Monet St. Croix | M (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
insufferablysmug) wrote2016-05-07 12:37 am
insufferablysmug) wrote2016-05-07 12:37 am
Entry tags:
app @ maskormenace
〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Betsy
AGE: 23
JOURNAL:be_themoon
IM / EMAIL: oakashandwillow / oakashandwillow (at) gmail
PLURK:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
be_themoon
RETURNING: yes i mean no shut up
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Monet St. Croix / M
CHARACTER AGE: it's COMICS. um. my guess would put her around 27-30?? realistically?
CANON ORIGIN: Marvel Comics - X-Factor
CHRONOLOGY: X-Factor v3 #230
CLASS: Hero
HOUSING: randomize
BACKGROUND:
The Marvel universe is a wonderful, marvelous place full of total contradiction, there are mutants, there are superpowers, please tell me I don't have to go into detail on it all I beg of you.
Monet Yvette Clarisse Maria St. Croix (I just like her full name okay) was born to Cartier St. Croix, Monacan ambassador to France, and his Algerian wife, while on a family ski trip to Bosnia. She grew up wealthy, talented, and beloved and accepted. She had three siblings – an older brother Marius, and her younger twins Nicole and the autistic Claudette- but she was their dad’s favorite. Everything went pretty fine until Marius manifested his mutant ability to eat other mutants’ bone marrow (??) or just touch them they’re really washy on how it works) and thereby steal their power, killed their mother as his first victim, turned into a hideous monster called Emplate, and got kicked out of the house. Her own mutant powers manifested not long afterwards but were pretty kickass and everyone thought it was great.
She continued growing up spoiled and arrogant until Marius returned and asked her to share in his quest to rule over the Earth by. She refused because he looked like a hideous monster and laughed at him over it, which got him so enraged that he changed her into a mute creature named Penance with red, diamond-sharp skin and teeth that was apparently a perfect food source of energy for him? Let’s be honest here Marvel never really went into the mechanics of that too much, or how Marius had so much magic other than the ‘strange dimension’ he’d been banished to. Anyways, Nicole and Claudette showed up, were horrified because they thought Marius and this strange creature had killed Monet, and Claudette banished Marius to another dimension because she… apparently knows magic? He told Penance he was the only one who could cure her and she jumped in after him.
Anyways, the point being that Monet was gone for several years being more or less tortured for her life energy as a captive of her brother in another dimension and also under his thrall, until one day a mutant named Gateway teleported her out of her brother’s grasp and into the care of Generation X, a group of mutant kids being looked after by Emma Frost and Sean Cassidy. A team that Monet St. Croix was apparently on! Turns out Nicole and Claudette, worried that the loss of his favorite daughter so soon after the loss of his wife would destroy their dad, had figured out that they could merge and impersonate Monet really well, except for when Claudette took control and Monet had autistic episodes. Also on the team were Paige Guthrie (Husk), Jono Starsmore (Chamber), Everett Thomas (Synch), Jubilee, and Angelo (Skin).
Penance stayed with the team, wary and flighty but slowly coming to trust her teachers more and even try to join in on things, though her version of joining in meant shredding her tests carefully. She protected them on missions and joined in on team things like picnics. They tried to discover what was wrong with her, but Emplate had put in mental blocks keeping her from revealing her true nature and stopping Emma’s attempt to psychically read her. At one point, with the rest of the team missing and Emplate the only person who knew where they were, Emma agreed to trade Penance to him for the location of the rest of the team. Sean stopped her and she claimed she had been making a trap for Emplate, but Penance never trusted her again. Eventually, after Monet-as-Penance and the-twins-as-Monet had both been on the team for a while without anyone realizing the truth, there was a series of really complicated events that led to Monet back in her own body and the twins in the Penance body.
