NATALIA ALIANOVNA ROMANOVA

BLACK WIDOW

WITH THE EARTH OF A HUNDRED NATIONS IN MY SKIN
I'M AT YOUR BACK DOOR

Full Name: Natalia Alianovna Romanova.
Nicknames: Most of the time, Natalia has no name. She is anyone and everyone and no one and has had a thousand and one names that she has assumed and then left behind. Some, however, pop up more frequently than others. ‘Natalie Rushman’ is her main alias that she uses in her day-to-day life in America when wishing to avoid any obvious links to her Russian heritage and background, while ‘Laura Matthers’ is a name she often uses on jobs as well. When clients come looking for her particular…services, ‘Natasha Romanoff’ is what she goes by, a quiet dig at foreigners who don’t understand the differences between masculine and feminine family names in Russian culture. Lovers may call her Nat. Maybe. If she’s feeling generous.
Gender: Female.
Age: 27.
Sexual Orientation: Pansexual, though hardly romantic. She is extremely good at detaching herself from what her body does and so can pose as any particular sexuality for a job without it actually reflecting on her own tastes. She does not feel shame regarding anything she does on a mission and, predictably, is pretty adept at feigning passion and chemistry.
Usergroup: Human.
Occupation: ‘Natasha Romanoff’ trades in intelligence, at the simplest level of things. Some people believe they have hired a spy in her, others an assassin. More call her a mercenary and leave it at that because they hire her to get a job done and don’t care about the semantics. ‘Natalie Rushman’, on the other hand, is an American-born woman who is still chasing her dream of being a ballerina, though still auditions for other dancing jobs. Out of necessity, she is not particularly successful in her chosen field, and therefore isn’t above doing temporary work whenever and wherever suits the aspects of her other job and alias.
Canon or Original: Canon.

YOU WON'T RECOGNIZE ME
FOR THE LIGHT IN MY EYES IS STRANGE

Powers/Mutation: Any power that Natasha has comes from training, not from her genetics. It is therefore safe to say that, though she may hold her own with some powered individuals, mutants will generally trump her in anything that is more than a purely physical fight.

Skills: The most obvious of Natasha’s skills were taught to her during her intensive training in the Red Room’s Black Widow ops programme, where she and other girls were taught to be the best intelligence operatives that Russia could offer. Due to being introduced to them at a very young age, when she was malleable and versatile in both brain and body, most of these are second nature to Natasha by now.

There is no specific name for the style of fighting Natasha uses, only that it involves a lot of turning and whirling and impossible-looking acrobatics in which one move flows seamlessly to the next. It was a style very obviously designed for women since she is no stronger than someone who is biologically human, despite being in peak physical condition in a sense probably comparable to that of an Olympic gymnast, and focuses on beating stronger opponents through ruthless speed, almost boneless-seeming flexibility and fighting dirty. There is no honour in the way that she fights, merely the intention of incapacitating someone as fast as possible to avoid being backed into a situation where her own fairly average strength would count against her. If able to be a whirling dervish in form-fitting black, Natasha is a ferocious fighter – quick and agile and often very, very difficult to keep a hold of – but she is still also limited by being a woman, five foot five and of a decidedly slender build. She is easily outmatched in strength and, though capable of working through an almost fiendish amount of pain, vulnerable when injuries slow her down or impair her flexibility.

Unarmed fighting was only an aspect of her training, though. Natasha is never found without at least one (preferably two) gun on her, her favoured model being a very easily hidden Ruger LCP. She does technically have a concealed carry permit, but is inclined to naturally be sneaky anyway and her everyday clothes are tailored to avoid drawing notice to either the ankle or small-of-back holster, though the gun is also small enough to fit in a jacket pocket which appeals to her more than it should. She is an excellent marksman, but also requires routine practice to keep her eye in. While working for Russian intelligence, she was kept up to date with all the latest models in other gun-types and practiced with those on a regular basis – now that she is freelance, though, she has reduced access to these weapons. This has resulted in her rifle and general sniper skills having probably grown rusty over the years and some of the most up to date models of larger guns might give her some pause. She is also small enough that large guns with powerful recoils are, physically, not suited to her.

