Name: Anastasia "Nastya" Solon
Codename: Lazarus
Identity: Secret
Height: 6'3''
Weight: 209 lbs
Eye Color: Blue-Green
Hair: Raven
Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
Other Aliases: The Tiger's Cub; Babylonian Kitten; Valencia Knightfall; The Immortal Warden; The Queen of Avalon; La Reina; The Queen of L.A.
Titles: "Queen of Avalon;" White Knight of the Hellfire Club
"You wanna know how I was deemed 'not a failure?' When I was 'born,' they shot me in the head."
Nastya was born as a product of Avalon 's clandestine Lazarus Project, and is a clone of famed mutant leader and terrorist Amaranth , the Tiger of Babylon. When Antonia Dain captured the mutant leader, she'd been immediately counting on his allies to come for him and began preparing for the very real possibility that they would eventually find and retrieve him. Samples of his DNA were taken for study, another portion set aside, in what was known as the Lazarus Project. Combining his DNA with her own , the result was a girl, aptly named Anastasia, or "Nastya," meaning Resurrection . While she was overseen often by a group of Avalon scientists, including Antonia Dain herself, Nastya's only constant form of anything akin to actual companionship came from the artificial intelligence Aeon, who oversaw all of her training and development, actively participating in tests through various means.
Much to the initial disappointment of her commissioners, for unknown reasons, Nastya does not appear to have manifested many of the additional abilities Amaranth possessed through the alterations of his genes, such as his molecular control and solidification; she has only displayed similar immortality, intangibility, and regenerative abilities. However, without the strain carried by the old man's age and combating the effects of a complete Zythium skeleton, her regenerative abilities are said to greatly surpass his own.
Although the resulting failure provided the opportunity to learn more, a girl who could only regenerate endlessly was little more than a meat shield and distraction. She also lacked the old man's experience, wisdom, and skill. Thus, she was forced through an impossibly rigorous development and training schedule as soon as possible, wasting no time at all in order to try and play catch-up with the millennia head start. Successive tests were then used to measure enhancements provided by her training.
An experimental procedure forcing rapid body, brain and muscle development made it so that Nastya was thinking coherently, walking, and making other fine motor movements within a few days of her birth. She was immediately put to training, refining coordination, balance, speed, strength, and other attributes to make her a well-polished utility for her handlers. In just a couple of weeks, she was acquiring the tools required to disable fully grown men and even wild animals. All in all, her physical and mental growth exceeded all expectations.
Due to a combination of experimental enhancements and carefully practiced refining, her senses and physical parameters have been enhanced to superhuman levels.
Her olfactory sense is sharp and accurate enough to trace even partially decayed scents over time, and has been trained to such a degree as to discern specific scents over vast distances, even if the source is miles away.
Her auditory sense has been trained to receive even minuscule sounds extremely far away, and trained not only to pick out specific sounds within a wide variety of mixed noise, but to accurately pick apart and place various characteristic measures of each individual sound (volume, pitch, intensity, etc.).
Her sight is trained to such a level as to enable her to see extremely long distances and to be able to adapt almost instantly to changes in visual stimuli, including light and color, her absolute threshold decreasing the the minimum number of photons that must strike her retinas in order to elicit an awareness of visual perception, while increasing the maximum threshold of visual interpretation, effectively enabling her to see colors that are not possible for either the typical human or mutant. In addition to this, intense focus allows the close perception of physical facets such as textures and materials in objects, bolstered by a sensitive touch allowing more depth of accuracy.
For mostly unorthodox purpose, even her gustatory sense experienced enhancement and training, and she was taught to distinguish various specific tastes, including ingredients in food and drink, toxins and other concoctions or fluids, as well as not typically consumed objects such as fabrics and other materials. In this way she has been, perhaps inadvertently so, made into a capable chemist herself.
The first sense to begin active development was, in fact, Nastya's equilibrioception. A combination of an enhanced visual system, vestibular system, and kinesthesia enable her to maintain perfect balance, agility, and grace to perform impossibly complex maneuvers on typically unstable surfaces such as a tightrope or sheet of ice, allowing her to move places in ways others are not at all capable. She is not documented to have photographic reflexes. However, the first "language" she learned was the language of movements and gestures, training these before she was taught how to read or learned to speak. As such, she is capable of reading minute expressions, tics, and movements to determine things such as mood, what movements someone is making or about to make in a battle, and even maintaining careful watch over general gait and demeanor, informing her on occasion of doppelgängers or simply someone in odd circumstances.
