The Last Voyages: Application
Apr. 8th, 2024 12:20 pmUser Name/Nick: Sage
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shobogan
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shobogan
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Zerxus Ilerez
Character Name: Madelyne Pryor
Series: Marvel Comics (616)
Age: Madelyne first awoke with the psyche and physiology of someone aged twenty-four and has lived...some number? of years? since then, so I’d put her nebulously in her late twenties/early thirties.
From When?: The fifth and final issue of Dark X-Men 2023, in her moment of indecision and distraction while fighting her alternate self. Instead of winning that fight, she loses.
Inmate Justification: She’s made some major strides in canon; she isn’t entirely consumed by spite and bitterness, she’s fighting for something larger than herself, and she’s started to let go of certain grudges. But she’s still a bit too comfortable with both slaughtering and using people, she doesn’t treat everyone she loves with the respect they deserve, and she has a lot of trauma to work through before she’s capable of being her best self. There has been a great deal of collateral damage in the meantime.
Arrival: She agreed. The offer will be familiar to her in a way she trusts, as much as she trusts anything, even if she hasn’t regained all the details. Besides, she can’t just die; she has shit to do.
Abilities/Powers: Madelyne has the same level of telekinetic and telepathic ability as Jean Grey. She’s not as trained with it, and therefore can’t do quite as much, but it’s still a truly ridiculous amount of raw power.
On the Barge I’d like for her to be limited to a general awareness of people and the ability to erect a psionic shield for both herself and others. Her telekinesis would be reduced to letting her hover a few feet off the ground, and manipulating light objects. She won’t be able to throw anything she couldn’t physically. (Yes, by “anything” I mean “sharp objects”.)
She’s also capable of using magic, and been given some training by Illyana Rasputin. Because of that, she can shape her power into a scythe that she calls the Scythe of Sorrows. She’ll be able to feel that shape, to know it’s still a part of her, but be unable to manifest it.
When it comes to actual spells, I’d say all of them are out of reach except healing minor wounds, and that she has the potential to learn more that are purely defensive or restorative.
Lastly, she seems to still be connected to the Phoenix Force in some way – her powers are sometimes expressed through flames, and she completely erupted in them when Alex died and she had to catch his soul - but it’s subconscious at best, and while she may be able to feel it in certain circumstances she definitely won’t be able to use it.
Inmate Information: “Is this my destiny...my eternal damnation...the fate of some unforgiven orphan of nature, who no creature of heaven or hell will have?”
Madelyne was made, not born – the majority of her memories stolen or fabricated, her very soul a spark of cosmic flame – and it’s an existential crisis she’s never truly recovered from. She was nothing but a prop in someone else’s game, easily discarded once her background role was over. For a long time she decided that this meant none of her earthly connections meant anything, and that all of her worst impulses were the core of her true self. Rebelling against her creator meant refusing to be his puppet, not refusing to be as monstrous he was.
The first consequences of this manifested with the help of overt demonic influence – Madelyne doesn’t bear full responsibility for the death and destruction wrought on Manhattan during the events of Inferno, or the near sacrifice of her own son and a dozen other infants – but she had the opportunity, in the end, to be a part of ending it, of making it right. Instead, all she wanted was to satisfy the bitter vengeance that consumed her, ready to die if it meant taking Jean with her.
When the Admiral pulled her onto the Barge instead, she was not amused. She began to flourish a little despite herself - existing in any other environment than canon was good for her by itself – but still disappeared before graduating. Having forgotten the Barge, her state of mind upon death was what defined her when Nate Grey accidentally summoned her spirit.
It could be argued that this, too, diminished her agency; according to Cable, she wasn’t truly Madelyne at all: “You, Madelyne...you don’t even truly exist. You’re all the misery and misfortune the real Madelyne endured, given a semblance of life...all the things that keep Madelyne’s soul from being at rest.” Still, she actively chose to manipulate Nate instead of being honest with him, despite caring for him. She chose to lash out at Threnody – another victim of Sinister – when confronted with her own nature, adding another pointless death to her growing list. She chose to ally with the Hellfire Club, at least up until the point where they funded genocide.