Though also trained in and extremely proficient with the flat-bladed throwing knives she keeps secreted on her person to be produced in moments of need, some of Natasha’s weapons are decidedly tailored to her own particular fighting style. Two heavy-looking bracelets around her wrist actually conceal wires made of a metal alloy chosen for both tensile strength and conductivity. Using these, Natasha has a weapon that can either make a handy garrote or a rappelling cable depending on the situation. They also include a dart-based firing mechanism and a small generator through which electrostatic bolts can be given down the connecting wire, a shock deemed her ‘widow’s kiss’. These can stun or incapacitate, depending on the variable charge that she controls, though this development did also include modifying her uniform so that she was insulated against her own weapon.

Combat is only one part of espionage, however. An even bigger part was about being able to fit in, to blend in wherever was necessary. A heavy part of Natasha’s training, and the part she found the most difficult, involved being rigorously drilled in language lessons until fluency was reached. It was difficult to achieve, and probably only happened because she was so young when she first started her education, but Natasha is fluent in at least seven languages, including English, French, Japanese, Hindi and Mandarin. Russian, of course, is her mother tongue and, oddly, her Russian accent only betrays itself when she is speaking English, though she was worked supremely hard to try and eradicate it altogether. Some days, she succeeds better than others. She was also tutored in diplomacy and etiquette, giving her access to higher-end events and company in cases where such infiltrations where necessary. Natasha is extremely practiced at playing the elegant, highborn lady and it’s one of her easier identities to assume, tailoring the image of course for each specific situation. It’s classier than being a whore or escort though, at the end of the day, often involves the same ending. To reflect this, her Red Room training did not respect or cater for innocence and all Black Widow trainees were given an educated in both seduction methods and sexual technique. Due to this, Natasha is often rather more clinical about sex than the average woman her age.

Other aspects of being a good spy involved being trained in the use of technology, both decoding information and encrypting them, though her hacking knowledge is only rudimentary. Natasha was also trained in the use of sedatives and poisons, as well as interrogation and torture techniques. Finally, all Red Room graduates were expected to be able to serve as assassins, for all that that was not their primary purpose. More particularly, they were able to make deaths look either natural or attributed to some other cause, and Natasha has never flinched away from this. She is also adept at disguising herself, via clothes, make-up and prosthetics, though keeping her naturally red hair the same in her day-to-day persona is both a physical and mental weakness since it makes her identifiable.

All Red Room graduates were given a cover story as well and the necessary training to back it up. Natasha’s involved being an aspiring ballet dancer, with the skills that went along with that dream. She is not stellar, but her natural grace and physical training lend itself decently towards the discipline to make her an average ballerina, which is useful to not let her succeed too much as ‘Natalie Rushman’ and draw attention to herself via any sort of starring role. She is good enough to be a chorus dancer and nothing more, also lacking the vocal skills that would make her more employable on stage. Ironically, she has to pretend to not be that decent an actress when, truly, she’s a chameleon and used to living in the roles that her jobs often require of her.

The one piece of tech that she reliably uses is actually implanted in her abdomen, hidden amidst her internal organs, and is a wireless device that collections information on her surroundings, her companions, on anything it can at all times. One never knows when such information will come in useful and a good spy never turns down a chance to collect knowledge after all…

Personality: Natasha is anyone and everyone and no one all at once. Confused? You should be. But she’s a spy and what else would you expect of her other than to be many-faced? Natasha is quite simply what she needs to be, when she needs to be. If that means being forgettable and blending into a crowd, then that’s what she’ll be, just as easily as she’ll put on any sort of act to get the job done – seduction, amusement, intimidation, ghost in the night, she’s been them all, and will be again. The heart of the matter is that Natasha was raised to be a blank slate onto which personas could be drawn in glorious, technicolour 3D – during which time she would live and breathe them completely – before wiping herself clean in preparation for her next mission.

