SCARLET WITCH

 

SCARLET WITCH

Real Name: Wanda Maximoff

First Appearance: The Uncanny X-Men (Vol. 1) #4, March 1964

Powers: Wanda Maximoff would have originally been merely an energy-manipulating mutant like her father, Magneto, if not for her birth on Wundagore Mountain giving the Elder God Chthon an opportunity to infuse her with chaos magic. Consequently, she developed her mutation as a hex power. By pointing at a target and concentrating, the Scarlet Witch unleashes her hexes, scientifically defined as a creating a psionic field around the target that causes probabilities to fluctuate wildly, making highly improbable events occur. Initially, Wanda's power was wild and limited. She could cast no more that three hexes in rapid succession without taking time to regenerate her energies, and she had no control over the hex's effect. Striking an opponent could just as easily make them stronger than defeat them. She typically caused some form of calamity, though, such as making floors or ceilings collapse, glass to shatter, guns to misfire, objects to burst into flame, machinery to turn on, shut down, or go haywire, etc.

After receiving some rudimentary training in magic at the hands of Agatha Harkness, Wanda developed a greater refinement in her powers, in terms of strength, stamina, and control. The Scarlet Witch now had no set limit to the number of hexes she could cast in a row, and the sheer power she could unleash and range of improbable events she could cause increased dramatically. She could destroy buildings by altering the odds of every single stress point or minute fracture in the construction suddenly breaking down at one time, or cause a passing comet to turn 90 degrees and crash to earth right on top of a target she chose. Wanda could also control specific outcomes, willing her hex power to force a specific improbability to happen. She could manipulate games of chance, control the roll of a set of dice, and so on. She can still cast wild hexes easily, but with concentration she can gather her energies and will that a single outcome be achieved.

For a brief period Wanda, as her reality's nexus being, was used by Immortus as a storehouse for accumulated temporal energy taken from other realities. This had the side effect of dramatically increasing her powers again, and altering their basic nature. Wanda's hex power would now retroactively alter the timeline to engineer the outcomes she desired. For example, instead of simply causing a metal pipe to fracture and break, she manipulated space-time so that the fracture was always present in the pipe. Wanda eventually rejected the temporal energy, losing all of her powers for several weeks. Eventually, her abilities returned at their pre-Immortus levels.

Wanda later became even more in tune with the "magical" nature of her powers after being used as a conduit for mystical forces by Morgan le Fey and learning the true "chaos magic" nature of her hex power from Agatha Harkness. Wanda developed a range of specific skills she can call on her hex power to perform. Because chaos magic is a form of "natural magic", the elements bent more easily to her power than other phenomena, allowing her to create fire, control wind, and so on. She can sense other forms of magic, as well as the natural order of things, and detect when something unnatural is occurring. Her hex power acts as a natural counterforce for any other form of magic and for the unnatural, allowing her to easily undo artificial changes to a "state of being", such as the presence of mind control. Wanda can also now generate hex fields (energy domes of hex energy that automatically alter the probability of any projectile suddenly being diverted away from her) or hex charges (samples of her chaos magic infused into objects to be used as talismans, such as when she focused her hex power into Iron Man's microchips and gave them to the Avengers so that they would be immune to Kulan Gath's mind-altering enchantment field while she wasn't with them). She also learned more specific hex castings, like making people invisible to the naked eye or healing and repairing wounds.

During the Avengers: Disassembled event, Wanda's powers raged out of control as full-fledged reality-altering abilities. Originally presented as the true extent of her powers untethered, it was later stated that Wanda actually became a conduit for the cosmic essence known as the Life Force, which was truly responsible for her ‘reality altering’ powers. During this period, Wanda's powers were phenomenal: She could create matter from nothing, and deconstruct matter in the same way, wiping it from existence. She could manipulate existing matter so that it moved aside to let her pass, altered shape and form, changed elemental composition, and so on. She could access souls from beyond and resurrect the dead, then banish them to the afterlife just as easily. Wanda could reconstruct spacetime, creating scenarios that represented a new sequence of events in history, and impose that scenario on the matter and energy around her, and the minds of other people. Her "House of M" construction changed the history of the entire planet Earth for several decades, influencing everyone present on it.

Although she has since been separated from the Life Force, Wanda remains incredibly powerful. Her "chaos magic" based abilities have apparently been restored to proper levels, allowing her to radically influence her environment by applying quantum-level manipulations to her targets, causing sudden but improbable things to occur. Her full range of capabilities at this point remains unclear.