Wanda Maximoff

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This page is about the Phase 2 incarnation of the character. For other uses, see Wanda Maximoff (disambiguation).

PHASE 2

Wanda Maximoff
Portrayed by Carrie-Anne Moss
Codename:	'Scarlet Witch'
Affiliations:	X-Force
Birthdate:	February 10, 1976

Journal:	Wanda Maximoff
Player:	Jen

...You get a failing grade for mansplaining not only the Holocaust to a Rom whose people were also slaughtered but also to the daughter of the man who bears those numbers.

Estranged from her father Magneto and her twin brother Quicksilver, Wanda was a founding member of X-Force and has devoted her life to standing up for the underdog.

Details

Character Journal: Wanda Maximoff

Real Name: Wanda Maximoff

Codename: Scarlet Witch

Aliases:

First Appearance: January 21, 2015

Date of Birth: February 10, 1976

Place of Birth: Bulgaria

Citizenship: Bulgarian

Relatives: Erik Lennsherr (father); Magda (mother, deceased), Pietro Maximoff (twin brother), Lorna Dane (half-sister)

Education: Masters in Social Anthropology with a minor in Archaeology. Currently doing her PhD. via correspondence with Cambridge University.

Relationship Status: Single and enjoying herself

Occupation: Researcher for Snow Valley Research Center

Team Affiliation: X-Force

Biography

Childhood

Erik Magnus Lehnsherr was visiting Europe in the early 1970s when he meet the traveling Rom family, the Maximoffs, and their extended clan. Invited to travel with them, he met and eventually fell in love with Magda. Despite their age difference, and displeasure of the Rom for marrying an outsider, the two married and Erik and Magda traveled with the clan while searching for a place to call home.

Having settled temporarily in Germany in 1975, Erik was witnessed using his powers and he and Magda were attacked. In the chaos, it appeared that Magda was killed and Erik used his powers to kill the attackers. Magda, however, was injured but alive - but now terrified of her husband. After she was taken to hospital, she left Erik and traveled alone back to her clan. For his own part, despite his love for Magda, he couldn't be with someone who couldn't accept him and headed back to the States.

It was only months later that Magda would learn that she was pregnant and eventually give birth to twins: Wanda and Pietro.

The twins grew up being raised by Magda and the clan, which included a whole host of rambunctious cousins. Nothing seemed out of place or unusual, though Magda could be cold and detached at times, sometimes concentrating more on running the clan than her two children.

The year the twins turned 12, though, everything changed. Wanda and Pietro's powers emerged when an angry mob caught them stealing. Amid thrown rocks, someone drew a gun and shot one of the men in the camp. Furious and terrified, Wanda instinctively lashed out and her powers manifested. She managed to knock down a large tree in her panic and the mob scattered. Unfortunately, she was too much in shock to remove herself from the path and only Pietro's intervention with his own just-emerged superspeed saved her.

Now Magda was suddenly faced with both of her children being mutants and, in Wanda's case, a destructive one at that. Terrified of them but also wanting to protect them, Magda spent several months tracking down the husband she'd abandoned.

Shocked to discover that he had two children he hadn't been aware of, and intrigued by the fact that both had manifested, Erik now became involved in their lives. Unwilling to let her children be taken from her, and with Erik unable to live there full time, their father would visit for weeks at a time whenever he could. Wanda and Pietro grew from suspicious to loving children, enjoying the attention and care that he showed them and especially considering he seemed to be the only one to understand what they were going through.

While Erik seemed at a loss for exactly how Wanda's powers worked, he helped her establish a solid base for attempting to control them. He brought them to the Mansion a few times, where they met Charles Xavier and received further powers help, but they always returned home.

He was the driving force for them getting their education. With his work and money, the twins both went on to higher education.

As Wanda grew older, however, her father spoke more plainly about his mutant-centric philosophy. Finding it distasteful, she tried to ignore but it became harder and harder to ignore the human hating part of him. She finally cut ties when Pietro joined the Brotherhood, instead focusing her attentions on graduating from Cambridge.

