LAGUN APP

[krasnaya_vdova]

 ↠ THE PLAYER
Name: Winter

Contact: natalia_vdova @ Plurk, natalia_vdova#0150 @ Discord

Over 18? Yepp.

Other characters: Nope!


↠ THE CHARACTER
Avreya Anatolyevna Orlova | Ava Orlova

Journal: krasnaya_vdova

Age: mid-20s (without her birthday trying to line up her exact age is a headache, but she's very much older than 15, and given the memory hijinks / 50-ish years of inherited memories, it's sort of awkward)

Canon:  Forever Red (This is a Marvel novel which pulls very heavily from MCU / Agents of SHIELD and the author has confirmed the first novel as existing in the AoS universe. I play this as a slightly different universe for player comfort.)

Canon point: Post-Civil War

History: There's no wiki, sorry! The plot is pretty convoluted so I'll try to just hit the main points.

Ava is the daughter of two Red Room quantum physicists. She spends time there as a child, but is taken as a subject the OPUS project when she's eight years old. When she's nine, Natasha rescues her as part of a SHIELD op, though this is later shown to be intentional. The OPUS project “links” two people together and Ava and Natasha are the first successful test case though they don't realize it at the time.
 

Natasha hands Ava over to SHIELD, while telling her that she'll come if she needs her. Natasha never does, and instead Ava spends the next five years locked up in an off-the-books SHIELD safehouse run by a section of SHIELD that thinks mindwipes are great, before running away at fourteen to be a homeless Brooklyn streetrat. She meets her bestfriend Oksana, who gets her into fencing, and when she's fifteen she starts having “dreams” about a boy that turn out to be because of her link to Nat.
 

At a fencing competition she both meets the boy from her dreams – Alexei – and Natasha, because the man responsible for OPUS all those years ago is back. After being shot at, Natasha and the two teenagers escape in a Quinjet and go to the Triskelion where Tony Stark deduces the purpose of the OPUS device-- weaponized quantum entanglement-- but fails to separate Ava and Nat. After Nat threatens to lock Ava up again, Alexei and Ava break out of the Triskelion together intending to solve the problem; Ava punches her way through lots of SHIELD agents and leaves their disassembled assault rifles by the front door as a passive-aggressive fuck you.
 

Ava and Alexei go to Odessa, managing to avoid SHIELD, and go to a shipyard where they find a lead on the device and the man behind it, finding there are over 100 other entangled people that could be used to compromise world security. Natasha tracks them down just in time to prevent a shootout, having discovered that SHIELD tampered with her memories and Alexei is possibly her little brother. Working together and using the quantum entanglement to their advantage, they manage to find a way to stop the device with a code that was imprinted in Ava's memories using Swan Lake. Also Ava and Alexei fall in love, I guess?
 

They manage to stop the device but Alexei dies in the process. Ava goes to SHIELD Academy for the next eleven months, and she and Nat bond over shared trauma, with Nat pulling her out of the academy briefly to go on an adventure in South America. Then the HYDRA reveal happens, and Ava goes into hiding while the Avengers do Avengers stuff, and Ava exists as more in the helping people sort of space. She gets pulled into Lagunbiru after the events of Civil War, making her roughly early/mid twenties.
 

I have a more detailed (and salty) write-up of the events of the novel here.

Personality: If there is anything that defines Ava as a character, it's that she's both a survivor and impulsive. This overall seems to be something of a trend with her: a lot of her most prominent traits are seemingly antagonistic, which has a lot to do with the fact that she's damaged. She's still figuring out who she is and who she wants to be, and given how rough her life has been it only makes sense that she's being pulled in several directions at once.

Her life has very clearly shaped her into a survivor. She's able to adapt to just about any situation and get through it, whether it's torture at the hands of Ivan Somorodov, physical and psychic experimentation, almost happily living on the streets of Brooklyn, or the death of her first love. No matter what the situation is, Ava always manages to come through the other side, and frequently in such a way that she's able to use it to her advantage, such as stealing SHIELD gear when she escapes from imprisonment, her reference that she “learned how to disappear”. Her survival instinct also comes with a certain amount of pragmatism – her friend Oksana complains about wanting cupcakes, and Ava points out that the fishsticks, stale thought they might be, are free. She's used to bad situations, and almost seems to feel safer there than she does otherwise. She's born in Russia, lived for five years in a SHIELD safehouse, and it's the streets of Brooklyn, a forgotten sports storage room left over from when the building used to be a YMCA that she uses as her bedroom that she seems the most comfortable.

But she also has a certain headstrong, impulsive quality to her too. She generally faces conflict head-on, seeming to frequently take the most direct path in dealing with things, which is admittedly not always the best idea. When Natasha walks back into her life after years of neglect, Ava punches her in the face. When faced with the prospect of being put back in lockup, she fights her way out of the Triskelion to go face the badguy herself because if she fixes the problem they wont have any reason left. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that she is fairly knee-jerk about things, and there's definitely a certain amount of stubbornness involved-- the fact that she doesn't want to play by other people's rules. The tie-in comic even coyly implies she's the sort to be attracted to danger. This can go both ways however. While on one hand breaking out of the Triskelion is about going to deal with Ivan, it's also about running away from Natasha who's backing her into a corner. Part of being a survivor is knowing when to run, so while Ava can be tactically very direct, to the point of choosing to shoot her way out of a situation until Natasha shows up, she will run when it seems to be the smart choice. But for Ava that seems to be more about an aversion to entrapment as opposed to danger.