To call Natasha Romanoff a liar is a understatement. She tells the truth only when necessary, or when it benefits her, because information is the currency of her world. There is no such thing as an ex-spy, they say, and even though her official days of espionage are behind her, Natasha is not the kind to say anything more than she has to. She holds her secrets close to her heart and is positively allergic to displaying any vulnerabilities. In fact, much of her life is spent in the pursuit of having as close to none as possible – she would say none full stop except she was trained to exploit those weaknesses in other people and knows better than most how everyone has an Achilles’ heel somewhere.

So while she admits her own weak spots exist, she also does her best to hide them, going so far as to construct fake vulnerabilities for opponents to ‘discover’ and put off the hunt for her true weaknesses. Sometimes, it feels as if all that Natasha is was and is a construct, someone else’s creation, and it is sometimes hard for even her to work out who she is at the core given that she is such a chameleon on the outside. After all, her acts go bone-deep for realism’s sake, a testament to when her job and her very survival relied on her being convincing.

Self-preservation is a fairly large part of Natasha’s motivations. She used to focus solely on serving her country as well she could, but once a certain amount of independence was achieved she started looking out only for herself. Natasha can be in a crowded room and still be completely isolated with how little she gives of herself, or invests in anything or anyone.

In many ways, it is this lack of a specific motivation that actually makes her weaker and less dangerous than her previous incarnation of herself when she was the Black Widow in truth. When she worked for Russia, she belonged to them. Working for her country was all she was and there was nothing that she was not willing to do for the mission, including the sacrifice of her own life were it necessary. Now, however, with her own survival being the main thing worth fighting for…well, there are obviously limits to what she is willing to risk. Without a specific cause to fight for, Natasha is both less dangerous and weaker than the Black Widow ever was.

That is not to say that she is not a force to be reckoned with. Her thorough training aside, what makes Natasha dangerous is that she does not flinch. She is not prone to hesitation or second-guessing herself and never hesitates when it comes to making a decision. She is almost eerily cold to all appearances, as clinical where her life is concerned as a doctor or a scientist, and is fairly obviously detached from what it is that she does. She is more thoughtful and analytical than passionate and, indeed, views being overly-emotional as a weakness, as a vulnerability.

In another world, maybe Natasha would have been taught to love, to not view all feelings as a diminishing of who she was, but this is not that world – left to her own devices and at the mercy of her training, Natasha often is just simply the job and nothing more since she hasn’t been taught that anything else matters. Or, more correctly, that it is sometimes worth letting yourself be vulnerable. As far as Natasha is concerned, the loss of her husband and child was enough to teach her that it is easier and more sensible to not care.

This is possibly why she almost never laughs in a completely sincere, though it has to be pointed out that she was developed at least a subtle, albeit barbed sense of humour in the years since her defection from service to the Russion government. And, as her ongoing ‘act’ as Natalie Rushman, she portrays innocent and happy rather well. For the most part, the petty lives of civilians and other ignorant people alternately bore her and make her feel hugely superior. It's rare that anyone actually amuses her, even rarer that she actually feels as if she can talk to someone as if they're equal. Hers is both a lofty and highly isolated role in the world.

In truth, however, Natasha is all ice on the inside, retreating to a white and dispassionate place within her that, whatever is affecting the outer layers of her psyche, is somewhere that is always calm and precise, which allows her to do what she does. She is a hard woman making a living in a world in a way that means she does not have to owe her allegiance to anyone ever again, something she is rather determined not to have to repeat after how difficult it was to extract herself from the world of Russian espionage. Once, she fought for them. Now, she just works for her own survival and that entails keeping her options open, being willing to swap to whichever side she sees coming out on top of whichever conflict is currently ripping the world in half. She is therefore not hugely loyal or dependable to anyone other than herself, and is not above being hugely manipulative even where people she actually likes are concerned. She does not see this as betrayal, though, merely business – nothing personal.

