the patterns are simple, the rules are complex

Player Information:
Name: Aubrey
Age: 23
Contact: mortalcity
Game Cast: Rikki Barnes

Character Information:
Name: Natasha Romanoff
Canon: Marvel Cinematic Universe (Iron Man 2 & Avengers)
Canon Point: Toward the end of Avengers: after the battle, before returning Loki to Asgard
Age: Late 20s or early 30s
Reference: Marvel Wikia

Setting:

Say it with me now: it's your basic Earth, but...

This variation comes with a lot of magic ~SCIENCE~!! that turns people into super soldiers and giant green rage monsters and shit, way too many geniuses (evil and otherwise) who make poor life choices, plenty of aliens and their toys, and a handful of gods (that are actually aliens).

The first major deviation from the standard Earth timeline (if you ignore certain Norse myths that it turns out aren't entirely fictional) is in World War II, when the United States Army began a program to create super-soldiers. The assassination of the lead scientist left them with a single super-soldier rather than the army they had intended: a man named Steve Rogers, who became known as Captain America. He was a legend in his own time, one of the great heroes of the war, and remains one today; he was presumed dead when he crashed Nazi super-soldier Johann Schmidt's plane in the Arctic to prevent it from detonating its bombs anywhere populated. The Tesseract, a mysterious power source possessed by Schmidt, was later found in the ocean, but both the plane and Rogers were eventually considered lost for good.

After the war, a secret organization called the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division was formed, in part by those who'd worked closely with Erskine and Rogers. SHIELD was created to anticipate and combat threats beyond ordinary military and espionage organizations - all the stuff mad science and rogue gods gets you, though they do seem to involve themselves in non-preternatural events as well.

Natasha Romanoff is an agent of SHIELD, recruited by Clint Barton when he was sent to kill her - she'd become a problem for SHIELD, too dangerous to be allowed to remain alive, but he saw something else for her, and apparently convinced his superiors they'd be better off with her on their side than dead. He was right. Natasha began her training so young it's very likely she doesn't remember a life before it - she was raised as a spy, and had her memories and identity altered and overwritten for her handlers' purposes probably more times than she's aware of. She was trained and programmed for efficiency, not mercy; she did terrible things, shed innocent blood, and eventually drew SHIELD's attention through her actions. Since then, she's made an effort to make up for what she's done, but she's well aware of the burden she carries, and of what she owes to those in SHIELD who gave her the chance to set things as right as she can.

In the past few years, the events SHIELD deals with have become more and more common and, possibly more importantly, more and more public: Dr. Bruce Banner's exposure to gamma radiation, turning him into the Hulk; Tony Stark building himself a "high tech prosthesis" and turning himself into a superhero; Thor's banishment to Earth and the subsequent showdown that leveled a small town in New Mexico... It's kind of a problem for them.

Recently, SHIELD's director, Nick Fury, began a project called the Avenger Initiative - he wanted to bring together a group of extraordinary people to fight the battles too big for anyone else on Earth, including SHIELD. Natasha was in charge of vetting Tony Stark for the team, briefly going undercover as his assistant - the initial evaluation did not go well, Tony being... well, Tony, and the Avengers Initiative was seemingly set aside for the time being.

That changed when the Tesseract, which SHIELD had been researching (and using to build weapons), was stolen by Loki, crazy murderous brother of Thor. They couldn't leave something so powerful in the hands of a psychotic god, and they certainly couldn't fight him directly, so Fury made another attempt at making the Avengers Initiative a reality. He brought in Tony Stark, Steve Rogers (recently retrieved from the ice after having been found alive, if unconscious) and Bruce Banner, with Natasha and her handler Coulson serving as something like liaisons between the three of them and SHIELD - or possibly babysitters, to put it less charitably. They were later joined by Thor, who had returned to Earth to retrieve Loki, and Clint, brainwashed by Loki when he first arrived on Earth, brought back to himself by a calculated blow to the head. Together, the team managed to stop Loki and the alien invasion he brought with him... though not without some major damage to Manhattan. We're sure the city will get used to this sort of thing after a few more movies.

Personality:

"You're a triple imposter; I've never seen anything like it. Is there anything real about you?"

To most people, Natasha is the perfect spy: inscrutable, perfectly adaptable, perfectly competent, fearless, emotionless, and capable of almost anything. She has a sort of quiet, low-level paranoia of the kind that involves knowing where all the people, exits, and possible weapons are in a room at all times, and doesn't seem to really trust anyone. She's very... intense, giving the impression that there's little else to her but her job, like she's weighing and judging every little thing about you, and every move she makes is calculated to achieve a specific goal.

The fact is that there's little room in her life for anything that's not calculated one way or another - with her training and conditioning, she barely has unconscious reactions anymore, not in her expressions or body language, and certainly not in her words or actions toward others. She is, however, very good at faking it, and all of those carefully calculated reactions can seem perfectly natural when she wants them to. Natasha's something of a social chameleon, becoming an entirely different person at a moment's notice, and even when she's being "Natasha Romanoff", that's a sort of performance in and of itself: due to what was done to her as a child and in her work as a spy, she's had to construct the person she is out of what's left behind when you take away the Black Widow.