While the twins-as-Monet had been arrogant snobs, it turned out the real Monet was even more so. Jubilee tried to be friendly to be her, but Monet made it clear she wasn’t interested in friendship with her, telling her she’d treated her like a pet when she was Penance and it had been humiliating and rude. They fell back into feuding. On the other hand, she got along well with her teammate Synch, Everett Thomas, and clearly felt romantically towards him. She was also extremely sympathetic towards her younger sisters, visiting them frequently in the basement they were stuck in given the school’s new human population and trying to figure out how to get them out of the Penance body.
Emplate attacked the school again during a dance, and an explosion once again separated the twins and forced them out of the Penance body. Somehow it remained animated, but the twins were again themselves. Their father showed up not long afterwards and took them all out of the school as well as arranged for Emplate to receive care. Monet agreed that it made sense to leave – there were bad memories attached to the school given her time as Penance there. But she kissed Everett goodbye and said she would miss him.
Except that her new school had a vampire headmaster, and after she beat him by impaling him, she decided it was time to head back to Generation X, where she picked up where she left off with Everett and started a relationship with him. Unfortunately, Emma’s sister Adrienne was messing with the school and ended up planting multiple bombs. One killed Everett, and Monet was devastated. The school was closed to everyone but the Gen X kids, who undertook more missions to help other kids. Monet, furious, mostly took these missions as an excuse to hit people. The only good thing was that she and Jubilee put aside their differences and formed a bond over their mutual distress over Everett’s death. When their teachers began acting oddly, the kids jointly decided that they were no longer fit teachers and closed the school down entirely. Monet promised to stay in touch, didn’t leave her phone number, and headed back to Monaco.
At some point after this, she was contacted by Banshee again to join his new X-Corporation, which was also using former mutant bad guys in an attempt to keep the peace among mutants. Working with Paige, Jono, and Jubilee again, as well as Jamie Madrox and others, she agreed to come in to help the others keep an eye on Sean, as they were worried about him. That turned into a total disaster, as she’d predicted, and afterwards she joined the X-Corporation in Europe to make up for her part in that disaster, again working with Jamie Madrox and now with Banshee’s daughter Siryn and Rictor as well. After M-Day, X-Corporation was shut down.
She then was hired by Jamie, who’d created X-Factor in New York, a mutant detective agency whose first assignment was looking into the roots of M-Day. Monet proved to be an invaluable member of the team, her mental powers helping a great deal. They slowly worked out the details of what had happened on M-Day, as well as publicly stating that they were now protecting Mutant Town and running into a law firm called Singularity that seemed to be gunning for them. They went so far as to state to the X-Men that if they attempted anything in Mutant Town, X-Factor would take them down.
In a personal interlude, Jamie accidentally got really drunk and while he slept with Siryn, a dupe of his slept with Monet. Or was it the other way around? No one knows. He kept up juggling the two relationships for a little bit until convinced to tell them, at which point Monet and Siryn became furious with him and each other, though they did reconcile in time to go to Paris on a shopping trip together and run into a mob hunting down a group of former mutants. Arrested for protecting the former mutants, they’re cooperating in jail when the police bring in one of the protesters, who’s covered in ash and states he burnt their building down, killing most of the former mutants. Monet breaks out and crucifies him to the wall in fury, afterwards rescuing the one girl who survived the inferno and leaving Paris.
Shortly afterwards, Rahne and Layla leave for totally different reasons, and after O.N.E. tries to control them they blow up their headquarters and resettle in Detroit, with Terry now pregnant with Jamie’s kid. While there, Secret Invasion happens, and X-Factor briefly hinder then help She-Hulk and Jazinda track down a Skrull while on a case to find Darwin. They then have to rescue Darwin after his father sells him out, and he and Longshot both join the team.
Okay, so X-Factor plots are heavily reliant on this really insane time travel thing going on. The briefest explanation is – a Jamie dupe went to the future, went insane, got used by bad guys, went more insane, and took over Monet’s mind temporarily in an attempt to kill a mutant who was pregnant with someone important to the rebellion later. Monet kicked him out eventually and tried to kill him.