Select gene alterations focused on those other than an X-Gene have produced alterations in Nastya's MSTN gene. Her body thus produces less myostatin than normal people, enabling her body to further develop muscles and strength to superhuman levels, resting currently at five tons of lifting/pushing strength, twice that in striking power. A secondary alteration, in conjunction with that in her MSTN gene, maintains simultaneous production of lactate for extremely strenuous muscle activity and faster purging of lactic acid in the muscles, and preventing disruptions of other metabolites to allow her faster recovery from fatigue, in addition to preventing Nastya’s muscles from growing too large at all, allowing her to maintain a relatively lean athletic build more conducive to rapid movement, agility, and danger avoidance.
Enhanced Speed/Mental Chronometry - The enhanced ability of her brain plus speed of movement decreases the amount of time between incoming stimuli, time taken for signals to reach the brain and register the stimuli, and further signals allowing her to react appropriately to the stimuli. In their reactions, many people's brains don't send signals quickly enough, and may send hasty and/or faulty signals, resulting in unconscious chance reactions that are only partially effective. A fighter may begin to perceive an incoming attack but inadvertently move into a punch, or simply dodge by chance. Nastya's brain sends signals many times faster and enable her to perceive things much more quickly, allowing more time to decide on a proper course of action and carry it out, thus leading to fewer mistakes in battle as her body follows suit. In a dead sprint at top speed, she could sprint at speeds up to ninety miles per hour for several minutes at full exertion, and likewise operate at superhuman combat speeds. However her body maintains heavy, thick muscles and not very much body fat at all; operating at peak performance as such would tire her out relatively quickly.
Even with physical performance levels exceeding projections, Nastya was not deemed a success. She was still...missing elements. And so they began the process of directed genetic splicing.
The first alteration of this kind was the splicing of source particles directly into her DNA. A procedure rendered possible only by the perfect adaptation and use of Trinity Blue's increasing control over biology to serve as a converter and conduit, the particles were adapted to a biological form and, along with some additional tampering, used to create what is known as the SRC gene, unique to the Lazarus.
In addition to enhancing her capabilities as a utility, this gene has provided her handlers with an opportunity to learn more about the particles through an additional source as she explores the effects. While some effects are shared between her natural adaptation and the raw particles as used by others, there remain some effects that would appear exclusive to Nastya due to Trinity's added work. Established and tested effects include manipulation of her mass and density, size, and even a way to render herself intangible in a similar vein as the militant mutant from whom she was spawned. Strangely enough, her intangibility seems to have an adapted telepathic defense so long as it is active; when her head becomes intangible, her thoughts seem to disappear as well, as if there were no mind to telepathically affect. Additionally, phasing seems to have a damaging effect on most forms of technology.
Among the forcefully induced alterations to her physical characteristics, further mutation led to the development of claws from the bones in her hands and feet. Able to be extended and retracted, these bones were selectively covered in a trion metal to enhance viability as a technical implement. The addition of trion renders these claws nearly unbreakable and almost infinitely sharp. It holds a certain energy-amplifying property, that any energy projected into the metal would be stored, and can then be amplified and released in greater quantities or used to enhance the sharpness and cutting power.
Numeromancy
One of the mutations activated when Antonia's genes activated within her, Anastasia developed the ability to view the world in terms of numbers. Whether she sees numbers in the world themselves, or her skill with calculating has simply advanced so far and so fast that that this may as well be the case, who can say but the girl herself? Now showing an enhanced affinity for calculation, she quickly began piecing the world together into values and formulae. Now, the language of the universe was open to her. In this, her affinity for mathematics is fast becoming so great that, if speculation holds, she could soon read numbers and equations like any other language, even better than others read languages like English and Spanish.
In this, her talent is so adept that simpler things may be deduced purely by intuition. Speeds of moving bodies (projectiles, vehicles, people, fists, etc.), wind speed, angles and trajectories, and many more transfinite details may be understood without so much as a single millisecond of calculation. More complex stimuli and numbers require work to translate and decode, extensive to varying degrees, but the lack of a need to work minutiae at all affords innumerable benefits. Because of this she doesn't need nearly as much time to appraise details of situation and response, freeing cognitive resources and allowing her to react even more quickly (and not to mention more accurately/appropriately) to incoming stimuli.
In some ways, as the name suggests, the extent of her numeromancy may be said to be supernatural. By reading the language hidden to most, she may know things and make associations that are not otherwise clear, seeing things like names and addresses, health condition, or other information not readily available, including such things that she could be considered retrocognitive. She could be considered a clairvoyant, achieved by decoding more obscure numbers, patterns, equations and coded applications. It allows her to much more accurately predict the future and, apparently, grants her the absolute capability of precognition - the ability to glimpse directly into the future. It has been theorized that pathways to other extrasensory perceptions may be open to her through the numbers.
