at Marvel were in fact trying to make the story accessible to any new fans looking to get in on all the hot comic action.

To that note, a lot of the important stuff remains the same. Mutants are humans with an active X-FACTOR gene that gives them remarkable, miraculous, or just plain outlandish abilities. These abilities can range from telepathy, telekinesis, phasing through matter, transmuting one's body into organic mimicry of solid diamond – really, there's no limit save the human imagination when it comes to what these characters are capable of. Some mutations are functional or even useful, but some are decidedly not.

And, also in keeping with the spirit of the normal Marvel continuity, mutants are still hated, feared and ostracized by their less evolved fellows. Wolverine is still a 5'3 Canadian with a penchant for beer and an overzealous lust for stabbing things in the face with adamantium. Charles Xavier is still a hypocritical jerk with the genuine welfare of mutant-kind close to heart. Scott Summers is still a boyscout with a stick so far up his ass it’s amazing he’s not spitting splinters and the Phoenix Force is alive and well in one Jean Grey.

Mutants have a tendency to come in all the colours of the grayscale – some are good, some are wicked, some are peaceable and some wish to bring war to the world. One of those less-than-peaceful evolutionary stepping stones is one Erik Lehnsherr, or ‘Magneto’.

Gone is the Byronic anti-hero of the 616 verse. Gone equally is the conflicted, tortured man that so recently found himself up on the silver screen in the X-Men: First Class continuity. This Magneto is a cold-hearted, driven terrorist who believes quite firmly that mutant supremacy is the One True Way of the future, and he will feed this bitter medicine to the whole of the human race in a hail of molten metal, if necessary.

But the backlash from that fire and brimstone doesn't just affect humanity alone. The more aware of mutants humanity becomes (and really, Magneto makes it almost impossible to ignore) the more violent and vicious humanity acts towards those that aren't under an umbrella of protection. Mutants are being killed in hate crimes, they’re being vivisected in labs, they’re being hunted on public reality television shows. Those that are unfortunate enough to have physically visible mutations are shunned by society, driven underground or to taking their own lives. Those that can, hide. Those that can’t tend to gravitate to one extreme or another; even though they may themselves never join an official syndicate. And those extremes, as always, are the Brotherhood of Mutants and the X-Men.

Perhaps it’s a matter of birthright that Pietro finds himself allied with the former. After all, he is Magneto’s son, though you’d barely know it by their interactions. Magneto belittles him constantly, insults his ability, rarely speaks to him without some deprecating insult and uses both he and his twin sister Wanda (also known as the Scarlet Witch, a probability-altering mutant) rather unscrupulously on missions that seem designed to rip any moral fibre right out of them, something to which Pietro doesn't come across as averse to. He eagerly leaps at any opportunity to please his father, trying to earn even the humblest modicum of affection or praise in return, though it seems like everything he does falls short of some impossible standard that Magneto has set for him.

The Brotherhood seems primed for world domination. They spend their not-inconsiderable resources destroying public symbols and buildings that the Neanderthals seem so prone to treasuring. The X-Men, at this stage, are little better than schoolchildren, the oldest barely eighteen, and they aren't equipped or funded (did I mention that Charles Xavier is sort of a pauper in this universe?) to take on the Brotherhood.

And so, TERRORISM. A lot of people - most of them innocent - die at Pietro’s hands, all in this pursuit of mutant supremacy. Both he and his sister use their abilities to terrorize and murder people wherever Magneto wants people terrorized and murdered. It should be said that the children don't exactly enjoy it, but they do endure.

Until Scott.

Mister Summers, Xavier’s favourite and boyscout extraordinaire, is briefly a member of the Brotherhood, and in that time he realizes that Magneto’s methods are by and large worse than any heinousness brought about by Xavier's seeming passivity. So when the government sends mutant-killing robots known as ‘Sentinels’ into the heart of Magneto’s hideout, Magneto (with a scoff! what idiots are these that would send METAL ROBOTS against the MASTER OF MAGNETISM, you ask?) decides to re-work their circuit boards and program them to attack and kill any humans they encounter. And lo, does he take his merry robotic show-and-tell troupe straight to Washington, DC. His goal? To execute the President on national television. (with his own limousine, it bears mentioning.)

