[profile]
Character Name: Gertrude “Gert” Yorkes
Canon source: Runaways
PB: Kirsten Vangsness
Personality: Gert has gone from snarky teen to snarkier adult. Sarcasm and dry humor are her ultimate defense mechanisms and help her to cope with the disappointment that is life. She is highly intelligent but often self conscious, though most of the time she hides it well. In a world full of skinny, gorgeous superheroes, Gert often feels disheartened. Not that you would ever know it, since, you know, she tells people like Dagger that they should have a little more self respect and cover her tits.
There is no more loyal friend than Gert. She will do anything for the people she cares about, since family is more than just blood relation. You can’t choose family but you can choose who to love. Nico’s death has had a lasting effect on her but she pushes through it in order to get to her ultimate goal of taking down all of their parents.
Although she is very anti-capitalist and “down with the man”, as she got older, Gert realized that the best way to defeat The Man was to become The Man and take down the system from the inside. She gives a hideous amount of money away to charity and although she hasn’t worked her way up to Tony Stark or Warren Worthington wealth levels, she is getting there.
History: "So the story was supposed to go like this. A bunch of kids were supposed to find out that their parents weren't only shitty, but they were evil. Real Evil. In fact, they were supervillains. They were supposed to find this out when they were fifteen and sixteen and they were supposed to run away. But that? That never happened. They never found out, so they lived their teen lives in tortured bliss. This was Gert's life, Gert's universe. Instead of running away at fifteen, she spent a summer at a camp for kids with too much acne and zero social skills (but they were geniuses).
Gert had always suspected that her parents were evil. Most kids thought this, but she was smarter than most kids - she knew they were evil. The strength of her conviction only grew when she was sixteen and the Hayes were busted by the X-Men for being evil mutants; Molly was taken in by her mutant saviors (and who knew that she was a mutant, too?) and Gert started digging up dirt in earnest. The next year, their parents came clean: they explained that they were the Pride and that they had done everything (evil!) that they had done in order to protect their children and make a better future for them. This better future included wiping out humanity and feeding the souls of virgins and vagrants to a trio of (evil!) Biblical beasts.
Nico rebelled. She'd always been the troublemaker. It turned out that she had a huge potential for magic (and who knew that her parents were evil wizards, too?) and so she was punished. Instead of getting a slap on the wrist, she'd been stabbed in the heart and her soul siphoned off for those aforementioned monsters. The other kids had stood around, frozen. Chase disappeared that night. Gert vowed that she would never feel that powerless ever again.
Their parents were too strong, too well-connected, to be taken down by traditional means. Gert had had to play nice and play hard in order to take them down. She'd spent most of her teen years hating The Man, but she realized that she would have to become The Woman in order to avenge the death of her best friend. Playing nice with her parents had its rewards. They gave her a psychic dinosaur from the future as bodyguard and a starting position in their lucrative antiques business. Gert sabotaged their time machine and sent them to a prehistoric alternate past where dinosaurs had huge brains and humans were always on the menu. She would have been kinder, but after Nico's death all the ugliness of her parents had floated to the surface. Besides, they were geniuses. They'd make do.
Her parents weren't the only ones who disappeared that year. Alex's mom and dad - the two humans who basically ran L.A.'s crime syndicate - died. Messily. "Accidentally". Alex, of course, inherited everything. It became very obvious that he was in it to win it and he didn't mind getting his hands dirty. He became Gert's biggest opposition. Revenge was one thing. Freeing L.A. and making the world a better place was another. So, with her dinosaur bodyguard twined behind her desk and a great deal of disposable income to buy off some good politicians, Gertrude York started out to take over the world." -- summary taken from www.kittypedia.org
How does your AU differ from canon? Gert is older, a little harder, a little wiser. She and the Runaways didn’t find out about their parents evil shenanigans until they were eighteen and that reshaped the world that she grew up in and her circumstances. At eighteen, Gert was mature enough to figure out that battling their parents head on would never accomplish anything in the long run. If the adults were going to be sneaky, she was going to be sneakier. She decided to take them on at the corporate level, put on a fake smile, and squeeze them for every asset they had. She has also taken over - businesses, become Karolina’s manager (she was the one who advised her to do that infamous Karolina/Scarlett Jo sex scene and Karolina has been infamous ever since) and basically beat The Man by becoming The Woman and using her money for good.
Strengths: Intelligence (especially with math and politics), a pet fucking dinosaur, wit, purple hair, common sense, and good business sense.
Weaknesses: Everything else. No, seriously. She is out of shape and hates to fight, which makes her poor hero. Underneath her sharp words, Gert is sensitive and has self confidence issues. Beeeees.
Preferred drop-in point: Manhattan
What are some of your plans for this character in their new environment? Trying to reconnect with the old gang, attempting to start a business, trying to stick it to The Man, running away from bees
First Person Journal Sample:
[Gert’s cell phone is knocked to the ground, so the video that follows is sideways and a little blurry. People are trying to take away Old Lace, which, as you can imagine, is a terrible idea.]
HEY. HANDS OFF THE DINOSAUR, BUDDY-NO, I SEE YOU THERE, HOT HANDS, AND THIS IS NOT NEGOT-HEY HANDS OFF MY ASS, TOO- I have a strict three date and five martini rule about touching--!!
[She is trying her best to fight them off, Old Lace chomping away at one of the scientist’s arms. Another scientist is holding Gert back and she tries to head butt him. It looks like it hurts her more than it hurts him]
I knew I should have gone to that self defense tai bo pilate whatever skinny bitch class, I am not cut out for this-DO NOT PUNCH MY DINOSAUR, YOU SON OF A--
Third Person Sample:
Gert wasn’t particularly religious by any means. She was raised Jewish, had a Bat Mitzvah, pretended to be interested in the Old Testament but it was, much like her childhood, a façade. She often felt that religion was a man made attempt to have rigid social hierarchies and pass judgments on people who didn’t “fit in”, but that was neither here nor there. After Nico was gone, Gert wanted to do something besides bury the body and brood in her room. Nico deserved more than her prickly indifference-hiding-pain, even though she of all people would understand that deep down, Gert was a mess.
Everyone was gone and Gert was alone again. She didn’t have Nico to call anymore about her fascist Right Wing professors, about how she needed to eat twelve hamburgers because strung out looking skinny girls were so 1980’s, and good LORD did she see Dazzler’s newest costume, what WAS that even? Chase was off travelling the world in his white pedo van though Gert was kind enough to send him the occasional email and rent check, Molly was fighting the world’s evils as an X-Men, Karolina had broken into the movie industry, Alex had been-well, after his parents’ “mysterious” death, he had somehow become her main competition in business.
To quote Chase: “Once a tool, always a tool.”
Ceremonies, like religion, were foolish. The notion of heaven? Ridiculous. It wasn’t until now, however, as an adult, that she realized why people clung to them. It wasn’t the dead who suffered; it was the ones who had to live on without them that truly were in pain. Ceremonies were supposed to be comforting, a way to “let go” of the person who was already dead and buried. Nico deserved some sort of “goodbye”, done in pure Nico and Gert style.
Putting the spiked bracelet “collar” on the black My Little Pony she had recently purchased, Gert shoved it away from the sand and into the ocean. She watched it bob its silver sparkly head until it disappeared into the night. Until we meet again-wherever the hell we might be.
Everyone closest to the beach heard one last resounding verse of Santana’s Black Magic Woman as the sun rose in the sky.