Amanda Sefton

Amanda Sefton is the research and administration assistant at the Snow Valley Memorial Center for Mutant Affairs. At nineteen, she's had more than her fair share of drama - now she just wants to have as normal a life as possible. Well, as normal as you can when you're a teenage mutant witch who happens to work with a highly-illegal team of spies.

Details

Real Name: Gemile Szardos

Codename: none

Aliases: Amanda Sefton, Amanda Seaton

First Appearance: January 11, 2004

Date of Birth: April 14, 1987

Place of Birth: Germany, raised in England

Citizenship: German

Relatives: Margali Szardos (mother), Ivan Szardos (father - deceased), Stefan Szardos (brother), Kurt Wagner (adopted brother), Jimiane Szardos (sister).

Education: High school equivalency, currently completing a double degree in Sociology and Linguistics.

Relationship Status: Single

Occupation: Research assistant to Wanda Maximoff, administration and research assistant, Snow Valley Memorial Center for Mutant Affairs.

Team Affiliation: X-Force

Biography

Childhood

The daughter of Margali, a gypsy witch, Amanda's mutation made her a target early on in her life. A magical practitioner called Rack realised the toddler’s potential and, posing as a German government worker, stole the two-year old from her family. He told Amanda as she got older that Margali had sold her to him. He brought on her mutation when she was five and used her as a power source for his spells, teaching her enough to use her and she teaching herself a little more in secret. When Amanda was eleven, the early onset of puberty prompted a particularly nasty blood ritual involving a demon, in which the child was almost killed. Social Services became involved after another member of Rack’s coven at the time, Pete Wisdom's sister Romany, took the child to hospital for urgent treatment; social workers removed Amanda from her ‘father's’ care and got a court order making her a Ward of the State. Rack was jailed briefly for assault and neglect and after his release he left England and disappeared somewhere in Europe.

For the next four years Amanda was shuffled from foster home to foster home, with occasional spells in institutions for unwanted children. The pattern became depressingly similar - she would be placed in a home, she would invariably use her magical abilities and the family would panic and demand her removal. Amanda's behavioural problems also didn't help. By the time she was fourteen, she had twelve different foster families under her belt, and was a frequent runaway. After the last family, hardline Christians, she ran away yet again and spent the next one and a bit years living on the streets of London and Brighton, doing anything to survive including prostitution, petty theft and begging. It was here that Romany found her and enlisted her brother Pete Wisdom to arrange a false passport for Amanda in order to smuggle her out of England, since as a State Ward she was the responsibility of Social Services and Romany felt they'd done enough damage. Romany herself was unable to foster Amanda due to her alternative lifestyle, and Amanda’s mutant power put her at risk in the magical community. Xavier's was really the only option for her, even though there is no-one who can really help her with the magical aspects of her abilities, it was thought it might be possible to control the amount of mystical energy she was able to channel.

Living At The X-Mansion

When Amanda came to the mansion she was brash, suspicious and obnoxious. Naturally blonde and blue-eyed, she dyed her raggedly-chopped hair black and had enough piercings to support a small African nation in stainless steel. Amanda prided herself on her independence, and was constantly on the lookout for the catch, since the mansion had to have one. However slowly she began to realise this was the best place for her, and despite some teething problems (such as turning Jake into a frog by accident in her first week), she began to slowly settle in and make friends. She was seriously hurt during the Mansion Invasion by Pete's former employers and became determined to learn to defend herself.

A great unforeseen problem was the presence on the school grounds of a powerful magical artefact, stronger in fact than anything Amanda had had access to - the Gem of Cyttorak embedded in the chest of the groundskeeper, Cain Marko. Unable to help herself, Amanda became addicted to the Gem, and once Cain and Moira MacTaggart discovered a way to shield it, suffered serious withdrawals. Her part in the events of Love Potion Number Nine drove her further into addiction and self-destructive behaviour, including forming an empathic link with the unstable Manuel. After eventually trying to kill herself after an altercation with Lorna, she had to return to England and Romany's care for a cleansing ritual, which blocked the link. She returned with the magical equivalent of a nicotine patch - an amulet on a chain around her neck that provided her with a baseline level of power to prevent withdrawal symptoms, with an added cut-off switch to prevent her from taking in too much power. She also acquired a magic tutor - Dr Stephen Strange, a professor at Columbia University and closet magician.