After all, Natasha is a hugely resourceful and ruthless woman and, when it comes to getting the job done or furthering her own goals, no one is sacred or untouchable. Including herself – during her training at the Red Room, seduction techniques were involved, and Natasha would not bat an eyelid at selling herself for a cause. She is detached from herself emotionally, but also physically. What happens to her body, or what she does with it…it doesn’t affect her. Not who she is at the core. And that similar detachment is why there is quite so much red in her ledger. She does not kill wantonly or for fun, but she won’t hesitate to take a life either if it is necessary. And blood on her hands doesn’t make her feel anything other than a desire to take a shower. She is clinical and practical and only ever does something for a reason.

She is not completely inhuman, however, as much as she thinks it would make her career so much easier. She has a dark sort of humour, in a very dry sort of way. She likes the sense of satisfaction she gets when she finishes a job. She likes martinis, the dirtier the better. She even likes sex, when she’s actually choosing to have it for reasons other than a job, but doesn’t indulge all that regularly – she tends to be attracted to confident, powerful men, but is contrary and also wants to stay away from the limelight and the public eye. This is mainly because Natasha is not driven to be successful for glory, or for credit. She doesn’t care about that at all. Even if her successes were attributed to someone else, she wouldn’t care. It suits her, even, because if her crimes are thought to have been committed by another person…well, then they can’t be traced back to her, can they?

No such thing as an ex-spy, remember. You can take the girl out of the intelligence unit, but you can’t take away her love for secrecy… Ideally, Natasha would like to live forever in the shadows and gets actively twitchy if she feels exposed or under-surveillance. She is too composed to ever be called paranoid, but it is also true that she likes to know she has at least three different exit-strategies from any situation. This may or may not be why she has safe rooms hidden around any city she routinely frequents, places bought or rented under an alias with no connection to herself where she keeps a weapons stash, emergency money, various identities and credentials that would allow her to escape at short notice. Natasha is a woman who always has a back up plan.

Predictably, this also means that she’s very difficult to get to know. And also that, honestly? She doesn’t really know how to be herself anymore. Or who that is, even. For all of her life, she’s been trained to be someone other than herself, anyone that is asked of her, and that’s a hard habit to kick. Natasha doesn’t let people in, doesn’t let them get close, and that’s a weakness all by itself because no person is an island and yet she tries to be. Because of this, she can never have the strength that allies and friends afford since she sees potential ones as enemies and vulnerabilities first. Natasha trusts no one other than herself, counts on no one other than herself…and therefore cannot be counted on herself. There is also a very real possibility that underneath all those aliases, those identities, those acts…she is nothing. No one. Empty.

Mainly because she hasn’t had cause to actually be anyone other than her acts yet.

Physical Appearance: In spite of her Russian background, Natasha isn’t entirely sure where her naturally dark-red hair comes from. Having no memories of any members of her family doesn’t give her any hints as to where it descends from and only its existence proves that someone passed the genetics onto her. Either way, it is thick and prone to curling, while being the colour of old blood. In the right light, burgundy hints are drawn out of it and, at night, it is deep enough in shade to appear black.

To go with this, she has a redhead’s naturally pale complexion. Though lacking in freckles, her skin can be almost translucent-seeming and it is very easy for her to look washed-out or tired. Any movement of blood beneath her skin is visible and she bruises excessively easy (though she has also become very practiced at covering these up with make-up to reduce the risk of drawing attention to herself.) If she was the type to blush much, which she isn’t, her cheeks would have conducted rosiness very easily.

Her eyes, while also being a washed-out and somewhat indeterminate shade that varies between blue and grey, are fairly hooded and quite often lowly-lidded. This, and the combination of some almost ridiculously thick eyelashes, make her expression fairly hard to read if all you’re focusing on are her eyes. Then again, Natasha makes a habit of keeping her face perfectly neutral when she doesn’t want to let anything slip, so maybe her eyelashes are not entirely to blame. Overall, her face is discretely heart-shaped, with a decided but not particularly dramatic chin and jawline, with cheeks that are more rounded than sculpted. Her nose is narrow and somewhat long, but the focus of her facial features tend to be her lips, which are extremely full for all that she doesn’t actually have a particularly large mouth. They might have been friendlier, however, if Natasha was more prone to smiling…