During her time there, Wanda became at first a student, and then more like family, to Agatha Harkness. Harkness realized exactly what type of forces Wanda was manipulating and took her to the Exemplars, a group of men and women dedicated to keeping the chaos world stable. They worked with Wanda to help her control her powers and she became Harkness' star pupil and, eventually, like a partner once she graduated.

Magda eventually died as a result of the Great Headache, a year after Wanda cut ties with her father.

Living At The X-Mansion

After graduating, Wanda worked towards her PhD but also was introduced to the weirder world of magic and artifacts thanks to the work Harkness was doing. She maintained ties with the Exemplars, though always felt there was something they were holding back from her. As the years past, she developed a good reputation among scholars and curators of the weird.

While traveling, Wanda was attacked by a group attempting to cash in on the fact that she was related to Magneto. Having been followed by the group, she was eventually rescued by the X-Men who took her back to the Mansion to treat her wounds. While she was there, she saw someone she hadn't seen since she was a teenager - Charles Xavier. After several days of rest and explanations, Xavier offered her a place there and Wanda, having realized that she'd buried her head with regards to what was going on in the world, accepted.

Wanda was an active X-Man for years, made friends and formed a family, while completing her PhD and continuing, when she could, on the work she did with Agatha. Everything was on track...until Chthon.

Chthon, the Elder God)

A few years into her tenure with the X-Men, Wanda's control over her powers started to slip. Headaches, visions, emotional outbursts followed and she was planning to take a short hiatus to travel to see the Exemplars for help. Before she could, she woke up one morning not herself - Chthon, an Elder God of Chaos, had finally broken through the barriers in her mind and had switched places, locking Wanda's mental presence up in the astral plane jail he'd been trapped in for centuries. His goal was to use Wanda's physical body and her powers to first destroy the Exemplars and then spread his influence over the world through the human cult that had developed over the years in his worship.

Thanks to the intervention, however, of the Exemplars, the ghostly echo of Bova (one of the original Exemplars) and the combined weight of Xavier and the telepaths, who were able to punch through Wanda's normal powers based psi-shielding, and she was rescued from the Astral prison she'd been trapped in. They chased Chthon back into the cage but with the knowledge that the cage was now damaged, weakened. Wanda, rendered temporarily powerless by the attack, briefly left the mansion but also refused to travel to the Exemplars, feeling betrayed that they, and Agatha, had never told her that they'd known she was tied to Chthon.

Wanda regained her powers thanks to a trip to the place of her birth, triggering ancient wards that the original Exemplars had put in place to trap Chthon centuries before. Bova once again appeared before her, explaining that Chthon was the Elder God of Chaos and that he had been piggy backing off of Wanda ever since birth. The Exemplars had been born from Chthon's former worshipers when it had attempted to enter the real world, no longer content to spread chaos from the place of the Elder Gods. The Exemplars had been tasked with keeping Chthon in his prison, hunting down the unfortunate hosts and either helping or killing them, depending on how far gone they were.

Powers back, Wanda returned to the X-Men but as a changed woman. Angry at the Exemplars and Agatha, and confused by the knowledge that there were things out there beyond what the X-Men were fighting, Wanda drifted. She became more and more involved with missions that had occult and darker sides to them and would have numerous run ins with the Chthon cult after.

X-Force

While Wanda felt more and more separate from the X-Men's mission, she was eventually approached by several others and became a founding member of X-Force. She helped formed the weird occult portion and was firmly entrenched with the team until all the X-teams were dissolved after the fall of Genosha in 2012. Left on her own, Wanda set out to try to root out the Chthon cult and Harkness, traveling on her own for months with not much to show for it.

M-Day and Beyond

After M-Day, Wanda made the decision to return back to the Mansion as the world reeled from the chaos. On her way back, she picked up her half-sister, Lorna who was afraid that her role as a mole within the Brotherhood of Mutants had been found out. Wanda started back up with X-Force and pretty much picked up exactly where she left off, although with some new faces such as Felicia Hardy, Kevin Sydney and Nina Thurman joining the team. Her mentor/elder sister type relationship with the team's witch, Amanda Sefton, continued as it had done, and she and David North were still buddies.