Upon her return to the school, Amanda and her best friend Angelo ran afoul of Patches, her former magic dealer, who had passed on information and her blood onto Rack. Driven to facing him, they barely escaped alive, Pete and Emma rescuing them at the last minute. There were positives - the link with Manuel was eventually re-opened and their relationship truly started. It was a difficult pairing - neither teen knew what love really was - and their insistence on keeping things opened caused problems. Manuel resented Amanda's closeness with Bethany Moore, a human girl she met through HeliX and Amanda was highly insecure about Manuel's flirtations with Jubilee. Eventually things escalated to the point Amanda and Jubilee physically fought each other, both with fists and with powers.

Halloween's attack by the Repodemon meant a certain degree of closure for Amanda, although it also meant the loss of Bethany, whose parents moved her away from any further danger. With the death of the demon and the unbinding spell she performed to rid herself of Rack, many restrictions on Amanda's magic dropped. Just in time for her to risk everything saving herself and Manuel from Selene and Alphonso during a Hellfire Club function on [[Manuel's birthday. The incident cost Amanda her boyfriend as Manuel retained few memories of himself and their relationship and brought her to the attention of Selene.

Lost In The Woods

Selene made her first move against the young witch shortly after New Year's, during a ceremony to exorcise her influence from Manuel. The attempt failed when Nathan and the Askani confronted Selene and Amanda and Manuel continued on their winter vacation through Europe. In Germany Amanda met with the birth family Wanda had found for her and determined for herself the extent of Rack's lies. On her return, Amanda found herself banned by Hank, Moira, Jean and Madelyn from using her healing powers except in emergencies and then only under supervision, in an effort to prevent the increasing signs of overload. Frustrated and feeling useless, Amanda agreed to summon the spirit of Jay's dead lover, causing herself brain damage in the process.

Alphonso continued to harass Amanda and Manuel, sending them footage of the beating Amanda had received back in November 2004. This created a rift between the couple, exacerbated by the death of Pete's father by order of Alphonso. Remy was able to identify Alphonso's role in the beating and the murder: Pete was told and left the school immediately after in order to seek Alphonso's death. Remy, who had always told Amanda the truth, revealed to her why Pete had left, cautioning her to keep that knowledge to herself for the security of the school. The weight of keeping such a secret from Manuel became telling and Amanda slid into her old habit of withdrawing from people. After Alphonso was killed, Manuel discovered Amanda had known the truth and threatened her with his powers. Unable to remain and unable to reach Romany who had withdrawn herself since Pete's departure, Amanda fled back to the Szardos family at the suggestion of Alison. Her abrupt departure damaged several of her close relationships, including that with Nathan, who was at the time laid up in medlab with a broken back as a result of the Youra mission.

Amanda returned to the school several weeks later, with a new student in tow - an abused shapeshifter called Meggan, found in a local freak show. Margali had adopted the child and Amanda acted as her surrogate parent during her time at the school. Her absences plus the amount of time lost due to her various injuries and healing demands meant Amanda failed her final exams and pushed her towards taking on summer remedial work in order to graduate high school. The demands she placed on herself meant she had little time for socialising or Manuel, with whom she eventually made a reconciliation. An argument with Strange after Bad Blood resulted in her firing him as her tutor and he left the country shortly after on a mysterious job, leaving Amanda to fend for herself with her magic studies. At this point in time Selene again appeared, this time with an offer of tutelage, which Amanda flatly refused.

In June 2005 an accident with the amulet pushed her back into withdrawals, culminating in her using Meggan's power to synch herself to energy as a fix. Shocked by what she had done and desperate to overcome the addiction, Amanda cut a deal with the only magic user available to her: Selene. Selene maintained her part of the bargain and Amanda gradually gained control over the addiction and the magic, learning to use life energy as a source of power. It was this skill that let her bring Remy back from death, using those in the medlab at the time to fuel the spell. For this she was expelled, and whilst the staff tried to find somewhere to place her, she ripped the link with Manuel out of their heads and teleported out of the mansion and to Selene, to fulfill her part of the deal and become her Black Knight for a year.