Her build is described as being that of a dancer – long-limbed, slender and toned – when, actually, hers is an athlete’s body disguised as a dancer’s. Natasha keeps herself religious in-shape, since being a fighter is part of what allows her her continued independence. Though not hugely tall, standing at just five foot five in her bare feet, with a natural tendency towards being somewhat fine-boned and delicately-built, Natasha has worked hard to put muscle on her body. So in spite of being slender and having a face that looks remarkably soft, the rest of Natasha is toned and tight. Her figure is fairly flashily curvy though, with a small waist that gives the illusion of boosting a modest chest that she does however know how to enhance, and she does definitely have ‘junk in her trunk’ as they say.

‘Natalie Rushman’ wears jeans and ballet flats and ratty camisole tops. ‘Natasha Romanoff’ wears whatever her job calls for. If that’s six inch-heels and a Chanel evening gown, then so be it. If it’s fishnets and a corset, she’ll make that work as well. And if it’s her uniform for fighting, or sneaking around in the shadows, then that’s a practically seamless, form-fitting body-suit that does not impede her flexibility in any way and also affords her insulation against her own electrical weapons. A belt made of interlocking metal discs rides low on her hips and serves as a fairly discrete form of utility belt, while this uniform also consists of a thigh and waist holster for her two pistols. Though difficult to see, there are various slits in the uniform from which Natasha can pull throwing knives deliberately chosen for their flatness and thinness, given that it’s fairly difficult to hide anything in such a tight uniform. Finally, bracelets that match the belt loop around her wrists and contain 200m of extremely thin, strong wire when combined, as well as the small generator that allows her to deliver her ‘widow’s kiss’.

Play by: Scarlett Johansson

History: They said the Romanoffs were descended from the last czars of Russia. They said that the ruling bloodline lived on. They said that they were once royalty, leaders, powerful.

Natalia Romanova was born poor, unwanted and alone. Blood did nothing for her.

Even in 1985, the poorest families in Volgograd – the industrial city formerly known as Stalingrad – suffered in the depths of poverty. Affordable food supplies were limited, healthcare was limited and the housing the Romanoff family squeezed themselves into…well, it was neither fit for czars or particularly safe. And all the heritage in the world didn’t save them when an electrical fault during the dying months of Natalia’s first winter caused a spark that festered unnoticed by the torpid family until it was too late.

Her family burned. Her mother and father and grandmother and uncle, and the brothers and sisters she would never knew existed. They all died and so too would have Natalia had her mother not smashed a windowpane and shoved the only one of her children who would fit through it out into the snow. The nine month old baby girl listened to her family burn to death, not aware of what the screams signified, only that her own cries of hunger and cold went unheeded.

Lying in a snowdrift could have killed her as surely as the flames she’d escaped from for all that it would have been a slower death, but fire services did arrive eventually, albeit too late for the rest of the baby girl’s family. And someone noticed the almost blue-skinned child lying in the snow close to the smouldering wreckage of her once-home, so Natalia was saved.

In a fashion.

Orphanages in an industrial city were hardly a priority when it came to achieving funding. Volgograd was a hard place to live in even if you were fit, healthy and able to find work, let alone if you were small, orphaned and unwanted. Natalia became a nameless ward of the state, a mouth to feed on the government’s money, and in a way she became their property. Because it was one thing to waste money on an unwanted girl-child…and quite another to make an investment into what, in the future, could be something of use to the then Soviet Union. So, before she could talk or walk or comprehend the decisions that were being made on her behalf, Natalia Romanova was sold into service.

She did not grow up with parents and siblings. Instead, she had instructors and fellow recruits and, really, you couldn’t mourn the loss of something you’d never known. Natalia was not unhappy growing up, simply because she didn’t know life was anything other than this. And what was ‘this’ exactly? It took years for Natalia to found out, given how the instructors placed a much heavier emphasis on working than asking questions, but answers gradually seeped out among Natalia and the other young orphans she trained alongside. They were recruits, in a facility called the Red Room Aacademy, and she and all the other orphaned or unwanted girl-children here had been cut away from all their ties in the outside world to make them purely focused on their training and their targets.