X-Factor split briefly after that because of the whole Siryn’s-kid-was-actually-just-a-dupe and Jamie absorbed him thing – Jamie and Guido went back to New York, Siryn stayed in Detroit with the rest of the team, but soon shut it down and headed back to Ireland, with Monet accompanying her in an effort to help her, as she and Siryn consider each other best friends. She came back to New York and said that she didn’t know what to do, Terry wasn’t bouncing back from it at all.
But oh hey, turns out her father was kidnapped by Baron Mordo, who wants Monet so he can feed on her energy to keep himself alive. After a brief interlude in which they knock down Doom’s castle and find out that Layla’s hanging out with him and someone’s trying to hunt down X-Factor, Monet goes after him with Guido and is captured. With other circumstances meaning a bomb’s being dropped on them, Monet agrees to let him feed on her if he teleports her, her father, and Guido out of there, but then instead telepathically convinces him that she kept her word and he’s been rejuvenated when he actually hasn’t been.
While protecting JJJ, Guido is shot . Monet completely loses it and trashes the people who did it, and then is the first to notice upon his miraculous recovery that he’s behaving oddly, including kissing her – turns out Layla brought him back and he has no soul! And then Jamie Prime is apparently murdered and the entire team spends an issue just arguing about everything, including how Layla’s back and being weirder than ever, Guido’s lack of a soul, and religion. Monet is brought in just as Wolverine says he’s brought in some new leadership, if they want it, and introduces Polaris and Havok.
Her current X-Factor teammates are Rictor, Rahne, Layla Miller, Longshot, Shatterstar, Theresa Cassidy, Strong Guy, and for the past two minutes Havok and Polaris. Former teammates were Jamie Madrox (deceased) and Darwin (on a leave of absence).
comics
PERSONALITY:
“I don’t hate everyone, Terry. I just think I’m better than them.”
Monet is one of those classic jerks with a heart of gold, with her heart of gold buried pretty deep. She’s spoiled, arrogant, and entitled, and has always genuinely believed herself to be better than the people around her in almost any respect. This has only been born up by her mutant abilities, which have basically guaranteed that she’s more powerful and more intelligent than most people she meets. She was a spoiled rich kid as a teenager, and she’s only grown more into the role as she grows up, not hesitant at all to throw her weight around and demand what she feels is her fair due.
But not all of her harshness is simply arrogance. Monet is emotionally extremely withdrawn, a result of her years as Penance. She cares deeply for her teammates, but isn’t very good at expressing it. When Terry was envious of Monet’s iPhone, she bought Terry and her other female teammates Layla and Rahne an iPhone, only to crush Rahne’s when she heard she was leaving. She said that she didn’t care whether Rahne stayed or went, but was actually pretty obviously angry and upset about it, and mentioned that since Layla was gone she’d keep hers for Rahne in mint condition in case she ever came back. Emotional connections aren’t something Monet does easily, but when she does make them she’s very intense about them, willing to go to huge lengths to protect the people she cares about even if she then turns around and is abrasive to them the next moment.
“It’s an odd feeling. Being insufferably smug suits me better, I think.”
Monet has admitted at one point to having suicidal thoughts, saying that she wakes up every morning and tries to convince herself to keep living. She still has strong trauma/PTSD symptoms from being held as her brother’s captive for so long, and some of her tough act is to keep people from seeing that, as she never wants to be or be seen as vulnerable again. Her image is very important to her, and she's very loud about her belief in her own superiority. On the other hand, for someone who professes to only really care about herself, she’s extremely willing to join up with a detective agency despite not needing the money and the living spaces being nothing like what she prefers.
She does, however, have her own special brand of justice. While most of the time she just goes along with the law, Monet has a definite violent, slightly sadistic streak in her, as demonstrated when a bigot burned down a building full of more or less helpless former mutants. She crucified him to the jail wall with the bars of her cell and painted a message in his blood on the wall. Yup. When Monet feels herself or people she considers under her protection personally wronged, the lengths she goes to to avenge them can be pretty scary. She’s proven herself more than willing to kill people, and frequently uses violence as a sort of release. Angry about being trapped somewhere with no way back to where you’re trying to rescue your dad? Let’s go hit Doom’s castle until it breaks. Think a thirteen year old girl is threatening your team? Threaten her right back. Her morality scale is definitely a little tilted, but she’s fighting for the right people.
