application.
Character Name: Threnody
Series: Marvel Comics
Age: Comics ages are notoriously specious, but let us go with 21 or thereabouts. Early twenties.
From When?: While trying to kick her death absorption cold turkey--she doesn't die here in canon, but easily could have, given she cut off her last remaining source of energy (Nate Grey, her ex-boyfriend and the potential father of her child) and was experiencing painful, dangerous withdrawal from what is essentially a drug addiction, while on her own, with no money or apparent resources.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Threnody is not a psychopath, but she is a confused, volatile young woman who has taken a lot of lives. Initially, they were accidents, often caused by the intermittent explosions her powers trigger, but as she became addicted to the consumption of supernatural energy, death was her favorite, and she went so far as to feed on fellow vulnerable members of society. One little push, and she can tip them into dying.
Item: [Wardens Only -- What Gives you Your Information While Here? Examples -- a compass, a book, a palm pilot, a tarot card, etc.]
Abilities/Powers: In terms of what she won't keep, Threnody is an energy absorber. She has been seen absorbing lasers, kinetic energy, heat energy, etc.; basically any kind. However, her favorite, the sort she can't control, is death energy, and it is addictive, as she eventually discovered. She can create blasts of concussive energy that have the potential to be extremely destructive--when Nate tried to remove her power blockers, the resulting energy explosion took down a building, and that was only the barest edge of her power. She can also create really ultra-incredible zombies that can be maimed, dismembered, etc., and reformulate their limbs to keep on coming. Healing them takes no energy from her, as she can absorb their "deaths" if they are finally destroyed by decapitation. She has also been seen feeding off at least one vampire. Her powers have a distinctly spooky edge that is unusual for most mutants, and when she was killed by Maddie Pryor earlier on, she used her own death charge to resurrect herself, which is when her zombie-related abilities kick in. Word of God states she is capable of being an omega-level mutant, but she has never really accessed those abilities with her power blockers instated, and she lacks control to a ridiculous degree. Also, she sucks at fighting; she's never been trained, and it shows.
It is implied/demonstrated that she can use the superpowers of dead mutants/powered people, but I don't even want to get into that with gameplay because a) it's never really explained and b) is ridiculous, so it also goes in the heap of "powers Threnody doesn't need to have on the Barge".
I'd like to scale her powers back to pretty simple ones: she can sense whether a being is alive or (un)dead, and when people are wounded enough to risk death, allowing her to do things like track them by the feeling of their weakening mortality. She may still feel drawn to death, but she cannot absorb its energy, at least not unless whoever her Warden is decides to grant her more power much later on. I would also like to keep her capable of communicating with the spirits of the dead. Telepaths who investigate her consciousness may be aware that her mind can function as a sort of "black hole" for telepathic energy, as canonically not even two of the most powerful telepaths in her world were able to control her psychically. She will not have her power blockers on the barge, so she really needs to be scaled back and granted increased ability by her Warden only in incremental amounts.
Personality: Threnody is a cunning, streetwise young woman whose somewhat provocatively dressed exterior conceals surprising cleverness--and a hell of a lot of inner conflict. To begin with, she really doesn't know who she is. She has no basis on which to found her current self-perception; while she is dimly aware that at one point in the past she didn't feel this terrible about herself, or this driven to harm others for her own gratification, she doesn't remember what it was like to be happy or normal or safe. Ever. As far as she knows, this is the sick, sad, ugly world, and she has to live in it. It makes her mistrustful by nature and quite a cynic, though she's not as wholly hardened as she might be if she had even a mere ten more years of life experience. She defines herself via her freakhood, her status as a mutant...and as her experiences with the Forgotten showed her, even among mutantkind, she's a little bit abnormal. But she wants very much to survive, and to keep going, and to feel something stable for once in her life.
Like many people who are wracked by instability, however, she'll reach out for little quick fixes to keep her going. Quick fixes like 'absorbing the energy of homeless addicts', which is funny, in a way, because she used to be homeless, too, and often skates in and out of existing in that liminal state of "living in other people's abandoned buildings". Once upon a time, she was the girl who was horrified and emotionally destroyed by accidentally taking lives. She coped by turning this self-loathing in on herself, and there is something a bit selfish about hating and fearing who you are as much as Threnody does. It's absorbing, and it's why, while she began with more effective rationalizations about mercifully killing individuals who only would have suffered intense pain had she not spared them, those rationalizations began to crack and eventually disappear. At the end of the day, it's about escape. She sees it as this huge, shameful weakness, and the more she despises it in herself and tries to pack it down into being her dirty little secret, the more in thrall to her own addiction she becomes. While she did decide to kick the habit, she went about it in a pretty dysfunctional way, given her isolated conditions, and she didn't say or think anything about doing it for herself. She wanted to do it to make Nate proud, in some obscure way, and because she wanted to raise her child adequately. These are lovely reasons, but not ones that usually permit addicts to have successful recoveries.
