v . i . r . g . i . n . i . a .. "p . e . p . p . e . r" g . r . a . c . e .. p . o . t . t . s
B A S I C S
Name: Name: Virginia Grace Potts Affiliation: Stark Industries, potentially SHIELD maybe?, depending on Rescue - BoP, Avengers, Justice League, etc. Alias/Nicknames: Pepper, the glorified babysitter, Tony's P.A., Rescue eventually I assume Age/Date of Birth: 35 / 12-27-1976 Place of Birth: New Haven, Connecticut Current Residence: Manhattan, New York Occupation: Personal Assistant to Tony Stark, Stark Industries Email Address: p.potts@starkindustries.org / pepperpotts@gmail.com Twitter: NotSalt
P H Y S I C A L S
House/Year: PB: Gywneth Paltrow Appearance: Pepper is 5'10", with green eyes and red hair. She has long legs and a toned figure, cultivated from her years as an up and coming professional dancer, which she maintains with a rigorous program of yoga and, when she has the time, pilates. Her work wardrobe is on the conservative side, but still stylish and feminine. She wears subdued neutral colors to maintain her professionalism. Her one deviation is her footwear. It is nearly always ostentatious - colorful, with no less than a 3" heel, and usually 4" or 5". They are easily the most extravagant and expensive part of her wardrobe; where she'll spend $10 on a three-pack of thong panties at Target, she'll drop upward $2,000 on a pair of Loboutins.
A B I L I T I E S
Strengths: Pepper's list of skills are vast. She is not a genius, but her math skills are impressive enough to rival that of her boss. Her organization skill are second to none, allowing her to keep track of multiple things at a time, and multi-task her way through every single day. She works long hours and long weeks and has the stamina to withstand the stress and demands of her job. She is furthermore patient and understanding, which comes in handy when dealing with her job. Other skills include first aid, a decent knowledge of art history, an education in accounting and business management, an understanding of foreign relations, and a fluency in 13 languages: Spanish, French, Latin, German, Russian, Japanese, Italian, Mandarin, Arabic, Portuguese, Persian, Pashto, and Sign Language. She's also an accomplished cook, baker, and knows table settings, how to be a hostess, social graces, tap, jazz, ballet, hula, ballroom dancing, and has done a little singing. She doesn't talk about most of the last seven. Weaknesses: Pepper is a giver, to a fault. In a way, this is also her strength, as she's a dynamo at supporting others and providing them strength and it does not actually weaken her, except that it has deprived her of a personal life. While her work life is extremely fulfilling, she works fourteen to eighteen hours a day, six to seven days a week, and is on call around the clock. She hasn't had a date in years, and anyone whose shown even the remotest interest in her has had to deal with her employer's possessive jealousy. In spite of Tony's all around behavior, she is also very devoted to him. She manages him expertly, and they have an understanding that he needs her, and that while she will leave if he pushes her too far, she is also far more tolerant of him than anyone should be. Some of the things she does for him fall far outside the scope of her job description, but for whatever reason probably because she has feelings for him she refuses to admit to she does them, doing anything and everything he requires in the broadest sense.
P E R S O N A L I T Y
Pepper's personality is a study in contrasts. By nature, she is shy, quiet, and prefers to keep to herself. She is easily embarrassed, and this is quite apparent, and she blushes quite visibly when caught off guard. However, she is also very driven, competitive, stubborn, and has a temper with a long fuse. When truly angry, she can be frightening. Pepper hates bullies, and over the years, with her growing experience and comfort in her role as Tony's assistant, she has learned to throw her weight around when necessary, with some of the most powerful men and women in the industry and even the world. She's gained quite a reputation in her own right, and garnered many job offers, but has turned down all of them - also earning her an even greater reputation for her loyalty. She is fiercely protective of her employer, and of her own personal reputation. She does not want to be seen as another of "Tony's girls", nor dismissed as one of his secretaries. She has fought to become respected as a member of the executive staff, in spite of the fact that she is only Tony's Personal Assistant, but given the sheer amount of work she does for him, and the level of trust he puts in her to handle his business, the distinction between Personal Assistant and Executive Assistant is one the Board of Directors clearly recognizes. Although Pepper is a passionate, emotional, caring, and deeply loving individual, she often comes off restrained and cold when at work, masking most of her deeper emotions with a sharp wit and Mona Lisa smirk. She uses this mask as a way to protect herself, and keep her distance from her boss's charm, which it would be all too easy to fall prey to and, she fears, ruin not only her job, but their friendship, working dynamic, her respect for him, and her reputation.