2015 proved to be a busy year for Wanda, with X-Force missions of the more usual type in Madripoor and on the high seas, and the usual consultation work. But there were other, more personal situations: North was taken by HYDRA and Wanda was part of the rescue team, bringing down the entire complex with her powers afterwards; her sister Lorna's boyfriend and adoptive family were abducted by their father, who wanted their attention (and who got it, in spades); and she was called in to help Clinton Barton retrieve a SHIELD compatriot who had gone missing.

There were two incidents in particular that rocked Wanda. The first was the time loop incident involving friend and lover Simon Williams, who apparently perished in the course of stopping Heinrich Zemo. The second was becoming trapped in the mind of a Quebecois teenager, thanks to a powers malfunction from Quentin Quire. During their time sharing a brain (along with Gabriel Cohuelo and Jean-Paul Beaubier) Wanda and Quentin came to understand each other better, something that had seemed impossible only weeks before after Wanda had floored the Magneto fanboy with her relationship to - and opinions of - his hero.

Physical Characteristics

Height: 5' 10"

Weight: 172 lbs

Eyes: Dark brown/almost black.

Hair: Dark brown, tends to be rather uncontrollable when long, currently cut to just above shoulder length.

Other Features: Tanned and tends to be stronger than she looks; muscular and statuesque.

Powers

Wanda "hexes" things via chaos manipulation, in essence breaking down the natural order of things around her. She makes what could happen, happen, or what could not happen happen. Or what could happen but would be wildly improbable and outside the bounds of expectation happen. She's studied quite a bit into chaotic theory and basically thinks of her powers as getting "A" and "D" to create "Z". However, it's a lot more complicated than that. There's another aspect to our world, the chaos side. When Wanda utilizes her powers, she essentially rips open the barrier between and tosses out the end result, not caring how it happens, just that it does. Sometimes she can't even quite predict the end result - Wanda's manipulation of chaos and reality does not extend to precognition.

But if she concentrates, she can force it; force "A" to connect to "D" and result in exactly "Z", but at a higher cost to herself. When she doesn't force it, it's like she mentally reaches a hand into probability, rummages about and tosses out a result. When she forces it, she has to hold open the barrier longer and mentally look for what she wants. She describes it as "Looking into the abyss, and yes, it's looking back, but the worst thing is... I think it's hungry". She's looking into things that most people aren't supposed to see and she wipes it from her mind. When she uses her powers, her mind becomes almost a chaotic whirlwind, making it hard to read or grasp (but only when she's actively using her powers, in order to keep up with all the information she's processing); most psionic powers have difficultly affecting her in this state.

When she actives her powers, red "hex" rings appear around her hands, glowing brightly depending on how hard she's trying. Also, if she lets an unfocused "burst" go, she can reform it and create a "hex blast", a beam of entropic energy that erodes or decays whatever it hits.

Between the instructions on her powers from her father and the Exemplars, Wanda had a much tighter control over her powers than she otherwise might have earlier in life.

After Chthon, she lost the limitless well (tapping straight into his chaotic nature), though that has been less of an issue over time. What she gained, however, was an ability to spot the breaking points in an object/person. Using this trick enables her to locate the weak point and then use it against the object or the person in question.

She is also able to affect certain mutant powers besides those with telepathic or empathic abilities: those with the ability to see in the future find it difficult, if not down right impossible, to get a good read on her; she has messed with the destination of teleporters before as well. It is always a guessing game as to which powers she'll be able to affect or what the results of such actions will be.

Equipment

Wanda tends to travel with a set of well honed knives.

Trivia

Because of the amount she traveled, with and without her family, Wanda speaks a good number of languages. Not all of them well, in fact most she only has a smattering of the necessary phrases down. She speaks Rom (Romani language, but mostly used for trading and cursing) fluently, along with German, French, and Hungarian and handles the Czech languages pretty well and she can bluff her way through most Germanic languages. Her English is rather good, though she gets confused by it sometimes.

Wanda is a gym rat and she relishes working out -- sparring, lifting weights, etc.

She owns a set of business cards that Amanda gave her for a gift with the term "Boss Lady" printed on them. It's a term that a number of the younger trenchcoats have picked up and Wanda considers it a fantastic term of endearment and she rather adores it.