If you're one of the rare few she's actually willing to be something approaching herself around, rather than some cover personality (which includes the distant, cold "SHIELD agent" personality she's cultivated for most people who supposedly meet "Natasha Romanoff"), she's still not a very emotive person. She's generally very laidback, calm about almost everything and often the voice of reason in a group - but with a certain deadpan sarcasm you don't usually see when she's working.

Natasha is confident and self-assured, but never arrogant - she's simply perfectly aware of her abilities and limits, of what she's good at and where she needs help, and so there's no need for doubt or hesitation in her world. Even when tied to a chair presumably being interrogated by Russian thugs, or being violently threatened by a psychotic god, she is entirely in control of the situation and obviously knows it. She feels no real need to prove herself or take offence when people underestimate her; she'll use their error in judgement to her advantage when it will be most useful, and she isn't particularly emotionally affected by what they think of her in the meantime.

Then again, it's rare to see her really genuinely emotional about anything - and even when she is, she seems to have the ability to switch her feelings on and off at will, or at least to bury her true feelings deeply enough that you'd never dig them up unless she wanted you to see them. There is, of course, a very good reason for that. In Natasha's world, for her entire life, feelings of any kind are dangerous, a lever for other people to use against you no matter if they're positive or negative... and so she plays them close to the chest, and shuts them down or ignores them if they become too dangerous.

If you asked her, she doesn't have friends, she has people she works with and people she owes a debt. That's simple and safe; that's something a spy can understand, and nothing that can be used to hurt her. "Love is for children" is the way she put it when speaking to Loki, and while she is playing him, she's also not lying - she believes it, wholeheartedly. In loving, you give a part of yourself away; not only do you have to trust the other person not to hurt you, there's now a part of you out in the open, a part of you that can't be protected completely.

When speaking about her affection for Clint, at her most honest, she describes it as being compromised, the same way she speaks about Clint being brainwashed, because that kind of emotion is a liability a spy can't afford. However, when people make it past her armor and into that "compromised" zone - the way Clint and Coulson have - she will go to the ends of the earth for them. For Clint, certainly the person closest to her, she walks out of a mission, faces the Hulk, gets up to fight on what's almost certainly a sprained ankle and bruised ribs, and walks into a warzone when she openly acknowledges she is not a soldier and doesn't particularly belong there. At this point, she would probably do the same for any of the Avengers as well, if necessary.

Probably the biggest thing that bothers her about feeling that much about anyone is that it's fundamentally a loss of control - and her entire life has been about control in one way or another, either being in control or having a total lack of it. She didn't choose to be a spy or an assassin - she had that chosen for her, when she was just a little girl, and by the time it was even remotely possible for her to make that choice, she was broken and twisted into this thing that wasn't good for much of anything else. She didn't choose to join SHIELD - it was that, or being killed for being too much of a threat to be allowed to live. She doesn't choose her missions or her objectives - she's a tool to be used by others, and she's well aware of that fact.

Given that, it's hardly surprising that she is almost obsessive about whatever control she can have - the control she finds in manipulating the people around her through words and emotions, or in knowing she could take out every person in the room without them laying a hand on her, in having a thousand and one plans and backup plans, exit strategies and bolt holes. It's obvious the Hulk scares her more than anything else, because here is something she can't possibly reason with or fight, something that's entirely out of her control and that there's no way to stop - in a way, the Hulk is all her issues with control personified, and all she can do when faced with it is run and hope it doesn't destroy her.

Almost as important as grasping what control she can is paying back her debts, one way or another. Part of it is that she honestly does feel remorse for the things she's done, but she also deeply doesn't like to owe people things, doesn't like that little bit of power it gives them over her. Sometimes she pays back that debt in a direct fashion - for instance, Clint saved her life, and Fury and SHIELD spared it, and she sees working for them as a way to pay them back for that - and sometimes more indirectly. Loki tries to hurt her by hurling all the terrible thing she's done back in her face, and while she acts shaken by it, she's not particularly. She recognizes that she's spilled innocent blood, done terrible things that she would take back if she could... but it doesn't do anyone any good for her to dwell on the past feeling guilty about it. What she can do is try to find a way to balance it out, do enough good for the world to make up for it in some way, and she's determined to do that.

However, there's something of a paradox in the way she goes about that: you don't work for a covert organization as a spy and an assassin and expect to come out of it with clean hands, and making up for the deaths you've caused by shedding more blood is a tricky business. But that's the thing about Natasha: she's been doing this for so long, and from such a young age, that she truly believes a weapon is all she can be, and there's only one thing a weapon is good for. She gets her hands dirty and does the terrible things the heroes never could because someone has to, and because she's damn good at it - but there's a reason she's so good at being other people, and that's because at her core, she doesn't particularly like being herself... and maybe she's not even certain who that person is, in the end.