This was when it became clear that, even if she wasn’t quite whole, she was still capable of being more than her worst moments. There were lines she still refused to cross, values she still held dear. When telepaths across the world were being hunted, she saved Jean Grey despite still blaming her. When Nathan’s evil clone offered to conquer the world with her, she only pretended to agree, using her position to save X-Man and Cable. This almost costs Madelyne her life, and she only survives thanks to a mysterious ally named Ness. This does not make her trust him; a few issues later she stands over his bed with a knife just to make that point to him. When she has a chance to save him in return, when he’s doing his best to protect her, she doesn’t. Madelyne seems to know this was unfair, but doesn’t seem bothered.
This was her last act before being killed by an alternate, evil version of Jean Grey, which did not help her Jean issues at all. This was when she was pulled back to the Barge for a second time, but there was a key difference: she agreed, because she had people she cared about again. She made more progress on connecting to more people and forging her own identity, but ultimately disappeared before the work was done.
After that, she’s a ghost on the astral plane. While she forgot the progress she made onboard, this didn’t erase everything she gained in her second life – she did her best to protect Nathan and Scott when Apocalypse attacked, and would have helped the X-Men fight if she was capable – but being trapped there took its toll, and ultimately twisted her into the worst version of herself yet again. Whenever she appeared, she was trying to lash out at the people she blamed for her state: the X-Men.
Years later, she was resurrected by yet another supervillain with their own agenda. She was offered clemency by Storm if she abandoned her benefactor and took it, striking out on her own. We have no idea what she did during that time, but she left the X-Men alone until they founded Krakoa and excluded her from it. Her bitterness about this is understandable, but as always it had collateral damage. She could have taken Sinister’s other discarded clones under her wing, but instead used them as cannon fodder.
This cost Madelyne her life again, and even once she was resurrected and accepted as a citizen of Krakoa, she didn’t trust it. Illyana gave her rulership of Limbo instead, and this too Madelyne put to the test; she invaded Manhattan in an echo of her actions in Inferno - with less of a death count this time, but it certainly wasn’t zero. Eventually she changed her mind and helped the X-Men undo this, but those people are still dead (or maimed, or traumatised).
Path to Redemption: Madelyne has started walking this path already, but it’s been a rough one that she’s backslid on a few times, and that always comes with considerable collateral damage. She’s both too powerful and too violent for anything else.
You might think the first watershed moment in this era of her life was being resurrected on Krakoa, but it wasn’t; as far as she could tell, this was a gift to Alex Summers, nothing to do with who she was or what she was owed. After all, the first time it came to a vote, it was turned down because she was a clone.
No, that came with Illyana’s offer to transfer rulership of Limbo to her. This wasn’t easy for her to trust; her instinct was to view it as manipulation or pity. Illyana was quick to refute it: “Having survived doesn’t earn you pity here. It earns you respect. This place...to control it requires one to be touched by anger and grief, and to have come out the other end. I see what has been done to you, and I know.”
Illyana saw a kindred spirit in Madelyne, and she was right. The airtight contract preventing backstabbing on either end certainly helped, but even going that far required more trust than Madelyne had extended in a very long time. When Illyana was almost overthrown prematurely, she fought alongside her, Dani and Rahne to restore her power and have it transferred fairly.
This camaraderie was not enough to stop her from taking advantage of loopholes in the contract, attacking New York City as a distraction while she tried to infiltrate Krakoa. The purpose was twofold: she wanted to know if she’d simply been shoved into a corner of appeasement, her agency and power strictly conditional. If Illyana meant it when she said that Madelyne deserved a seat at the table, that she was free to make her own choices regardless of their caliber. This did hold true, but she needs to learn how to trust without testing it at every opportunity regardless of the cost to everyone around her.