H I S T O R Y
Virginia Grace Potts was born to Lewis and Ellie Potts of New Haven, Connecticut, the youngest of seven. Her father was an FBI agent, and twice the family lived abroad, once spending three years in Spain, and once spending two years in Paris before returning to live in Virginia. There, he worked in the Intellectual Property Protection and High Tech Crimes departments while Ellie worked as a housewife. All seven children were home-schooled, due to rather conservative religious beliefs which deemed the public and private school systems too permissive.
Education was not considered as strong a priority for Virginia by her parents, but education laws and Ginny's own desires ensured that she was not only well educated, but her own reading made her better educated than her brothers. Primarily, the course of study given her by her mother was intended to prepare her for life as a society wife and mother. Trained in skills befitting an Edwardian young lady, Ginny's one saving grace was that she was allowed to pursue her talent in dance. By her teenage years, she was considered semi-professional, and being courted by Academies in the U.S. and abroad.
When Ginny was fifteen, the brother to whom she was closest in age and affection, Jamie, announced to the family that he was gay, and was promptly disowned. Jamie disappeared from her life, not to heard from again until just before her graduation when he announced he was living in Metropolis after spending three years in France studying baking at the Cordon Bleu, and he wanted her to come live with him. Ginny's decision to do so instead of accepting one of the invitations coming in from the dance academies or companies ensured that she too would be disowned.
Ginny enrolled at Metropolis University, majoring in dance and business management to help her brother run his new bakery business. It was here that she met and made friends with Clark Kent, a journalism student who became a good friend. For the first year, everything went very well. Then Jamie became ill, and his prolonged illness was eventually diagnosed as HIV. As things progressed, changes needed to be made. When he could no longer work, the business was sold to his partner and, with the loss of medical insurance and in that time before decent medical coverage for HIV patients, Jamie used the money to pay for his care. Ginny gave up dancing, changed her dance major to accounting, and added two foreign language minors to her two majors. In addition she took on two part time jobs - one doing taxes and other accounting jobs in the off season, and the other singing 30s and 40s music in a small ensemble with other students from campus to make ends meet.
When home, she took care of her brother. She prepared his meals so that he could eat when she was gone. She cleaned up after him, and cleaned him up when he could no longer do it himself. She took him to the doctor and hospital when things got worse. She gave him his medicine, and even his injections. Jamie died two months before she graduated college, and at the funeral, two of her brothers were in attendance. It was the last time she would see any member of her family.
After graduation, Ginny needed a change of scenery, and moved to Manhattan, where she applied to and was hired by Stark Industries accounting department. She worked there a year as a secretary until the day when she discovered a mathematical error in the budget report that would cost the company a significant amount of money. Bringing it to her supervisor's attention, she was laughed at, and told that Tony Stark had done the budget, and Tony Stark didn't make mistakes. Angered, she took the report to her supervisor's supervisor, and when she received the same response, she continued up the chain of command, finally storming into the office of Tony Stark himself, demanding he look at her findings.
To her surprise, he not only looked, he saw. Impressed with her tenacity, and the fact that she had the nerve to tell him to his face, he hired her as his personal assistant on the spot, changing her life instantly. He also gave her her nickname, Pepper - by which she would ever thereafter be known. She would almost just as instantly be told that the job was essentially that of a glorified babysitter, but she would discover that while there were aspects of that in her new job, there was a lot more to it. The responsibility Tony gave her was immense, often on par with running the company, and his faith in her gave her the confidence to do the job, even if she preferred letting him make the big decisions and taking a supporting role, offering advice when asked.
He was a difficult man to work for, but she grew to respect him in some ways, to tolerate him in others, and to care about him in still more - when on a trip to Afghanistan, his convoy was ambushed and Tony went missing. Devastated by his apparent loss, Pepper did her best to help Obadiah Stane run the company and do whatever they could to help find Tony and bring him home, while inside she was hurting far more than she would have liked to admit. It was yet one more event in her life that turned everything around, and his return was a struggle to keep up as his injuries made her face that he had really nearly died.