Magneto is untouchable. Very nearly invulnerable, save for one flaw in his natural design: his susceptibility to telepathy.

Of course, he has a helmet for that, right? Right?

Or he did, at least, until Scott more or less brow-beat Pietro ('isn't it about time you stood up to your freakin' dad for once in your life anyways, you little snot?') into running (across the ocean and several thousand associated miles) to his father and ripping the damnable thing off so that Charles could do mental voodoo on his brain. Of course, his motives are hardly clear even to himself – years of pent up anger, frustration, of being belittled and mocked and derided no doubt took their toll. He just has a lot of feelings, okay.

Thus de-helmeted, Magneto is now more or less helpless to the direct application of telepathy to his cerebral cortex, and Charles, to the casual onlooker, proceeds to murder Magneto with a very sinister application of his own magnetic powers.

And so, Magneto is dead (long live Magneto). The terrorist threat, or at least the figurehead thereof, neatly removed from the picture.

Pietro and Wanda lead the Brotherhood for a time, shifting the focus slowly but inexorably away from the murder and mayhem and into a different vein of terrorism – exposing governmental corruption, attacking economic centers, disarming and paralyzing the world's military forces. The idea for this shift in polarity seems to have come from none other but Charles himself, who oh-so-casually suggested it to the bereaved twins as an alternative to killing everyone they come across.

However, there are those in the Brotherhood to object to this new, tamer ideal. And it is a group of these such individuals who, upon finding out that Magneto is alive and well and living in Queens with a series of psychic blocks hammered into his brain to make him think that he is a helpless, harmless fourth grade teacher with no mutation at all proceed to remind him of who he really is.

Magneto, re-awakened to awareness by a group of the Brotherhood's psychics, has only one message for his children. 'Daddy's home'.

Understandably, they get the hell out of dodge. Not only did Pietro betray him in such a manner that resulted in his subjection to a menial, human existence, but he and Wanda then proceeded to neuter the Brotherhood and everything Magneto would have had it stand for. NOPE.AVI.

They run - not to the X-Men - but to one Nick Fury, the acting head of S.H.I.E.L.D, and the de facto authority on the superhero/metahuman team known as the Ultimates (but better known, probably, as the Avengers, because that’s sort of what they’re called in every other Marvel continuity except this one). At the time, the Ultimates are the primary offensive superhuman threat response team in America, and they are the ones immediately dispatched against Magneto. So Pietro and Wanda, at S.H.I.E.L.D's invitation, come to sit at the not-so-round table to offer what insight they may. And why not? They're already considered traitors to their kind, and their father isn't of a mind to be brimming with paternal affection. They literally have nowhere else to go.

Unfortunately for them, Magneto came to this conclusion all on his own, and he show up at the Triskelion building to punish his errant children. He does this by calling them to his side and, after a little speech (in which he furthers his attempt to tear down any of the self-worth that Pietro may or may not have been building up over the months of his supposed 'death'), he proceeds to shoot his son's knees out while his daughter watches.

There's a father of the year award to be had in there somewhere.

At this point, Wanda and Pietro sort of drop out of the storyline for a bit, and the universe rumbles on without them. It's not until Magneto is captured and imprisoned that we see either of them again, and by this time they're employed by Fury himself as a sort of covert black ops team. The public media, of course, would spurn the idea of Magneto's children working with their star-spangled Ultimates, and so their involvement with S.H.I.E.L.D is kept largely under wraps for over a year.

Instead, they're usually utilized on mutant-neutralization missions, hunting dangerous members of their own kind in such a way that allows their targets to be killed or imprisoned. It seems that they don't officially fight any missions alongside the Ultimates until they take down Thor – a battle in which Wanda and Pietro are both relatively instrumental.

But the big Moment of Crowning Badass comes during the later battle with Loki's forces. The Trickster God orchestrates everything – he has Captain America taken out of commission on false charges of treason, he arranges for Tony Stark to be out of the picture, he's had Thor locked up and presumed psychotic and schizophrenic, and he's had Hawkeye's family murdered and the man himself captured and interrogated.