When most people are addicted to something dangerous, the only body count involved is their own. Tragic, but at least it doesn't rob other people of life. What T does is significantly worse. Threnody doesn't see what she does as violent. It feels natural. She talks about how death is not just this passive thing that happens, the way she sees and feels it, it is its own force in the world, something as real and tangible as electricity. She does not, however, have the excuse of not knowing better, because if she didn't, she wouldn't come up with these surface-level rationalizations. Furthermore, she's as emotionally addicted to death as she is physically. It is, as mentioned, an escape, and she is a chronic runaway. Whenever things have gotten difficult, Threnody has abandoned them: she left home, she left New York, she left Sinister (admittedly, it's kind of hard to blame her for that one), and most importantly, she left Nate. While she was, on one hand, doing an ostensibly noble thing by leaving him, and she had a lot of good intentions, it was also a really good excuse to get away from all of her conflicted, confusing emotions. They were very in love, considering how chaotic their relationship was, and Threnody does wish they could have kept playing house forever. This is exacerbated now that she has a very young child to care for.
She loves her kid. That much is inarguable. But she is cognizant of the fact that she is not really capable of taking care of herself, much less an infant, and frankly, she has no idea what she's doing. Her maternal instincts are there somewhere behind a haze of energy-absorbing, flashbacks of traumatic memories, and weird relationship issues. She doesn't really know how to properly communicate with or care for this child, and it's both frustrating and humiliating, like yet another thing she's a "freak" about: like a lot of women, she expected to have the baby and suddenly be imbued with the magical ability to know what her child needs at all times. She questions whether she has any right to motherhood in the first place, given her circumstances.
It wouldn't be impossible for her to learn to care for a child, even if she doesn't presently have all the skills. Before her addiction really started to wreck her, she would sometimes find herself playing the Responsible, Bossy role, as with Nate (who comes up constantly, sorry about that, but... her primary appearances were as his girlfriend and in his book, so they're pretty intertwined and her interactions with him are what most of her characterization comes from); he'd show up late, Threnody would be like "kid, I will kill you in your face if you keep showing up late all the time," and he'd grin cheekily at her and she'd let him skate. She actually likes that dynamic--feeling a little bit like the manager, having a bit of power she can wield. Sometimes she uses her social savvy and knowledge of different types of people, fashion, etc., to try to play teacher to those who don't have her social aptitude, a little low-budget Cher-in-Clueless kind of thing, and it always surprises her how great it feels to actually do something nice for once. In her experience, that feeling never lasts, though, and inevitably, her old aches rise up again, and she begins to wonder if she should really bother.
When her emotional weakness was nearly taken advantage of by Morbius, Nate tells her that he knew Morbius would seek her out--but the way she responded to him was another matter entirely. He points out that she identifies with Morbius not because she is as soulless and cruel as Morbius is (even though she says they are alike, it's purely in regards to how their powers drive them), but because she doesn't think she deserves better. She is quick to defend some boundaries, as she's experienced enough under Sinister's rule and her own time to understand that if she can't stick up for herself, she's going to get killed pointlessly--but she craves understanding, a like mind, and because she has a somewhat disillusioned view of herself, she tends to associate herself with people even less morally scrupulous than she is. The exception is, of course, Mr. Sinister. While working for him, she saw--and was the subject of, on occasion--myriad hideous experiments, the nature of which she can still barely really talk about, and which continue to bother her. For all she sees herself as kind of an enormous fuck-up, she knows, at least, she's never been that perverse. Threnody follows what is part of her nature, and as of late she has begun to let that aspect of herself own her (you can't control what you're terrified of, after all), but Sinister breaks nature into bitty pieces and makes Frankenstein's mutant out of the ruins. On the other side of the fence, though, while she exists in a world full of superheroes, she isn't one. "Threnody" is her alias because it's the name that's stuck, but she has no desire to don a costume and fight crime.