With the downfall of Selene and the sacrifice of Askani to bring Alison back from the brink of death, Amanda was brought back to the school by Pete. Her mutant powers burned out, her relationships largely in tatters and unable to deal with the consequences of the magic any more, Amanda asked Tante Mattie to take the spell-casting ability away and returned with her and Remy to New Orleans.

The Path To X-Force

Amanda spent several months in New Orleans under the watchful eyes of Tante and Remy. She remained in contact with those friends who stood by her after the events of the previous year - Angelo, Marie-Ange, Doug and Jubilee, and wrote often to Moira, She sought therapy for her addiction and abuse issues and completed her high school equivalency, with an intention to go to one of the local colleges in September and study social or youth work.

Not long after Angelo's visit in January 2006 Amanda started getting headaches. She chalked it up to the study she was doing to finish her equivalency and didn't say anything. Then just before Lorna's visit in late February, the first migraine hit. Several more followed and Tante's arts were ineffective. Amanda went to the local clinic doctor who diagnosed migraines and gave her stronger painkillers, but they didn't work either. Eventually, concerned and frightened, Amanda went to Muir Island with Remy in March to find out from Moira what was wrong.

Moira's eventual diagnosis was the manifestation of Amanda's mutant powers. The damage done in November effectively "re-set" Amanda's powers back to their original state, prior to the interference of Rack. Several months on, Amanda was undergoing manifestation, the same as most young mutants. The difficulty was Amanda was subconsciously blocking her powers, refusing to even entertain the thought they might be coming back after the events of Lost in the Woods and was thus causing herself more and more pain. It took tough talking and a lot of thinking for Amanda to see the situation the way Moira presented it: as a second chance to do things properly, without the issues and the damage of before. The final decision was to accept the return of her powers - but to reject the path of magic. Amanda stayed on at Muir after that, working on her powers and learning to bleed off power when she needed to, until Pete brought her in to find Romany on account of her occult knowledge.

Amanda's first few months in X-Force were spent in a support and research role, consulting on the occult and mystical and given her medlab training, acting as first aider. Something happened, as things always do, that caused her to reconsider her decision to not use the magic: after talking to Forge and Marie-Ange she realised she couldn't run away from what she is, and that the magic was a part of her and always would be, a part that could do great good if she was responsible with it. Asking for it back became unnecessary - Tante's spell had a loophole, as all spells do, and Amanda regained the ability to perform magic, much to her initial surprise and displeasure. Slowly allowing herself to perform spells again, she discovered many things had changed and none of the old rules applied.

Using the information taken from the harddrive Remy took from Charlie's computer and her own work, plus consulting others in the magic underground, Amanda began to develop her own style of magic since none of the traditional forms seemed to work for her. It was urban magic, essentially - building off the quirk in her mutation that allows her to absorb the energy of cities.

It will take years before she's anywhere near the level of proficiency she used to be. With the removal of the accelerations created by Rack and by the demands of the mansion, she's on a far more natural learning curve - one she'll eventually master, but not for a very long time. In the meantime, she's learning that she has many more skills than the magic.

Physical Characteristics

Height: 5ft 3in

Weight: 134lbs - slim build, but no longer unhealthily thin.

Eyes: Blue

Hair: Blonde - cut to shoulder length and generally worn straight.

Other Features:

Piercings: Not as many as before: four holes in her left ear, three in her right, right eyebrow hoop, nose stud, tongue stud and belly button ring.

Tattoos; three Norse runes on her solar plexus, vaguely magic-related protective patterns on her right upper arm.

Scars: Left hand, inch long scar on both sides from the Soulsword.