She did learn something else, at least, and it was very important. She wanted Jean Grey’s memories of their son, and the only possibility she could see was taking them by force. Madelyne was Jean’s dark mirror, and she refused to believe that made her inferior. Therefore, naturally, Jean was the liar, the coward; her vaunted righteousness was a thin veil over everything seething and ugly inside of her.
Right up until that compassion was extended to Madelyne, fully and freely and with no strings attached, even though Jean was winning the fight already. She shared all of her memories of Nathan Christopher, and also told her that she’d voted to resurrect Maddie from the very beginning. It was the first time she understood that her darkness - their darkness - wasn’t something Jean cowered from or papered over. She lived with it every day and chose to extend a hand anyway, when she could, because it genuinely mattered to her. Madelyne mattered to her, not as a means to an end but as a person.
If Jean can make that choice, then so can she. She even says so in as many words, after Jean dies in an attack during the last Hellfire Gala: “There are mutants out there, somewhere, and we can’t wait for them to come to us. Jean wouldn’t.” The problem, of course, is that Jean had years of learning how to channel that rage constructively, how to conduct herself as a superhero, how to lead and inspire people. Madelyne has barely even worked with a functional team since coming into her powers; she may genuinely want to protect and uplift her people, but that doesn’t mean she knows how, and Jean isn’t there to show her.
In much the same way, she wants Limbo to be a place of growth and renewal – not an easy or painless one, but cleansing in its fire. “For too long, Limbo has held the spirits no one wants to face. The parts of us we condemn to darkness. Nothing heals in darkness. I will open my arms to the rejected ones. The ones who have fallen so far, they've been starved of light.” Madelyne wants to give people the sanctuary she didn’t have, and empower them to shape their own fate. At the same time, she isn’t in the business of selfless charity: accepting her boons means that you ow her her a debt, and accepting her refuge means that you answer to her. It’s an exchange, a structure, that she can feel comfortable with and hold herself to.
It says a lot that Alex – the one person who’s there fully of his own choice, because he loves her, because he wants to help her – is the one she takes the most advantage of, and treats the least like an equal. That definitely needs to be addressed before she graduates, and she needs to at least start learning how to be a good partner and friend. (She won’t remember connections made on her previous stays right away, because that will bee to overwhelming for her to deal with, but in time that will also contribute to her progress - in both how to love and how to lose.)
In some ways Madelyne has embraced the darkest parts of herself as the Queen of Limbo, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Ruthless pragmatism, unflinching brutality and cunning manipulation are valuable tools regardless of which side in a conflict uses them, and she’s decided to defend her people in the wake of relentless persecution.
It’s a choice she needs to keep making every day, and it’s easier on some than others. The same mystical instrument that allows her to find mutants in need could let her snuff out souls like candles if she wanted, and a part of her remains tempted. That’s exactly what her other self – a version of her who chose power above all else, who’s been more demon than mutant for a very long time – taunted her with.
When she first had infernal power coursing through her, manipulated by outside forces and maddened by existential grief and boundless rage, she used it to lash out at the world. She wants to be more than that – more than wrath and anguish and a cycle of suffering – but old habits die hard when you’re forging new ground in a hostile world.
It’s a difficult line to walk. She needs to learn more about striking that balance, how to deal with mistakes when she makes them, and how to trust other people to counsel her. Having a warden she respects and trusts will be a huge part of this process. They’ll need to call her out without talking down to her, and understand her actions without excusing them. Someone who’s more practical than idealistic would probably work better, because while it’s important for her to indulge in compassion and move beyond her most cynical tendencies, she’ll always be a pragmatist.
Mostly buying into what the Barge represents and wanting to take her life back are a firm start, but that doesn’t mean she knows what she’s doing. Ultimately, she needs someone who can shepherd her without making her feel controlled, who can hold her accountable for inevitable mistakes without condemning her for them, and who can talk her through all the complexities of morality that she’s decided to straight up avoid dealing with for so long.
History: Here, and then Here.
Sample Network Entry: Here!
Sample RP: Here!