Non-deterministic
The best-kept secrets of Anastasia's creation and existence belied secrets about not only herself, but Antonia Dain who commissioned her. Details unknown to all including her closest friends and even the artificial intelligence which stores details about nearly everything the woman saw and knew.
It is that the woman who came to be known as Antonia Dain was the result of a genetic engineering project uniting a number of history's modern titans, and that Anastasia was likewise conceived using material from Antonia and several beings herself.
Owing much to another among the more radical members of her lineage, Anastasia was born exhibiting anomalous properties recorded in less than a handful of others throughout time.
Though it is a widely debated topic among scholars, in many circles it is accepted that one of the overarching truths of the universe is that most everything is deterministic. The laws of the universe apply to nearly all things. The relationship between cause and effect that says all things are bound by causality, and all states of all things are bound by previous states. Applied to human beings this means all that someone is, is shaped by previous extant states of the universe around them and themselves in it. All anyone will ever think or say or do is a result of what happened before, as a result of what happened before that, as a result of what was before that, and so on...
Contra this, we gather the idea of the nondeterministic, that which may act independently of previous states of the universe and itself. Chance and true perfect randomness stem from this principle.
It is through this quality that, like Antonia prior to her dispersal , Nastya is a particularly unique being, paradoxical and often unrestrained by conventional laws. Her nature is that of the nondeterministic. Existing as one whole throughout space and time, because of her unique status she is unable to be affected/read by foreknowledge, abilities such as precognition, intuition and danger senses, and even omniscience. To all things pertaining to the future—to possibility itself —she is a universal blind spot. Even when direct time travel is involved, it is difficult-to-impossible to determine her impact on the future; or it on her.
Arts of the Arcani Antonia herself taught Nastya how to utilize two of the Arts of the Arcani that she'd learned through sight: Vespa and Zadkhiau. Although she is not documented to have photographic reflexes, Nastya picked up skills rather quickly, due to a combination of studiousness and conditioning, and the enhanced cognitive development she underwent.
Skill: Arts of the Arcani - Vespa (Wasp)
All beings are systems of matter and energy. Like any system, there are nexus points which influence critical functions. Vespa is the study of these points and how they might be disrupted or destroyed.
Vespa teaches the secret strikes by which a chi user's chakras are disabled, the pressure points which a limb or organ can be paralyzed, and even the occult techniques which strip a mage's powers.
Like Antonia before her, Nastya ascended to the level of her master, even if neither has been officially recognized as a practitioner at all. She knows the secret points to induce pain, muscular paralysis, or other disabling, from individual limbs to the entire body. The dreaded death touch is also a part of her repertoire, able to cause immediate or delayed death. Capable of attacking more than the body alone, she can disable key chakra points to inhibit chi flow; denying a chi user access to their inner power. This can also be used on a magic user, disabling their ability to tap into their magical energies.
Also following her master, Nastya was taught the ways of Antonia's own secret innovation in use of the art, learning the ways to willingly reverse the effects of the art, granting a chi user or magus the use of their abilities once more, re-mobilizing a limb, and even reversing the effects of death, should it be attempted within a reasonable time after death and depending on other circumstances.
Skill: Arts of the Arcani - Zadkhiau (Shatterpoint)
The second art taught to her by Antonia, Zadkhiau is said to unlock the quantum secrets of reality itself, the most proficient Zadkhiau user able to supposedly shatter buildings with a touch, "feel" the flow of a battle around them, or "break" another with a single word. Even without extraneous sense she can intuitively sense details and opportunities in the environment, displaying an acute spacial awareness for openings even outside her field of view.
As with Vespa, neither Nastya nor Antonia are recognized as practitioners of Zadkhiau, but Nastya has been taught to use it with a similar level of proficiency, including picking apart strategies and tactics just as well as elements in the physical world.
In the Art of Zadkhiau, however, Nastya has been as much a teacher as she has a student. Showing herself a prodigy, she not only quickly learned what was taught to her, but discovered herself the way to adapt a personal spin on Zadkhiau in the same vein as Antonia has with Vespa. Continued practice has led to discovery of alternative means by which to use the art, a secret innovator herself. By targeting lasting facets of shatterpoints within the environment, she has learned to apply certain techniques to these points, offering increased degrees of freedom in dealing with them. Fortification of these points may allow them to withstand some degree of tampering even from Nth level practitioners. Alteration of points themselves may allow for intuitively determining and targeting of a specific, fleeting point, and enabling that point to stay active for longer periods, or alternatively, making one vanish harmlessly. Some may speculate that this improvised mastery level would allow one to even create precise shatterpoints, but they would be wrong. It would, however, would make possible the moving of points from one place to another.