”I don’t think people can really change. I think they just get better at hiding what they are."
Monet’s a contradiction in a lot of ways. She’s exceptionally intelligent, but she’s content sitting back and letting others puzzle things out, preferring to hit things and go for the direct approach. She’s one of the most overpowered characters in X-Men history probably, but she’s always stayed more or less on the sidelines, and seems completely uninterested in joining the X-Men themselves, content to hang out with a detective agency that really isn’t all that famous or in the spotlight. She ditches responsibility any chance she gets. She professes not to care about people but protects them despite it being of absolutely no benefit to herself. She’s a spoiled rich kid hanging out with a noir detective club. She’s emotionally distant at best, despite feeling very strongly about a lot. But deep at heart, despite actively making it sound like she isn't, she's a good person.
”Not to sound unsympathetic – not that I am sympathetic, I’m just trying to sound like it.”
POWER:
All canon.
- Enhanced physiology. This is a whole fun umbrella of stuff. She approaches invulnerability, taking hits from Hulk and She-Hulk relatively unscathed. She has a healing factor that speeds recovery from injuries as well as making her more resistant to poisons and toxins. Superhuman hearing, sight, reflexes, agility, speed (approaching 100 mph), stamina, and strength (capable of lifting up to 10 tons at least – she’s shown throwing cars and snapping light posts with ease, as well as carrying an entire elevator with four people in it without effort).
- Flight. She has stated at one point that she can reach supersonic speeds, and has been shown catching up and leisurely keeping pace with a passenger plane at one point, while telepathically messing with a passenger on it.
- Telepathy/enhanced brain function. She can read minds, project thoughts and illusions into the minds of others, and protect her own mind from telepathic assault, though she is not invulnerable to it and has had her mind taken over a few times. They only work within a small range of her, and she frequently uses physical contact to make it easier, but within that range she’s extremely powerful and has proven herself able to get into Emma Frost’s mind. She also has superhuman intuitiveness/intelligence, a photographic memory, and can perceive others mutant auras.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[ it's video, because it's Monet. she doesn't believe in hiding. she also looks incredibly irritated with Literally Everything.
it's because she is. ]
Is this really what you expect me to do here? [ not that she can hold up her assignment to the camera very easily since it's on the same device she's transmitting from, but she's not thrilled, or even happy, or even anything approaching that. ]
Whoever is in charge here should rethink their position. Not that anyone seems to be truly in charge.
Isn't that new and exciting.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
He'd gotten into her head. He'd gotten into her head and pulled Penance out again, dragged all her nightmares into the bright light of day and turned her screaming terror on herself. Made her show her fear. Made her show her weakness.
There were offenses Monet could forgive. Slights she could brush off. Unlike Guido or Shatterstar, she wasn't likely to start a fight because someone punched her. (Fight wasn't the right word for the one-sided affairs that generally turned into.) She could take being shot at with equanimity, generally. (Unless it messed up her clothes.)
The point being, she didn't generally take things personally when they went out and fought the bad guys. Being terrible was essentially their thing, after all. Taking personal offense was pointless unless they were personally messing with you. Otherwise just punching them until they stopped trying to kill you and handing them over to the authorities was generally sufficient.
That wasn't what she was going to do with Baron Mordo. No. Him she was going to create a special circle of hell for. Ripping out his spine was too kind. Death in general was too kind for him, no matter how slow. She was going to get into his head and find out what made him scream and then she was going to trap him in there with it forever. She was going to –
She was going to let him go in his sad delusion of happiness, pleased with himself even as he died. Believing he’d pulled one over on her. Knowing that he’d found her weakness.
Because that meant she was better than him. Not that she didn’t already know that – of course she was better than him, that was obvious enough. But this was proof of that. For herself and for everyone else. She was the good guy, here.