Special Notes: Her last app, for her second stint on the Barge.
User DW:
shoboganPlurk
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Zerxus Ilerez
Character Name: Madelyne Pryor
Series: Marvel Comics (616)
Age: Madelyne first awoke with the psyche and physiology of someone aged twenty-four and has lived...some number? of years? since then, so I’d put her nebulously in her late twenties/early thirties.
From When?: The fifth and final issue of Dark X-Men 2023, in her moment of indecision and distraction while fighting her alternate self. Instead of winning that fight, she loses.
my everlasting flame, my dying star
Inmate Justification: She’s made some major strides in canon; she isn’t entirely consumed by spite and bitterness, she’s fighting for something larger than herself, and she’s started to let go of certain grudges. But she’s still a bit too comfortable with both slaughtering and using people, she doesn’t treat everyone she loves with the respect they deserve, and she has a lot of trauma to work through before she’s capable of being her best self. There has been a great deal of collateral damage in the meantime.
Arrival: She agreed. The offer will be familiar to her in a way she trusts, as much as she trusts anything, even if she hasn’t regained all the details. Besides, she can’t just die; she has shit to do.
Abilities/Powers: Madelyne has the same level of telekinetic and telepathic ability as Jean Grey. She’s not as trained with it, and therefore can’t do quite as much, but it’s still a truly ridiculous amount of raw power.
On the Barge I’d like for her to be limited to a general awareness of people and the ability to erect a psionic shield for both herself and others. Her telekinesis would be reduced to letting her hover a few feet off the ground, and manipulating light objects. She won’t be able to throw anything she couldn’t physically. (Yes, by “anything” I mean “sharp objects”.)
She’s also capable of using magic, and been given some training by Illyana Rasputin. Because of that, she can shape her power into a scythe that she calls the Scythe of Sorrows. She’ll be able to feel that shape, to know it’s still a part of her, but be unable to manifest it.
When it comes to actual spells, I’d say all of them are out of reach except healing minor wounds, and that she has the potential to learn more that are purely defensive or restorative.
Lastly, she seems to still be connected to the Phoenix Force in some way – her powers are sometimes expressed through flames, and she completely erupted in them when Alex died and she had to catch his soul - but it’s subconscious at best, and while she may be able to feel it in certain circumstances she definitely won’t be able to use it.
Inmate Information: “Is this my destiny...my eternal damnation...the fate of some unforgiven orphan of nature, who no creature of heaven or hell will have?”
Madelyne was made, not born – the majority of her memories stolen or fabricated, her very soul a spark of cosmic flame – and it’s an existential crisis she’s never truly recovered from. She was nothing but a prop in someone else’s game, easily discarded once her background role was over. For a long time she decided that this meant none of her earthly connections meant anything, and that all of her worst impulses were the core of her true self. Rebelling against her creator meant refusing to be his puppet, not refusing to be as monstrous he was.
The first consequences of this manifested with the help of overt demonic influence – Madelyne doesn’t bear full responsibility for the death and destruction wrought on Manhattan during the events of Inferno, or the near sacrifice of her own son and a dozen other infants – but she had the opportunity, in the end, to be a part of ending it, of making it right. Instead, all she wanted was to satisfy the bitter vengeance that consumed her, ready to die if it meant taking Jean with her.
When the Admiral pulled her onto the Barge instead, she was not amused. She began to flourish a little despite herself - existing in any other environment than canon was good for her by itself – but still disappeared before graduating. Having forgotten the Barge, her state of mind upon death was what defined her when Nate Grey accidentally summoned her spirit.
It could be argued that this, too, diminished her agency; according to Cable, she wasn’t truly Madelyne at all: “You, Madelyne...you don’t even truly exist. You’re all the misery and misfortune the real Madelyne endured, given a semblance of life...all the things that keep Madelyne’s soul from being at rest.” Still, she actively chose to manipulate Nate instead of being honest with him, despite caring for him. She chose to lash out at Threnody – another victim of Sinister – when confronted with her own nature, adding another pointless death to her growing list. She chose to ally with the Hellfire Club, at least up until the point where they funded genocide.
