@c23intros
{natasha lyonne, 107, cis woman, she/her} || vera berenson is a mutant with the ability of alien physiology. they’ve been in new york for thirty-five years where they spend most of their time as a data scientist. when i think of them, i think of a glow in the skin and eyes, a missing puzzle piece, looking to infinity and beyond (!). they are affiliated with the brotherhood.
omg buzz lightyear ?
QUICK FACTS:
full name: vera natalia berenson
date of birth: august 10th, 1891
zodiac big three: leo sun, gemini moon, aries rising
gender & pronouns: cis woman & she/her
sexual orientation: bisexual
enneagram: 7w8
mbti: entp
temperament: sanguine-choleric
moral alignment: true neutral/neutral evil. it really depends on the day and who you are!
ability: alien physiology
affiliation: the brotherhood
alias: o6*
*it’s some type of extremely huge, extremely bright, explosive star
BACKSTORY:
triggers: neglect, experimentation, drug abuse, addiction
ok this intro is gonna change up a few times in formatting... it got very long because of that and because of 107 years being covered FAHDUSOUFAILNSJD so also feel free to just consult the timeline it’s much shorter we just got the details here *’35 years’ is also completely arbitrary..........
1891: born a beautiful child in new york city to two russian immigrants who migrated to new york following the anti-jewish pogroms that had overtaken their home.
1895: began a slow and grotesque transition into this ugly, fearsome, dark thing that frightened both her and her parents alike. -- think a slightly toned-down xenomorph with a faint silver glow.
they don’t know what to do about this. the thing is that they do love their child, but... if her mother had given birth to vera looking like that ? bye bye, baby ! so they settled on doing a kind of... hide her away in the basement <3 try to not cry when they see her just because the transformation is that grotesque...
1900: they gave up on visiting. they just gave her food, water, and shelter. gave her her own personal fork with candles (ily fox) menorah and the like so she could feel her heritage... but, like, it didn’t really work. they just chucked a few books down there on judaism, as well as a few books for fun reads.
and when i say ‘chucked,’ i literally mean like... imagine a quick and violent throw because they’re scared !
1905: vera, in privacy, has... at least been able to work on herself ? and discovered one day that she can turn into a human -- or, at least, a human with a faint silver glow around the skin and eyes. and better still ? she could turn into other people.
so her parents released her HAFOUAEDJLNKFAD but still didn’t talk to her much because... what the FUCK is that thing...
1915: okay, this is weird... her aging seems to be slowing down... and shouldn’t that fall have done more damage than it did?
(see: longevity and invulnerability. not gonna spend a long time on this or her other abilities manifesting, just thought i should point out... why she doesn’t look like she’s 107...)
let’s do a large time-skip. in this lacuna, she left. she began socializing with ‘other humans’ ( which began very ‘how do you do, fellow human?’ ). she fell in love with space. and there was an odd... inherent knowledge.
1940: she hears of NACA and their new cleveland laboratory. up until this point, she hadn’t really known anything about this ‘NACA,’ but she began engrossing herself in its news.
1957: NACA begins a foray into space travel. vera decides to stop floating around and dedicate herself to becoming the perfect candidate for a job... and may doesn’t know how people were selected back towards the beginning, she can only find information about how they’re selected in modern day, but i have a feeling that vera had to get some forgery involved -- and deus ex machina: superhuman intelligence made it work !
1959: a year prior, NACA turned into NASA. vera, taking on the super generic alias ‘paul’ and passing off as any given WASPy mid-30s-man, she was hired.
1960-1968: vera, better known as ‘paul,’ was invited to join the... very large Project Apollo team. given that the goal was to send a man to the moon, she accepted with no hesitation!
she threw her all into this -- and into paul, who i’m just really picturing as the most generic waspy man in the world like... so generic he doesn’t have an fc because he’s a shutterstock model. of course, i may venture to say that staying ‘paul’ for so many hours, every single day, put a strain on her body that was already being cooperative by not being all xenomorph :\ but she figured that it was worth it ! she was like a space shark, had to keep moving or she would die -- even after the death of a friend, one among the three astronauts who were originally planned to be the first men on the moon... all of whom died in a fire during a preflight test but besties... this is new technology, ur running the risk :\
1969: wow, history lesson continued: the mission was a success! finally! there were still some steps to go, but a man had set foot on the moon. TAKE THAT, RUSSIA!
but she would not see these next steps from the inside :\ with all of the relief that came with the men landing unharmed, her body was like ‘finally, i can stretch!’ and one day, very soon after, with no controlling it... bestie went from paul to vera to xenomorph.
so when you turn into an alien in the middle of a building that’s dedicated to space travel, obviously some interest - and maybe a little terror - is going to be taken.