Except, apparently he forgot to check his Evil Overlord Handbook, the part where it says 'the good guys always win.' Janet Pym breaks Cap out of confinement. Hawkeye, though summarily disarmed, uses his fingernails (ugh!) as projectiles to kill his captors. Wanda and Pietro are at the Triskelion building when it's attacked, and together they manage, with Pietro's super speed and Wanda's probability-altering powers, to save a healthy fraction of S.H.I.E.L.D staff. Thusly outfitted, there is a Battle.

And it's during this battle, whilst Pietro is defending Hawkeye's honour from the speedster on the other side, that Pietro sort of accidentally winds up in Sacrosanct.

Personality: In summation, DADDY ISSUES. Because issues. Pietro has them. He's spent his entire life falling short of Magneto's expectations, and this constant state of inadequacy and failure has given a form and shape to a personality that's fractured, splintered, contradictory and at times downright neurotic.

But he seems somewhat self-aware of all his issues, at least. He thinks too fast, functions too quickly to remain ignorant of his own neuroses. He's fully capable of recognizing just how damaged he is – though that doesn't necessarily mean he's going to try and fix it.

Pietro is by parts a victim, a martyr and a masochist. He acknowledges that his father is a psychopathic lunatic, that he deserves to be at the very least imprisoned for what he's done but at the same time, he hates himself for having abandoned the man, and he stands, perfect and patiently still, while Magneto metes out a punishment he sees as absolute and necessary.

He hates his father because he wants so desperately to be loved by him. Rationally, he understands that the man is deserving of nothing more than his contempt, but rationality doesn't always apply when the opposing maxim is one you've carried since childhood. If Pietro could get away with following Magneto around chirping WHY WON'T YOU LOVE ME at the hem of his cape, you know, he'd probably do it.

Apart from his father, the person that has the most influence over him is his twin sister, Wanda. There's nearly nothing he wouldn't do for her, and that statement is more or less without limit. They're almost never apart, and when they are it's usually due to the fact that Pietro's particular brand of combat makes it difficult for him to function as a close-knit member of a team.

But outside of combat, it's reasonable to assume that wherever Wanda is, Pietro is undoubtedly close at hand. This stems from insane possessiveness, protectiveness, and more than just a little bit of not-entirely-kosher love. Yep. As stated by Janet Pym in Ultimates 3, issue 1, Pietro has more than strictly familial feelings for his sister. But while they are physically close beyond the boundaries of normal sibling affection, their relationship is never shown to go beyond hand-holding, or curling up against each other in the cold, or light, playful jesting. Or readings of romantic poetry. Yeah.

So. Pietro himself.

Pietro exists in almost a constant state of unmitigated irritation. Everything around him functions at a level of speed that he literally cannot comprehend. It's like the world is moving in slow-motion, mired in molasses, and he's the only one who recognizes it. He gets impatient at the drop of a hat when someone doesn't understand a concept right away. He hates waiting on people to do things. Hell, he hates waiting, period. A series of panels in the 616!verse describe this as PMS – or Pietro Maximoff Syndrome. Despite the difference in his name between these two universes, the same idea still applies.

He is by turns arrogant, condescending, demeaning, abrasive and flat-out sarcastic. With strangers he tries to maintain a sort of aloof frigidity. When his buttons are pressed he can erupt into violent anger, quite literally before you can blink. He just has a lot of feelings, okay?

He's hot-tempered, impetuous, brash, impulsive. He tends not to think things through before he does them by virtue of not needing to think things through. His brain functions six or seven times faster than any human alive. He processes information and decides how to act almost before he himself knows what conclusions he's reached. Human are still 'cattle' to him, metahumans are barely above that themselves. He's never shown to directly contradict belief in Magneto's doctrines – ladies and gentlemen, the anti-hero.

That Pietro ends up on the Ultimates is not a matter of pure altruism. As mentioned, he and Wanda simply had nowhere else to go, no one else to take them in. They're considered race traitors by the Brotherhood, and they both abhor Charles Xavier's peaceful stance in mutant-human conflict resolution. With the Ultimates, he's at least doing something, even if it's not entirely a cause he believes in. Protecting humans? Yeah.

