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Character Name: Billy Kaplan / "Wiccan", but he hasn't used that for a while
Canon source: Marvel Comics
PB: Nnnope they make me nervous.
Personality: Sort of simultaneously cynically sarcastic and stupid idealistic? The difference can be pretty marked, especially considering Earth got destroyed with everyone he loves on it. A lot of the time he really honestly believes that they are going to restore Earth just because he can't not believe that, but ... that doesn't stop him recognising precisely how dire their situation is, and he copes with it using pretty much equal measures of resigned sarcasm and determined optimism. Well, that and the fact that, okay, he might gripe about what he and the others spend most of their time doing sometimes but on many levels, many stupid fanboy levels, he does actually think it's really cool that they are traversing dimensions, facing unholy horrors and unearthly sights, in an effort to restore Earth. It would be appropriate to describe him as genre savvy and loving it.
As one might expect from someone with his geek credentials, Billy is kind of an awkward person, generally speaking. He's sort of prone to putting his foot in his mouth, but he's even more prone to worrying about whether he's just said the wrong thing. He often acts like if he can be sarcastic about something then he's absolutely fine. He downplays and apologises for his own problems except when he's exaggerating them for intended humorous effect - generally he'll only give a non-snarky account of what's bothering him if he's incredibly stressed out or upset, and even that's not always a guarantee of seriousness.
Despite being in essence an ascended fanboy who has never gotten over how cool it is that he gets to be a superhero and do magic and stuff even though he's been doing it for like three years, the reason he does it is still that he honestly believes he has no choice but to use his powers to help people and do good. That's his main motivation, even if sometimes he isn't sure how to balance that with being cautious and responsible with his powers (see Weaknesses) - which in turn sort of mirrors another inner conflict of his. What he wants in life (you know, once the Earth is back to normal, which it will be, okay) is to be a superhero and do superhero things with the Young Avengers, because they're like a family and they're his best friends and he doesn't want to wind up apart from them and occasionally helping them out with stuff but mostly handling big important magic stuff that he doesn't talk to anybody about because nobody understands it - basically, he doesn't want to grow up to be Doctor Strange, but he is really, really worried that he'll have to.
History: Starts out the same as canon, which is way complicated and ridiculous so you can see Wikipedia for everything up until Children's Crusade. As per Children's Crusade, Billy accidentally put twenty villains into comas after one of them threatened his boyfriend, and the Avengers suddenly realised that what they had on their hands had the potential to be another Scarlet Witch, with the phenomenal cosmic powers and the killing a bunch of people and the rewriting reality and erasing mutantkind and everything, and they really, really did not want that to happen.
Being good guys, when faced with the choice of either firing Billy into the sun, or trying to make sure his magic stayed under control, they opted for the latter, and - cue divergence from canon - decided to ask Stephen Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, for a hand. He'd lately acquired a teenage sidekick and that seemed to be working out okay for him, so they figured he might be willing to take on another magically gifted teenager if it meant minimising the risk of future damage to the universe. Strange reluctantly agreed, which led to Billy spending weekends with him, learning to get a better handle on his magic. (This, of course, meant that he and often the other Young Avengers wound up getting mixed up in a lot more weird magic shit over the course of the next few years in between their own ridiculous superhero shenanigans.) When Billy graduated high school, he decided it would be best to study magic full-time than go to college; his parents were concerned about the idea of him not getting a degree, but, he explained, he was much more concerned about the idea of accidentally commiting magical genocide, and on balance everybody figured that was the bigger priority.
So everything was going pretty well. Billy didn't get on too well with Casey, Strange's other apprentice - where he was a bit sarcastic and pessimistic sometimes but actually a total enthusiastic dork, Casey was just plain cynical and found very little joy in all of the ridiculous magic stuff that filled Billy with relentless fanboy delight - but his understanding of and control over magic was improving and there was much less reason to be worried that if someone killed his boyfriend he'd involuntarily turn the earth's crust inside out or something.
UNFORTUNATELY something far worse happened! The Earth was consumed by an explosion of dark magical energy, caused by another dimension collapsing too close to Earth's reality. Strange sensed the coming cataclysm but too late to do any more than shield part of his Sanctum Sanctorum from destruction, leaving himself, Casey, Billy and Wong the only survivors in a dimensionally displaced fragment of a building that only managed to hold together because it was so charged with magic. All was thankfully not lost, though: Melinda, Queen of the Death Dimension, claimed all of the souls of Earth and promised to keep them safe and whole until Strange and his merry band could find some way to restore Earth.
Since then, they have shifted the Sanctum Shard through layers of reality, trying to save Earth and getting caught up in various interdimensional magical troubles. The Sanctum as it currently exists consists of the upper floor, some of the middle floor, and the hallway of the original building; some of the doors that you would expect to lead to other rooms now lead to pits of tentacles and screaming. When it anchors itself in a dimension it appears as part of the building it once was, usually grafted weirdly onto something else (for example, other buildings, trees, hills) or just standing on its own, defying gravity, with weird spaces where walls should be but aren't. (It's not a good idea to look at them.) It retains many of the features it had when it existed on Earth, for instance spontaneously rearranging its rooms, and being bigger on the inside than the outside. Billy makes precisely as many Doctor Who jokes as you think he does.