She still wanted his spine around his throat. But even she couldn’t always have her cake and eat it too. This would have to be enough.
FINAL NOTES:
n/a
NAME: Betsy
AGE: 23
JOURNAL:
be_themoonIM / EMAIL: oakashandwillow / oakashandwillow (at) gmail
PLURK:
RETURNING: yes i mean no shut up
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Monet St. Croix / M
CHARACTER AGE: it's COMICS. um. my guess would put her around 27-30?? realistically?
CANON ORIGIN: Marvel Comics - X-Factor
CHRONOLOGY: X-Factor v3 #230
CLASS: Hero
HOUSING: randomize
BACKGROUND:
The Marvel universe is a wonderful, marvelous place full of total contradiction, there are mutants, there are superpowers, please tell me I don't have to go into detail on it all I beg of you.
Monet Yvette Clarisse Maria St. Croix (I just like her full name okay) was born to Cartier St. Croix, Monacan ambassador to France, and his Algerian wife, while on a family ski trip to Bosnia. She grew up wealthy, talented, and beloved and accepted. She had three siblings – an older brother Marius, and her younger twins Nicole and the autistic Claudette- but she was their dad’s favorite. Everything went pretty fine until Marius manifested his mutant ability to eat other mutants’ bone marrow (??) or just touch them they’re really washy on how it works) and thereby steal their power, killed their mother as his first victim, turned into a hideous monster called Emplate, and got kicked out of the house. Her own mutant powers manifested not long afterwards but were pretty kickass and everyone thought it was great.
She continued growing up spoiled and arrogant until Marius returned and asked her to share in his quest to rule over the Earth by. She refused because he looked like a hideous monster and laughed at him over it, which got him so enraged that he changed her into a mute creature named Penance with red, diamond-sharp skin and teeth that was apparently a perfect food source of energy for him? Let’s be honest here Marvel never really went into the mechanics of that too much, or how Marius had so much magic other than the ‘strange dimension’ he’d been banished to. Anyways, Nicole and Claudette showed up, were horrified because they thought Marius and this strange creature had killed Monet, and Claudette banished Marius to another dimension because she… apparently knows magic? He told Penance he was the only one who could cure her and she jumped in after him.
Anyways, the point being that Monet was gone for several years being more or less tortured for her life energy as a captive of her brother in another dimension and also under his thrall, until one day a mutant named Gateway teleported her out of her brother’s grasp and into the care of Generation X, a group of mutant kids being looked after by Emma Frost and Sean Cassidy. A team that Monet St. Croix was apparently on! Turns out Nicole and Claudette, worried that the loss of his favorite daughter so soon after the loss of his wife would destroy their dad, had figured out that they could merge and impersonate Monet really well, except for when Claudette took control and Monet had autistic episodes. Also on the team were Paige Guthrie (Husk), Jono Starsmore (Chamber), Everett Thomas (Synch), Jubilee, and Angelo (Skin).
Penance stayed with the team, wary and flighty but slowly coming to trust her teachers more and even try to join in on things, though her version of joining in meant shredding her tests carefully. She protected them on missions and joined in on team things like picnics. They tried to discover what was wrong with her, but Emplate had put in mental blocks keeping her from revealing her true nature and stopping Emma’s attempt to psychically read her. At one point, with the rest of the team missing and Emplate the only person who knew where they were, Emma agreed to trade Penance to him for the location of the rest of the team. Sean stopped her and she claimed she had been making a trap for Emplate, but Penance never trusted her again. Eventually, after Monet-as-Penance and the-twins-as-Monet had both been on the team for a while without anyone realizing the truth, there was a series of really complicated events that led to Monet back in her own body and the twins in the Penance body.
While the twins-as-Monet had been arrogant snobs, it turned out the real Monet was even more so. Jubilee tried to be friendly to be her, but Monet made it clear she wasn’t interested in friendship with her, telling her she’d treated her like a pet when she was Penance and it had been humiliating and rude. They fell back into feuding. On the other hand, she got along well with her teammate Synch, Everett Thomas, and clearly felt romantically towards him. She was also extremely sympathetic towards her younger sisters, visiting them frequently in the basement they were stuck in given the school’s new human population and trying to figure out how to get them out of the Penance body.