Powers

Before 2006, Amanda absorbed energy from mystical objects and her magical abilities were scattered over a number of disciplines, with some things coming remarkably easily, and others beyond her. Under Strange's tutelage she honed her skills - healing magics, simple shielding, astral projection. She had also learned a number of darker spells from her time with Rack, including force bolts and summoning the dead. The larger the spell (major healings, summoning of dead spirits, etc) the more difficult it was, frequently causing overload and headaches, nosebleeds and fatigue. Following the reboot at the end of 2005, things became very different.

Mutant:

• Ability to draw energy from cities and eventually use it to power magic. The larger and older the city (eg: London, Paris, Rio, New York), the more power. The opposite also applies - the more isolated and unpopulated an area, the less power Amanda has access to. Cities (and areas) that have experienced trauma and damage - such as Beruit, Sarajevo, Beijing's Tiannamen Square - will cause her physical pain as the natural energy flow here has been disrupted. In the 'heart' of cities, where there is the most life - eg: Times Square in New York, Trafalgar Square in London, Champs De Elysee in Paris - are hotspots, where the power is most concentrated.

• Ability to sense the locations of cities, their rough size, their state of 'health'. Perception of cities as 'alive'.

• (to be developed in the future) Ability to know where she is in a city, to the point she doesn't get lost, even in a strange place. Eventually she'll be able to track others' movements, roughly.

• (to be developed in the future) Drawing from comics canon with the teleporting, initially the ability to 'port within the confines of a particular city (starting with New York, as her 'home base') and from there between major cities, those with the most power - eg. London, Paris, Rio, Istanbul, Amsterdam, etc. She will not ever be able to take passengers and this aspect of her power will take at least a year to surface and be even vaguely controlled.

Magic:

It's perhaps easiest to think of Amanda as being at the same stage as a level three mage in D&D. There's a range of spells she's capable of doing, but what restricts her is the amount of power available, and her own personal issues with magic and using it when it's not needed. Largely defensive spells and illusions. The other thing is that the spells she does reflect the power source, the urban environment; there are elements of the city in the manifestations or processes. The spellcraft she knew, everything taught to her by various people... none of that applies. Spells either fail entirely or have unexpected results, often inconsistently different. Many spells from before - the levitation/TK, the aura stuff, the spirit summoning, the potions and sleep spells - are gone irretrievably. Others - summoning the elements, for example - have been twisted to the point they're actually more harmful than good.

She can still heal, that being her family's "gift", but there are many more limits than last year. The first being that healing of any kind takes power directly from living things, the greater the injury the greater the power demand. So healing will require Amanda to have to decide and/or consult with those around her as to whether they accept that cost. The second is there's only so many times and Amanda can heal someone before it stops working. The more serious the injury healed, the quicker that time frame is.

Equipment

Amulet: a mystical crystal charm designed to maintain Amanda during her addiction. No longer used.

Trivia

As much as she identifies herself as English, Amanda has never legally held citizenship there. Rack smuggled her in with false papers, and Pete provided the same to get her out to Xavier's. She is now in possession of a legal German passport in her birth name.

She is still a polyglot, but she has lost many of the more esoteric dead languages she used to know as a result of brain damage caused by breaking the link and channelling Askani.

Plots

2004

Mansion Invasion

Love Potion Number Nine

Limbo

Daddy's Girl

Red X Mission: Stonewall

Collateral Damage

Asgard

Trojan Horse

Devil In My Mind

Repodemon

Heiress Discordia

Proteus

2005

Shadows Fall

Remy's Eleven

Shattered

Gypsy Road Trip

Brood

Little Girl Lost

Bad Blood

An Offer You Can Refuse

Buy Now, Pay Later

Just One Drug

With Malice Aforethought

High Cost of Living

Lost In The Woods

2006

Opening Salvo

Romancing the Holy Whatsis

Don't Leave Me With The Germans

Race Around The World

The Curse Stops Here

Worlds On Fire

Body Snatchers

Meta

Player: [Rossi]

E-mail: wytchbrat@gmail.com

AIM: wytchbrat

Player Icon Base: Billie Piper Billie Piper]

Meta Trivia

The movieverse version of Amanda Sefton was first pitched by Dex to the player as a sixteen year old [John Constantine]