The story of the Eternals — as they understand it — is this: The First Host of Celestials experimented with mankind and created divergent races: the genetically and atomically unstable Deviants, the humans (who would later birth their own divergent breeds), and the Eternals. The Second Host came to check up on their experiments and subsequently destroyed Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu after being accosted (ineffectually) by the Deviants. The Third Host came and went without incident. The Fourth — and final — Host, however, remains to be seen. Stories exist of a Dreaming Celestial on the west coast … but, Sersi isn't really the one to ask about /that/ nonsense.
She's the daughter of the Eternals Helios and Perse and one of (if not the) youngest of the fourth generation of Eternals — most specifically, those born after the coming of the Second Host and the resulting Great Cataclysm.
She is the originator of the legends of Circe, the legendary transmuter of men to pigs, and her adventures among mankind are legendary. She was present in Rome during Nero's reign … and, later, was an aid to Merlin in exposing an imposter. She was in France for a while during the Revolution and was even friends with Thomas Chatterton, an English poet. Her adventures throughout life have taken her practically everywhere at least once or twice, though she might have trouble remembering from time to time. After over twenty thousand years, though … can anyone blame her for not remembering who was at that one party in Camelot?
She has fought a cosmically-powered mechanical Hulk, all manner of Deviants, and many more threats over the years. She grew affectionate toward an anthropology professor and saved the life of a man pursuing suicide; but her strange nature was enough to eventually set the former adrift and the latter to die in Lemuria during an ill-fated mission into the Deviants' domain.
Much time has passed since then. Where the others seemed set to play out their Eternal soap opera, she preferred the one among humans; at least they didn't have the pretense of being 'better' than all that nonsense. She has since more or less estranged herself from her fellow Eternals in recent years, with the greater threat of the Deviants now well behind them. While she keeps up on the family gossip from time to time, she prefers to spend her days in the here-and-now, focused on the lovely people she's acquainted with more. They aren't liable to beg her to rush off to some obscure place and go into battle; that's just not /her/ style.
She has come to know most — if not all — of the world's elite. Superheroes, supermodels, celebrities … all the big names know Sersi and Sersi knows them. While few might believe she's /really/ an Eternal, the Avengers know her quite well. She's spent some time gallivanting around with them and has been involved in some crazy shenanigans.
Such shenanigans weren't entirely harmless, however. After entering Uni-Mind with the Brethren Leader — a forbidden act among her kind — her psyche seemed to be compromised.
During her involvement with the Kree-Shi'ar war, she was one of the Avengers who disagreed with the order not to kill the Supreme Intelligence. She, with others, ostensibly took care of the threat, but things just haven't seemed the same since.
She's finally back to settling into her old ways as a part-time Avenger, full-time party girl. Or trying to, at any rate. The already 'off' Eternal is a bit more off-kilter these days.
UNAPOLOGETIC
She does what she does and apologizes to none. Asking her why she did something will generally yields one of three answers: because she *can*, because she *wanted* to, or it seemed like a good idea at the time. Or maybe all three at once, just to be difficult. It isn't that Sersi's motives aren't to be questioned but, rather, that she just doesn't bother to veil her motivations at all (which might be more confounding than her illusions).
HEDONIST and FREE SPIRIT
She's always been a free-wheeling, fun-loving sort and being tied down with 'responsibility' has never been her style. Stuffy meetings? Not her thing. Even when fighting in battle, she isn't the kind that will just lay the beat down on ugly; she has to make it fun, if only for herself. She rarely sees a need to be serious and is much, much more motivated to get the most pleasure out of life with the least amount of pain (to herself and others!) as possible.
CAPRICIOUS and MERCURIAL
On top of purely being unapologetic, Sersi is notorious for having a mercurial personality. She's just as inclined to save a man from committing suicide as she is to drop her boyfriend du jour for someone else on a complete whim (did we mention she's an incorrigible flirt? She's totally an incorrigible flirt). She might feel like staying in Paris for a week, only to venture elsewhere entirely for another week … or more. The only plans she keeps are party plans (naturally) — all else inevitably falls to the wayside as being far less important. She loves to travel, loves adventure, and loves unpredictability in all its forms; keep her on her toes and she'll inevitably return the favor.
SELFISH and SELF-CENTERED
In Sersi-land, it *is* all about her. While she might not be as obnoxious about it as others might, her deepest motivations always circle around what she wants, what she likes, and how to get those things. It's not that she's uncaring, per se, about what others want or like … but she's the type that's more like an overbearing aunt with her heart in the right place (even if the execution is /all/ wrong): trust auntie Sersi, she /knows/ what you really need, honey, and that's a nice drink with an umbrella in Tijuana and a full makeover. What? Deviant threat? Pfft, they'll be there when we get back.