Equipment Since returning to Avalon as its head, Nastya has taken to using some tools just like those Antonia used as the Noir Rose, as well as having made use of a number of her own. These things are often stored, miniaturized via a special connection between embedded particles and her own SRC gene. Like Antonia, Nastya may be known to use:
Flash grenades Fragmentation grenades Napalm/Incendiary grenades Cryo grenades Sonic grenades Spike grenades Gas grenades (includes smoke, tear gas, and other variations) Gravity grenades Miniature bombs (modified plastic explosive - set trigger stimulus and kaboom) Bubble shield Micro camera + voice recorder Cryptographic sequencer (multi-modal; aids in hacking, tracing various signals) Remote tracers Bubble Shield: Based on a design Nastya personally modified from Antonia's prototypical magitek shield, Nastya's are more conventionally restrictive and extreme in their operation. The bubble shield encases its user in a field of energy through which persons and objects are not able to pass. Its formation is of a geodesic sphere with a ten foot radius around the node from which it forms. After formation, each barrier has an energy limit that, upon being reached, leads to the dissolution of the shield, requiring the device to recharge. Conventional weaponsfire and other smaller projectiles have very little if any effect on the shield and tends to ricochet harmlessly off (unless one makes such an attack from the inside). While strength variations may be made, most bubble shields can withstand up to one hit from anything as strong as a nuclear strike without any immediate effects passing through (though something of this magnitude would lead to immediate dissolution), more from anything less. Resistant even to tunnelling effects thanks to the density of its composite particles, those trying to pass through may find trouble and even pain for their efforts. Nastya may surmount this through her own perfect intangibility which acts independently of such things.
Gravity grenades: "Black hole in a can." These grenades were made to harness the power of gravity in a way that, once detonated, produces a controlled reaction projecting a controlled field. The "blast radius," rather than producing a concussive explosion and shrapnel, acts as a sort of event horizon. Anything caught within it then has the forces acting upon its physical body continually increased. As the forces increase, the body's physical system changes. These forces are eventually increased to such a degree that they quickly succeed in overcoming the outward pointing forces, thus eventually collapsing the body into a singularity at its gravitational center, effectively destroying it.
There exists a secondary variation which completely removes all forces acting on a body caught within the blast radius, thus enabling the outward pointing forces to overcome the inward pointing forces, thus ripping the physical body into atoms, those atoms into subatomic particles, and those subatomic particles into elementary particles, effectively destroying it.
Marshall and Holton: A pair of custom-made twin pistols, each marked by a distinct scent for locating over distance and for Nastya to tell them apart. .45 rounds in a 7 + 1 magazine, may hold multiple types of ammunition. Standard, expanding (hollow- and soft-point), fragmenting, and high-explosive incendiary are all common types. Left with Dain's instructions, Nastya has also come into possession of trion ammo and the knowledge of how to produce it. These enter a target's gravitational field and decrease the outwards pointing forces of the body's internal pressure, allowing the inwards pointing forces to cause the target to gravitationally collapse into nothingness.
Sintítulo: A 12-gauge pump action shotgun with a customized rocket attachment. Drum mag allows fast reloading by removing the need to load shells individually, also allowing 12 +1 capacity (as opposed to 10 + 1 without). Extra full choke squeezes pellets together, concentrating fire and increasing range. Incendiary rounds also carried.
A egis de la Reina
"This shield was originally designed for our Vice President Mr Washington. He turned out to be a complete asshole. So it's now yours."
―Julius Jones
Designed by Equalizers resident nerd Mr. McAbe and given to the Noir Rose , designated Aegis de la Reina was then given a design facelift and modified by Anastasia's own hand. Infused with particles of the SRC gene itself, the physical properties of the Aegis may be manipulated in the same ways as she does her own body. Used in sync with a certain device, it can be controlled as by telekinesis and called back to whomever wears this device at any time, across any distance.