Emplate attacked the school again during a dance, and an explosion once again separated the twins and forced them out of the Penance body. Somehow it remained animated, but the twins were again themselves. Their father showed up not long afterwards and took them all out of the school as well as arranged for Emplate to receive care. Monet agreed that it made sense to leave – there were bad memories attached to the school given her time as Penance there. But she kissed Everett goodbye and said she would miss him.
Except that her new school had a vampire headmaster, and after she beat him by impaling him, she decided it was time to head back to Generation X, where she picked up where she left off with Everett and started a relationship with him. Unfortunately, Emma’s sister Adrienne was messing with the school and ended up planting multiple bombs. One killed Everett, and Monet was devastated. The school was closed to everyone but the Gen X kids, who undertook more missions to help other kids. Monet, furious, mostly took these missions as an excuse to hit people. The only good thing was that she and Jubilee put aside their differences and formed a bond over their mutual distress over Everett’s death. When their teachers began acting oddly, the kids jointly decided that they were no longer fit teachers and closed the school down entirely. Monet promised to stay in touch, didn’t leave her phone number, and headed back to Monaco.
At some point after this, she was contacted by Banshee again to join his new X-Corporation, which was also using former mutant bad guys in an attempt to keep the peace among mutants. Working with Paige, Jono, and Jubilee again, as well as Jamie Madrox and others, she agreed to come in to help the others keep an eye on Sean, as they were worried about him. That turned into a total disaster, as she’d predicted, and afterwards she joined the X-Corporation in Europe to make up for her part in that disaster, again working with Jamie Madrox and now with Banshee’s daughter Siryn and Rictor as well. After M-Day, X-Corporation was shut down.
She then was hired by Jamie, who’d created X-Factor in New York, a mutant detective agency whose first assignment was looking into the roots of M-Day. Monet proved to be an invaluable member of the team, her mental powers helping a great deal. They slowly worked out the details of what had happened on M-Day, as well as publicly stating that they were now protecting Mutant Town and running into a law firm called Singularity that seemed to be gunning for them. They went so far as to state to the X-Men that if they attempted anything in Mutant Town, X-Factor would take them down.
In a personal interlude, Jamie accidentally got really drunk and while he slept with Siryn, a dupe of his slept with Monet. Or was it the other way around? No one knows. He kept up juggling the two relationships for a little bit until convinced to tell them, at which point Monet and Siryn became furious with him and each other, though they did reconcile in time to go to Paris on a shopping trip together and run into a mob hunting down a group of former mutants. Arrested for protecting the former mutants, they’re cooperating in jail when the police bring in one of the protesters, who’s covered in ash and states he burnt their building down, killing most of the former mutants. Monet breaks out and crucifies him to the wall in fury, afterwards rescuing the one girl who survived the inferno and leaving Paris.
Shortly afterwards, Rahne and Layla leave for totally different reasons, and after O.N.E. tries to control them they blow up their headquarters and resettle in Detroit, with Terry now pregnant with Jamie’s kid. While there, Secret Invasion happens, and X-Factor briefly hinder then help She-Hulk and Jazinda track down a Skrull while on a case to find Darwin. They then have to rescue Darwin after his father sells him out, and he and Longshot both join the team.
Okay, so X-Factor plots are heavily reliant on this really insane time travel thing going on. The briefest explanation is – a Jamie dupe went to the future, went insane, got used by bad guys, went more insane, and took over Monet’s mind temporarily in an attempt to kill a mutant who was pregnant with someone important to the rebellion later. Monet kicked him out eventually and tried to kill him.
X-Factor split briefly after that because of the whole Siryn’s-kid-was-actually-just-a-dupe and Jamie absorbed him thing – Jamie and Guido went back to New York, Siryn stayed in Detroit with the rest of the team, but soon shut it down and headed back to Ireland, with Monet accompanying her in an effort to help her, as she and Siryn consider each other best friends. She came back to New York and said that she didn’t know what to do, Terry wasn’t bouncing back from it at all.