How does your AU differ from canon? okay well I changed my mind about what AU I was doing like FIVE TIMES? but apparently I have settled on this one so basically A FEW THINGS:
- Casey Kinmont didn't get fridged at the end of Strange #4 and instead stayed on as Strange's apprentice indefinitely
- after the Avengers started getting worried about Billy's powers they were "hey Stephen you can handle teenagers right you've got that Casey kid" and Billy was like "OMG" and Strange was like "FML"
- At some point Strange reacquired the full use of his magical powers; this happens all the time
- a few years after that, the entire world was destroyed by a terrible interdimensional cataclysm, but it happened so suddenly that the only fragment of the universe that he managed to preserve was part of his Sanctum Sanctorum, and now he and Billy and Casey and Wong operate out of that, travelling the multiverse and getting caught up in wacky magical shenanigans as they search for the key to restoring Earth. They've been doing this for maybe almost a year.
SO. This AU Billy is a few years older than canon, about 20, and has lived through the end of the world, so he's more mature and less of a totally insecure pile of neuroses. HOWEVS although he can be pretty resigned and cynical and gets upset about what has happened as much as you would expect someone in his position would, he is still completely hopeful and determined that they are going to rescue all of the lost souls from Earth and that everything is, eventually, going to be okay, and with that in mind he manages to maintain healthy levels of both good-natured sarcasm and gleeful, dorky enthusiasm, depending on what exactly the situation calls for.
Also, as a result of being saturated with magic for so long, Billy's cape is a little bit sentient, in a similar fashion to that of Doctor Strange's Cape of Levitation but less powerful and without Capitalised Artifact Status. It moves on its own sometimes and occasionally likes to drape itself over people, but is incapable of much more than gentle rippling.
Strengths: Magic. He can basically do whatever the plot requires him to be able to do at any given time. He can fly, he can teleport himself and others, he can make himself invisible, he can astrally project himself, he can locate people, he can heal people - if you can think of it he probably has a spell for it. He's a good deal more magically competent than he is in canon, having spent three years or so practicing. In terms of actual power, there's not much real difference, but now he actually knows what he's doing instead of just knowing that if he concentrates hard enough, stuff will happen. This is fortunate, because his powers in their raw state - the ability to magically affect reality just by wanting it hard enough - are really kind of dangerous. Very dangerous, if what the Scarlet Witch did is any measure of it. Billy knows this, and he's spent the last three years learning to channel his magic through much more careful, measured spells and incantations that are less likely to get out of control than the way he used to do it, with the concentrating and the wanting and the directly affecting the fabric of reality with his desires. He does still fall back on that in occasional moments of panic, but gone are the days when he'd do stuff like change a room from sparse to pleasantly furnished with a wave of his hand just because he could. (You never know whose attention that's going to draw or what you might break - for example, wards, magical artifacts, reality.)
In keeping with canon, his powers are bound by the restraints of the fourth wall; if it would be inconvenient for the plot for him to be able to magic something, then everyone just conveniently forgets that he can do it, within (and occasionally a little beyond) reason.
Personalitywise, mostly just he is really a good person. If he can do the hero thing in any given situation (without rupturing time and space, although see Weaknesses for more on that) he'll do it, and he is totally on board with all that great power = great responsibility stuff. He might not be very confident socially, but he is pretty sure of himself and will not be untrue to himself for anything, even if it means people flushing his head down the toilet a lot. (Thankfully, those days are behind him. Mostly. He doesn't want to dismiss the possibility of some kind of Swirly Dimension.) He's not exactly outspoken or given to putting himself forward except in serious business hero situations, but being himself is a lot more important to him than fitting in. Of course, sometimes this too can be a problem. SEE BELOW.
Weaknesses: Okay, so, thing about magic: it's very bound up in confidence and belief, and that makes Billy's situation a little shakier than he's happy with. On the one hand, he has a much better idea of what exactly he's capable of than he used to; he knows he can do all kinds of outrageously powerful magic stuff if he wants to, so if he did want to, he'd be able to do that stuff without having to sit down and try to convince himself it was possible first. On the other hand, it's way, way dangerous, and he's kind of scared of that - and the thing about how these powers work is that if Billy is scared of being able to do something, that makes it more likely to happen. If something's on his mind as being feasible, that means it's ... literally more feasible, because of the significant part that ~believing~ plays in his ability to do anything with his powers.
So, yeah. That's a concern. He worries about that. At the same time, though, he has trouble balancing it with his desire to help people, and, in trying to do the right thing, he sort of swings between being more reckless with his powers than he should be and being more cautious than he needs to, and he often winds up doing things he regrets. Also, although he is generally motivated by a desire to do good, his magic is fundamentally selfish: if he doesn't genuinely want to do something, he can't use his powers to make it happen, which can be an obstacle.
Apart from that ... well, he's sort of socially incompetent. He is pretty charming, in his way? But it just does not come naturally or easily to him to adjust his behaviour to accommodate different people in a way that would help him get along with them better, and he doesn't quite have the charisma to make that work all the time. He is just himself at people, and whether that works out depends on the individual's tolerance for Billy Kaplan. Since many individuals do not have a particularly high tolerance for prolonged exposure to Billy Kaplan, he has never been particularly confident socially and tends to assume that people won't like him. (The whole "knowing how to interact with people" thing hasn't really been helped much by the company he's kept lately. Doctor Strange is not a man renowned for his gregariousness.)
Billy can also be really stubborn in a naïve teenager way; he's a bit more mature in this regard than he used to be, but he's still given to believing a little harder than necessary in the people he hero-worships. You'd think that experiencing several alternate realities where everyone is evil - and having been imprisoned in the Negative Zone by people he totally thought were great when he was a kid in his own reality - would have put more of a damper on this, especially since he is pretty cynical in other ways, BUT NO.