Originally made with a "classified," unknown metal, Anastasia had the Aegis coated in a layer of an experimental gamma trion and fitted with an inertial distribution device (IDD). The gamma trion coat enables it many of the very same properties as the characteristic metal, with some slight differences. Like beta trion it allows for absorption of direct-transfer energy, and amplification & projection of said energy. However, while beta trion releases energy in the form of pure concussive force blasts, gamma trion boasts more flexible discharge potential. Its energy may release in the form of pure concussive energy blasts, electricity, a wave of thermal energy, or a combination of any and all. The trion also boasts the hardening, and sharpening along edges, of beta trion, adding to its utility as both defensive and offensive tool. However, it is unknown whether or not these properties in the experimental metal are as strong as in beta trion.
The IDD works in conjunction with the trion's energy-absorbing properties and aids in bank shots. When the shield is thrown and makes contact with a surface, energy from the strike is stored and amplified—in essence, allowing it to move even faster (think pinball) and continue its airborne movement—perhaps indefinitely.
The Legacy Blade When Antonia Dain cut down Amaranth Solon in Gothic City, she did so in one stroke.
It was said she had prepared painstakingly for the encounter, spent innumerable hours, countless tireless nights, preparing contingency after contingency after contingency, expecting most of them to fail miserably, forcing her on to the next one. Although many had tried, all had failed to stop the man many believed to be the "Mutant Messiah," the man most deserving of the title, and he who stood the greatest chance of leading the X-gene–carrying mutants to their destiny as the inheritors of the Earth. The man could never die; could he even be stopped, or merely delayed long enough to become a problem for the next generation to pass on to their children, and theirs after that? Antonia Dain prepared for many encounters with the legendary warrior, uncertain if it would take ten or a hundred attempts to bring him down, and preparing every plan as if it were destined for simultaneous success and failure.
She needed only one.
In a flourish of steel, she sprung her trap and cut down the ancient warrior with a quickness that belied the cumulative skill of either and surprised even herself. She severed his Zythium skeleton at the spine, dividing him in two.
All of this would have been impossible were it not for a single critical element prepared months in advance. In the company of a trusted companion, she prepared an expedition to Timbuktu after pinpointing precisely the location of a reserve of the rare anti-metal variation of vibranium. Depleting the reserves even in taking a minuscule amount, she fashioned this into a sword in the style of a Chinese war sword.
This war sword is the implement that facilitated Amaranth's downfall and saved Antonia Dain a prolonged encounter with one of the most dangerous men alive.
Anastasia has taken this war sword and refashioned it into a blade to fit her needs, along with a steel katana which her predecessor had taken from the body of a boy known only as "The Vatican Assassin," who was shot down by Jayden Knightfall during Antonia Dain's first venture with Quintus Knightfall.
The steel of the katana serves as a base, forming the bulk of the blade. It's nothing special, save for holding some sentimental value with its past bearers. A layer of diamond, only as thick as a single molecule, covers this. The diamond layer serves as a barrier to protect the steel from the vibranium, which comprises the outer layer. Although this layer is relatively thin as well, its special properties make it invaluable nonetheless; for on contact with other metals of any kind, this vibranium emits vibrations which cause the atomic and molecular bonds in other metals it contacts to weaken, liquefying them. This is the reason it was dubbed "anti-metal."
She calls this weapon her "Legacy Blade," as it represents for her the culmination of every legacy she herself is connected to, both directly and indirectly.
Nastya and the Legacy Blade Accompanying the blade, Nastya had two specialized "sheaths" constructed as well. The first, made of leather and wood, is quite simply for safe-keeping, to keep the blade from being exposed and harming anyone unintentionally. The second is a designated "combat sheath." Its internal casings made of diamond, its exterior is a sleek beta trion designed to fit tightly over the anti-metal blade, connected via molecular seal using Nastya's molecular control. This is to allow her the use of the Legacy Blade in sparring or other situations she wouldn't want the anti-metal exposed.
Valencia Knightfall Anastasia has assumed the identity of Valencia Knightfall, estranged daughter of Andres Knightfall, just as as Antonia Dain before her. She is the reported head of Avalon as Dain's successor. In addition to a full work of verifying documents and corroborating contacts, there are physical differences between the two, made possible through shapeshifting via Anastasia's molecular manipulation. This identity is given distinct features down to her facial/bone structure, gait and gestures (to the smallest details), vocal intonation and overall sound.
Characteristics Anastasia Valencia Height 6'3'' 5'9'' Weight 209 lbs 160 lbs Hair Raven Raven Eyes Blue-green Blue Blood Type AB+ O- (provided by documents)
Anastasia, unlike Valencia, is deliberately without any documents to prove her history or existence [save for top secret files kept by the scientists in charge of her creation]. Additionally, the masked alter ego shares characteristics in line with Anastasia in order to separate her from the CEO.
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