It's almost a form of atonement, of penance. Protect the cattle because there is no other option, because he does feel bad, in his own way, but not quite bad enough to do it out of the goodness of his heart.

That said – the longer Pietro hangs around with the Ultimates, the more tempered his personality seems to become. He's certainly still capable of all his other vices, but his anger outreach program is blunted, his words no longer carry quite the same level of biting cruelty. He's being rehabilitated, slowly, by being around people like Captain America and Clint Barton (who Pietro seems fond of in that way where Clint's an awesome daddy and he probably envies the man's children for the rapport they have with him) – but the stamp that Magneto left on him will probably never truly fade so much as it has the potential to be shaped into something not quite as... well, negative.

Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions:

SUPER SPEED: Pietro is generally described as (one of) the fastest mutant in the Marvel universe. In Ultimates, he kicks that up to eleven and states that he's been hitting Mach ten since he 'still had pimples'. The super speed applies to more than just the velocity at which he can travel – he can also read extremely fast, smoke an entire pack of cigarettes in seconds, solve rubix cubes between one beat of a normal human's heart and the next, and he can also sort of fly. However this is the least dignified experience ever (it involves flapping his arms) and he will probably not do it. Ever.

INCREASED REFLEXES: to avoid doing silly things like stubbing his toe while he's running at those ridiculous speeds of his, Pietro also has the reflexes to match.

INCREASED DURABILITY: In order to compensate for his body travelling at high velocity, his bones are harder and his organs and bodily requirements (oxygen, et al) are adapted to withstand the g-force he exerts on himself.

METABOLIC EFFICIENCY: Pietro has a ridic caloric intake to compensate for the energy expenditure he has when he spends time zipping around like a hummingbird on crack. As a result, his body is extremely efficient at breaking down proteins and the like.

HEIGHTENED BRAIN ACTIVITY: Similar to the reflexes, Pietro has a tendency to think seven or eight times faster than your average human (also, his heart beats twenty-five times a second!). This leaves him incredibly frustrated with most people because they simply cannot function as fast as he can. (Have you ever had to wait in line for the ATM behind someone who's never seen one before in their life? Yeah. He feels that way all the time. About everything. No wonder he's bitchy.)

MULTILINGUISTIC: He's shown to have a perfect grasp of both English and German, and he can probably also speak the mutant language of Epsilon-Omega.

Ooooof course the speed thing is going to be dampened on his arrival at Sing. But I would like to keep the brain activity around the same, because it's been shown in other applications of canon (namely, the Son of M continuity) that when Pietro loses his powers he becomes rather depressed and suicidal and crazy. So no hitting near-lightspeed for him, but I'd like to say he can still hit Mach 10 or 12. He'll also tire quicker than he's used to when he uses excessive amounts of super speed, so no zipping all over the station ceaselessly.

And of course, the obligatory 'thou shalt not godmode' commandment. Anything that Pietro has the potential to do with his super speed – throwing damsels over his shoulder, dressing people in drag before they can so much as blink at him – will of course be ran past any associated muns before being accomplished. He might be super-fast, but it's no fun for everybody if he just has free run of the station.

As for weaknesses, well. He's just as likely to die from a gunshot or a stab wound as anyone else, really. The trouble is of course that he can generally dodge these things if he knows they're coming.

Outside the realm of the physical, his biggest weakness is Wanda. Pietro loves his sister deeply and desperately. He basically loses his mind whenever she's hurt or threatened, and he is irrationally overprotective and possessive in her general direction. Pietro would do anything for her, and as such is rather easy to manipulate if someone knows which buttons to press. And because he is hot-headed and impetuous, it's not exactly an easy thing to overlook when every other word out of his mouth seems to be some variant on her name.