Finding she's outside of her universe, won't come as much of a shock to her after everything that's happened with the Asgardians and the Chitauri back home; it will, however, really really piss her off. She won't immediately believe that she wasn't brought here intentionally, she won't trust the kedan, and she'll be looking for someone to hold responsible for her presence here, as well as a way to get herself and her team back home. Natasha doesn't like things out of her control; the simple fact that she's here is one giant loss of control is going to have her on edge for a while, and she'll be looking for ways to get that control back in whatever way she can.

Appearance: Here!

Abilities:

Natasha is an ordinary human, just with enough training and practice at what she does that she makes it seem superhuman. She's a master at hand-to-hand combat, both armed and unarmed, skilled with just about any weapon you could put in her hands, an Olympic-class gymnast and acrobat, and a master spy and assassin with all the rather alarming skills those professions entail. However, she is only as strong, fast, and durable as any other highly trained human, and has no actual superhuman abilities to speak of.

Inventory:

• Her Black Widow outfit:
  
  • Super cool black catsuit with SHIELD insignia on the shoulder
    
  • One apparently useless belt with a red hourglass on it? Man, IDK.
    
  • Utility belt containing: pepper spray, garrotes, smoke bombs, a couple of discs that can be thrown and deliver a nasty but probably nonfatal jolt of electricity, and probably a few small EMPs or explosive devices
    
  • Thigh holsters with two pistols, both out of ammo
    
  • Black leather gloves, fingerless
    
  • Black boots of some kind
    
  • Widow's Bite. Those things on her wrists? They're energy weapons that can deliver a very powerful and definitely deadly shock.
    
  • Earpiece (which is probably not invisible in reality, though it is in the movie) used to communicate with other Avengers

Suite: Fire Sector, one floor. The proximity to the palace will appeal to her, and the local gang activity is not necessarily a bad thing in her view - she has her uses for the criminal element, and is very experienced in dealing with them back home. She does prefer to lay low, though, and doesn't really need her place for somewhere to put her things and sleep, and a secure place to retreat when necessary, so one floor suits her just fine.

In-Character Samples:
Third Person:

Natasha's been staring out the window for the past hour. For a while after the plane left Calcutta, she tried going over what little information they have on Loki, the Tesseract, Selvig, but at a certain point she had to admit that she'd already memorized everything they had, and going over it a fifth or tenth time wouldn't help. She tried to think of every contact Barton could have pulled into this, everyone with a grudge against SHIELD that he might be able to track down, but it's a long list, and she can't know what's most likely without knowing what Loki plans. She could try napping - probably should, knowing what's ahead of her - but she's been all but vibrating with restless energy since Coulson called her in, and sleep isn't going to happen any time soon.

So she stares out the window, eyes unfocused so the stars overhead blur into the darkness of the sky. She tries to think about anything but Clint and where he is now. Nervous energy spills down her limbs, making her want to bounce her leg, drum her fingers against her thigh, anything to bleed a little of it out. She takes one slow breath and then another, forcing her body to relax even while her mind's still whirling. Slowly, reluctantly, her tense muscles unknot and the restlessness fades. She's calm. She's worried, and she's impatient to do something, but she is calm.

Abruptly, over the rumble of the engines, she realizes she hasn't heard Banner moving for some time now, not even the soft sounds from the tablet as he read over what they had to give him. She turns to glance over her shoulder, and is a little surprised to find him watching her, his expression oddly speculative. Natasha raises one eyebrow and asks, "Can I help you, Dr. Banner?"

He hesitates for a second, and then shakes his head a little, a flicker of something that might be a smile touching his lips before he ducks his head. "I... No. I'm fine."

Natasha eyes him for a moment longer before turning back around in her seat, her eyes moving automatically to the screen on the pilot's side indicating their location. They're a little over an hour out from the Helicarrier, and maybe then there will be something she can do, some way she can make sure Loki bleeds and Clint and Selvig come back in one piece. She huffs a soft sigh, barely audible even to her own ears, and looks out the window again.

Network:

[ The woman in the video looks stressed and exhausted - it's in the dark circles under her eyes, the slightly messy hair, the way she holds herself. She's dressed in local clothes, her legs folded underneath her in the chair in front of her home console (...or the console of one of the empty suites nearby), arms wrapped around her chest more protectively than anything else, and she's watching the screen, not the camera, as the video opens. ]

I was wondering...

[ A deep breath, and a little shift of her head to flick the hair out of her face. The movement seems natural, but it casts just a little more light on the fading bruise high on her cheekbone. It's from the battle, not from anything here, but it works for her at the moment. ]

I haven't been here long, so I apologize if this is something everyone knows, but how do the kedan tell us apart from them? Obviously some of them don't look human, but enough of them do that I don't see how they know we're not one of them. [ A thin smile. ] It seems like it can't hurt to try and blend in, but apparently it's harder than it looks.

[Private to Steve]
Hi, Cap.

I'd like to speak in person. Do you want to find me, or can I come to you?