She might like to help, though--in her own way, which is often underhanded. Threnody is a good liar and even traitor. Resourcefulness and manipulative skill are learned, and while the latter is not usually associated with positive influence, it can be used that way. She has historically not been above lying to get her way, or stealing, or assorted other petty crimes. Cutting corners for the sake of her own well-being isn't the hugest deal in the world, and is even understandable in some circumstances, since she is pretty well economically disadvantaged, but it's telling that she barely even thinks about it. She's shocked when Nate tells her he doesn't want her to lift wallets anymore. Certain kinds of bad behavior are utterly normalized in her mind, and this feeds into the disparity she has of "Her People" and "Shiny Happy People"; anyone who is too clean-cut tends to fall into the latter category. Give her someone who's a bit of a cocky bastard, like Nate, and she's much more comfortable, mostly because really nice, sweet, clean-cut, well-adjusted people aren't supposed to even exist in the same planet as Threnody, in her mind, and she ends up wanting to kind of put them in a protective bubble where they won't be exposed to people like her. (Also she finds it a little bit boring, in most cases, but she's accustomed to a certain degree of excitement.)
She speaks in a way that's often colloquial, but peppered with enough twenty-five-cent words to suggest she's probably a lot smarter than she lets on--she doesn't "play dumb" or act like a ditz, but she doesn't mind being underestimated when it comes to brains. Her education is entirely self-taught, but one benefit to working for a supergenius like Mr. Sinister is the access to incredible amounts of information; she's ranked as one of the smarter Marvel characters in terms of raw intellect and potential...or at least she was in the 1990s when she was still a featured character. Threnody is a quick study, gifted with technological matters and mathematics in particular, and she has a pretty creative mind, prone to thinking in somewhat more poetic terms than her manner of speech might let on. She doesn't have a classical education by any means (even if she'd probably really enjoy one), but at least she tries. She also has a pretty awesome repertoire of pop cultural references, although she was never the media fiend type like some people.
Socially speaking, she is a playful, drawling sort, with a thing for affectionate nicknames when it comes to people she likes (Nate is usually referred to as "Grey", but sometimes also things like "muscles" or whatever comes to mind). She can be sarcastic, although usually it's not in a vicious way; she's got quite a lot of sass, in a dry kind of way. Threnody hails from an era in her canon where rebellious, even ~*punk rock*~ young adult characters were becoming particularly common, and as she matured into a full-grown adult, she never really lost her fondness for things to the left of the mainstream. She makes a point of knowing where the social hot spots are, where social boundaries can be pushed, and has a preference for subversive media. These are also the arenas where she's slightly more likely to be accepted, because even though she runs away a lot when it comes to emotional situations, she gets pretty irritable when it comes to being genuinely denigrated by bigots for her status as Other (which she is on multiple levels, not just her mutant status--though that's the one she gets the most attitude about). Being different all the time is goddamn exhausting, but she can't help it, so she may as well make it work for her. Or, sometimes just for the sake of being a huge troll, invade the preferred locales of the rich and sophisticated in order to pass herself off as one of them 'til she gets kicked out, which she's remarkably good at. Despite all her comic book anti-villain angst, she can be benevolently mischievous, especially towards those she finds a bit too full of swagger and perhaps in need of some mild ego checking. She is often assertive or bossy, as noted, when she's well and comfortable with herself, in a friendly kind of way, but her first instinct is very rarely to attack people (she doesn't view her feeding as violence, even though it...is still killing folks); Threnody has a temper, and when she's angry she says some nasty things, but she is not immediately inclined to do physical harm to people just because she's upset, and enemies have got the jump on her because of it (see: Maddie. Thren doesn't know Maddie slept with Nate while mind controlling him, but if she did, that'd be an exception to her usual disinclination toward bloodshed).
Threnody is a New Yorker and has had a lot of exposure to all kinds of elements both in her duration working for Sinister and as a street kid in her youth. Not much about human behavior truly shocks her in terms of generalized depravity, but she is not fearless and is correctly wary around individuals with massive power, like Exodus. Despite her opinion of herself as pretty weak, though, she demonstrates surprising bravery and strength of will in tracking down Nate in the first place, trying to prevent Exodus from harming him by grabbing the massive gun that minutes ago she said was much too large for her, and standing up for this man she only met a little while ago. In the face of real physical threats to people she cares about, she will risk life and limb with a reckless abandon and gutsiness that she doesn't completely understand--it's instinct, a better instinct than her energy consumption. She still sometimes wants to be a complete survivalist, go hard, and say "fuck everyone, I only care about myself." It doesn't quite work that way, though, and she knows it. Fellow eternal outsiders like Nate trigger her instinctive knack for sussing out individuals who, like her, are damaged goods far too acquainted with what it's like to be used and abused. Those are the people she understands best: freaks, after all, stick with freaks.
