Name: Maria Marjorie Moretti
Gender: Female
Age: 29
Appearance:
Maria has a lightly tanned complexion inherited from her Italian father and her Spanish mother. Maria is all angles and sharp edges-she comes from a long line of tall, bony women with high cheekbones and an angular facial structure. In her awkward teen years, Maria appeared gangly and boyish, but she has grown into her figure nicely and has made the subtle yet immediately noticeable transition from "bony" to "slender". She is still inordinately tall, though, standing at 5 feet and 10 inches. Nothing to be done about
that.
Maria's hair is a warm, honey-brown color. It is thick and straight, falling about halfway down her back. Maria is fond of styling her hair in all the latest fashions, which requires the extensive use of steel rollers and hair rags. Her eyes are a blue-green color and usually lined with heavy make-up. Maria has the long fingers of a piano player, mostly due to her genetics (she has never played the piano in her life), and she had perfected the art of gliding across a room. Maria is willowy and graceful, with the posture of a prima ballerina. Her lips are rather average, but with the purposeful application of her favorite red lipstick, they appear to be full and pouty.
Not all of Maria's beauty comes naturally. She worked on her posture and her walk for years, and she keeps herself on a strict diet to maintain her figure (Maria knows for a fact that she couldn't pull off a curvaceous, statuesque look, even if she had any curves; she is much too tall for it) and to keep her skin smooth and freckle-free. After all, when you're in the same business as Maria, your beauty is practically all you've got.
Personality: To others, Maria is a sultry, intoxicating temptress, capable of charming the secrets right out of someone with a coy glance and a flutter of her long eyelashes. She reads people like an open book, a skill honed through her years spent in her particular line of work. Sharply observant, perceptive, and brutally analytical, Maria has been taught how to detect subtle shifts in emotion, how to seduce a man (and perhaps even a woman, though Maria has yet to cross that bridge), and how to kill someone in a dozen different ways while dancing the waltz. Enigmatically charismatic, Maria exudes a certain aura that instantly draws people to her. She puts up a playful and coquettish front all while maintaining a certain air of mystery that unfailingly attracts the attention of her target. Elegant and refined, Maria is able to engage in lengthy discussions about a wide range of topics, from European literature to the latest technological advancements and Parisian cosmetics.
Maria hides a spine of steel behind red lipstick and expensive silk gowns, pretending that she has morals and "womanly sensitivities" (whatever the hell
that's supposed to mean). In truth, Maria is as about as cold-hearted as they get, thinking mostly of herself and the few people she genuinely cares about. She can be stupidly, blindly loyal to a person or a cause, to the point where she is sacrificing everything for one single thing. Maria is sly and shrewd, often manipulating and blackmailing people into doing her bidding. When she isn't around clients, Maria comes off as a bit stand-offish and aloof, although she is fiercely protective of her "girls". She values her independence and is truly afraid of very few people. Deadly and alluring, Maria holds no qualms against playing men like a flute to achieve her own goals. And oh, play them she does-most people don't stand a chance against the wiles of the venomously beautiful Maria Moretti.
Background history: Maria was the product of a one-night stand in between an Italian gangster and a dockside whore. She grew up on the streets of New York City, foraging for food during the day while her mother worked the wharves and piers of the city at night. Maria's mother told her of her true ancestry when Maria was nine; how she came from a long line of women with special gifts, and how these women had taken advantage of their gifts through the centuries. Descended from Spanish gypsy snake charmers that fled the country during the reign of Queen Joanna the Mad, Maria's mother could hypnotize others with her big brown eyes, draw people to her with a single touch, and poison someone with a kiss. Maria's own abilities began to manifest in her early teens, and she suddenly understood how her mother could make so much money in the span of a single night.
It was another few years before Maria's mother revealed why she came to America. After getting mixed up with a dangerous crowd in London, Maria's mother woke up one day to find that she'd been robbed of everything she owned. Penniless and with nowhere else to go, she plied her trade until she had enough money to pay for passage across the Atlantic. Once she had arrived in New York City, she intentionally sought out a man to get her pregnant, for if the women of Maria's line reach thirty-five years of age without giving birth to a daughter, they die.
Maria's mother taught her everything she knew until she (rather ironically) died of the Spanish flu during World War I. Maria wasn't even twenty at the time. Thankfully, her mother had left her with a considerable sum of money and her father's name and current address. Armed with that information, Maria packed her bags and made her way to Chicago.
When Maria got to Chicago, she snuck into her father's ostentatious home and confronted him. He practically had a heart attack at the sight of her, but he recognized those alluring, mesmerizing eyes immediately, despite how long it had been, and he saw how incredibly useful Maria's abilities could be. Maria changed her last name to Moretti and began working as a high-class escort in one of Chicago's speakeasies while secretly passing along information to her father, who ran a vicious gang.
Maria spied for her father-Alessandro Rossini-for a couple of years before she began running a bordello herself. Alessandro passed along funds for the establishment, and in exchange, Maria passed along any pertinent information and did odd favors for him anytime that he needed it. Maria has developed a fierce, if unrequited, loyalty to her father as a result of their highly profitable partnership. She is also ferociously protective of the young women who work in her bordello, though she won't take any shit from them.
Maria frequently wears long, ornate hairpins that have wickedly-sharp ends in her hair. She normally has some sort of blade hidden in her bodice or under her skirt, and she sometimes conceals a pretty little pistol with gilt metalwork and a mother-of-pearl handle on her person. Maria is no soldier, but she has a knack with blades and most certainly knows how to shoot a gun.
Maria found herself in trouble in 1940 when the police linked a recent death to Maria. The man that was killed was last seen with her; indeed, Maria had kissed him hard in an alleyway, poisoning him. Maria was arrested. At first, she was unworried, certain that Alessandro would somehow bail her out, especially considering the fact that she'd killed the man at his bidding, but as time went on, it soon became clear that no help was coming. Maria decided to take matters into her own hands and attempted to escape the facility she was being held in. She was unsuccessful, though the authorities discovered that anyone she kissed ended up dying. When the government began assembling a team of powered individuals to take down Hitler and the Nazis, Maria was offered her freedom after the war was over if she helped to fight. Maria accepted, though she cares more about her vengeance than Adolf Hitler.
Maria is worried that she will not be able to give birth to a girl before she turns thirty-five. She only has six years left, and who knows how long the war could take?
Superpower and how the character got it: Maria is able to hypnotize others by looking directly into their eyes. Eye contact must be maintained, and the effects usually wear off after an hour or so. She can only hypnotize one person at a time.
Maria is immune to most, if not all, forms of poison, and there are trace amounts of poison in her skin. Prolonged skin-to-skin contact with Maria will make the other person feel foggy and a bit like they are drunk. It will make Maria seem irresistible as well, depending on the person. There is also a lethal, fast-acting poison in her saliva, which can kill a man within thirty minutes. Maria wears a thick layer of lipstick to dilute or nullify the poison if she has a client that she doesn't want to accidentally poison.
Nobody is quite sure how exactly Maria's ancestors originally obtained their abilities, but Maria is quite certain that it had something to do with their natural affinity for snakes. She isn't certain where the part about giving birth to a girl comes in, either. Maria resents that she must give birth in order to survive; she places high value in her independence and feels like the one stipulation was somehow placed on the women in her family by backwards old men who couldn't stand seeing a woman having so much power.