But oh hey, turns out her father was kidnapped by Baron Mordo, who wants Monet so he can feed on her energy to keep himself alive. After a brief interlude in which they knock down Doom’s castle and find out that Layla’s hanging out with him and someone’s trying to hunt down X-Factor, Monet goes after him with Guido and is captured. With other circumstances meaning a bomb’s being dropped on them, Monet agrees to let him feed on her if he teleports her, her father, and Guido out of there, but then instead telepathically convinces him that she kept her word and he’s been rejuvenated when he actually hasn’t been.
While protecting JJJ, Guido is shot . Monet completely loses it and trashes the people who did it, and then is the first to notice upon his miraculous recovery that he’s behaving oddly, including kissing her – turns out Layla brought him back and he has no soul! And then Jamie Prime is apparently murdered and the entire team spends an issue just arguing about everything, including how Layla’s back and being weirder than ever, Guido’s lack of a soul, and religion. Monet is brought in just as Wolverine says he’s brought in some new leadership, if they want it, and introduces Polaris and Havok.
Her current X-Factor teammates are Rictor, Rahne, Layla Miller, Longshot, Shatterstar, Theresa Cassidy, Strong Guy, and for the past two minutes Havok and Polaris. Former teammates were Jamie Madrox (deceased) and Darwin (on a leave of absence).
comics
PERSONALITY:
“I don’t hate everyone, Terry. I just think I’m better than them.”
Monet is one of those classic jerks with a heart of gold, with her heart of gold buried pretty deep. She’s spoiled, arrogant, and entitled, and has always genuinely believed herself to be better than the people around her in almost any respect. This has only been born up by her mutant abilities, which have basically guaranteed that she’s more powerful and more intelligent than most people she meets. She was a spoiled rich kid as a teenager, and she’s only grown more into the role as she grows up, not hesitant at all to throw her weight around and demand what she feels is her fair due.
But not all of her harshness is simply arrogance. Monet is emotionally extremely withdrawn, a result of her years as Penance. She cares deeply for her teammates, but isn’t very good at expressing it. When Terry was envious of Monet’s iPhone, she bought Terry and her other female teammates Layla and Rahne an iPhone, only to crush Rahne’s when she heard she was leaving. She said that she didn’t care whether Rahne stayed or went, but was actually pretty obviously angry and upset about it, and mentioned that since Layla was gone she’d keep hers for Rahne in mint condition in case she ever came back. Emotional connections aren’t something Monet does easily, but when she does make them she’s very intense about them, willing to go to huge lengths to protect the people she cares about even if she then turns around and is abrasive to them the next moment.
“It’s an odd feeling. Being insufferably smug suits me better, I think.”
Monet has admitted at one point to having suicidal thoughts, saying that she wakes up every morning and tries to convince herself to keep living. She still has strong trauma/PTSD symptoms from being held as her brother’s captive for so long, and some of her tough act is to keep people from seeing that, as she never wants to be or be seen as vulnerable again. Her image is very important to her, and she's very loud about her belief in her own superiority. On the other hand, for someone who professes to only really care about herself, she’s extremely willing to join up with a detective agency despite not needing the money and the living spaces being nothing like what she prefers.
She does, however, have her own special brand of justice. While most of the time she just goes along with the law, Monet has a definite violent, slightly sadistic streak in her, as demonstrated when a bigot burned down a building full of more or less helpless former mutants. She crucified him to the jail wall with the bars of her cell and painted a message in his blood on the wall. Yup. When Monet feels herself or people she considers under her protection personally wronged, the lengths she goes to to avenge them can be pretty scary. She’s proven herself more than willing to kill people, and frequently uses violence as a sort of release. Angry about being trapped somewhere with no way back to where you’re trying to rescue your dad? Let’s go hit Doom’s castle until it breaks. Think a thirteen year old girl is threatening your team? Threaten her right back. Her morality scale is definitely a little tilted, but she’s fighting for the right people.