This was the KGB’s ‘Black Widow Ops’ program. And Natalia Romanova was going to grow into one of their most promising recruits.

The Soviet Union may have ended when Natalia was six, but her training did not. The girls did not even notice the fall of the U.S.S.R., so insular was their life. Constantly ranked and never allowed to feel relaxed or complacent about their standing within the facility, the girls were drilled relentlessly. Physically, they were taught to fight, to blend in, to survive no matter the cost. They were taught espionage skills and how to lie in seven different languages. They were drilled in politics and diplomacy and the differences between taking down a person and a government.

They were taught to be spies and assassins and anyone other than themselves. And, because they were orphans in a country with no use to them, the girls learned because they had no other purpose, no other reason to be. Natalia, with no memories of a life before the Red Room, well, she learned faster than most. When, at the age of 16, the girls who were ranked ‘A’ out of all of them were given the dregs, girls ranked ‘E’ who were unlikely to ever be good enough to be of worth to the government, and told to prove their dedication to the cause…well, Natalia passed. Without blinking. She was named ‘Black Widow’ and left the Red Room behind to serve Russia in whatever way she could.

The war may have been over and Soviet Russia no more, but the world still ran on the currency of intelligence, so there would always be work for spies. Before she was twenty, Natalia had been sent on missions in twenty-seven countries (smuggling herself out of three of those in coffins, which was always fun), brought home information that let her superiors blackmail several world-leaders when she didn’t do it herself and had seduced at least three members of various old, ancient royal families. There was that supposed czar blood showing through again…or not. Natalia did exactly what was needed of her, expected of her, and the only identity that mattered to her was the one that got the job done.

She was a good spy. Possibly one of the best on the payroll. And that was mainly because she’d never known anything different. Espionage was her life and Natalia had been trained to be the best, to accept being nothing less than that because failure…failure got you handed to the wolves. It was something one of her instructors had said during her time in the Red Room – ‘there are wolves in the night.’ At the time, she hadn’t been sure what it had meant, but the older she grew, the more dangerous she became, she realized this – that there wasn’t all that much difference between wolves and girls like herself.

They both had sharp teeth.

Natalia was her government’s wolf and she hunted at their command, never questioning the aspects of her life that they had shaped and controlled over the years. At least until she met him.

He was a pilot. And she was a spy. It should have been a horrible cliché and, in many ways, it was. Because Natalia had never been interested in anything other than the job before and yet, suddenly, here was someone who pulled on her in an entirely different way. He wasn’t a client or an informant or someone she needed to seduce for work.

He was something entirely different. And even girl-wolves put away the fangs at some point.

Her pilot represented the moment that the Russian government lost its previously complete control over the Black Widow. After he wrapped a ribbon around her finger (too poor to afford a real ring, he said) Natalia was no longer wholly belonging to her job, her mission. In fact, she was showing dangerous signs of caring about something (someone) more than her work and her allegiance to her employers.

Clearly, her owners were less than thrilled by this turn of events. Maybe if it had just been the man, they would have found ways to work around it…but when a routine medical checkup revealed a pregnancy, well, that was too much. Too many other tugs on Natalia’s loyalty. And there distractions had to be dealt with.

Natalia was told that it was a test flight accident that left her a widow and, oh, her codename had never seemed more ironic. For all that Natalia presented a stoic, uncaring face to the world, her sharp ears picked up on the first whispers of ‘the Widow’s curse’. Later in her life, they would be familiar ones. Now they actually pricked at her composure and that was something Natalia had never had to deal with before, the sense that ‘hurt’ and ‘grief’ and ‘loss’ were anything other than acts she put on for the job. Suddenly, feelings were no longer something she just had to feign. And she was no longer the only person she had to look out for.