And there is a counter-point to that, in that she does have spy skills, so while her preference drastically seems to be "shoot it / punch it / hit it in the face" she can also manage short cons and stealth and distraction when those are the superior options. She's good enough to be able to slip on an airplane in New York City with Tony Stark running facial recognition.

One of the interesting thing about Ava, is that she is emotional, almost to the point of wearing her heart on her sleeve. While with her falling in love with Alexei there are extenuating circumstances (kinda creepy extenuating circumstances tbh), she does seem to care for people pretty quickly. She's also not shy about admitting that it hurt her when Natasha abandoned her for eight years, that she wanted Natasha in her life, that she wanted a friend, a sister and she felt betrayed. It makes an interesting comparison to Natasha, who is shown to play her cards close to her chest, and in Forever Red at the end when Natasha cries over losing Alexei when Ava hugs her, Natasha is critical of her own weakness, while the narration points out that Ava wouldn't judge her. She does not have that shame about being honest with feelings, is willing to admit that she wants people in her life. She wants friends, wants a family unit, which I think speaks to her resilience as a character. She does not allow her past to break her. There's honestly almost a kind of optimism about her that I think makes her white costume very fitting. One of the tie-in comics also shows Ava telling another students at the SHIELD Academy about what happened to her and how she knows Natasha, showing that she doesn't have that tendency to hide who she is, she doesn't compartmentalize. She hurts and she cares, but she's always raw and honest about it, even if it means she's significantly more likely to punch someone in the face.

But, she is also fairly antisocial. She didn't want to compete in the fencing tournament, and Oksana had to almost beg to get Ava to go to a club with her for five minutes, showing that she doesn't seem to like going outside of her comfort zone. Alexei even comments on how surprised he is that she came up and talked to him, because after getting to know her, he knows that she's not that kind of person, even describing her as a loner. Ava was on the streets for years, and yet she had only one friend, to the extent that she doesn't seem to have even have had other acquaintances. She uses “we” to refer to her and Alexei and Oksana is shocked because for nearly four years Oksana has been the only other person in her life. She trusts people, but at the same time she doesn't trust easily, can be paranoid when it comes to new situations. But there's also a sort of innocence about her, too. She's not particularly worldly or pop culture savvy. When talking to Oksana about the Avengers she sort of shrugs them off, but when she first meets Tony she gets so flustered she calls him “Mister Iron Stark” and is clearly star-struck, although it wears off around the fifth time he electrocutes her. She still has the potential for wonder about the world.
 

Her motivations seem to hinge a lot around the concept of connections – perhaps fitting for a book that touts the concept of weaponized quantum entanglement. She wants friends, family, and she seemed to be just starting to try and build that when Hydra happened which left her running ever since.

Abilities and Nerfs: 

+ Red Room: General Marvel super soldier-type physical enhancements; she's considerably stronger and more agile than most people; literally punches her way out of the Triskelion, can drop fifty feet like it's nothing, etc etc. 

+ quantum link: She was linked to Natasha Romanoff in her canon through weird quantum pseudo magic-science. As a result she has Natasha's skills, and a not insignificant amount of her memories. With player permission this can also result in active links such as sharing of feelings, sensations, dreams, there's a sequence where Ava looks through Natasha's eyes to sight snipers, and other things of that nature are possible.

+ energy control: Her main power is her ability to create and manipulate energy. She is basically a human generator, which canon mentioning that her body more or less constantly creates energy, but also turns into energy to a limited degree. At this point her control is much better than it was, but she still has control issues, especially when she has nightmares. Canon mentions her setting things on fire accidentally using her powers. She can also create EMP blasts, more or less perform telekinesis with objects she can pass a charge through (her strength level with this is kind of ridiculous and should probably be nerfed-- in another novel she uses it to stop a train. So I'm thinking that she's unable to pass a charge though anything that's a structural part of the station, but can use it on independent objects?) She can also change energy states, such as shifting electricity into plasma, and seems to manage fairly delicate control of this. Plasma and electromagnetism, and normal electricity seem to be where her powers lay predominantly. Interestingly, her powers are said to heighten with adrenaline / responds to hormone spikes, etc so arousal is likely going to make her control worse, but there's also some low-key sex-magic potential using arousal to increase her powers once she figures out how to harness it. Canon also makes a lot of noise about how she's still learning, so there is probably room for her to figure out different ways of applying her powers.

 

Inventory: Her duffle bag, which mainly includes her phone and laptop, some tech trinkets, a few changes of basic clothes, a couple days of non-perishable food and bottled water, her Red Widow uniform, and the pair of retractable blades she fights with. A photo from the Academy, and a faded half of a five euro bill with an hourglass drawn on it.

Appearance: Ava is described in canon as being a slim, petite girl with hair as red as Natasha's, she is also frequently referred to as her mirror or shadow, and the tie-in comic likes using parallel shots to illustrate the similarities. I use Katherine McNamara as her PB. Link