Natasha Stark

## Personality

Natasha is basically made up of three different personas at the moment:

*Natasha Stark* - The socialite. What began as an easy way to piss off her grandfather has turned into both cover story and defense mechanism. It’s amazing how easily she can be underestimated when she’s playing the spoiled rich party girl, even by people who should really know better. Her public face is always on point, whether it’s a witty quip or a charming smile. Or just throwing money around.

*Iron Man* - The bodyguard. Iron Man is focused, determined and single-mindedly heroic. There are rumors that Natasha’s metallic bodyguard is actually a robot, and she might encourage them just a bit. But Iron Man is a chance to do the right thing, even if that means putting herself in danger to help others.

*Tasha* - The girl. The one that comes out when she’s alone, or with people she absolutely trusts, and the part of her that’s still trying to process what happened to her and how to deal with it. Tasha is the one who wants to look after people she cares about, and give them anything that would make them happy. She’s also kind of a nerd, though she’s sarcastic enough that she hides it well. Sometimes.

## Powers

**Cyberpathy:** Natasha’s brain has essentially rewired itself to become like a computer, which means that not only does she process information better, but she can mentally connect to other computers and devices. It does, however, mean that she’s susceptible to things like computer viruses and faraday cages.

**Enhanced reflexes:** She can move and react faster than a baseline human, though not to superspeed levels.

**Healing factor:** Slowly biologically regenerates. Can also repair her armor, to a degrees.

**Supercompressed Armor:** She has supercompressed metal stored inside her bones that she can cover herself with at will. Natasha uses it both as protection and as a way to link up with her Iron Man armor.

## Talents

Genius level engineer, inventor, and programmer. Decent at hand to hand (thanks to lessons from her “PA”). Multilingual (Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, French, Russian, Korean).

## Interests

Pop culture junkie in general, especially high fantasy and hard sci-fi. Loud, angry music. Bright makeup and killer heels.

## History

When it became clear that Gregory Stark was going to be too busy screwing around to actually run StarkIndustries, family patriarch Howard gave him an ultimatum - produce an actual heir or be cut off. Gregory almost immediately handed over a baby Natasha and went back to enjoying his life. And Howard set about molding his new granddaughter into a proper heir.

In some ways, it worked out well. Natasha quickly proved to be brilliant, especially with anything engineering or computer related, to the point where she was building circuit boards at age 3. On the other hand, Howard’s heavy-handed idea of raising a child didn’t exactly sit well. Once it became increasingly clear that nothing Natasha ever did was going to be good enough, she became a lot more focused on pissing him off than on trying to win his approval.

That was when the party girl image started. In part because it was easier to make friends when you were buying everyone drinks, but also because it was reminiscent enough of her father for the tabloids to take notice. Howard’s response was to block her from going to MIT, like she’d intended, and to put her to work cleaning up some of the more forgotten company warehouses.

She’d been intending to blow off the whole thing. But in one of those warehouses, clearly one Howard hadn’t even looked at after acquiring, she found what turned out to be a boy in a box. Somehow, she ended up being the one to coax Bucky Barnes back into some semblance of normalcy, though it took some work and a lot of wrong steps. Building him a better arm to replace his prosthetic probably helped.

They were just starting to find their feet around each other when Natasha was suddenly kidnapped off the street. The explosion used as both a distraction and to get rid of her guard ended up detonating closer to her than anyone intended -- and triggering her mutation, not that she knew what it was at the time. She thought she was dying. But her kidnappers knew a suspicious amount about her, including just what she was actually capable of producing, and they made some compelling arguments as to why she should start building weapons for them. Instead, with the help of another prisoner, she put together what would become the first version of the Iron Man armor and broke out instead.

Bucky promptly decided that she couldn’t be trusted to look after herself, and tried to make himself her bodyguard. Natasha reassigned him to “PA” (mostly as a joke), and “Iron Man” became her bodyguard instead. It was a good cover -- she could control the armor remotely if they needed to be in the same place, and clearly she couldn’t be the one inside it, she was a girl. The party girl persona ramped up as further cover, and with Bucky there to carry her purse, everything was going well.

At least until they were both approached about going to mutant school. She honestly hadn’t seen that one coming.