Path to Redemption: Threnody will be a bit resistant to a Warden's authority at first, though not in an overtly hostile way; she will feel like she's someone's "project", or worse, an experiment, and she'll need some time to develop trust. Very harsh, drill-sergeant treatment will just make her sullen and unresponsive. She needs to see her Warden as human and "normal", flawed like Threnody knows she is, but able to overcome their own issues and be a good person (or at least Warden material) regardless. Eventually, she will begin to warm up to the idea of redemption...once she's convinced it's even possible for her, which will also take some doing on her Warden's part. However, just because she's now open to the idea of trying doesn't mean she won't have periodic backslides. She canonically is pretty damn self-aware when it comes to her tendency to self-sabotage good things in her life, an example being her entire association with and defense of of a fellow death-oriented superpowered individual named Morbius, who is a categorically terrible vampire creeper with a weird Nosferatu face. Being self-aware doesn't stop her from doing it, though, unfortunately, and her Warden will need to, throughout the entire three steps I have outlined, be patient as well as very firm about remedying her penchant for shooting herself in the foot.
First things first, she needs to completely kick the death habit. Not having her powers will send her into withdrawal pretty quickly on the Barge, but if she gets power allowances in the future, she'll immediately be faced with the temptation to feed. On the Barge, she can't run away from her problems, and she'll be forced to confront what she's done, what she's afraid of, and why dealing with things is so frightening for her. She killed people simply to enjoy it, because it fed her impulses, and because it made her feel better for a little while. Just because she isn't always selfish doesn't mean that wasn't incredibly selfish of her, and she needs to remember her victims, and even actually describe them as such, since she is afraid to verbally contextualize what she's done as murder. Threnody needs to learn some new coping mechanisms, both physical and emotional ones, in a variety of stripes, in lieu of relying quick-fix gratification in whatever form it comes in. If she has those negative impulses, she should be permitted to confess them to her Warden instead of hiding them. Graduated inmates will be good role models for her as proof it is possible to become a better person.
Secondly, there will be periods of lashing out when she realizes she can't run. Threnody is often easy for the enemy to discount because of her age, size, and gender, as well as the fact that she traveled with Nate Grey, who was kind of the apex of all telekinetic and telepathic power in the world, but she is a seriously dangerous young woman, and her emotional vulnerability aside, her Warden needs to keep an eye on her when she's frustrated. She usually self-destructs, but if someone really agitates her, she's not above turning the knife outward. She doesn't need her Warden to be her best friend, but she does really need somebody to let her work out all of that frustrated rage she's got pent up about Sinister and every other person who's tried to abuse or manipulate her over the years. As discussed in her personality section, she can also be manipulative, and that needs to be nipped in the bud right quick. Call her on it directly, force her away from lying to herself, and don't let her self-flagellate as a derailment technique.
Third and finally, she needs to learn some balance. How to balance her powers out, how to balance her desire to feel normal with the fact that she's always going to be significantly different in some ways. Helping her manage her powers in an incremental way is a good idea, though there's no need for her to ever be at full capacity whilst on the Barge--but once back in her world, she's not going to have the structure or the Warden to keep her on the straight and narrow, so she'll need to be emotionally prepared and able to control herself when she's in the company of the dying. Sinister's power blockers were useful, but they just pent up all that energy instead of helping her to control and utilize it. In terms of normalcy, for as smart as she is, she's kind of questionable in terms of life skills. She can rewire electronics, but she's never paid a bill. Shooting guns the size of Texas is no problem, but hell if she knows what's on a driving test. Obviously she can't incorporate some of these bureaucratic aspects of daily life on the Barge, but she can be prepared for them--the job placement will be really good for her in this regard, since her previous jobs have been "supervillain's pet death-hunter" or "eye candy", neither of which look good on a resume. If she really wants to live a decent life and take care of her daughter, she's going to have to legalize the way she cares for herself and her child, stop cutting so many corners, and recognize that sometimes normalcy is not what she expected. She'll never be completely without some zaniness, due, in part, to being a mutant but also just her own personality, but she can learn to keep from instigating.