Inventory: One shiny black friction-proof suit made out of, hell, I don't know, ground up moon rocks or something. Because honestly, there is basically no malleable fabric on earth that could reliably take the sort of friction Pietro generates. MAGICAL MOON ROCK SUIT. That, plus his S.H.I.E.L.D identification pass and that pretty much sums up the extent of his earthly possessions at the moment.
Appearance: Pietro clocks in at just about six feet tall, and (depending on the artist of the hour) looks to be decently muscled. He has white hair and a rather Zoolandian BLUE STEEL gaze.
Age: Never officially stated, but it's reasonable to assume he falls somewhere in the range of 21-24.

OC/AU Justification ;
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across?
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test?
And What Did You Score?

Samples ;
Log Sample:

Celebrity. The word fair tasted foul even in the confines of his own mind. They lived in a world where celebrity meant being trotted out, trussed up, and stripped down on an altar of sacrifice for the impotent thronging masses of Dateline and Oprah. Everyone wanted to know your secrets, be you Captain America or Reed Richards or even Magneto's bastard, terrorist children.

Celebrity had won them public favour, certainly. Some journalist – braver than most, or perhaps just that much more entrepreneurial – had the bright idea to cast them as victims (he disliked that word) of Magneto's regime just as much as any human killed in his myriad attacks. Everyone loved an anti-hero, after all. As long as he and his sister made periodic statements to the press about putting their mutations to good use, as long as they were properly repentant, as long as they preached for peace and harmony and all those things that Magneto had spent years cautioning them against—

As long as they did those things, they were safe. The public failings of Bruce Banner were much more marked than anything they'd ever done. Pietro was far too fast to be caught by a camera, and Wanda had excelled at altering the probability thereof just in case. They'd never been caught red-handed on the scene of a crime in their lives, though undoubtedly they'd taken more than the eight hundred lives that Banner had managed in his little moment of indiscretion. And so, despite their heritage, they were permitted some small sliver of public affection, when they weren't being eclipsed by Tony Stark and Captain America, or the largely public domestic battle of the Pyms.

Generally, he tolerated it. Pietro had a remarkable capacity for endurance. But this went somewhere beyond that realm, reached into his gut and twisted like a knife-edge, or an adamantium claw.

The Scarlet Witch – hex or hero? An inane headline, though that hadn't stopped the magazine he now held from running an editorial beneath it.

There was a list of all his sister's public failings, a few more private ones undoubtedly leaked by some member of the Brotherhood who would be alive perhaps an eighth of a second after Pietro knew their name, and a segment on eligible super and metahumans it was suggested she date.

Tony Stark, who obviously had a thing for brunettes, and whose troubled past and intelligence made him the logical match.

Captain America, who could stop violating one of the sacraments of marriage if only he'd cease his petty adultery with Janet Pym.

Johnny Storm, who was sure to 'kindle a fire' in any romance.

Piotr Rasputin, Colossus. To say nothing of the size of his--

The paper was crumpled before it even became a clear thought in his mind. That he was angry was an understatement. Every fibre of his body seemed to thrum with anger, and his heartrate, steady and constant in a resting state at twenty-five beats a minute, was much, much higher.

Tony Stark had a fifty-two percent controlling interest in this petty little magazine. By that same note, Pietro had words for him. He half-hoped, for Stark's sake, that the man was already in his little iron carapace, because at least then the ensuing brawl would be half-fair.



Network Sample:


[the transmission is heralded by several premature activations. On – brief static, off again. On, brief static, off again. This happens five or six times, and finally, in audio only,]

I have no desire to bandy words. The name is Peter Maximoff, and I've a vested interest as to whether or not anyone here has heard of the Ultimates, Tony Stark or Steve Rogers, otherwise known as Captain America.

[... there's a moment of silence. It sounds positively grudging. And then,]

I would...appreciate it.

[There can only be so many explanations for the circumstances of his arrival. Wanda had once conjured dinosaurs, surely this isn't too far out of her grasp? But if not that, then he is either dead, or he did a little more than surrender Hurricane to g-force her body wasn't as elegantly designed as his was to withstand. He's read through all the necessary tutorials, and through half the network's contents beside – one of the perks of reading almost as fast as he runs – but there was nothing there that satisfied his curiosity. Until then, RECON. All the recon. Forever.]