”I don’t think people can really change. I think they just get better at hiding what they are."
Monet’s a contradiction in a lot of ways. She’s exceptionally intelligent, but she’s content sitting back and letting others puzzle things out, preferring to hit things and go for the direct approach. She’s one of the most overpowered characters in X-Men history probably, but she’s always stayed more or less on the sidelines, and seems completely uninterested in joining the X-Men themselves, content to hang out with a detective agency that really isn’t all that famous or in the spotlight. She ditches responsibility any chance she gets. She professes not to care about people but protects them despite it being of absolutely no benefit to herself. She’s a spoiled rich kid hanging out with a noir detective club. She’s emotionally distant at best, despite feeling very strongly about a lot. But deep at heart, despite actively making it sound like she isn't, she's a good person.
”Not to sound unsympathetic – not that I am sympathetic, I’m just trying to sound like it.”
POWER:
All canon.
- Enhanced physiology. This is a whole fun umbrella of stuff. She approaches invulnerability, taking hits from Hulk and She-Hulk relatively unscathed. She has a healing factor that speeds recovery from injuries as well as making her more resistant to poisons and toxins. Superhuman hearing, sight, reflexes, agility, speed (approaching 100 mph), stamina, and strength (capable of lifting up to 10 tons at least – she’s shown throwing cars and snapping light posts with ease, as well as carrying an entire elevator with four people in it without effort).
- Flight. She has stated at one point that she can reach supersonic speeds, and has been shown catching up and leisurely keeping pace with a passenger plane at one point, while telepathically messing with a passenger on it.
- Telepathy/enhanced brain function. She can read minds, project thoughts and illusions into the minds of others, and protect her own mind from telepathic assault, though she is not invulnerable to it and has had her mind taken over a few times. They only work within a small range of her, and she frequently uses physical contact to make it easier, but within that range she’s extremely powerful and has proven herself able to get into Emma Frost’s mind. She also has superhuman intuitiveness/intelligence, a photographic memory, and can perceive others mutant auras.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[ it's video, because it's Monet. she doesn't believe in hiding. she also looks incredibly irritated with Literally Everything.
it's because she is. ]
Is this really what you expect me to do here? [ not that she can hold up her assignment to the camera very easily since it's on the same device she's transmitting from, but she's not thrilled, or even happy, or even anything approaching that. ]
Whoever is in charge here should rethink their position. Not that anyone seems to be truly in charge.
Isn't that new and exciting.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
He'd gotten into her head. He'd gotten into her head and pulled Penance out again, dragged all her nightmares into the bright light of day and turned her screaming terror on herself. Made her show her fear. Made her show her weakness.
There were offenses Monet could forgive. Slights she could brush off. Unlike Guido or Shatterstar, she wasn't likely to start a fight because someone punched her. (Fight wasn't the right word for the one-sided affairs that generally turned into.) She could take being shot at with equanimity, generally. (Unless it messed up her clothes.)
The point being, she didn't generally take things personally when they went out and fought the bad guys. Being terrible was essentially their thing, after all. Taking personal offense was pointless unless they were personally messing with you. Otherwise just punching them until they stopped trying to kill you and handing them over to the authorities was generally sufficient.
That wasn't what she was going to do with Baron Mordo. No. Him she was going to create a special circle of hell for. Ripping out his spine was too kind. Death in general was too kind for him, no matter how slow. She was going to get into his head and find out what made him scream and then she was going to trap him in there with it forever. She was going to –
She was going to let him go in his sad delusion of happiness, pleased with himself even as he died. Believing he’d pulled one over on her. Knowing that he’d found her weakness.
Because that meant she was better than him. Not that she didn’t already know that – of course she was better than him, that was obvious enough. But this was proof of that. For herself and for everyone else. She was the good guy, here.
She still wanted his spine around his throat. But even she couldn’t always have her cake and eat it too. This would have to be enough.
FINAL NOTES:
n/a