it all happened so very fast that vera put up no defenses -- which quickly landed her in a state of unconsciousness, before being towed away to an unknown building and woken up within some seriously reinforced walls.
a group of actual WASPy men began oscillating between explaining the predicament ( “you’re in the middle of a desert something something you can’t break out something something we mean no harm something something but we need to harvest around something something” ) and interrogating her ( “where do you come from something something how long have you been among us something something what have you come for something something” ) but... she came from the usa, she’d been in the usa since birth, she just went to nasa to explore a passion... like, damn !?
of course, nothing said was satisfactory, but that wasn’t all they had to concern themselves with. this was the first time they were ever met a real life alien ! they needed to do some dissecting an experimenting but also... oh man, phil, we’ve gotta keep the subject alive ! who knows how long it’ll take for us to find the rest !
although it was only a small fragment of her life, the three years spent within the walls of... dun dun dun! area 51 were grueling. -- don’t get me wrong, there were many times she used her abilities, seeing as they didn’t know she was a mutant and, therefore, had nothing to nullify her. but, weakened and relying mostly on defensive powers, less and less and less could be done. but six months after those initial three years, she was offered a deal: she agrees to continue being a governmental lab rat by her own ‘free will,’ she gets to walk away. they figured they had exhausted what they could do with their resources at the time... and she did give them some pretty great fake answers when they started to wear her down. ( so, like... i guess in c23verse, they think they’ve made contact with aliens... but lbr the government probs has :\ )
not ideal, but she reluctantly agreed. to ensure this wouldn’t be some grand lie for her freedom, the researchers inserted multiple tracking microchips beneath her skin.
throughout the rest of the 1970s and the early 1980s, she was beckoned to various facilities. more often than not, it was some kind of drug they wanted to experiment with -- see if they could create something that would reveal an alien ( aka, a pill they would require all of their employees to take if she switched, involuntarily, from her human-ish form to the alien form ), something that would repress what an alien could do, something that could force truth, so on and so forth...
and obviously these were not intended to be torturous, nor were they intended to be enjoyable, but the effects varies. sometimes they were torturous, but there were times that she would wind up snagging a little extra to replicate the dna of an have... an endless surplus of a drug made just for her <3
see, after some years of spending the limited money she was given in return on a variety of street drugs... she found nothing quite compared to these pills intended to reveal her true self that really just pulled some euphoric and indescribable trance over her. and... and... she got them for free -- hell, she was paid for them ! and could just... duplicate the dna to create more !
but that did not mean it was desirable. in the slightest. being at the beck and call of the usa government, being their little alien guinea pig when she wasn’t... an alien..., still getting the occasional harvest treatment... the presidential address tore it. maybe she was a mutant ! she didn’t really care ! she just knew that that would lead to some more ideas from her waspy old man pals !
so, one night, she took some speedball and began quite the bloody excursion to fish all over her body, beneath the flesh and occasionally within some sinew, to hook onto the tracking chips and rip them out. this left her in... quite the state ! and her body had become overwhelmed by both the shock that the pain and blood loss had caused, as well as the amount of drugs in her system, and didn’t heal itself.
and yet, she woke up ! and not in a governmental facility ! but it was somewhere with... you know, more than one person. over a span of a few hours, she would learn:
1) she’d gone xenomorph mode after her body was like ‘damn bitch chill’ :\
2a) that actually saved the day, because it made her an obvious mutant and
2b) she’d been healed by a mutant within a pro-mutant, anti-human, organization: the brotherhood
i might say, it was not long after this that she was like “oh shit that’s so hot let me in”
the government is NOT HAPPY ABOUT THIS DEVELOPMENT, but :\ she would, indeed, join the brotherhood and... like, for the most part, clean up. but more in an ‘i can function in society’ way than an ‘i’m the spitting image of well-being’ way. ( she still replicates the dna of those experimental drugs -- she has not stopped that )
professionally, she’s been able to put her #WomenInSTEM! skills to good use (same with personally, but that’s more comedic). i did, indeed, look up ‘jobs similar to rocket science’ and looked into descriptions... salaries... tight schedule/loosy goosy... and data scientist ? perfect ! especially in a world where tech is still blossoming and being invented as opposed to our world... where it’s pretty much just being innovated.
personally... walter white’ing ( but just for herself ), trying to find a way that sela can get laid without turning her partner into stone, experimenting with worms-for-brains ( until she learns they’re part of essex, ofc ! ), so on and so forth and what have you.
RAT’S ALL FOLKS!
TIMELINE:
spoiler: i give up trying to do the math on her age halfway through...