History: Threnody is a native New Yorker who was originally born Melody Jacobs. Very little is known about her past, and she has a form of amnesia that seems to be triggered by her own abilities, so she probably has been 'lost' since her mid-teens, when it's customary for mutations to manifest. She knows her mother's name, and where she's from, and that's about it. Her abilities were initially so strong that they drove her into a kind of madness: she was plagued both by the persistent voices of the dead and by explosions that her powers would cause when she went into energy overload. She lived with a collection of other lost souls, including a nice older couple who cared for her...and whom she ended up killing in a burst of concussive energy she couldn't control. Traumatized, in constant physical pain, and rejected by the others in the enclave, she ended up running away...all the way to the opposite side of the country. In Los Angeles, she was picked up by an employee of Mr. Sinister's, and Sinister, despite objections from a couple of X-Men, promised to help Threnody in exchange for her loyalty. He gave her neuro-implants that bound her powers, and in return, she owed him.
She became one of his "toys", his bloodhound for tracking down mutants who were infected with the Legacy virus, collecting information on every other mutant she came across on his behalf. While she came to loathe Sinister and his agenda. she used the opportunity to expand her education, and developed a pretty impressive technological capacity, considering her previous lifestyle. When she learned about Nate Grey, she realized he might just be powerful enough to help her escape Sinister for good, and when she tracked him down in Paris (Sinister's Marauders hot on her heels), Nate did in fact save her, killing her would-be captors. Threnody became his traveling companion and later girlfriend, throughout battles with other mutants like Exodus and Cable, despite their occasional uncertainty with one another. In Greece, they were confronted by Holocaust, which is a wildly inappropriate name for any character, Marvel, including a villain. Being up close and personal with Holocaust's dying victims gave Threnody her first chance to play the hero, which she did...but she also had a moment of weakness when she gently pushed an injured man into death so that she could absorb his energy.
When they returned to New York, Threnody left Nate for a while for reasons unknown. She was quickly thereafter abducted by Marauders, but was removed from their clutches by an angry Abomination, who was one of the Forgotten she'd stayed with years before as a teenager. Nate fought the Abomination for her safety and learned about the accidental deaths she'd caused, but accepted her, anyway, which brought them closer; they began to live in SoHo, with Nate using his abilities to sneakily avoid paying the rent, trying to make a life together. Threnody's addiction to death grew stronger, however, and when she had an encounter with the Living Vampire Morbius, Nate confronted her about her problem, and told her she could come back home when she'd decided to stop hurting others. Before she could make up her mind, she was attacked and killed by Madelyne Pryor, who was designed to procreate with Summers children--like Nate. (Consider that Madelyne is Nate's mother's clone. Be grossed out. Why, Marvel.)
Threnody resurrected herself with her own 'death charge', and was accompanied, upon exiting the morgue, by several zombies apparently of her own raising. Nate had abandoned the apartment, thinking that Threnody had left him for good, and so Threnody and her zombies took up residence there. Threnody, by then heavily pregnant, was deeply wounded when she discovered that Nate was now Madelyne's companion, not realizing that Madelyne was messing with his mind, too, but still rescued him after he seemed to become ill and comatose after a prolonged fight. It's not clear on where her kid was during all of that--she gave birth sometime before Nate woke up from his little coma-nap. When he woke, he found her in pain and now tormented by the presence her obsessive zombified followers, who called for her day and night. Nate helped her get away from the zomboids, and she told him that Maddie had killed her, all those months ago; she hadn't wanted to leave him. For the first time, she admitted to what she'd been doing to those people she'd killed, though she knew she still hadn't broken herself of the feeding. She wasn't sure if she even wanted to stop.
It was then she realized that her primary source of energy, the focus of her addiction, was none other than Nate himself. Because of the intensity of his abilities, Nate was destined to die at a young age, burning out before the eyes of everyone who loved him, including Threnody. She realized that if she told him the truth, he'd never leave her, and she'd never stop feeding...and she'd kill him, slowly but surely. She told him that she never loved him, broke his heart, then left to retrieve her child and begin the dangerous, terrifying prospect of going completely 'cold turkey'--something she'd never done before, and which threatened to destroy her in the process. And that's about it. MARVEL IS DRAMATIC.