Marie-Ange Colbert
| Marie-Ange Colbert | |
|---|---|
 Portrayed by Alicia Witt | |
| Codename: | Tarot |
| Affiliations: | X-Force |
| Birthdate: | August 18, 1987 |
| Journal: | Marie-Ange Colbert |
| Player: | Frito |
Contents
Details
Aliases: Vision (X-Men trainee name), Francine Morrison
First Appearance: May 30, 2003
Place of Birth: Lyons, France
Citizenship: French
Relatives: Duvall (father), Jeanne-Michele (mother); Jean-Phillipe (cousin).
Education: High School diploma, currently completing degree in architecture via correspondence.
Relationship Status: Dating Doug Ramsey
Occupation: Employed by Snow Valley Memorial Center for Mutant Affairs to research and improve ADA regulations for mutants.
Biography
Childhood
Marie-Ange is the only daughter of Duvall and Jeanne-Michele Colbert. Duvall was a kind, if rather distant man and largely left Marie-Ange to the care of her mother, who was something of a religious type. Raised as a good Catholic girl, she was sent to an all-girl's school when she reached secondary level. She manifested in her early teens and managed to hide her powers for several years until the Great Headache resulted in her being exposed to her classmates. There was concern for the safety of the other students, given not much was known about mutants in France at that time, but one of the nuns knew of Charles Xavier and his school and it was arranged for Marie-Ange to transfer under a student visa to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.
Living At The X-Mansion
Marie-Ange came to the school at the end of May 2003. Aware of only her imaging power at that point in time, she quickly adapted to the school, making friends among the many new students at that time: Jamie Madrox, Everett Thomas and Doug Ramsey. She was also one of the students who came under the wing of Dr. Nathaniel Essex, resulting in her being recruited to kidnap Betsy for further surgery, an action that resulted in her receiving punishment duty in the medlab. It was during this duty that she met Manuel de la Rocha, with whom she had an on-again, off-again friendship.
It was in September 2003 that Marie-Ange's precognition surfaced, usually in the form of prophetic dreams. She began keeping a regular dream journal when it was discovered she had foreseen over the months several events, including Mystique's impersonation of Bobby Drake, Emma Frost's kidnap and escape, the nature of Doug's powers and Alex Summers being held hostage by Selene. She began testing with Dr. Moira MacTaggart to refine this troublesome power, using tarot cards and other means of divination (with the help of Amanda Sefton's exposure to the mystical) to focus it. She also forsaw the attack by Jamie's twisted dupe, but was unable to interpret the vision until too late: she was forced to kill one of the dupes, something which caused her to lose faith in her Catholicism and question her pacifism.
In the wake of the love potion disaster, Marie-Ange and Doug began a relationship, which was only strengthened by their separation in Asgard. During her time in Asgard, Marie-Ange was taken in by Odin, who had her trained in the warrior's art. He also gave her one of his ravens, Memory, as a means of keeping tabs on her during her journeys through his land. On her return it became obvious Marie-Ange's precognition had become more refined as a result of her interaction with Odin. She began sharing a suite with her now-friend Amanda, the two girls' powers and temperaments interacting unexpectedly well.
When Doug interpreted one of Marie-Ange's visions and nearly got himself killed trying to protect Rahne Sinclair from a sniper's bullet, Marie-Ange made the decision to become an X-Man trainee and received the codename "Vision", with Doug joining her on the trainee roster not long afterwards. However, problems arose with her precognition, eventually leading to her to almost have a psychotic break, only seeing the deaths of those around her. Remy LeBeau was the only one exempt from this, and eventually he was able to get her help from Tante Mattie, a houdon in New Orleans.
Tante's hard-learned lessons about her precognition came back to haunt Marie-Ange when her roommate was targeted by Selene. In order to ensure that worse events did not happen, Marie-Ange had to stand by and let Amanda gradually be drawn to the Hellfire Club. This, combined with her increasing frustration with the limits imposed on her as a trainee and her increasing knowledge that she was harder and more ruthless than many of her fellows, served to create doubt in her mind as to her place at the school and the team.
X-Force and Snow Valley
Following the rescue of Romany Wisdom, Doug and Marie-Ange broke up following a public argument in the foyer of the mansion. Doug accepted a job offer with Snow Valley Memorial Center for Mutant Affairs and moved out. At college, Marie-Ange had an encounter with Quentin Quire, a telepath with a crush on her. The interaction of their powers when he tried to telepathically influence her resulted in a number of alternate presents appearing to the mansion residents. It was Doug who worked out the connection, but his treatment of Quentin drove a further wedge between them.
Following her assistance with the incident in Germany, Marie-Ange accepted a position with Snow Valley. It was awkward, working with Doug, but they managed to achieve a business relationship and later a friendship, brought on by the various missions they went on. She began dating newcomer, Garrison Kane, but an incident during the Christmas lockdown in the XF brownstone led her to question the finality of her feelings for Doug, eventually leading her to end things with the Canadian.
Despite the incident - a rather heated kiss under the mistletoe, Marie-Ange did not manage to get Doug to admit that he still had feelings for her, and eventually resorted to a risky and manipulative plan. She and Forge feigned a relationship for several weeks in March 2007, eventually culminating in Doug confronting first Forge, and then Marie-Ange herself and admitting that he still loved her.
2007 has provided Marie-Ange a series of reminders that she is where she is supposed to be, and doing the right thing, even if the choices she has to make are not always easy. Beginning with confronting a radical fundamentalist Christian with intent on forcing the end of civilization and continuing through to going along with Doug's sketchy plan when they were stranded in Uganda.