The betrayal of Stane, her own brush with death, and Tony's suicidal behavior with the Iron Man suit have all added to her growing confusion, and as she struggles to maintain her equilibrium and maintain "business as usual", it helps to see him behaving as normal with women as though nothing has changed. It's a good reminder of why she can't get too close.
Except when they're alone and he acts completely different.
O T H E R
DID YOU READ THE RULES? Yep! 5, 6 with villain. PLANS/IDEAS What would you like to do with this character? How do you think your character can be integrated with the other universe? Pepper is really easy to pigeon-hole, given her schedule and, the fact that her world circles around Tony, and her devotion to him. However, I would really like her to develop some professional and personal relationships with people in both universes. I was able to get her a school contact with someone of the same age in DC, but there are other people I think she could get along with. Maybe Luthor could make a play to steal her for his company, and maybe once she gets into Rescue, she could join a team of her own. I don't think most people consider that she even could do that in the Marvel universe, but maybe she'd work in the JLA, given her no weapons stance, which would be interesting if Tony stayed with the Avengers. Maybe she could be a BoP, too.
W R I T I N G S A M P L E
Pepper's days always started early. She was out of bed by 4AM, at Tony's penthouse by 6AM and, depending on the day, either hustling Tony out of his lab or out of bed by 7AM. By then, she'd had an hour to re-examine the day's schedule (which she already had committed to memory the night before), organize the paperwork for the first round of business to be attended to, and perhaps most important - figure out where Tony was, exactly.
If he'd had 'company' the night before (and Pepper used the term lightly), Tony was never still in bed himself. Then it was her job to get the lady, or ladies, dressed and on their way before either a) they had a chance to distract Tony from work, or b) he had to see them again and stumble around the fact that he'd usually already forgotten their names. Those morning, and some others, Tony was already in his 'garage' - not actually a garage at all, though it did have cars - working ferociously on something or other. On these days, it was 'simply' a matter of pulling him away from said project, shoving him into the shower - sometimes quite literally- all the while going over the schedule and highlighting the important points he needed to remember for that morning.
If by some miracle Tony had managed to get some sleep the night before, her morning routine was even more complicated. After taking care of her other business and peering carefully into Tony's bedroom (the things she'd seen...), she realized it was going to be one of those mornings.
Taking a breath and tucking a loose strand of her red hair behind an ear, she first went to the windows, opening the shades to let the dim morning light filter into the room. He was lying on his stomach, sprawled completely across the width of the California King-Sized bed, the electromagnet in his chest pressed against the mattress so she couldn't see it. This was almost a relief - it reminded her of the months he'd been trapped in Afghanistan, and she didn't particularly like to think about that time. Nonetheless, the magnet was fascinating. Sheets covered him from waist to mid-calve, which spared her a great deal of embarrassment as well. Not that it was anything she hadn't seen from him before - the man undressed in front of her so casually, she often felt like a wardrobe - but it spared her the ever-present teasing: "If you wanted a show, Potts, you could have simply asked."
Quickly selecting his clothing for the day, Pepper lay them on the divan in Tony's luxuriously appointed, though highly modern, bathroom and grabbed his robe, holding it before her like a shield as she finally approached her bosses sleeping figure.
"Time to get up, Tony. Rise and shine."
Tony grumbled something about mornings and rolled over. She dropped the robe over him quickly. "Come on, up and at 'em. You've got a 9 o'clock with Rand International, and it just gets worse from there." She interpreted his garbled reply to mean that he needed further encouragement. She grabbed his arm and tugged - hard. Despite four-inches of heel, Pepper had a lot of practice performing minor miracles.
It took ten minutes, but finally she got Tony to his feet (robe draped over him in a nearly-modest fashion), and into the bathroom. Pepper turned on the water, got it to the scalding hot temperature he preferred, then shut the door behind her, snagging the robe on her way out and trusting that the nudity, combined with the lure of a hot shower would do the rest of the job for her.
Frowning, Pepper paused before she could take a step. She'd only just noticed it on her way out - a deep purple bruise on Tony's left side. She wondered what exactly it might be from this time, but as she went down to start the espresso machine, she determined to ask her boss about it later... as soon as she could think of a way to bring it up that wouldn't earn her more teasing for having noticed.