LIVE AND LET LIVE
While other Eternals (and humans, too) might have a knee-jerk, must kill, reaction to Deviants, she's much more inclined to just … let it go. In fact, that's how she is with everything: the idea of fighting, of war, of all that violence just doesn't make /sense/ to her. Why /can't/ we all just get along? It will take a lot to pull her out of her selfish and self-centered cocoon and drag her onto the world stage to duke it out with others — but, when it comes to threats to those she has come to love and adore, she'll be one of the most loyal warriors that the world will see.
ENERGY BEAMS: Energy beams are not Sersi's forte, though she has them. She can shoot concussive blasts of energy from her eyes and hands. At its lowest usage, this energy can be helpful as a source of light and heat; at its highest, she *might* make a pretty good dent in the side of a tank. Her range is roughly a hundred feet and the power itself is limited to whether or not she can see her target and/or gesture at it.
METABOLISM BOOST: Her heightened metabolism grants her a few nifty tricks, the most notable being: she can eat what she wants and not gain a pound … and she has an accelerated rate of healing. Injuries that might take months for a human to heal from will take her mere weeks, at best. Granted, she can fudge around some things with her transmutational powers, but anything tough enough to land her in the hospital is liable to render those abilities temporarily moot anyway.
SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH: She can lift up to 20 tons with her bare hands and without telekinetic augmentation and can deliver the same level of force if she felt like hauling off and slugging someone. Her strength is also tangentially related to her superhuman stamina and other physical attributes.
INVULNERABILITIES: She is effectively immune to disease, toxins, radiation, and severe extremes of temperature and environment. She is not immune to feeling pain, however, and despite the immunity to the /effects/ of those things, she might still feel discomfort relating to them.
FLIGHT: Call it telekinesis, levitation, or jumbling around the molecules in the air to make her buoyant; Sersi can fly. She can take along about seven other people with her in the air and fly at speeds up to 800 miles per hour at her absolute maximum; her average rate, however, is roughly 650 miles per hour. She's fairly aerobatic, though she's no Ikaris; casual flight can be done indefinitely, but pushing herself to max speed for long stretches is a sure-fire way to guarantee she'll be grounded for a while.
ILLUSION GENERATION: Where her primary talent lies in matter transmutation, she's no slouch in the realm of illusion generation, either. Her illusions touch on all five senses fully and are generally perceived as real by all but those talented in sniffing out such things. Her illusions dissappear if she's rendered unconscious; similarly, if the targets of her illusion move out of range (or she just forgets about them), then the illusions are similarly destroyed. She can affect a decently-sized crowd of people of about twenty to twenty-five individuals (e.g. making them all appear to be the same person) or a large space (generally limited to what she can see) at a given time. Her range, when holding an illusion on someone that's out of sight, is approximately three hundred feet; beyond that, she cannot retain the illusion.
MATTER TRANSMUTATION: She is the only fifth-level Adept at matter transmutation. Simply put: if it exists, she can reshape it. This power comes with an inherent understanding of how things work on an atomic and subatomic level; it's an instinctive knowledge that cannot be fully articulated. A magic sword can become a mug of coffee, boorish young men can become pigs, and stone gargoyles can become the real thing made of flesh and bone. The effects of her transmutation are permanent unless she (or another matter transmuter) 'fixes' them. Particularly powerful magical items may also reverse the effects. She only needs to see her target to transform it. The size and mass of the item are immaterial, though prolonged use of this power (e.g. spending an hour /constantly/ changing things) can be exceptionally draining.
MIND CONTROL: Her powers of mind control are refined, though generally limited. If she can look someone in the eye, she can tell them to do something — and be obeyed. Some commands will be impossible to obey (such as: 'kill a loved one' or 'kill yourself'), but bidding her mortal enemies to get her some ice and lemons is not only feasible but generally obeyed without hesitation. Her control is temporary, generally limited to sending someone (or a group of someones) to complete a simple task; she's not the kind to play puppet-master.
TELEPATHY: She can read the minds of Eternals and other humans — which includes mutants and their ilk. She cannot read the minds of Deviants or Celestials. However, she can still speak to them via telepathy and be heard by them. Her psionic probes generally only skim the surface, though she can dig deeper if need be. She is not a psionicist, however, and using this for more than a short period of time (no more than about ten to twenty minutes) will generally result in a headache or nosebleed and the pain will eventually force her to stop (or pass out; either-or).
TELEKINESIS: Telekinetically, she can heft up to 40 tons of material, though the act is definitely not one that can be done more than once in any given encounter — and it may well knock her out to try it a second time, if she's not completely weakened after the first. She is otherwise able to lift smaller items through her mind alone and manipulate them as she sees fit for extended periods of time relative to the weight of what she's working with.