Her decision to join X-Force and consider less scrupulous tactics were put to the test when Amanda was abducted and the team went to New Orleans to rescue her. While breaking into Candra's house in New Orleans, she was forced to kill in self-defense.
2008
As the only member of X-Force who had not fully succumbed to their alter-egos, Marie-Ange made the decision to smother Ben DeRoy, killing him and putting an end to his subconscious use of his reality-warping powers.
In February, Marie-Ange's precognition was one of the causalities of the attack on and emergency reset of the astral plane, although she was not aware of this until spring, when the team believed Mark to have been killed in the collapse of St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. While her precognition had always been erratic, she had never been wrong about a predicted death, and when she could get no consistent reading about Mark's return, she was forced to acknowledge to herself that the power was no longer functioning properly.
This theory was further confirmed when Amanda disappeared into London. In the fight with the city's guardian spirits, Marie-Ange was pulled into a Punch and Judy show, representing the tradition of the Saturnalia festival. She fought, was eventually having to play along with the show until she was presented with the right moment to act. She animated The Devil from a tarot card for Punch to defeat, as he traditionally does, and then finally animated - and mentally took over - an image of Death to kill the innocent bystander who had also been forced into the show - and into the role of the Lord of Misrule.
The theme of death continued into the late summer, when Marie-Ange and Amanda were called upon to assassinate Hussar, a member of India's Imperial Guard. While accepting of the necessities of her chosen job, Marie-Ange came home exhausted, needing a few days to recover and reconcile herself with what she had done.
Fall came with the return of Marie-Ange's precognition, and a final pained reminder of what not telling her friends and co-workers about it being broken could cost her. While attempting to travel from the Brownstone to Silver with Jean-Phillipe, the cousins encountered Apocalypse's Hellhound, Caliban. Caliban's ability to enthrall others was uniquely effective on Marie-Ange, causing the violent return of her precognition, sending her into a catatonic state only broken by Jean-Phillipe's revelation that he had been working for Magneto.
The sudden return of the power caused Marie-Ange day-long migraines and waking nightmares, and it was only until a few hours before Silver was attacked by radical supports of Apocalypse that she finally regained some measure of control over it, predicting the attack, and giving Mark and the refuges at the club time to prepare. She had one last vision near the end of the fight, fleeing the club to run two miles to the New York Stock Exchange to help Emma Frost find Doug's reborn body.
Physical Characteristics
Height: 5’6”
Weight: 135 lbs.
Eyes: grey
Hair: naturally red, tinted to various shades from strawberry blonde to auburn
Other Features: Marie-Ange has an armband tattoo of the four suits of the standard tarot deck. She also carries a pair of scars from being shot in the chest - one under her heart and the other on her back.
Powers
Marie-Ange is a rarity among mutants, with two seemingly unrelated mutant abilities.
The first is the creation of solid images, formed directly from astral matter, or ectoplasm. Marie-Ange can form three-dimensional solid images based off of any two-dimensional representation that she can see. The simpler the structure, the easier it is to animate and control. While Marie-Ange can control the actions of her constructs, she can also endow them with a semblance of autonomy, such as animating an image of a farmer to clean out the stables without her direct attention. Her most powerful constructs still have a finite amount of structural integrity, and if breached, dissolve into the astral matter they are formed from, leaving behind a thin layer of viscous 'slime' that evaporates quickly.
Marie-Ange tends to use small playing-card sized representations of her constructs to create them, most often a personalized deck of tarot cards. She has also been able to construct temporary supports and shelters from building blueprints, and on at least one occasion create a simple support without any base image. The effort of this construction, however, exhausted her greatly and has not been repeated.
Due to the nature of Marie-Ange's images as psionic constructs, she retains a minimal link to them, limited only to tactile senses. She gets a very minor amount of feedback from what the images touch, or what touches the images. Because of this, the sudden dissolution of an image can cause her pain, and it requires an major degree of concentration to keep an image intact when it is under some kind of attack. In one event, Marie-Ange has used this link to mentally take over one of her images in an emergency, although she retains very little awareness of what exactly occurred, believing the hazy memories to be from a concussion.
Marie-Ange's second mutant ability is precognition, the ability to visualize future events. This ability was initially uncontrolled and nigh-incomprehensible before Marie-Ange trained with Tante Mattie, and learned the process of focusing her precognition through either her card reading or her art. While Marie-Ange can attempt to induce a precognitive episode through meditation and specific techniques, this process is not always reliable. Most of her "visions" come without warning, and are often difficult to explain or interpret without some form of focus such as her art.
On a few occasions, Marie-Ange's gifts have combined to create short-lived solid images of potential events that she had seen and drawn in her sketchbook.
Due to Marie-Ange's precognition she possesses no mental shielding and her mental landscape has been described as akin to a black hole. While this makes her vulnerable to psionic attack, the unique mental state caused by her precognition means that only the most experienced or equally uniquely minded of psions can enter her mind unwanted without serious repercussions.
Equipment
Marie-Ange owns more decks of Tarot cards then she does shoes or art supplies.
She has a considerable number of shoes.
Trivia
Marie-Ange has an army of animated imps who do her bidding in the brownstone. They are based off the Nac Mac Feegle from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels and the Imp pet as see in World of Warcraft
Plots
2003
2004
2005
X-Men Mission: Things That Go Boom
2006
Operation: Don't Leave Me With The Germans
X-Men Mission: The Perfect Nanny
2007
2008
Meta
Player: Frito
E-mail: 
AIM: fritokal
Player Icon Base: Alicia Witt
Meta Trivia: Unknown to her player when choosing a face, Alicia Witt has played a precognitive in a movie - she was Alia, younger sister of Paul Atreides in Dune.