This was when it became clear that, even if she wasn’t quite whole, she was still capable of being more than her worst moments. There were lines she still refused to cross, values she still held dear. When telepaths across the world were being hunted, she saved Jean Grey despite still blaming her. When Nathan’s evil clone offered to conquer the world with her, she only pretended to agree, using her position to save X-Man and Cable. This almost costs Madelyne her life, and she only survives thanks to a mysterious ally named Ness. This does not make her trust him; a few issues later she stands over his bed with a knife just to make that point to him. When she has a chance to save him in return, when he’s doing his best to protect her, she doesn’t. Madelyne seems to know this was unfair, but doesn’t seem bothered.
This was her last act before being killed by an alternate, evil version of Jean Grey, which did not help her Jean issues at all. This was when she was pulled back to the Barge for a second time, but there was a key difference: she agreed, because she had people she cared about again. She made more progress on connecting to more people and forging her own identity, but ultimately disappeared before the work was done.
After that, she’s a ghost on the astral plane. While she forgot the progress she made onboard, this didn’t erase everything she gained in her second life – she did her best to protect Nathan and Scott when Apocalypse attacked, and would have helped the X-Men fight if she was capable – but being trapped there took its toll, and ultimately twisted her into the worst version of herself yet again. Whenever she appeared, she was trying to lash out at the people she blamed for her state: the X-Men.
Years later, she was resurrected by yet another supervillain with their own agenda. She was offered clemency by Storm if she abandoned her benefactor and took it, striking out on her own. We have no idea what she did during that time, but she left the X-Men alone until they founded Krakoa and excluded her from it. Her bitterness about this is understandable, but as always it had collateral damage. She could have taken Sinister’s other discarded clones under her wing, but instead used them as cannon fodder.
This cost Madelyne her life again, and even once she was resurrected and accepted as a citizen of Krakoa, she didn’t trust it. Illyana gave her rulership of Limbo instead, and this too Madelyne put to the test; she invaded Manhattan in an echo of her actions in Inferno - with less of a death count this time, but it certainly wasn’t zero. Eventually she changed her mind and helped the X-Men undo this, but those people are still dead (or maimed, or traumatised).
Path to Redemption: Madelyne has started walking this path already, but it’s been a rough one that she’s backslid on a few times, and that always comes with considerable collateral damage. She’s both too powerful and too violent for anything else.
You might think the first watershed moment in this era of her life was being resurrected on Krakoa, but it wasn’t; as far as she could tell, this was a gift to Alex Summers, nothing to do with who she was or what she was owed. After all, the first time it came to a vote, it was turned down because she was a clone.
No, that came with Illyana’s offer to transfer rulership of Limbo to her. This wasn’t easy for her to trust; her instinct was to view it as manipulation or pity. Illyana was quick to refute it: “Having survived doesn’t earn you pity here. It earns you respect. This place...to control it requires one to be touched by anger and grief, and to have come out the other end. I see what has been done to you, and I know.”
Illyana saw a kindred spirit in Madelyne, and she was right. The airtight contract preventing backstabbing on either end certainly helped, but even going that far required more trust than Madelyne had extended in a very long time. When Illyana was almost overthrown prematurely, she fought alongside her, Dani and Rahne to restore her power and have it transferred fairly.
This camaraderie was not enough to stop her from taking advantage of loopholes in the contract, attacking New York City as a distraction while she tried to infiltrate Krakoa. The purpose was twofold: she wanted to know if she’d simply been shoved into a corner of appeasement, her agency and power strictly conditional. If Illyana meant it when she said that Madelyne deserved a seat at the table, that she was free to make her own choices regardless of their caliber. This did hold true, but she needs to learn how to trust without testing it at every opportunity regardless of the cost to everyone around her.
