Character history

[aa_natasha]

CHARACTER'S FULL NAME: Natasha Alianovna Romanov

CODENAME: Black Widow

ALIASES/NICKNAMES: Nat

SPECIES: Human

GENDER: Female

AGE: Mid 20sish

ORIGIN: Volgograd, Russia

POWERS: Being badass

HISTORY:

Natasha was born to Russian parents, though she doesn't remember them. Both were killed in a fire when she was very young, and she was rescued from the blaze by Ivan Petrovitch Bezukhov, a Soviet soldier who took her into his home. She was with Ivan only a short time before she entered a secret training program run by the KGB known as the Red Room Academy.

There Natasha was trained extensively in combat and espionage. She quickly became one of their top students, and by the time she was fifteen she was regularly engaging in covert work for the KGB and other aspects of the Russian government. She was active in missions around the world for well over a decade and gained an international reputation as a ruthlessly efficient agent and assassin. Her loyalty to Mother Russia was firm and deeply embedded.

It wasn't until her activities crossed SHIELD that her efficiency began to falter. After disrupting several of SHIELD's plans, they sent Clint Barton to kill her. He recruited her instead. Neither speaks freely of the details of that interaction, but this much is clear: Most of Natasha's childhood and teen years are cloaked in foggy uncertainty. The Red Room Academy, and later her employers, did not hesitate to use unorthodox training methods, including many that can loosely be referred to as brainwashing. Natasha has a difficult time sorting fact from fiction when it comes to most of her life.

What she does know is that her ledger is stained red, and that the people and organizations she once devoted her life to betrayed her in the most fundamentally personal way possible.

Her loyalty and devotion is related as much to a personal trust and gratitude toward Clint and Fury as to SHIELD itself. She doesn't often speak of her time prior to SHIELD, but it is never far from her mind.

She currently serves as Nick Fury's go-to spy on any number of projects. She has been directly involved with the Avengers Initiative for some time, and has been instrumental in collecting information and providing evaluations of potential candidates.

PERSONALITY:
Natasha is focused, driven, and intensely capable. She's often serious to a fault, particularly where work is concerned, and does not open up to others easily. She's wary and cynical, with an often dark view of the world and a knack for reading others. She's confident to a fault, which often leads to behavior that would be reckless if it didn't always seem to turn out well.

She's also a consummate actress. She trades on the expectations others bring to her, and is quite capable of playing up various aspects of herself to smooth the way for effortless manipulation.

With those she knows very well, Natasha is funny, with a wicked sense of humor. She is capable of deep personal loyalty and has a keen sense of right and wrong (though it doesn't always align with conventional thinking on the matter).

SKILLS:
Natasha is a spectacular marksman with both hand pistols and a sniper rifle. Her hand to hand combat skills are extraordinary; she's been trained in a number of martial arts and tends to be creative when it comes to tackling opponents who outnumber or outsize her.

She is a master manipulator, with an uncanny ability to read others based on tone and body language and a gift for getting others to underestimate her. She's almost always in control of her own body language; even those who know her well find it difficult to decipher truth from fiction.

She speaks a number of languages conversationally, including Russian, English, French, Italian, Latin, Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, and Farsi.

Also she can fly planes.