Natasha Stark

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Everything I've done, everything I'll do today, everything I'll ever do, I do to protect this world.

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Name:	Natasha Stark
Age:	34
DOB:	May 29

Eyes:	Blue
Hair:	Black
Height:	5'11"
Weight:	150

Canon:	Marvel 3490 (616-Based)
Canon Point:	Just after Execute Program
PB:	Lena Headey
Player:	Gray (talkincodes)
Timezone:	EST

Natasha’s history is largely the same as 616 Tony Stark’s with some slight variations -- she was the Stark’s biological child instead of being adopted, her capture was in Afghanistan instead of Vietnam as per more recent retcons, and of course her lack of a Y chromosome.

Natasha Stark is complicated. This is, after all, the woman who spent years pretending to be her own bodyguard, and the duality didn’t entirely disappear once she stopped keeping the two identities separate.

In the beginning, it was simple, or at least simpler. Before the Avengers, before the armor, before Afghanistan, Natasha was a socialite. Too smart, too rich, too privileged, she sailed through life not really caring about anything because nothing could hold her attention long enough. And after a childhood of constant reminders that she would never be good enough, it wasn’t hard to let the money and fame go to her head. So what if she didn’t always actually enjoy the constant parties and drinking and tabloid-trolling behavior? She was finally proving her father wrong, especially when she still managed to make more of Stark Industries than he ever had, even in the middle of all her hedonism.

Funny how stepping on a land mine could trigger one hell of a change in priorities.

Afghanistan was a wakeup call in a lot of ways, not just for what her inattention was letting happen but for how much more she could have been doing with herself. Watching Yinsen literally die for her was the nail in the coffin. The armor he’d helped her build had intended to be just a way to get them both out, but Natasha wasted no time using it to get revenge for his death. After that it seemed simple to use it to make up for other things as well. To be better.

Iron Man -- and she’d let it be Iron Man, the better to hide exactly who was inside it -- was a hero. He was brave and selfless and respected and invincible. Iron Man fought terrorists and spies and helped found the Avengers. It was so easy to let Natasha Stark fall into the background, to be just the bankroll for the Avengers, still the socialite but a slightly wiser one, funding a superhero team as penance. Even when she eventually rebranded as Iron Woman and then made her identity entirely public, it was always a little clear that Natasha liked being the person in the armor a lot more than she liked being Natasha Stark.

Her double identities aren’t the only symptom of the fact that Natasha’s biggest enemy has always been herself. In some ways, it makes her an even better hero -- she will not hesitate to risk her life to save someone else’s, especially when that someone is a fellow Avenger. In other ways, though, her self-sacrificing is even more dangerous. Her genuine belief that her life is worth less than other people’s is why she frequently decides she needs to face bad situations alone, whether it’s facing down the repercussions of her stolen technology or dealing with her mounting alcoholism without looking for help until it nearly killed her. There’s an even darker side too -- since Natasha believes she is already past redemption in a lot of ways, she’s much more willing to resort to morally questionable acts to keep anyone else from having to get their hands dirty. She’ll hate herself (even more for it), but she’ll do whatever needs to be done.

But for all her struggles, Natasha’s greatest strength has always been her force of will. It’s what kept her going to invent a way out of a death sentence while being held in captivity, it’s what kept her fighting when she had to wear a breastplate at all times and plug herself into a wall every so often to keep her heart beating, what kept her together long enough to reprogram a biotechnological virus with a 97% fatality rate while critical injured and then survive injecting herself with it. It’s what let her build companies from the ground up and make them all successes, even as a woman in male-dominated fields: Stark Industries and then Stark Enterprises and then Stark Solutions.

Natasha genuinely believes that the world can be made better, and she’s not afraid to fight for it. She’s been called a futurist, not just in that she tries to predict the future, but in that she’s always looking for ways to improve not only herself, but the world at large. She cares about people, she cares about the future of humanity, and she just wants everything to be better.

In the end, Natasha at her heart is an engineer. She just wants to fix and improve things.

Genius - Natasha is an acknowledged genius, and has been called one of the smartest people in the world. While it most obviously manifests in her instinctive understanding of engineering and mechanics, it also makes her a lightning-fast and creative thinker, capable of making intuitive leaps and mostly-accurate predictions. It also allows her to think on multiple levels, to the point of being able to control more than one physical body at the same time.

Combat Training - Thanks to years of working with some of the best fighters in the world, Natasha is a trained hand-to-hand combatant. She’ll never be able to challenge the really skilled martial artists, but she can hold her own in a fight.

Multilingual - Natasha can speak multiple languages, including Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian and French.

Extremis - The Extremis virus essentially fused Natasha to her armor, to the point that the under-armor is now stored in her bones and can be manifested at will. She can control the armor cyberpathically, even if she is not in physical contact with it, and she can mentally connect with all of the communication devices, scanners and recording equipment the armor has. She can also connect with other communications and computing systems, though her control is not as direct, and can project her voice through them.

The virus also rewrote her physical body to an extent, giving her superhuman reflexes and the ability to both heal her body and repair her armor on a minor scale.