The baby in her was the last relic she had of her husband. It was also the biggest threat to her usefulness to the Russian government, as the one thing that suddenly mattered more than her doing her job. And yet, it was her own body that betrayed her, not her bosses.

A stillbirth was the final nail in the coffin of Natalia’s blind devotion to her country. Before, it had been simple – the Red Room and her espionage work had been all she’d known and therefore all she’d cared about. But with grief for a husband and a child so raw in her…it gave the spy more perspective than she’d ever had before. But she was the woman she’d been trained to be, an actress and a liar down to her bones, and even in spite of her losses she knew that her own continued existence depended on proving that she was still useful to her intelligence unit.

So for a year, nearly two, she worked, as normal. Or as close to normal as there was for an international spy who specialized in extracting sensitive information from the most close-mouthed of marks. With the only testament to her little ‘slip’ being a few silvery lines on her belly, Natalia outwardly seemed to be more focused on her job than ever. Mutants were a rising problem in the world and most governments, her own included, were scrambling to work out what they represented in the long game. The Russian take on it all was that, much like little orphan girls, mutants were just another commodity to be used. They represented opportunities. More than that, they represented weapons. And Russia wanted to latch onto this notion before other countries did. Natalia’s job was simple – find the mutants. Find the powerful ones. And report back to Russia with the best way for recruiting them or, in some cases, taking them.

Natalia found many mutants. Brought some of them home as well. But, along the way, she also found alternatives. Escape routes. And twenty-one months after giving birth to a baby who never took its first breath, the Black Widow was sent to Georgia to bring back a mutant that her bosses wanted.

Instead, she disappeared.

She was meticulous. She was thorough. More than that, she was careful not to give Russia any reasons to come and find her. It was one thing to defect, but another entirely to make them need to eradicate her. So for a couple of years she moved around, laid low, put on faces as easily as she left them behind. The problem with training a girl to spy for you was that you also trained her to get away from you, and as hard as they looked for her, the Black Widow as they knew her was gone. Lost.

Now, Natalia Romanova is merely a name from the past, given how few people look at Natasha Romanoff or Natalie Rushman and know who she used to be. Natalie Rushman is a New Yorker, with aspirations of being a dancer. She likes cappuccinos and greek food and films that make her cry. She is completely ordinary, nothing special, and as forgettable as everyone else who came to the city with dreams bigger than themselves. Natasha Romanoff, though…she’s a name in the underground. A person you come to with a specific question, a want, a desire. For the right price, she’ll get it for you. She may not use her codename in its original intention and setting, but the Black Widow she is in America is something of a play on how she catches any information that comes into her ‘web’, including that of the ‘world wide’ variety.

Following in the footsteps of her trainers, though, her specialty is anything related to mutants. Because Russia had it right – mutants aren’t going to just disappear, though the role they will play in the future is unclear. Because of that, Natasha is…flexible. Registration is a very real possibility and if it comes, she wants to be ready for it, collecting information on just who’s a mutant, what they do, where they live. It’s information like that that she plans to barter – either selling or keeping secret. She isn’t fussy about who she works for.

All she knows is that she wants to be on the winning side.

RP Sample:

Hi my name is Lell! I'm twenty-one years old and I found this site through technically, I’m pretty sure I get half of it if Penni and I ever get divorced.

I hate you, but not more than I love you. I've never been a fan of Black Widow, of her character, her plots, or the face they cast for her in the movies. ScarJo has never been a favorite of mine, and she's actually one of those celebrities whose face I hate. Well. At least I did. It's taken time, and research to be able to approve your application, but luckily I read fast. And luckily you're the amazing writer you are. Not only to I feel my pure disinterest of this Natasha to be wavering, but I also think I can approve of her face. You've taken a character I knew little to nothing about, and didn't want to, into someone I think I could end up liking and appreciating and wondering why she's not been in play for so long. And that, that's really just an amazing example of your talent. I love the way you've folded her into our ever growing verse and I know I'm going to adore that which you do with her.

Hit the claims. You know the drill.