She did learn something else, at least, and it was very important. She wanted Jean Grey’s memories of their son, and the only possibility she could see was taking them by force. Madelyne was Jean’s dark mirror, and she refused to believe that made her inferior. Therefore, naturally, Jean was the liar, the coward; her vaunted righteousness was a thin veil over everything seething and ugly inside of her.
Right up until that compassion was extended to Madelyne, fully and freely and with no strings attached, even though Jean was winning the fight already. She shared all of her memories of Nathan Christopher, and also told her that she’d voted to resurrect Maddie from the very beginning. It was the first time she understood that her darkness - their darkness - wasn’t something Jean cowered from or papered over. She lived with it every day and chose to extend a hand anyway, when she could, because it genuinely mattered to her. Madelyne mattered to her, not as a means to an end but as a person.
If Jean can make that choice, then so can she. She even says so in as many words, after Jean dies in an attack during the last Hellfire Gala: “There are mutants out there, somewhere, and we can’t wait for them to come to us. Jean wouldn’t.” The problem, of course, is that Jean had years of learning how to channel that rage constructively, how to conduct herself as a superhero, how to lead and inspire people. Madelyne has barely even worked with a functional team since coming into her powers; she may genuinely want to protect and uplift her people, but that doesn’t mean she knows how, and Jean isn’t there to show her.
In much the same way, she wants Limbo to be a place of growth and renewal – not an easy or painless one, but cleansing in its fire. “For too long, Limbo has held the spirits no one wants to face. The parts of us we condemn to darkness. Nothing heals in darkness. I will open my arms to the rejected ones. The ones who have fallen so far, they've been starved of light.” Madelyne wants to give people the sanctuary she didn’t have, and empower them to shape their own fate. At the same time, she isn’t in the business of selfless charity: accepting her boons means that you ow her her a debt, and accepting her refuge means that you answer to her. It’s an exchange, a structure, that she can feel comfortable with and hold herself to.
It says a lot that Alex – the one person who’s there fully of his own choice, because he loves her, because he wants to help her – is the one she takes the most advantage of, and treats the least like an equal. That definitely needs to be addressed before she graduates, and she needs to at least start learning how to be a good partner and friend. (She won’t remember connections made on her previous stays right away, because that will bee to overwhelming for her to deal with, but in time that will also contribute to her progress - in both how to love and how to lose.)
In some ways Madelyne has embraced the darkest parts of herself as the Queen of Limbo, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Ruthless pragmatism, unflinching brutality and cunning manipulation are valuable tools regardless of which side in a conflict uses them, and she’s decided to defend her people in the wake of relentless persecution.
It’s a choice she needs to keep making every day, and it’s easier on some than others. The same mystical instrument that allows her to find mutants in need could let her snuff out souls like candles if she wanted, and a part of her remains tempted. That’s exactly what her other self – a version of her who chose power above all else, who’s been more demon than mutant for a very long time – taunted her with.
When she first had infernal power coursing through her, manipulated by outside forces and maddened by existential grief and boundless rage, she used it to lash out at the world. She wants to be more than that – more than wrath and anguish and a cycle of suffering – but old habits die hard when you’re forging new ground in a hostile world.
It’s a difficult line to walk. She needs to learn more about striking that balance, how to deal with mistakes when she makes them, and how to trust other people to counsel her. Having a warden she respects and trusts will be a huge part of this process. They’ll need to call her out without talking down to her, and understand her actions without excusing them. Someone who’s more practical than idealistic would probably work better, because while it’s important for her to indulge in compassion and move beyond her most cynical tendencies, she’ll always be a pragmatist.
Mostly buying into what the Barge represents and wanting to take her life back are a firm start, but that doesn’t mean she knows what she’s doing. Ultimately, she needs someone who can shepherd her without making her feel controlled, who can hold her accountable for inevitable mistakes without condemning her for them, and who can talk her through all the complexities of morality that she’s decided to straight up avoid dealing with for so long.
History: Here, and then Here.
Sample Network Entry: Here!
Sample RP: Here!
Special Notes: Her last app, for her second stint on the Barge.