TK SHIELD: Her telekinetic powers can be warped to produce a protective shield or bubble, depending on her needs. The size of the shield/bubble determines how much force it can withstand; a small shield/bubble can handle significantly more abuse than a large one. A dome large enough to hold herself and seven others within it can handle the impact of a standard tank shell (or the equivalent of one ton's worth of force) before cracking and eventually shattering, for the sake of comparison. Such shielding is typically bullet-proof and safe from most projectiles — smaller missiles, sure, but nuclear warheads … not so much.
TELEPORTATION: Another innate talent of the Eternals is the ability to teleport. The process is highly unpleasant and not one that is casually indulged in. Another Eternal can follow in the wake of her teleportation field (as she can follow in another), which takes the form of glowing light that quickly fades. She can take herself and several passengers without difficulty. In simplest terms, it is breaking one down to all of their subatomic components and rapidly reassembling them elsewhere; nausea, headaches, and other side-effects are common among passengers, while Sersi herself risks being completely paralyzed with pain after arrival. She can teleport to any place she's familiar with without difficult … but, if going to an unknown locale, the risk of failure becomes astronomical without perfect coordinates.
IMMORTALITY: By nature of being an Eternal, Sersi is immortal. She is thus immune to the ravages of time — she will not age and cannot die, although she can feel pain to the same degree that humans can. Her destruction is only possible if her atoms are dispersed across a very wide area … but, even then, it's entirely possible that she'll be able to reassemble herself over the course of time.
ETERNALS: She has her fellow Eternals to call on as a tremendous — if rarely used — resource. This includes Olympia itself, should she feel a need to make use of the places as a location of relaxation and knowledge.
MONEY: Put bluntly: she's as rich as she needs to be. She makes a fair bit of money with her party-planning and professional hostessing services … and she can transmute practically anything she needs. Sersi isn't a woman who wants for anything /material/ in this life and that makes her happy.
SOCIAL CIRCLES: She's a woman with friends in all the right places. From celebrities to models to just about everyone in between, she's friends with /all/ of them.
HOMES: She has a plethora of homes and apartments throughout the world. While she's centered in New York City, she has apartments in nearly every major city across the globe. Why? Because she /can/ — and because it means she has a nice variety of locales at which to throw her lavish parties.
HEDONIST: She's terrible. Incorrigible. But, ultimately, she's just in it for fun. If something isn't fun? She's just not interested. Fighting war, doing battle against evil, or even just taking out the trash … none of that really appeals to her. Getting her to do anything more than be the socialite she is will take a Herculean effort; convince her it's worth her while and she might consider. Might. Just don't expect her to help clean up the mess afterward.
IMMORTAL/EGO: She's never going to die. That knowledge alone is enough to make her just a /bit/ arrogant and cocksure of herself. Okay, make that a /lot/ arrogant and cocksure. She has reason to be (to her mind), but it can make her pretty unbearable to work with if one doesn't know what they're expecting. And the whole immortality thing does suck on its own merits — for as much as she adores mingling with humanity, she knows they're all going to die eventually.
TELEPORTING: Teleporting, while something she /can/ do … is not something she /likes/ to do. Stripping oneself down to atoms to reassemble them elsewhere is unpleasant to say the least. Worse still, if she doesn't know /where/ she's going, bad things can happen — not the least of which includes accidentally fusing with a solid object she wasn't anticipating on being there. Secondarily, teleporting takes a significant toll on her powers — and, worse, she runs the very high risk of being paralyzed with pain upon arrival.
PUBLIC FIGURE: Sersi's face and name are well-known to the world at large. Whether people /believe/ she's an Eternal or not is another matter, but she's not one who will ever be able to hide her activities for terribly long before someone, somewhere, snaps a photo or throws a video up on YouTube.
PHYSICAL ATTACKS: For all of her cosmic power … she can still be laid low by a sucker-punch. Despite their immortality, Eternals can still feel pain — and they don't like it. So, if it's an ambush or even just an unexpected assault, she's still just as susceptible as Joe Schmoe to being smacked around (and feeling it!) before she can pull something out of her bag o' tricks.
POWER FOCUS: She needs to focus on the work she's doing; without focus, even the finest illusion will be unraveled and her transmutations set awry. While she can do some low-key multi-tasking — singing, dancing, chatting up a storm while maintaining an illusion — she falls far more under stress when in the middle of, oh, a fight. Or if a nerve-chewing beast is keeping her in agony. In either case, if she can't concentrate on what she's doing, her work will inevitably fall apart.