BORN -- in nyc, 1891, to russian immigrants who left due to the anti-jewish pogroms that invaded their home ( listen, russia is both to historically explain the early presence in the usa and to make things ironic later on )
AGE 4 -- started mutating into this gross thing ( think a dulled down version the xenomorph from alien ) -- a very slow process, i may add, which made it all the more grotesque. her parents were like “damn... love her... but she’s kinda creeping me out...” so they just boo radley’d her and forced her into the basement FHAODSIJN
AGE 9 -- parents stop visiting and just... chuck necessities and various ways to entertain herself downstairs instead... like, that kid is just really creepy, they can’t help that they cry every time they see her :\
AGE 14 -- vera learns how to transform back into a human(oid -- her skin and eyes have a soft silver glow), as well as how to shapeshift. they’re like “oh, thank god. you can come out of the basement.” but they still didn’t talk much because, like... what the FUCK is that thing?
AGE 24 -- has since left, has since begun interactions with the real world ( which began very ‘how do you do, fellow human?’ ), but damn why is aging starting to take so long...
1940 -- (huge time-skip, i know) hears about NACA and, with her inherent love of space and technology, begins following news surrounding them.
1957-1959 -- NACA has begun incorporating space-travel, so fuck it!, she’s gonna join one way or another ! i don’t really know how, because there isn’t much available online about requirements in the ‘50s/’60s, but it probably required forgery that her superhuman intelligence really helped out with.
1960-1969 -- joins NASA as a waspy guy named ‘paul.’ becomes part of Project Apollo and, after a couple misfires, succeeds in sending men to the moon ! TAKE THAT, RUSSIA ! there were still a few steps to be taken, but her body was like ‘wow, this was fun, such a relief it worked out, i’m gonna let go of paul because i’ve been in this form for way too long’... right in front of everyone’s salad. didn’t have much time to defend before she was unconscious and escorted somewhere else.
1969-1972.5 -- Area 51 bestiesssssss ! a lot of questions she has no answers to. some harvesting, tests, and experimental drugs, but... they have to keep her alive because they have no clue where to find others like her. after exhausting their resources, they’re like ‘so in exchange for freedom, can we place a bunch of tracking microchips and just force u to come be our guinea pig whenever?’ and she was so over it all at that point she was like ‘ya sure.’
1972.5-1983 -- she, indeed, becomes a guinea pig for the government. it’s better than being held, and more often than not is just riddled with experimental drugs ( that don’t do what they were intended to do, but sometimes do have such an effect that she’ll snag one to replicate its dna and use recreationally ). but there are also the occasional inhumane tests or harvestings which... not fun.
1983 -- after the presidential address, she’s like ‘well... idk i’m probably a mutant. anywayssssss, time to get these tracking chips out before they get even more ideas with this development.’ so she takes speedball and digs around in quite the gory scene, fishing multiple tracking chips out, some of which were lodged within sinew. the drugs and bodily turmoil took too much of a toll and her healing didn’t kick in. but she was found and healed by a member of the brotherhood -- as she had apparently fallen into xenomorph form.
1983.5 -- joins the brotherhood.
1985 - PRESENT -- has cleaned up enough to be a functioning member of society with a job and a role in the organization, but still fucks around and finds out. just not as severely ! does make her own drugs -- for personal use -- and is trying to create one that will distance herself from the ‘empathy’ ability. also just fucks around and finds out with anyone she can !
( tin’s upcoming muse will be important but that’s after the finale ! )
CONNECTION IDEAS:
a relative. only child, but since she’s 107yrs old, i feel like it would be a missed opportunity to not provide room for people who she’s technically the ancestor of, or possibly a child... i am still mulling that one over... that would become formal, though ! but hey, if it interests you, tell me bestie. would’ve been in a mid ‘70s-ish period. and would’ve said ‘bye bye, baby.’
on that note, old acquaintances. i know we currently only have two immortal muses, but... hey... it’s a fun concept !
people she fucks around and finds out with. ( see: uses them for various purposes in her fun little scientific endeavors because #WomenInSTEM! but they usually aren’t totally ethical <3 not in the torture way, just in the... like, one thing that’s been established is that she’s trying to fuck around and find out how to get sela laid without her turning her partner into stone OHFUIADLSJKN )
brotherhood buddies ! just some besties within the brotherhood, you know !
conflicting loyalties... she’s 100% brotherhood, but it would be quite fun to have her have a connection with either an xavier person or an omega. i mean, she already has a quasi-buddy in worms-for-brains... she just doesn’t know they’re part of the essex house 😔
‘drug buddies’ ! but god... you’re still doing cocaine ? that’s so yesterday 🙄 but no, you can’t have any of the special supply 🙄
all the regs ! fwb ( loose women, loose morals ! ), exes, regular friends, regular enemies ( i mean... brotherhood... even if she isn’t as bloodthirsty as some of them... still brotherhood ), neighbors, so on and so forth and what have you !